The Shutdown That Really Matters: The End Of The Silk RoadGary Gibson Prohibition is the Morally Reprehensible Part, Not Buying and Selling Drugs Lets get this out of the way first. To most of the violence-addicted authoritarians still infesting the planet, particularly the US, in overwhelming numbers, the FBIs takedown of the Silk Road is a triumph of good over evil. The mainstream media and the comments section under the pertinent articles bear this out. Most people think that its a good thing that government tells people what they can buy to put into their own bodies. Despite the empirical evidence that prohibition of certain substances for private consumption increases usage and outright abuse while setting up violent underground markets, they still cheer on the war against people and their personal choices. They consider the resulting damage to and loss of life due to kidnapping by the government and murderous regulation among black market competitors to be worth making their personal code of conduct a matter of official gun-backed policy. To hell with those people. I feel obligated to mention them because their pro-state, anti-freedom noise will be deafening, but they dont deserve to be given any more respect or consideration than people who support chattel slavery. Make no mistake about it; if you care about free markets and human freedom, the shutting down of Silk Road is a sad event and the braying of the crowd about just desserts for breaking the law is as ignorant as it is cruel. Feds Luring Site Operator Into Some Violent Gangsta Stuff Now that weve established how morally sound Silk Road was and how thuggish its detractors and persecutors are, lets take a look at how it all came apart. Ulbricht was arrested yesterday in San Francisco. While some of the charges against him are for operating a vast, underground online exchange for illicit substances, it was Ulbrichts attempts to have a thieving former employee beaten and a blackmailer assassinated that let the feds build a case against him. But it was the feds who lured him in, much like they lure patsy mosque attendees into the terrorist plots the feds themselves concoct in an effort to produce bad guys for their terrorism security theatre. You might say that beatings and murder are no way to resolve disputesbut thats exactly the kind of violent dispute resolutions state prohibitions force people to enact in the black markets! Prohibition cuts black markets off from non-violent, legal or reputable arbitration systems. Silk Road was an attempt to make the underground free markets as free of the state-spawned violence that infects them in the world of actual street corners and turf wars. In a bit of irony, the states agents had to invent a fictional extortionist to lure Silk Roads operator into the gangster hit. Mind you, the people who are offended that such a libertarian person would privately pay for violence to defend himself are the same kind of people who have no problem with their stolen tax dollar funding the explosive dismemberment of hundreds of thousands of foreign innocents their governments deem acceptable collateral losses. What Have We Learned? There are a few important lessons to take away from this. 1) No Bitcoin info was actually hacked or anything so ominous as that. The Feds relied on a simple, boneheaded mistake Ulbicht made to figure out who he was when he went looking for help from other software engineers on the Stack Overflow site. They then relied on trickery to get him to ask them to do something scandalously illegal which was emphatically not the state-prohibited free market activities on his notorious site. It was like getting Al Capone on tax evasion instead of dealing in alcohol (which is now legal, by the way) and murder. 2) If youre going to arrange retaliatory or defensive murder for hire, assume that the people offering these services are federal agents looking to bust you. 3) If youre going to run the biggest online exchange of prohibited items, do so in a nation-state that isnt the biggest, most heavily armed and heavily surveilled fascist police state the world has ever seen. Ulbricht would have been much, much better off running his site in a non-Western country that wouldnt just roll over for the US. He should have gotten a different passport at the very least and perhaps even eventually gotten rid of his US citizenship. Steps like these seem extremeuntil the federal police toss you in a cage with the intention of keeping you there for a few decades. P.S. Just a few days ago we began writing in TDV Homegrown about how the Silk Road could present a unique opportunity to take advantage of prohibition. We are careful not to recommend that our readers actually break the law. We were just pointing out that for certain bolder, liberty-loving entrepreneurial types, encryption and Bitcoin were making it a bit easier to profit from prohibition. Nothing has changed. The seizing and shutdown of the Silk Road is just a temporary setback. There is already another, much less known place where former Silk Road vendors and customers are already migrating. Well talk about it a bit more in the next issue of Homegrown. Learn more about signing up by clicking here now. Gary Gibson cut his teeth writing for liberty and profit as the managing editor of the Whiskey Gunpowder financial newsletter. He now writes for and edits The Dollar Vigilante. Gary recently stopped playing Russian Roulette by basing himself in the USSA and now spends his days roaming around Latin America. 