Robin Brookes and the Ripple Project

Robin Brookes came up with a clever way to pay his tax and protest it too:

Last year he was visited by bailiffs demanding payment for the earlier tax year 2002–03 who found themselves facing a wall of £10 notes under a sign reading: “Every 10 seconds Britain spends this much occupying Iraq.”

The bailiffs unpinned the £10 notes and left.

Back in August, I mentioned the “Ripple Project,” which was attempting to create a “decentralized peer-to-peer currency and payment system” based on electronically-mediated trusted chains of IOUs.

It basically allows people to make their own currency, based on the full faith and credit of themselves, that is as fungible as their reputations allow. It not only destroys the government currency-creation monopoly, but fully democratizes currency-creation.

The idea has a beautiful cleverness to it, but honestly I haven’t given it the kind of research and thought it deserves and so I can’t yet give it a wholehearted thumbs-up. Still, I want to make note that the project is live (and in Beta) if you’d like to give it a go.

If you’re wondering why I’m plugging a project like this on a blog dedicated to tax resistance… see, for instance, The Picket Line 25 January 2006.

I’ve got a soft spot for tough-love critiques of the anti-war movement. Here’s Scott Ritter’s.

The federal government is currently spending 20.8 cents of every $1 the economy generates, up from 18.5 cents in 2001, White House budget documents show. That’s the most rapid growth during one administration since Franklin Roosevelt.