Money is the foundation of the structure of social cooperation, and you cannot straighten the upper floors of a building whose foundation is sliding.

The money is broken, and everything else runs downstream of that.

You Are the Collateral, Forty-Three Cents on the Dollar

My latest with Mises Institute

https://mises.org/mises-wire/you-are-collateral-forty-three-cents-dollar

Yet while there is little that is likely to induce men who are good by our standards to aspire to leading positions in the totalitarian machine, and much to deter them, there will be special opportunities for the ruthless and unscrupulous. There will be jobs to be done about the badness of which taken by themselves nobody has any doubt, but which have to be done in the service of some higher end, and which have to be executed with the same expertness and efficiency as any others. And as there will be need for actions which are bad in themselves, and which all those still influenced by traditional morals will be reluctant to perform, the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion and power. The positions in a totalitarian society in which it is necessary to practice cruelty and intimidation, deliberate deception and spying, are numerous.

In the beginning there was man, and for a time it was good. But humanity’s so called ‘civil societies’ soon fell victim to vanity and corruption. Then man made the machine in his own likeness.

A man is walking through a field when he encounters a tiger.

He runs, but the tiger pursues him. At the edge of a cliff, he grabs a wild vine and lowers himself over the side. Above him, the tiger waits. Far below, he sees another tiger waiting to devour him.

Then two mice—one white and one black—begin gnawing through the vine.

Hanging there, surrounded by danger, the man notices a ripe strawberry growing within reach. Holding the vine with one hand, he picks the strawberry with the other.

He eats it.

How sweet it tastes.

The K-Shaped Economy Is Not in Your Imagination

My latest with the Mises Institute

https://mises.org/mises-wire/k-shaped-economy-not-your-imagination

The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber... In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.

"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sOoner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved."

43 cents of every income tax dollar now goes to interest. Your labor is the collateral on loans you never took out, pledged by people who already spent the money.

#NothingStopsThisTrain

The fundamental political question is why do people obey a government. The answer is that they tend to enslave themselves, to let themselves be governed by tyrants. Freedom from the refusal to serve. Tyrants fall when the people withdraw their support.

- Murray Rothbard