IMF steps up measures to tax Europe's Shadow Economy

The IMF plans to give nations in Europe, with around 30% GDP going to the underground economy, guidance in taxing their shadow economy. With about 30 million in USD's to help countries like Greece and Ireland tax their underground economy.

Countries with strong underground economies will be forced deeper into the underground. Tax guidance from the IMF will prove week at best. It is cheaper for a business to avoid regulation's, and taxes. In these challenging economic times shadow economies grow.

The World Wide Agora: a proposal by Robbie Revenant

The World Wide Agora: a proposal

by Robbie Revenant

I had originally considered entitling this article "iAgora", in parody of Apple's endless stream of "i"-products, but after saying it aloud, judiciously decided against it.

Thus, "The World Wide Agora": a more descriptive—though certainly less humorous—title. This is the topic of my article; however, before I get to the meat of it I would like to justify it. So let me start with the bones.

There seems to be some debate going on—a schism of sorts—between those who propose that our practice of radical free-market left-libertarian anarchism (agorism) be done in the open, and those who counsel that it be done in secret. Unquestionably, both arguments have merit.

The open-door-agorists (if I may call them that) argue that by self-identifying they encourage others to learn about agorism and join the underground free-market, to their benefit and the state's detriment. The closed-door-agorists argue that antagonizing the system and operating out in the open will only lead to fines, incarceration, and the eventual death of the movement. Furthermore, it may discourage practitioners from participating fully out of fear of reprisal from the state.

As I see it, this is a conflict between the two main problems agorists face when attempting to practice what they preach. How do buyers and sellers find each other? And how do they trade black- or grey-market commodities without being caught? The first requires that agorists be open and public about what they do and what they are offering. The second requires that they be clandestine and secretive. How do we resolve this seemly unresolvable dilemma?

Let's first consider the case of a small, rather homogeneous, agorist community. Suppose I make widgets. These widgets could be anything. They could be something the government deems impermissible for us to own or sell (drugs, weapons, happy meal toys, etc.). Or it could be something heavily regulated. Or it could be that neither party wants to pay taxes on these items. Maybe we just value our privacy and don't want the government snooping on our purchases—what right do they have to know you buy widgets! Maybe they are a white-market item, but because I buy the component parts on the black-market and then sell there, I am able to keep costs down and provide a perfectly legal product at a price that is superbly lower than the same item under government-scrutiny (due to the fact that I'm avoiding sales tax, income-tax, tariffs, and a host of licensing fees, oversight, and other regulation in the production of my wonderful widgets).

In short, it doesn't matter if it's a hand-grenade or a hat-rack. I've got it; you want it; and we both agree on a price. Now, in our little local agorist community such a transaction is quite feasible. We can assume that every agorist knows every agorist (or that someone knows someone who knows someone, etc.). The information problem is no problem at all. Buyers can easily find sellers. Sellers can easily find buyers.

So too, the problem of making the transaction without being apprehended by the police is of little concern. Yes, some Nosy Nancy could observe and report us (and this is becoming a growing threat given the recent drive to deputize the public into a national Snitch-Corps). However, this can easily be circumvented by making the transaction discreetly in a secure location. If Nancy doesn't "see something", Nancy won't "say something". (Thank you, Janet Nazi-tano!)

Now, this idyllic community of agorists has several shortcomings. The first is that all our buying and selling options are restricted to what is local, thus limiting our options. The second, of course, is that such communities are still very rare. So let us move on to the real world, the one in which agorists are scattered across the country—nay, the world.

Now suppose I live in Tucson. And you live in Keene. We suddenly have some major problems arise. You really want a widget, but how do you know I sell widgets? One simply can't put up a website that says, "Buy Bob's Bazookas, Basement Bargain Prices!!". That will no doubt attract significant unwanted attention, not to mention a lengthy jail sentence. You couldn't even sell home-made jam without the FDA shutting you down, or the IRS seizing your bank accounts and threatening imprisonment.

What's an agorist to do? Well, here is my vision (and it's not at all revolutionary, merely the next logical step). You log onto the WWA. Your account has a profile. It may be anonymous, containing no pertinent data about the real-life you; or it may contain enough information to identify you as, well, you. It's your choice.

Others would also have profiles on the WWA and be able to interact on a minimal level (no stalkerish Facebook-like feeds here). You would have a credential-rating based on an algorithm that takes into account who has verified that they know you and to what degree. Having 2 people certify that they know you in person would result in a higher credential-rating than 20 people who just know you from some other virtual meeting-place. The algorithm could also take into account the "connectedness/distance" from a "trusted" or known agorist (the agorist version of an Erdös-number). The idea is to give others a sense of how well they can trust this person, who may very well be anonymous, and to weed out law-enforcement. Anyone would be able to see your credential-rating.

The WWA, in its complete form, would have 3 sections: the Market, the Forums, and the Lyceum. (Although it's the Market that is the heart of the matter, since the Forums and Lyceum already exist in some form or another elsewhere on the web.)

Entering the Market, you see something very akin to Amazon.com or other online stores. There would be a searchable database of items for sale by third-parties. Any user can set up a shop if they have a good or service to sell. Much like Amazon's third-party sellers, they would each have a seller-rating, letting potential buyers gauge whether or not to trust a particular seller. Likewise, each user would have a buyer-rating, although only potential sellers when contacted by a buyer would be able to see his rating. This is to protect the buyer's privacy. (No one need know how many times you've made purchases or trades in the marketplace, or at all!)

Communication in the WWA is done via PGP-like encrypted messages between buyer and seller, passed via secure http (and perhaps even a third layer of encryption) from seller to server to buyer and back again. The servers and mirrors for the WWA would only keep such messages long enough to pass them to the client (buyer or seller). In this way, it acts like a mail-server in which email is deleted off the server when read. The buyer and seller would, of course, have a record of these messages on their local machines, which could be purged also for security purposes if necessary. Notice that even the server hosts cannot read these encrypted messages, nor do they persist on them. These are private conversations between buyer and seller alone!

Such messages would allow buyers to place orders, work out the details of custom orders, make inquiries, and arrange payment (trade, cash, credit, gold, silver, BitCoin, money held in escrow by a trusted third party until the transaction was completed, etc.)—all beyond the scrutiny of prying eyes.

Digital-signatures would be used to verify that an agreement had been reached. This would provide some measure of accountability in the event of a dispute. Both buyers and sellers could be removed for fraud or multiple failures to live up to their contracts. The rating system would have to suffice at first. Later, trusted arbitration groups may pop up to which both sides would voluntarily present their unencrypted agreement, and any other evidence that one lived up to the agreement and the other did not. The WWA would then abide by the ruling of the arbiter and act accordingly on the buyer's or seller's account.

Sellers would be permitted to sell anything that did not violate the NAP. Anything that does (stolen goods, slaves, etc.) would be removed and the seller banned.

The Forums would allow users to communicate at length on various topics in the usual threaded conversation format. Various discussions could be completely open, or restricted to certain users, or restricted to users that meet a certain credential threshold. In this way, you could start a conversation on a topic and have anyone join in, just a few associates, or anyone who is likely to be an actual practicing agorist and not a cop.

The Forums would work differently than most you may have encountered. Nothing would reside on the server for very long in restricted rooms. They would only persist long enough to pass to the other users in the conversation. In fact, it may be possible to design it in a strict peer-to-peer fashion, with the server functioning only to let others in the conversation know who has what pieces of the thread available for download. As with all messages in the WWA, the thread would be encrypted with a PGP-like session key—in this case, unique to the participants and the thread. Only participants in the thread would be able to read it. Even the server hosts and mirrors would not have access to this information.

The Lyceum would be an open area where more theoretical discussions about the history of economic and political thought, as well as the development and current state of agorism could be taught. Unlike the forums, this area would be directed by lecturers familiar with agorism and the particular topic at hand.

The World Wide Agora would then be a kind of super-discreet hybridization of Amazon.com, Facebook, and an online university. It would have fewer bells-and-whistles to be sure; but it would, in turn, make protecting your privacy it's highest concern. This is the reason for all of the encryption and non-persistence of data—to secure the privacy of participants in the agora should the servers be compromised by law-enforcement.

Note that some agorists could choose to remain completely anonymous. Others could self-identify, tying their profiles to their real-world persona. They could thus proclaim to be agorists, promote freedom of the individual and the starvation of the state, help educate others, and at the same time, their actual transactions would be secure from scrutiny. We would have achieved openness without sacrificing privacy.

There would also be other less tangible benefits to having a secure-but-open electronic marketplace. We could get an instant summary of the size and scope of the underground market. If people begin to realize that hundreds, then thousands, then millions of their fellow citizens are participating in counter-economics, they may be more inclined to follow suit. The social-stigma of the counter-economy will wash away and the agora will thrive!

*Technical Note: This is merely a call to action. I confess that I do not personally possess the requisite knowledge to make such a system work. My programming knowledge is in C, C++, Java, and high-level packages like MATLAB. I know nothing about secure PHP or MySQL programming. There is certainly incentive to create the WWA, though. Aside from helping out the movement (promoting a genuinely free market), one could make a nice profit by either charging a small fee for each transaction (which might not be desirable due to privacy concerns), or by charging sellers a fee for setting up shop (much like charging a fee for a booth at a swap meet). Either way, much work would need to be done on a design level first. What I have outlined is merely a rough sketch. Great care would need to be taken to design the protocols necessary to ensure that the three top priorities of such a system would be met: Privacy, Privacy, Privacy!

So, to any enterprising agorist computer-geeks out there: Go to it!

Agora! Anarchy! Action!

Open Source Agorism

Agorist dodge the state by guarding their autonomy. Whether because they do it thru virtue or survival. Which is an valiant tatic for agorism. The means at which we enter into agorism should be open source. As the tools we use to keep our actions and ourselves autonomous are open source so should our strategy be. Open to anyone who sees the fault in the means to becoming an agorist and maintaining agorism. As open source technology has improved encryption, so could it be applied to improve agorism. Open source agorism, so that all the buds may bloom into the black rose that is our culture.

A golden economy by any other name

Agorist's of all stripes, weather they ever heard the word or not. Are participating in the counter culture. We see open agorist who produce wealth off the books. To the blood stained hands of those who, are the parasite's of the black market. Are shaping the face of the golden economy.

Those who choose openness to gain the counter cultures' vision of a truly free market. Fly in the face of statist parasitic market. Call on those who support them when their property is in parol. If they are vindicated through jury nullification or by any other means. The golden economy is seen by those who want liberty now, act to be the change they see in these Agorist hero's.

Those who choose to be the overt Agorist, who use technology to advance an invisible golden economy. Build a new society within', without the parasites. Who whether to not be caught or on the principle of autonomy move in the shadows. Learning from the parasite's of the black market to keep their heads down, moving the golden market foreword. Using technology and living off experience, to sustain a market for those how wish to stay golden.

The uneducated Agorist, who makes up the majority of the golden economy. Who through whatever choice of their own, is advancing liberty unwittingly.
Needs use the most, to see the beauty of their actions and to advance these ideas to the uninformed Agorist.

Then their are those the highly debated parasites of the black market. Those who move as statist in a black market, as too be the rule of law in a market that has no need for their protection/rule. But have survived and can teach us much as to how to survive in a parasitic economy.

Rise and rise again, until all markets, are golden!!!

Black Market Cocaine; Who's the # 1 Exporter

270 tons of cocaine was produced in Colombia in 2009, according to the US Office of National Drug Control Policy.The 2009 amount was lower then the 280 tons produced in 2008 and the 700 tons produced in 2001. 95 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States is produced in Colombia.

Cocaine production in Colombia fell to less than half the world’s total last year, when Peru surpassed the nation in cultivation of the drug’s base ingredient, the coca leaf, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said in June.Cocaine production in neighboring Peru rose last year, to 225 metric tons, while output in Bolivia remained stable at 195 metric tons, according to today’s statement by the White House drug czar. Europe may be one of the main markets of both nations, the U.S. said.

As eradication and law-enforcement efforts increase, traffickers are diluting the drug, the drug czar said. Purity of cocaine seized in bulk shipments in the U.S. declined 14 percent from 2006 to 2010.

U.S. Forces in conjunction with Colombian forces, have stepped up their campaign in the last 10 years. This will only continue until the U.S. no longer is able to exploit the world for it's control over it's resources. But as demand increases the countries such as Peru and Bolivia will surpass Colombia. As long as the Colombian's & U.S. Forces continue to attack the Colombian's Cocaine Trade.

Spain's counter economy is gaining approval

Spain's underground economy generated 205.2 billion euros ($275 billion) in 2009, equivalent to a fifth of the country's gross domestic product, consultants A.T. Kearney say in a study commissioned by VISA Europe and released Tuesday.

Spain and neighboring Portugal are tied for third place in the ranking of Western European nations in terms of the ratio of off-the-books economic activity to total GDP.

Factors encouraging the underground economy in Spain include relatively high taxes and social security levies and the large number of small businesses and the self-employed, the study's authors say.

They also note that Spanish tax authorities lack the resources to vigorously pursue people and firms who evade taxes by hiding income.

In terms of value, the bulk of Spain's underground economic activity takes the form of transactions among companies with annual sales of less than 6 million euros ($8 million), according to A.T. Kearney.

The study expressed concern that a widespread Spanish view of off-the-books economic activity as something normal leads to greater acceptance of a counter economy.

An Excert from-Second Realm:Book on Strategy Crypto-Anarchy, Tradecraft, TAZ and Counterculture

Next steps

Should you find this strategy attractive, the question of where to go from here needs to be answered. These are some hints on how to proceed:

1. Make it your goal to achieve liberty based on this strategy or a variation of it.

2. Tell others that you committed to being active for liberty.

3. Dedicate some of your time on a regular basis to spend working on the Second Realm.

4. Start saving, so you can invest into the Second Realm when opportunities come up.

5. Take digital privacy serious. Start using PGP, I2P and similar. Learn about secure behavior.

6. There are some digital autonomous zones out there. Join them and spend time building your reputation.

7. Network with others, but not only in the digital but also in the physical. Have a few drinks together, or start a project. Declare your meetings as being autonomous.

8. Give up collectivist thought, especially asking for permission and requiring others to support you before you do anything.

9. Give up the quest for philosophical homogeneity. We will always differ in the details.

10.Start or support local OTC-Exchangers. Build a position of digital currencies so you can partake in covert commerce.

11.Live a culture of Liberty. Support the autonomy of others visibly: Respect!

12.Insert kindness and strength into the world. Charity and justice are for YOU to do.

13.Encourage others that work for liberty, that invest and produce.

14.If you are an artist, writer, musician, fashion designer (or whatever), run wild in creating our new culture.

15.Begin with defining your boundaries: Shun people that actively attack liberty and deny autonomy to others.

Second Realm:Book on Strategy PDF.