LA ESTAFA DE LAS BANDERAS NOBLES. El socialismo tiene un mecanismo perverso que repite sistemáticamente en toda América Latina: SE APROPIA DE CAUSAS NOBLES PARA JUSTIFICAR CURROS INDEFENDIBLES. Primero elige una causa moralmente atendible. Los discapacitados, los jubilados, la universidad pública. Después, en nombre de esa causa, exige cada vez más gasto público, crea estructuras burocráticas gigantescas y administra cajas multimillonarias sin controles ni transparencia. ¿Y qué pasa cuando alguien llega y se anima a preguntar dónde está la plata? ¿Cuando alguien pretende auditar esas cajas? APARECE EL CHANTAJE MORAL. No muestran los números. No rinden cuentas. No explican nada. Te acusan de estar en contra de los discapacitados, de los jubilados o de la educación. Porque el objetivo no es discutir cómo ayudar a quienes mas lo necesitan. EL OBJETIVO ES QUE NADIE SE ATREVA A CUESTIONAR SU NEGOCIO. Y cuando finalmente se abren las cajas, aparece lo de siempre: intermediarios, estructuras militantes, privilegios y curros financiados con el dinero de los pagadores de impuestos. USAN A LOS POBRES COMO ESCUDO MORAL PARA DEFENDER LOS PRIVILEGIOS DE LA CASTA. Lo vimos en la Argentina y lo vemos en cada país donde el socialismo logró echar sus garras. Siempre el mismo mecanismo. Siempre el mismo chantaje. Siempre los mismos beneficiarios. Y siempre las mismas víctimas: los que verdaderamente necesitan ayuda y los argentinos de bien que pagan la fiesta. NO DEFIENDEN DERECHOS. DEFIENDEN CAJAS. QUE SE ABRAN TODAS LAS CUENTAS. QUE SE PUBLIQUE CADA CONTRATO. QUE CADA RESPONSABLE RINDA CUENTAS HASTA DEL ÚLTIMO PESO. LOS ARGENTINOS MERECEN SABER EN QUÉ SE GASTA SU DINERO. VLLC!

Murray Rothbard published "What Has Government Done to Our Money?" in 1963, two years after the Kennedy administration quietly accelerated deficit spending and a decade before Nixon finished destroying what remained of the gold standard on August 15, 1971. Rothbard wrote it as a weapon, rather than a textbook. The book tears apart the mythology that central banking is a neutral technical institution. Rothbard traces the mechanics of money from commodity origins through state capture: governments monopolize the mint, debase the currency, create central banks to launder the counterfeiting, and finally sever the gold link entirely so the theft faces no hard constraint. Every step follows the same logic: The state expands the money supply, hands the new money to politically connected spenders first, and you absorb the price increases after the purchasing power dilutes. Inflation is a tax, collected without a vote. The clearest lesson in the book is that fractional reserve banking is legalized fraud. Banks (used to) lend out money they simultaneously owe depositors on demand. This creates credit cycles: artificial booms followed by necessary busts. The Federal Reserve, chartered in 1913, exists to backstop that fraud and prevent the liquidation that would otherwise discipline reckless banks. The book's legacy is substantial. It gave the post-1971 hard money movement a readable, rigorous foundation. Ron Paul cited it repeatedly during his Federal Reserve auditing campaigns in the 2000s. Bitcoin advocates adopted its framework wholesale, treating the 21-million-coin cap as the digital gold standard Rothbard demanded. The villains are identifiable and institutional: the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and every Congress that chose inflation over honest taxation because inflation hides the cost. The dollar has lost over 97% of its 1913 purchasing power. Rothbard named the mechanism before most people admitted it existed.

Ludwig von Mises published The Theory of Money and Credit in 1912, eleven years before the hyperinflation that destroyed the German mark and wiped out an entire generation of European savings. He was 31 years old. He wrote it while working as an economist at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, watching governments across Europe begin their love affair with central banking and paper money. The book's core argument is simple: Credit expansion by banks does not create real wealth; it distorts the structure of production by sending false price signals to entrepreneurs. Businesses invest in projects that only appear profitable because artificially low interest rates make the math work. When rates normalize, those investments collapse. Mises called this the business cycle, and he traced its origin directly to central bank manipulation. Every recession you have lived through follows this exact pattern. Central banks are to blame for the boom/bust cycle: specifically, the Federal Reserve, the ECB, the Bank of England. These institutions inject credit that no saver voluntarily produced, and they do it to fund government spending and protect politically connected banks from the consequences of their own bad bets. Einstein published his special theory of relativity in 1905. Mises published Theory of Money and Credit seven years later. Both men identified a mechanism invisible to everyone around them and built a predictive framework from first principles that their contemporaries largely dismissed. The Fed has expanded its balance sheet from roughly $900 billion in 2008 to over $7 trillion by 2026. Mises wrote the autopsy before the patient was even sick. The book has been sitting there for more than 100 years, but interventionists choose to ignore it.

JAVIER MILEI: "The UN has become a useless organization whose only purpose is to sustain a caste of fatally arrogant parasites, masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats." "I would remind them of what Ludwig von Mises said: "Good people do not think about controlling the lives of their fellow human beings." "Those who were supposed to guarantee collective security in human rights failed in their task. Instead, they allowed chaos, violence and international terrorism to flourish."

INSTEAD OF WATCHING AN HOUR OF NETFLIX TONIGHT. This 20 minute lecture by Andreas Antonopoulos will teach you more about the financial surveillance complex and KYC risks, than most people learn in years. Bookmark it and share it, no matter what.

Every government-issued paper currency in history has collapsed. Every single one. Rome debased the denarius until it held almost no silver. Weimar Germany printed the mark into oblivion by 1923, destroying middle-class savings in under four years. The Continental dollar, the French assignat, the Zimbabwean dollar, the Venezuelan bolivar. The list runs long and the ending never changes. Central banks manage fiat currency to fund government spending that tax revenue cannot cover, not to protect your purchasing power. Inflation is a tax. Every dollar created without corresponding production transfers purchasing power from savers to first spenders, which is always the government and its connected institutions. The dollar has lost over 97% of its purchasing power since the Federal Reserve opened for business in 1913. That loss did not happen accidentally; the Fed ran the printing press, and you absorbed the damage. Defenders will argue that modern central banking is more sophisticated than Weimar. The math remains identical: spend beyond revenue, monetize the gap, dilute the currency. Sophistication only determines the speed of the destruction. No fiat currency has ever survived indefinitely. Not one government has voluntarily relinquished the power to inflate. Given those two facts, the current dollar's long-term trajectory requires no guesswork.

Anyone looking at the long-term silver price chart always asks one question: WTF happened in 1980? The answer is one of the most interesting stories in modern financial history. Nelson Bunker and William Herbert Hunt accumulated roughly 100 million ounces of silver between 1979 and 1980, driving prices from $6 to $50 per ounce. They believed, correctly, that fiat currency expansion under the Federal Reserve made hard assets the rational hedge. They acted on that belief aggressively and legally. Washington panicked. Big banks and trading houses simply did not have the silver they sold in the futures market to deliver, and stood to lose an indefinite amount of money. To put it plainly, the Hunt brothers owned most of the physical silver and also owned the futures contracts. To deliver physical silver on the futures date, the firms who sold the futures had to buy it from somewhere, and that somewhere was the Hunt brothers themselves. Checkmate. Naturally, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Chicago Board of Trade changed the rules mid-game in January 1980, issuing "Silver Rule 7," which restricted new silver futures purchases and forced liquidation of existing positions, forcing the Hunt brothers to sell by law. The exchanges moved the goalposts while the Hunts were already on the field. Prices collapsed. The Hunts faced margin calls they couldn't meet. On March 27, 1980, silver dropped 50% in a single day, now called "Silver Thursday." The brothers eventually declared bankruptcy in 1988. The entire apparatus, the CFTC, the Fed, the major banks holding short positions on silver, had direct financial interests in stopping the Hunts. The banks short on silver lobbied the government and got the rules changed in their favor. You never hear that part emphasized. Property rights mean nothing if regulators can rewrite market rules the moment a private actor threatens well-connected institutions. The Hunt brothers didn't destabilize the monetary system. They exposed how fragile a debt-based system looks when real money starts moving. H/T to @MiningVisuals for this excellent graphic.

Bitcoin left the 200-week moving average again. BTC price: $77k 200WMA: $65k 🔵Every cycle bottom happened when the rainbow turned blue. The people who bought the last three times this happened made generational wealth. Interactive chart👉charts.blockhorizon.io/chart…

Keynesians have built an entire cathedral of policy on a cracked foundation: the belief that spending, by itself, creates wealth. John Maynard Keynes watched the Great Depression and concluded that economies collapse because people hoard money instead of spending it, and that government must step in as the "spender of last resort." The story sounds compassionate, but the math is disastrous. There is something called the broken window fallacy, which Keynesians ignore blatantly. When government borrows $800 billion to fund a stimulus package, you see the construction workers hired. You never see the factories not built because private capital was crowded out or taxed away. The unseen cost is as real as the seen benefit; Keynesians simply refuse to count it. Then there is the interest rate manipulation problem. Central banks suppressing rates below market-clearing levels do not eliminate recessions. They manufacture them. Cheap credit signals to entrepreneurs that real savings exist to fund long-term projects. Those savings do not actually exist. The housing boom running from 2001 to 2007 was exactly this: millions of investment decisions made on a Federal Reserve lie about the price of capital. The deepest error is treating consumption as the engine of prosperity. Consumption is the destination, not the fuel. Capital accumulation, saving, and deferred gratification build the productive capacity that makes consumption possible later. When you tax your savings to fund someone else's spending today, you are liquidating the economy's future, not stimulating it. Keynesians have been wrong at every major turning point since 1936. The theory survives not because it works, but because it tells politicians exactly what they want to hear: Spending more is a good thing.

🇺🇸 US 10Y Treasury yields are testing 5%. US mortgage rates are back above 7%. Think about what that means. The FIC now wants around 5% to lend to the US Government for 10 years. That is a very expensive cost of capital for the world’s reserve currency. The government can only borrow more to service the interest. Borrowing more increases the debt burden, while inflation helps erode that debt in real terms. AI productivity may offset some inflationary pressure, but it also creates an even bigger divide. If you own productive assets and hard money, you participate in the upside. If you only own currency and earn wages that fail to keep up, your purchasing power gets diluted. That’s true K-shaped economy.

“Inflation is made in Washington because only Washington can create money... What produces it is too much government spending and too much government creation of money and nothing else.” — Milton Friedman

It's time for the separation of money and state: The state's monopoly on money is the original sin of modern economics. Every other government intervention you suffer under depends on it. Before 1913, private banks issued competing notes backed by gold. A bank that overissued faced immediate redemption pressure from rival institutions. The discipline was mechanical and merciless. When the Federal Reserve centralized that function, it removed the punishment for overissuance and handed politicians a printing press in a marble building and formal titles. Ludwig von Mises identified inflation as a tax in 1912. Every dollar created without corresponding production transfers purchasing power from your savings to the first spenders, which are invariably governments, contractors, and politically connected financial institutions. By the time the newly created money reaches your wage or your savings account, prices have already adjusted upward. You absorb the cost. The Treasury captures the gain. Currency competition, not central planning, produces monetary discipline. El Salvador's 2021 Bitcoin adoption experiment, whatever its stumbles, demonstrated that states are not the only entities capable of running a monetary system at scale. The technology exists. The political will is the variable. The deeper point is constitutional, almost philosophical. Separation of church and state recognized that fusing spiritual authority with political power corrupts both. The same logic applies to money. Give the state control over the unit of account and it controls the terms of every transaction, every contract, every act of saving you attempt. Control over the unit of account is total power, exercised quietly, denominated in percentage points, and blamed on supply chains.

RT @Excellion: Treasury @SecScottBessent says “over the next four years we will have to have another Bretton Woods moment.” That would be…

Austrian Economist Friedrich Hayek: I don’t believe we shall ever have good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government…all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can’t stop.

Keynes built his entire macroeconomic system on a single false premise: that saving and investment are separate, potentially divergent forces requiring government to reconcile them. Saving and investment are not separate forces. Every dollar you save gets lent, invested, or held as cash balances that lower prices and raise real purchasing power for others. Ludwig von Mises laid this out in 1912. Saving IS investment. The act of withholding consumption releases real resources, steel, labor, time, for capital formation. No reconciliation needed. Keynes invented the "paradox of thrift" to justify intervention. If everyone saves simultaneously, he argued, aggregate demand collapses and the economy contracts. The error here is treating the economy as a bathtub with a fixed water level rather than a dynamic network of production stages. Lower consumption spending frees resources that entrepreneurs redirect toward longer, more productive capital structures. What Keynes gave governments was intellectual permission to punish savers through inflation and deficit spending. You pay that price every month at the grocery store.

L-BTC is marketed as being backed 1:1 by Bitcoin. ~4,000 BTC have now left the Liquid Federation wallet and are currently controlled by the purported white hats. Until those Bitcoin are returned, 95% of the BTC that was held in the federation reserve is no longer under the federation’s control. So what exactly does “1:1 backed by Bitcoin” mean right now? This is the counterparty risk Bitcoin was designed to remove.

This wasn't allowed in public incase it offended anyone. So please don't retweet it. Thanks 🙏dutchbarn.com

One of the most important decisions you'll make is what money to save in.

Just published a working paper: "Asymmetric Tail Curvature in Bitcoin Price Quantiles" benjamincowen.com/reports/as…