I first read Industrial Society and Its Future by Ted Kaczynski in my early 20s and it immediately resonated with me. Most people will recognize ‘Uncle Ted' by his media assigned moniker - The Unabomber. Obviously he did bad things to earn that title and took innocent lives. I’m not writing this to condone the bad things he did, I am writing this to translate his 1970s playbook for opting out of a system he fundamentally opposed to our modern, industrialized life in the 2020s.
Ted lived off-grid in Lincoln, Montana in a 10x12 structure built of plywood mostly resembling a modern-day shed. He called this cabin home from 1971-1996, over 25 years, with no running water or electricity. In a more respectable way, in an act of civil defiance, he lived the life he believed in - a life with minimal technology. This is the part of Ted’s story that I admire.
Online there is a growing trend known as “Get Rich, Get Off-Grid”. Ted obviously doesn’t fit the bill for the first half but I wonder what he would’ve done in our current era. After all, he was 167 IQ and obviously would’ve recognized the Federal Reserve was now in the business of stealing freedom from regular Americans by printing money or as they so eloquently put it, Quantitative Easing via Modern Monetary Theory. Luckily for Ted, America was still on the gold standard until 1971 when Nixon suspended the convertibility of the dollar to gold, abandoning the Bretton Woods system. The same raping of natural resources those titans of industry were doing to mother nature that Ted targeted were now about to engage in a new form of warfare against American savers. Luckily for Ted, the visceral downstream effects of the Fed’s dual mandate weren’t felt until long after his arrest in 1996.
In the past 6 years the Federal Reserve has printed over 40% of all US dollars ever in existence. The unelected powers that be stole over 40% of our purchasing power to juice asset prices to enrich The Shareholder Class. If you were Uncle Ted during this time period, this would’ve translated to your grocery bill doubling and your property taxes tripling in the great state of Montana. What would Ted have done had this happened to him? Work longer hours at the grocery store? Do more odd jobs in the community? Ted would’ve had his purchasing power pillaged and probably would’ve ended up on government benefits because that is how the system is engineered nowadays. Plus, he had a tendency of asking family for handouts.
M2 is the growth of the money supply.
A dollar invested is a dollar maintaining its purchasing power. A dollar saved is dry tinder awaiting a Fed spark.
I feel this every day. I am a Veteran and most of the veterans I have around me are on VA Disability. A couple of them earned it but most are just taking advantage of the system. I don’t hold it against them at all. They are mostly secular people and if I was too, I’d be doing the same. Unfortunately, I’m not secular and I believe in a power higher than the current almighty. Our current “One Nation Under Gov” is deeply flawed and deserves to be taken advantage of until it fixes itself. It would be easier for me to get 100% VA Disability from my 6 years in the military than it would be for me to continue to scale my real estate business in our current environment. This is the reality of today’s America. We haven’t been a capitalist society for a while now and a lot of our biggest issues are the direct result of government involvement. Excessive regulations are enforcing the “too small to succeed” playbook in which our big institutions are all too happy to play under.
Every year the US Dollar loses roughly 7% of its purchasing power. A $100 dollars in savings in 2020 equates to ~$60 today. Holding dollars is a guaranteed loss. You must bet nowadays. There is no “I don’t gamble” anymore. This is because America’s greatest export is its currency, US Dollars. In a lot of ways this is why you have people with rocket science degrees working on Wall Street. America now being the world’s casino was best described by Triffin’s Dilemma in the 60s.
The US is in the business of producing dollars
Hopelessness was always how I’d describe my feelings after someone telling me why things are the way they are now. The good news is all you have to do is abandon comfort & join the shareholder class. Easy right? Of course not. Debasement comes for us all. We all feel it with the price of things becoming more out of reach every passing day. By owning real assets like stocks, real estate, bitcoin, we are aligning our incentives with the powers that be. When they debase our purchasing power away, our assets go up in value to hedge away some of the pain.
Moving to Montana to live in a 10x12 structure with minimal amenities is still the move but to do so we must also own a portfolio of stocks, bitcoin, real estate or some combination of all. If not, our savings will be depleted in no time. Not by us spending it all, but by the Federal Reserve continuing to engage in its ongoing financial warfare against savers. This will continue until debt to GDP levels return to more safe levels. The options for our fearless leaders are debasement or all-out default. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out which route they’re taking.
Anyone under 40 years old has no choice but to do whatever must be done to get to some form of asset ownership as soon as humanly possible. If not, every passing year asset prices get further and further away from wages. Wages have not kept up with asset prices for a long time because the pool of available workers has grown exponentially in the last 50 years. This in part due to the women’s liberation movement & Hart-Cellar Act leading to gangbusters migration while availability and quality of jobs has not increased at the same rate. This is why income inequality is so bad these days. This is why we have a K-shaped economy.
Imagine buying a house in the 1970s when there was virtually no immigration and selling it in the 2020s. Oh to be a boomer!
7 years ago Kelsey and I bought our first property in my generational home city of Philadelphia. Since then, we have purchased 6 other properties in PA, NC and FL. Across our real estate portfolio we have roughly $1,500,000 in 30yr fixed mortgage debt. 2/3rds of this debt is fixed at 2.5% for 25 more years. This was our best way for us to counter the Federal Reserve’s ongoing warfare against our family. How you choose to fight back against the Fed is up to you.
The thing that most people don’t realize at this point in internalizing why we’re going through what we’re going through is that Weimerica doesn’t end by prices and values going to 0, it ends by everything going to a million/billion/trillion. The last time I wrote a post like this, The Death of The Middle Class, was during Covid when stocks were at all-time highs and fear was rampant. Now we have the Iran War with all-time highs in both stocks and fear. Do you think the outcome will be different this time?