Break free from the Kakistocracy

Yesterday I spent the night in a hotel with my wife and son. The reason was that we had an early appointment at the Australian High Commission in the Strand and figured we’d ‘make a day of it’.

Our appointment was to get my son his Aussie passport, just like Daddy and Mummy. You see my boy is what I’d consider fortunate in that he’s allowed to hold both British and Australian citizenship and passports.

That means he’s a citizen of two wonderful countries. He’s British by birth and Australian by decent thanks to yours truly. And as we left the High Commission after our appointment my wife and I remarked that he was indeed ‘lucky’. We then realised it would mean at the appropriate age he’d probably want to move out of home to whichever country we weren’t in at the time…

Nonetheless, he’s lucky in that he can live and work in two beautiful and very different parts of the world. But it also means he, like us, potentially has to go through all the difficulties as well that brings.

While the Australia is a part of the Commonwealth, outside of our Westminster-system style of government and the Queen as our head of state, there aren’t too many other similarities.

We speak different languages (I’ll let you dwell on that one). We have quite dramatically different climates. Our economies are in different predicaments. Our currency is different. Our social services, public services, healthcare systems are all different. Even our financial systems while they might appear similar, are also very different.

I noticed it when moving to the UK. When landing in the UK I had no history of credit. Why would I? It was all back in Australia where I’d held bank accounts, credit cards, I’d even previously owned a property with a mortgage.

But in the UK, I didn’t exist financially. And when you don’t exist financially, you can’t get a bank account. Without a bank account you can’t get a rental property… let alone a mortgage. You definitely can’t get a credit card or any other kind of loan. Heck you can barely get a phone.

That’s all the financial pain.

Then there’s the healthcare issue.

The NHS is a wonderful thing. ‘Free’ healthcare for all. Well, it’s great in theory. I’ve never had to use it for myself. In six years, I’ve only needed to see the doctor once, and that was to register in the first instance. My son however arrived in this world via the NHS. And it was frankly wonderful in how we were treated during that process.

But my son is in ‘the system’ so to speak. He’s British by birth, was born in the NHS. His medical records are all here, all in ‘the system’.

I on the other hand have a medical record in the UK about the size of the headline in this essay. Of course over my 35 years of existence I’ve been to the doctor loads of times. I had shingles twice, once as a kid, once as a 20-something. I fractured my wrist playing football once. I tore all three ligaments in my ankle in one go. I’ve had moles checked, been caught with viruses and bugs… all kinds of pretty normal things.

But here in the UK, none of it ever happened according to my medical records.

Nope, I’m like the Wolverine here in the UK. 35 years old, never been sick. They only know I was born (somewhere) because I exist. But they don’t know where.

That’s all obviously because the bulk of my records are in a filing cabinet or a local network in a GP surgery in the Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne somewhere.

Now, you’d think that moving from one Commonwealth country to the Commonwealth country would make transition of life easy. But it’s one of the most stressful, difficult, frustrating experiences of my life.

Add into the mix the ongoing saga of my own visas and it’s very easy to see why people don’t move to a new country. It’s easy to see why people just stick with what they know

And for my son, it will be the same if he ever decides in the distant, distant future to live back in Australia.

Of course over the last six years I’ve had to build up all of these things. Bank accounts, credit histories, energy and phone bill histories. I’ve managed to get a mortgage. Even regularly exchanging currencies from one place to another.

It was and continues to be one of the most frustrating experiences ever.

But why is that so? We profess to live in a world that’s high-tech. I’m one of the biggest proponents of our incredible, revolutionary, modern technology world. Yet moving from point A to point B is actually the hardest thing in the world to do.

It challenges our very idea of what freedom is. Are we really all that free? Or do we continue to live under the iron fist rule of the elites in power?

I can tell you why moving to a new country is so hard. It’s because the country you leave never really wants you to leave. Why should they make it easy to leave? Why should they let you freely choose a better place to move for whatever reason you so decide?

They intentionally want to make it hard. If they let everyone easily move around, they’d lose tax revenues. They’d lose money for their healthcare services. They’d lose contributors to their social services. They’d be forced to do a better job at building a better country to give people a legitimate reason to stay.

But in a kakistocracy (Google it) that’s not going to happen.

Of course it could all change. And in our modern, progressive world, my view is it all will change. In fact I envisage that by the time my son does want to stretch his wings and maybe think about living somewhere else in the world the difficulties I’ve experiences will be a thing of the past for him.

He will be able to go anywhere in the world and be able to transact and operate financially anywhere with complete seamlessness. He will take medical records, personal records, identity and data records with him anywhere and access them at any time.

Importantly he will control that data and information and he will do it thanks to cryptocurrency, blockchain networks and distributed ledger technology.

His currency will be bitcoin. His records and data will exist on immutable blockchain networks like Ethereum. He will operate different financial instruments with the likes of Binance and Tezos. He will connect and swiftly move through cities connecting to devices and the machine economy with IOTA.

This is the world 20 years from now. Where cryptocurrency is ubiquitous and seamless. It’s a world where the frictions and frustrations of today’s world no longer exist. This world is inevitable.

That’s right, it’s coming at us whether you like it or not. Sure, right now it’s hard for some people to see. And along the way there will be power struggles that we’re already seeing from centralised authority like government.

But this is what breaking the shackles of the kakistocracies looks like and it’s driven by the people. The crypto revolution will free us, it will empower us, it will break down barriers and borders like never before.

This is what’s coming, and if you’re smart, savvy and keen to profit from it, my view is you should already be immersed in the world of crypto to see exactly how this future is speeding at us.

Regards,

Sam

Category: Market updates