24A051 Phew! We Made It! by Jim Davies, 12/31/2024

The year is over, or it will be at midnight. During its course there was some doubt, for the deliberate provocation of Russia by US-led sanctions and arming of its enemy in Kiev caused Team Putin to warn several times that if push came to shove, they would put their nuclear arsenal to use. If that had happened, 12/31 would not have taken place, or nobody would have been around to notice.

Everyone will be wishing you a happy new year, and in fact I expect 2025 to be quite a lot better. The lunatic in the White House will at last have retired, and for all his faults Trump has promised to bring that extremely dangerous war to a swift end - and has already begun the process.

That's the first of two reasons why I'm glad he was elected - although of course I did not vote, voting being so immoral. The other reason is his promise to free Ross Ulbricht from his obscene prison sentence. I sure hope DJT doesn't forget to take care of that, on January 20th. You might join me in sending a reminder.

Another, much less prominent event made 2024 a satisfying year for me: I've been able to issue a Second Edition of my primary book, A Vision of Liberty. The changes are not big, but tidied up some loose ends; and it was a pleasure to read through it again word by word in order to be able to do so. Have you read it yet? - I do encourage that, or to read it a second time if you have. I'm not exactly impartial, but think I've written nothing better. When my ashes have been scattered on a certain lake, and you-all are enjoying life without government, I hope you'll celebrate what it foresees and chuckle at its errors. It's a free download, enabled by a click on the blue link nearby on the right.

It fills a niche not found elsewhere. The simple symbolism of its front cover is that we are in a long dark place but about to emerge into a future of almost unimaginable brightness, and the text tries to take advantage of that "almost." The reader is taken to a time three years after all government has evaporated, and is shown how familiar things have changed very much for the better. There are other works that cover part of that ground, often in more detail but usually in a more theoretical manner; for example the Tannehills' The Market for Liberty and The Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman. My Vision is written in the first person, of one who explores the actual new world in which he finds himself. I hope it inspires the reader to hunger and thirst for its arrival.

In 2025 I have in mind to make a second edition also of the other two members of the Liberty Trilogy, Transition to Liberty and Denial of Liberty. Each has some loose ends to be tidied - for example in the former I predicted that Chelsea Clinton would move in to the Oval Office to revive her father's dynasty. Hey, forecasting the future is much harder than predicting the past. Denial has less to tidy, because it deals with history, and (interpretative revisions aside!) history is a fixed fact. Even so it may be possible to improve it by emphasizing more the ruinous cost of government in every era.

The basic idea of the Trilogy remains unchanged and I've heard of no alternative way to terminate the Era of Government. Each re-educated person needs to find one more each year to undertake the study (eg in TOLFA) and so resolve never to work for the state, and to replicate likewise. It's an ultra-light workload, with zero cash cost, and is unstoppable. Do the math.

From Wiki: