Ross Ulbricht’s Silk Road was an idea that the government had to stop: freedom from government. From Joel Bowman at joelbowman.substack.com:
(The Gadsden Flag, flown by revolutionaries since December 20, 1775)
“When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.”
~ P.J. O’Rourke, from Parliament of Whores (1991)
As dear readers know, our beat here is Free Markets, Free Minds and Free People.
We’ve been following this pithy tricolon, on and off, for most of our writing career. Over twenty plus years… across ninety countries (and counting)… we’ve been fascinated by stories of human liberation – whether intellectual, geographical, financial, political, philosophical etc. – in the epic, age-old battle of Man vs. the State.
You can imagine our delight, then, when news crawled across the “socials” earlier this week that Ross Ulbricht, the American entrepreneur and creator of the Silk Road online marketplace, was given a “full and unconditional pardon” by President Donald Trump. From his Truth Social:
