Chyden Finance: profit from hypocrisy

Recently, a very nice individual alerted me to Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, which you can download for free in the format of your choice.

Little Brother looks like an interesting read. I’ve downloaded it within an hour of typing these lines and read the first two pages. I’ll write a full review later, if one is called for.

My initial concern is with Doctorow’s conflation of ‘world’ with ‘USA’, as when he laments a world gone mad and cites the US National Security Administration as evidence. Then again, his complaints about ubiquitous cameras seem to apply more to the UK than to the USA, so maybe he is conflating the Anglosphere with the world.

Either way, that is not the world. To call two fading imperialist governments ‘the world’ cedes orders of magnitude more power to the wizard than is warranted by the little man behind the curtain.

Granted, my local sheriff’s department — which is not nearly as big or well armed as the US federal government — could throw my daily calendar into disarray, and Congress and the President wield power well out of proportion for 536 individuals among a population of more than 300 million, but I choose to live here.

However, if I become sufficiently annoyed, I can leave and deny my tormentors the taxes that I pay and the benefits of my investment and consumption spending.

This is not to say that we should not push back and keep the power-hungry in check. It is to say that declaring the ills of the USA to be the ills of the world is the wrong diagnosis.

It’s a big world out there.

Invest accordingly.

CWE