Fiat money is a government permission slip to slowly steal from you, and every central bank on earth runs one. Here is how the mechanism works. Governments spend beyond what taxation can cover. Rather than default honestly, they instruct their central bank to create new currency units, purchase government debt, and inject the proceeds into the financial system. As of late 2026, the Federal Reserve held $7 trillion in assets, most of it acquired through this process. The new dollars dilute every dollar you already hold. Your purchasing power falls. Nobody ever announces the heist. Mises called this the "crack-up boom," the terminal phase where currency creation accelerates until the public loses confidence entirely. Germany 1923. Zimbabwe 2008. Venezuela throughout the 2010s. Each collapse followed the same script: politicians facing fiscal pressure chose the printing press over honest accounting. They always do. This also causes another problem: Prices carry information, specifically the relative scarcity of goods and the preferences of millions of people acting voluntarily. When a central bank manipulates the money supply, it corrupts that signal. Entrepreneurs invest based on distorted interest rates, build factories the real economy cannot support, hire workers for projects that only pencil out at artificially cheap credit. Then the correction comes, and you watch your portfolio, your job, your neighborhood absorb the damage that Washington's balance sheet avoided. Sound money, whether gold or a hard-capped digital currency, removes this lever from political hands. Governments hate this removal because it strips them of the power to inflate.