Written by: TechFlow
On July 15, Trump selected Ohio Senator JD Vance as his vice presidential running mate for the 2024 election.
In a short while, the circle of friends was flooded with messages.
On one hand, JDVance is crypto-friendly.
According to his disclosed personal financial report, as of 2022, he owned between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of Bitcoin on Coinbase .
JD Vance has made several statements in support of cryptocurrency. In 2022, when the Canadian government froze the bank accounts of people involved in the Ottawa truck driver protest, he posted: " This is why cryptocurrency is booming. If your political views are wrong, the government will cut off your access to banking services. "
In addition, he also criticized SEC Chairman Gary Gensler for being too politicized in regulating cryptocurrencies.
On the other hand, many people, including the author, have read JD Vance's work "Hillbilly Elegy". After reading this book, you may understand why Trump was elected in 2016.
In everyone's intuitive impression, when talking about the internal contradictions of American society or the dissatisfaction of the lower classes, people usually think of blacks and Latinos, but the reality is not the case. According to a survey, the white working class is the most pessimistic group in the United States .
Vance has been a member of this lower-class group since he was a child. He was born in a poor town in the "Rust Belt" of the United States, to an ordinary working-class family.
Globalization has led to the relocation of manufacturing industries, and the industries that local people relied on for survival have rapidly declined. The lives of local people have fallen into a vicious cycle: their parents are poor, alcoholic, abuse drugs, and use domestic violence, which is then passed on to the next generation .
A life with no future and hope makes them full of resentment and anger, and being trapped in their livelihoods has made their thinking rigid, especially the young people. They have a lot of enthusiasm but extremely poor social interactions. Even if they want to seek change, no one tells them how to start. So they are forced to repeat the path of their parents, and no matter how hard they try, it is of no avail. They are born poor and inherit poverty, " just like original sin, which plagues the locals all their lives ."
Vance's childhood was quite turbulent. Not only did his biological father leave them, but his mother was also addicted to drugs and alcohol. Fortunately, Vance's grandmother not only loved him, but was also far-sighted. In order to prevent the difficulties of the previous generation from repeating on her grandson, she did her best to create a relatively stable family environment for Vance. After his mother was sent to a drug rehabilitation center, Vance spent three years with his grandmother, giving him a warm and harmonious family environment.
His grandmother encouraged Vance to change his destiny through studying: " If you want the kind of job that allows you to spend weekends with your family, you have to go to college and achieve something ."
After graduating from high school, Vance received acceptance letters from Ohio State University and Miami University. However, for a student from a poor family, the cost of college was an unbearable burden, so he decided to take a detour and join the Marine Corps.
After returning from the army, he returned to school, but in order to pay for tuition, Vance had to long part-time jobs at the same time. It was not until August 2009 that Vance graduated from Ohio State University with honors.
Not long after, Vance received an acceptance letter from Yale Law School and was awarded a full scholarship. At Yale University, Vance met the noble person in his life - Amy Chua, the author of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" and a professor of contract law at the time.
Amy Chua was very interested in Vance's experience and strongly suggested that he write about his life in rural Ohio. Vance was very resistant to the proposal of publishing a book at first, but later he began to write some things to Amy Chua, and she responded positively.
Amy Chua later introduced Vance to a literary book agent, and Vance began his career as a writer.
In 2016, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis was officially published. It was during Trump's campaign and once topped the US Amazon book sales list. Jennifer Senior, a critic for the New York Times, wrote: " Vance uses compassionate and insightful writing to provide a sociological interpretation and analyze how white people at the bottom of society have driven Trump's rise ."
Trump's son Donald Jr. liked the book very much, and he and Vance later became good friends. Although Vance was a "black fan" of Trump at the time, and criticized Trump as a "complete liar" and "idiot", and compared him to "American Hitler", during this year's Republican primary, Vance called Trump the "greatest president" he had ever met in his life.
From the bottom of society to best-selling author/senator, Vance's story is like the American dream interpreted on the screen.
However, in his TED talk, Vance said: " For those of us who are lucky enough to have achieved the American dream, the demons we have experienced are always chasing us not far behind. Even if I have any talents, if I am not saved by many loving people, these talents will be wasted ."
Perhaps, as Vance said, his success was partly due to luck and help from noble people, but he was just a lucky escape in the survival game.
Kindness is often abstract, but evil is concrete and clear. For the poor at the bottom, poverty is like original sin, rooted in the dark corners of the world and the soul. Being born in poverty makes people blocked from information, rigid in thinking, lack of correct judgment, unable to identify opportunities, unable to use social resources, and being ridiculed as "a group of lazy idiots". This kind of poverty and helplessness is passed down from generation to generation. Poverty grows silently into a quagmire, swallowing up the future of the unfortunate.
So, what does this have to do with Bitcoin?
Believe me, there is no poor person who doesn’t like Bitcoin, unless he is Lang Xianping .
From an ideological perspective, Bitcoin has carried the right-wing values of "anarchism" since its inception. As a pioneer of the American right today, it is not difficult to understand why Vance likes Bitcoin .
In the 18th century, economist Richard Cantillon proposed a famous theory, which was later called the Cantillon Effect. In short, the person who receives the banknote first gets more benefits than those who receive it later .
Printing money makes the rich richer and the poor poorer because when a large amount of new money is injected into an economy, the first recipients, the wealthy, can spend the money before prices rise, such as by investing in assets such as real estate, precious metals, and art.
As this money trickles down to the poor (if it still exists), it loses its value dramatically due to the inflationary effect of money printing. While the rich see their incomes rise as prices rise and their assets increase in value, the poor see their relative incomes fall as the cost of living soars.
This may be one of the inherent defects of capitalism. Almost all economies currently regard printing money as the ultimate solution to the problem, and in the short term, it is effective.
There is only one way for the poor at the bottom of society to wrest power from the 1%, and that is to eliminate their ability to manipulate fiat currency.
Can Bitcoin challenge capitalism’s centuries-long monetary hegemony without bloodshed?
If freedom is at the heart of Bitcoin, will it ultimately increase or reduce inequality?
I don’t know either. At this moment, I suddenly thought of the lines in “Dying to Survive”: There is only one disease in this world, and that is poverty .
