Ross Ulbricht at 40
A Decade Behind Bars for Facilitating Free Markets
Ross Ulbricht
Hi Plebs,
Yesterday marked Ross Ulbricht's 40th birthday, a sombre milestone as he enters his 11th year behind bars for creating the Silk Road marketplace. While prosecutors succeeded in putting him away for life, Ulbricht's case raises deeper questions about ethics, hypocrisy, and the rules of a system that routinely pillages its own citizens.
The Establishment Moves the Goalposts
Let's be clear - Ulbricht never directly sold illegal drugs nor committed acts of violence himself. His "crime" was founding an online market premised on the principles of freedom, anonymity, and laissez-faire economics. Yet this act of pure free market facilitation was branded as a federal "kingpin" charge worthy of the most unconscionably harsh sentence.
Why such a draconian punishment? Because the Silk Road represented a digital free haven from the economic authoritarianism demanded by American institutions and their corporate backers. It facilitated peaceful, voluntary exchange outside their tightly-controlled chokeholds.
So the establishment simply moved the goalposts, contorting laws to ensure this momentary glimpse of freedom was snuffed out. All in sanctimonious defiance of the principles of liberty they publicly espouse.
An Ethical Abyss
And what of the ethics under tying Ulbricht's interminable sentence? How can we take such moral lectures from the same institutions who:
Launch destructive wars on flimsy pretexts, killing millions of innocents
Debasing their currency through unlimited money printing, eroding the life's savings of their own citizens
Rigging markets and bailing out corporate giants with taxpayer funds
Persecuting truth-tellers like Assange, Snowden and Manning for exposing crimes
This tragic asymmetry lays bare an implacable double standard. For Ulbricht, peaceful facilitation of voluntary exchange is a life sentence. For the establishment? Indiscriminate military interventionism, mass surveillance, economic pillaging through inflation - all carried out with impunity under the rubric of "authority."
A Principled Path Forward
Perhaps most unforgivable is the moral vanity underpinning Ulbricht's draconian sentence. That a system so replete with ethical transgressions of its own could issue a punishment of such finality on purely sanctimonious grounds.
As Ulbricht enters his 40s largely sealed off from the world, it's a sobering inflection point. A moment to reflect on who the real criminals are in a system utterly unmoored from its own ethical foundations. His continued jailing is a study in civilization's capability for myopic injustice cloaked in hollow piety.
If society still believes in the principles of voluntary association and self-determination, the path forward is clear. Cease this wasteful, unethical incarceration of a fundamentally ideological "criminal." Reaffirm humanity's birth right claim to peaceful, free exchange - not merely in empty slogans, but through courageous moral actions.
Cheers, and onwards with Bitcoin
