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Inflating away $40 trillion in debt? The government intends to steal from you slowly enough that you won't notice until your savings are already gone.
Trump's statement reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what inflation actually is. Ludwig von Mises identified inflation as a tax. Every dollar the Federal Reserve creates without corresponding production transfers purchasing power from savers to the first spenders, which means the Treasury and its contractors eat well while your paycheck buys less. The debt doesn't disappear. The burden shifts onto you.
Let me break it down for you. The government borrows $40 trillion, which it cannot repay. So it instructs the central bank to create new money to service that debt. That new money causes prices to rise. Rising prices squeeze working Americans, who then demand more government support. The government borrows more to fund that support. The cycle tightens.
Weimar Germany tried this in 1923. Zimbabwe tried it in 2008, printing 100-trillion-dollar notes that couldn't buy bread. Argentina has repeated the experiment so many times it has become a case study in willful self-destruction.
Sound money advocates have made this argument for over a century: debt doesn't vanish through inflation; it gets redistributed. Creditors take losses. Retirees on fixed incomes get gutted. The politically connected, holding hard assets and equity, walk away intact.
What Trump describes is default by deception.
Knossos Micro retweeted
People who declare food, housing, education, healthcare, and whatever else politicians add to the list to be “human rights” usually imagine this means they personally get more of them.
What they rarely consider is what their principle actually means when universalized. If everyone has a right to goods and services regardless of ability to pay, someone else must be obligated to provide or finance them.
And if that principle is genuinely global, affluent North Americans and Europeans don't gain new entitlements, they acquire enormous obligations to billions of poorer people. The comfortable advocate imagining a larger share for himself may discover that, by his own standard, he is among those expected to surrender resources so others can receive theirs.
The slogan sounds considerably different once you're the one holding the bill.
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“We could say the government spends like drunken sailors, but that would be unfair to drunken sailors, because the sailors are spending their own money.”
— Ronald Reagan
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The elite won’t suffer but everyone else will- that’s 100% guaranteed. Worth a very short read.
Boris Yeltsin walked into a Houston Randall's grocery store in 1989 and went quiet. Not quiet in a polite, diplomatic way. Quiet in the way a man goes quiet when reality collapses on him.
He saw 30,000 products on shelves. He saw ordinary Americans buying chicken, cheese, and fresh bread without a ration card, without a two-hour queue, without bribing anyone. A Soviet man of real power, surrounded by abundance that Soviet central planners had promised for seventy years and never delivered. He reportedly told his aide that if ordinary Soviet citizens saw this store, they would riot.
Central planners destroyed the price system. Without prices, nobody could calculate where to send resources. Hayek proved this theoretically in 1945. The Soviets proved it empirically with empty shelves every single decade they existed.
You grew up in that system, and you got potatoes when the state decided potatoes existed for you. You stood in line for meat that had already rotted. You traded favors to get medicine your doctor prescribed. Bureaucrats in Moscow set production quotas with no feedback mechanism, no profit signal, no way to know what you actually needed.
Yeltsin left that Houston store and reportedly wept in the car. He later said it destroyed his belief in the Soviet system more than any dissident literature ever had.
Socialism grinds people down daily, in a thousand small humiliations, until standing in line for bread feels normal.
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"If more government is the answer, then it was a really stupid question." — Ronald Reagan
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Milton Friedman:
“Inflation is just like alcoholism. In both cases when you start drinking or when you start printing too much money, the good effects come first. The bad effects only come later.”
“That’s why in both cases there is a strong temptation to overdo it: to drink too much and to print too much money.”
“When it comes to the cure, it’s the other way around. When you stop drinking or when you stop printing money, the bad effects come first and the good effects only come later. That’s why it’s so hard to persist with the cure.”
The First World War did not erupt. Governments built it, financed it, and kept it running long past the point where any rational army would have quit the field.
Franz Ferdinand's assassination in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, gave chancelleries and foreign ministries the pretext they needed. The war itself required something more durable than a pretext. It required central banks.
Every major belligerent suspended the gold standard within weeks of the opening shots. Britain suspended convertibility in August 1914. Germany, France, and Austria-Hungary followed. This mattered enormously. Under a true gold standard, you cannot fund a four-year industrial slaughter. Governments run out of money and populations refuse further sacrifice. The war ends. Instead, central banks printed currency to buy government bonds, transferring the cost of the war to ordinary wage earners through inflation, a tax nobody voted for and most never identified as a tax.
Ludwig von Mises watched this from Vienna and identified the mechanism precisely: inflation allows states to conscript private purchasing power without explicit confiscation. Every loaf of bread that cost more in 1917 than in 1913 represented a transfer from the buyer to the war machine.
The death toll reached approximately 20 million people. The fiscal cost exceeded $200 billion in 1914 dollars. Neither number was achievable under honest money. Politicians and generals sustained the catastrophe because central banking made it financially possible to keep going. Remove the printing press and the trenches empty themselves inside three months.
Sound money is a hard constraint on state violence. States hate hard constraints.
Knossos Micro retweeted
The land of engineers vs the land of managers
There is a fundamental difference between a society that is organized around making things and one organized around managing people who make things.
The engineer lives under the tyranny of reality.
You cannot negotiate with gravity.
A reactor either works or it doesn’t.
A bridge either stands or falls.
The manager operates in a different universe – one of meetings, incentives, credentials, narratives, alliances and permissions.
And here is the paradox:
Engineers create the wealth. Managers often end up controlling it.
Why?
Because the engineer is busy solving the problem.
The manager is busy understanding the organization – and scheming…
Give the second enough time and the people who build the machine eventually find themselves reporting to people whose principal skill is talking and building nothing.
You could see this transformation in the 1990s. The vocabulary itself was revealing: suddenly technical competence was not enough. You needed "communication," "stakeholder management," "networking."
None of these things is inherently bad.
But once the ability to navigate the system becomes more valuable than the ability to produce the result, the system begins selecting for a very different kind of person.
And this is where the political connection becomes interesting.
Capitalism needs engineers.
Socialism needs managers.
Capitalism ultimately asks:
What can you produce that someone values enough to pay for?
A managerial-bureaucratic system asks:
Can you obtain the permission, budget, position or institutional support to make it happen?
The first rewards competence because reality is the judge.
The second rewards proximity to power because the institution is the judge.
This may help explain one of the great transformations of post-war France: the relative rise of administrative and business elites alongside the gradual weakening of the country’s extraordinary engineering and industrial culture.
France did not suddenly become less intelligent.
It increasingly rewarded a different kind of intelligence.
The people who build things and the people who run the system are not the same people.
And when the second group becomes dominant, something profound happens:
The civilization stops asking "Does it work?"
It starts asking "Is it approved?"
That is the moment when the land of engineers becomes the land of managers.
And eventually, the managers start managing the decline.
Yesterday we learned what communism is: a system of lies.
Today, why the managerial class embraces it.
Start with the mechanics. In Europe, everything is illegal by default – you want to build, hire, launch, you ask, and silence means no. When everything requires permission, permission becomes the currency. And a permission economy has a ruling class: the people who master the apparatus, know the right rooms, speak the right script.
Now see what the lie does for them. A system built on truth asks: who is the best person for the job? That question is lethal to inherited position – merit doesn’t check your surname. A system built on the approved narrative asks instead: who belongs in the room? Who has the credentials, the connections, the correct vocabulary? That question can be inherited.
This is why so many rich European families are socialists. Not stupidity, not naive idealism. For some, guilt and moral posturing – most didn’t create their wealth themselves. But mainly it’s preservation: the subsidies, the government contracts, the protected networks – all wrapped in the language of caring for the population.
The lie is not a cost of this system. It is the load-bearing wall. Say true things – about merit, about the budget, about who actually built what – and the whole arrangement is exposed. So truth itself must become negotiable, and anyone who insists on it becomes dangerous. Zakłamanie (the systemic lie) is not communism’s malfunction; it is the operating system of every elite that cannot survive an honest question.
That is the continuity from the nomenklatura to Brussels: it never needed to believe in Marx. It needed a system where advancement runs through loyalty to the narrative instead of results. Understand this and the present becomes legible: the managerial class is the nomenklatura – same selection, same script, same immunity to results. Only the letterhead changed.
And look where it actually lives. The large corporations are run exactly like socialism from the inside: committees instead of owners, process instead of judgment, HR as the party cell, DEI statements as the loyalty oath, promotion by narrative compliance – and the shareholders as distant and powerless as the Soviet “people” who nominally owned everything. The managerial class holds them the way the nomenklatura held the state enterprises: legally owning nothing, actually controlling everything, and answering for no result.
The biggest mistake is to laugh at them. They are educated, organized, and effective – small minorities that shaped legislation, media, and schools are not incompetent. You don’t defeat an organized elite by calling it foolish. You defeat it by understanding how it holds power – and by building the alternative that asks the lethal question again: what can you actually do?
Knossos Micro retweeted
"You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth — and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated."
— Thomas Sowell
Here are the most important lessons from the Austrian School of Economics in one post:
The entire edifice of modern economic policy rests on a lie: that a group of planners can manage an economy better than the people living in it.
Start with value. Nothing has value in the abstract. You value a glass of water differently when you're drowning than when you're dying of thirst in the Sahara. Value lives inside individual human minds, not in objects, not in labor hours, not in government decree. Every price control, every subsidy, every centrally administered wage floor ignores this and produces predictable wreckage.
Money didn't come from a government committee. It emerged spontaneously from markets, as traders across centuries converged on commodities like gold and silver because they held value across time and space. Governments didn't invent money; they hijacked it.
Inflation is the expansion of the money supply itself. Rising prices are the symptom. When the Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet from roughly $4 trillion to nearly $9 trillion between 2020 and 2022, the price explosion that followed wasn't a mystery. It was the direct, mechanical consequence of that expansion. The Fed caused it.
Prices do something irreplaceable: they transmit information across millions of actors simultaneously. When lumber prices spiked in 2021, builders across North America cut waste and sought alternatives without a single bureaucrat issuing a memo. No central planner can replicate that signal, because no central planner possesses the knowledge embedded in it.
This connects directly to the knowledge problem. You know your neighborhood, your suppliers, your customers, your own tolerance for risk. Your competitor knows his. A bureaucrat in Washington knows none of it. The knowledge required to run an economy is dispersed, personal, and contextual. It cannot be extracted, aggregated, and fed into a planning model. The Soviet Union ran that experiment for seventy years and produced chronic shortages of basic goods.
Bad businesses must be allowed to fail. When they fail, they release labor, capital, and resources to producers who will use them more effectively. When Washington handed General Motors $49.5 billion in 2009 to prevent exactly that process, it kept misallocated capital locked inside a failing structure and punished every competitor who had managed their business responsibly.
Every function government performs, a voluntary market arrangement performs better: faster, cheaper, and responsive to actual human preferences rather than political incentives. Education, roads, security, dispute resolution, all of it. Government agencies face no profit and loss signal, no competition, and no mechanism to reward performance. They optimize for budget preservation and political survival, and the people using the service have no exit option.
The political class and the central banking apparatus that sustains it are the villains. Both benefit directly from the idea that expert management beats voluntary exchange. They will not surrender that idea willingly.
What would you add?
Knossos Micro retweeted
This PERFECTLY explains why ‘The Left’ is obsessed with being morally superior
“Did you ever ask yourself why it's always the weakest, least competent, and average IQ people who base their entire identity on morality and tolerance?”
Here’s the psychology behind it:
“Every human being carries the same deep drive to matter, to be respected, to reach something external, whether that's money, status, an attractive partner, or genuine skill at something. In the real world, all of these get measured through competence, strength, and intelligence, and that's exactly the problem for people who fall short on those measurements.
They still feel the drive, but they can't reach the goal, at least not to the degree others can, and unconsciously they experience the inferiority that comes with actual objective inferiority.
To avoid feeling useless and insignificant, they move the target. Instead of competence, the goal becomes being a good person, a goal defined entirely by them that requires no measurable skill, no competition, and no real work to declare victory in. This gets them the exact same feeling of accomplishment without ever having to develop any of the competence that would normally be required to earn it.
That's the path the weak and the incapable take because it's the only game left where they can still call themselves winners.”
You could spend 1000 years trying to come up with a better explanation for liberals and their mindset and you wouldn’t be able to, because this is it
If you fail at everything else, you simply make your entire life about being “morally superior”
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Why can’t communists be communist the way the Amish are Amish, as in, peacefully, voluntarily, among themselves, without taking anyone else’s property or forcing anyone else to participate?
If communism is really about cooperation and community, why does everyone else have to be forced into it?
Knossos Micro retweeted
Milton Friedman on 4 ways to spend money:
1) Your money on yourself (you’re careful about both cost and quality)
2) Your money on others (you care about cost, less about quality)
3) Someone else’s money on yourself (you care about quality, not cost)
4) Someone else’s money on others (you care about neither)
The last one is how government spending works.
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After the Green Party takes power we will no longer need money.
Instead, we will exchange goods and services.
For example, you might come and renovate my kitchen, and in return I'll write a poem about climate change for you.
Or you'll give my car a full service, and I'll spend an equal amount of time explaining queer Marxism to your children.
Elon Musk described the government in four sentences and never made a political argument. He read out the schematic.
Musk: "Government is a corporation in the limit. It is the most corporate thing. It is maximum corporation. And it's also a monopoly, and also is the only one that's allowed legally to do violence."
Take the flag off it and look at what's underneath.
It collects revenue. It employs millions. It owns land. It writes the rules it operates under.
That's a corporation. Line for line.
With three edits.
You cannot choose a competitor.
You cannot decline the transaction.
It is the only one on earth permitted to use force to make you pay.
Every other relationship in your life required your consent. This one required your birth.
Musk: "Why would you want to give a corporation with no competition that can't even really go bankrupt more money?"
There is no condition under which it stops. None was ever built in.
Everything that has ever gotten better got better by being allowed to die. Evolution runs on extinction. Science runs on falsification. Markets run on bankruptcy. Your own body runs on cells that kill themselves on schedule.
Failure isn't cruelty. It's information. It's the only mechanism in the universe that tells a system it was wrong.
Take it away and the system doesn't become permanent. It becomes blind.
A company that misreads the world loses customers.
A government that misreads the world receives a larger budget the following year.
It's the only structure we've built where failure is what feeds it.
Musk: "I think the role of government should be that of like a referee, and not a player on the field."
A referee was never supposed to be weak. He was supposed to be outside the outcome.
The moment he starts scoring he isn't corrupt. Corruption would mean he broke a rule. He wrote the rules. He's just playing, and he's the only one allowed to keep score.
A system like that never gets caught. It only gets old.
Every civilization that collapsed did it with its institutions still standing.
The buildings stayed. The titles stayed. The revenue arrived on schedule.
What died was the feedback. The signal telling it that reality had moved and it hadn't.
Rome didn't fall in a day. It stopped listening for a century and called it stability.
That's the actual danger. Not tyranny. Deafness with a budget.
And it runs deeper than politics.
Everything you love is precious because it can be lost. A promise means something because the person making it will die. Your time matters because you don't get more of it.
Mortality isn't the tragedy of being human. It's the only reason anything costs anything.
Then we built one institution exempt from all of it. No death. No scarcity. No consequence. A thing that can never lose anything, deciding what everything is worth.
It bills in dollars. It's paid in hours. And it has never once felt what an hour costs.
It can be wrong for a century and feel nothing. You get eighty years and have to be right the first time.
It doesn't have to win the argument. It only has to outlive the person making it, and it has never lost that one.
It borrows against people who don't exist yet, and they will pay, because it will still be standing when they arrive.
Then we handed it the only gun.
This isn't a conspiracy. Conspiracies need competence and coordination. This is a design flaw, and design flaws only need time.
That's the good news. A conspiracy can't be proven or fixed. A design flaw can be both.
Everything good in your life exists because something was permitted to fail on the way to it. Every medicine. Every machine. Every idea that survived contact with reality.
The one institution that cannot fail is the one holding the gun.
That isn't a warning. It's an engineering problem.
And every permanent thing on earth was designed by people who weren't.
Knossos Micro retweeted
Capitalism is a powerful force for good. It benefits everyone, especially those who lean in and help build the future.
But it’s under attack (again). Wealth taxes, price controls, government-run grocery stores, asset seizures. Fear is being used as a political lever and an excuse for control. I’ve seen this play out before, it leads nowhere good.
I lived in Buenos Aires in 2008 when the Argentine government seized $30B in private pensions to ‘protect’ citizens from the financial crisis. Then they froze access to the dollar and nationalized companies. Within a decade, inflation was over 50%. The elites had miraculously moved their money, leaving regular people to take the financial hit.
Politicians are selling collectivism out of the same playbook used by Argentina, Venezuela, and the former Soviet Union: promise protection, concentrate power, tighten the fist. And the costs fall on the poorest people in society who are unable to protect themselves.
Capitalism isn't perfect. But it’s far better than every alternative that’s been tried. Millions of people making independent decisions, with the free market rewarding the best ideas, will out-build any central planner.