Dr. Riste Simnjanovski is a tenured professor of public administration at California Baptist University. Most recently, his published research explores digital assets in the public and private sectors.
In 1873, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner copublished the novel, “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.” While the text doesn’t receive the recognition it should, possibly as a result of the direct attack on American politics, it’s a brilliant piece of literature that Bitcoiners may find amusing. In any event, I strongly encourage readers to take a peek at it. The correlations to what Americans face in 21st-century politics seems to overwhelmingly mirror history. In my opinion, the correlations to Bitcoin are easy to spot.
One of my favorite Twain quotes states, “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress, but I repeat myself …”
Twain, and the lesser-known Warner, had a knack for satire in a way that was a bit offensive and vulgar at the time, if not compelling and true, to a fault. If Twain had a Twitter account, he’d have millions of followers and perhaps an equal amount of vocal objectors.
The deeply-rooted corruption of American politics at every level is pervasive and systemic. All perspectives agree that corruption exists, government officials pick winners and losers in business and business returns the favor by financing their next “elected” official. The irony is that the actual era, i.e., post-Civil War America, is now literally defined as “The Gilded Age” taken directly from Twain and Warner’s satirical book.
The process of gilding is pretty straightforward: you take something of little or no value and apply color to it in order to create the illusion of wealth. One might imagine a tin coin, painted with a golden hue to resemble a