Leftist: But without government, who will look after the poor? Me: Before the welfare state existed, working-class men cared for the poor without the need for your tax dollars. Friendly societies and fraternal lodges, groups like the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and the Ancient Order of Foresters, covered millions of Americans and Britons by 1900. They paid sick benefits, death benefits, and contracted physicians called lodge doctors, who charged members roughly $1 to $2 annually for full medical care. Competition kept those doctors honest. Members fired physicians who underperformed. The state destroyed this ecosystem, specifically through the 1911 National Insurance Act in Britain and its American successors. The British Medical Association lobbied hard to eliminate lodge practice because those contracted rates embarrassed the profession. Government handed doctors a captive market instead. By 1920, lodge medicine was gutted. You lost the ability to fire your provider, lost transparent pricing, and inherited a bureaucracy that answered to politicians, not to you. Mutual aid societies solved the knowledge problem that central planners cannot solve. Members lived near each other, worked the same trades, and could detect fraud immediately. A sick neighbor either was sick or wasn't. No bureaucrat 400 miles away can make that call. David Beito documented all of this in his 2000 book "From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State." Voluntary association produced accountable, affordable welfare. Government produced dependency and cartelized medicine. The substitution caused a theft of function. Any government wants its people dependent on it, not on some social society.

The Federal Reserve printed roughly $4 trillion between March 2020 and early 2022, expanding its balance sheet from $4.2 trillion to over $8.9 trillion, and Jerome Powell stood in front of cameras calling the resulting price explosion "transitory." Inflation is a tax. Every dollar created without corresponding production transfers purchasing power from savers to the first spenders. The government and its preferred financial institutions spent those fresh dollars before prices adjusted. You spent them after, at a grocery store already pricing in the damage. By June 2022, CPI hit 9.1 percent, the highest since 1981. Rent, food, used cars, energy: all of it ran hot simultaneously. Monetary expansion redistributes wealth rather than creating it, taking from your pocket to give to whoever holds newly printed money first. Powell's "transitory" call was deliberate. The Fed had every price signal and money supply number available. M2 grew 27 percent in 2020 alone. That expansion predicted exactly what followed. The Fed created this inflation deliberately, financing pandemic-era federal spending that Congress could not politically tax you to fund directly. Printing was the cowardly path. You paid through purchasing power destruction rather than a visible tax line on your return, which is precisely why they preferred it.

Prices carry information that no central planner can replicate. Mao Zedong spent three decades proving this at the cost of roughly 45 million dead in the Great Leap Forward famine alone. Deng Xiaoping's 1978 Household Responsibility System did one essential thing: it let farmers in Anhui province keep surplus grain after meeting state quotas and sell it at market prices. That single change, price signals attached to individual ownership, triggered an immediate production explosion. Chinese grain output jumped from 305 million tons in 1978 to 407 million tons by 1984. Collectivization severs the connection between effort and reward. State procurement prices had disconnected individual incentive from output. Peasants farming communal land had no reason to produce beyond the minimum, and hundreds of millions starved because of that severed connection. When Deng restored prices, he restored the coordination mechanism Mao had destroyed. Capital, labor, and land started flowing toward productive uses because individuals now captured the gains from productive decisions. Maoism's failure was not execution or insufficient resources. The ideology itself was the catastrophe. Command allocation cannot substitute for price signals because prices aggregate dispersed local knowledge that no Beijing committee possesses or ever will. Every year China kept markets contained to agriculture while maintaining state industry, growth stalled in those sectors. Every liberalization produced the same result: output rose. Prosperity follows from prices and property rights. Deleting those two things leads to poverty, famine, and death.

The Fed and banks create new money and hand it to borrowers first. By the time that money reaches your paycheck or savings account, prices have already adjusted upward. You paid the inflation tax. The banks booked the gains. Richard Cantillon identified this mechanism in the 1730s. New money does not spread evenly across an economy like water filling a bathtub. It flows through specific channels, enriching whoever receives it first before prices rise, then destroying purchasing power for everyone downstream. Look at post-2008 numbers. The Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet from roughly $900 billion in 2008 to $4.5 trillion by 2015. The S&P 500 tripled. Real wages for median workers barely moved. Wall Street firms and Treasury-connected primary dealers received the new money at near-zero rates, bought assets, and watched those assets inflate in price. Your grocery bill followed later. The Federal Reserve acts as a wealth-transfer mechanism, supposedly creating stability and employment. This is a political outcome, not a market outcome. Governments grant the Fed its monopoly on money creation. Political connections determine who borrows first, cheapest, and largest. The system produces inequality by design, then politicians blame the market for the results.

Sweden's socialist experiment nearly killed one of the most productive economies in the world. The Swedes fixed it by reversing course: something the left refuses to do. By 1993, Sweden's GDP had contracted three years straight. Unemployment hit 12 percent. The welfare state built after World War II had pushed marginal income tax rates above 80 percent, crowded out private investment, and handed bureaucrats control over capital allocation. The state owned or regulated everything that mattered. Then Sweden cut. Drastically. Between 1991 and 1994, the center-right Bildt government privatized state enterprises, deregulated financial markets, opened Sweden to foreign competition, and slashed the top marginal tax rate from 87 percent down to 50 percent. The central bank gained independence from politicians in 1999. Corporate tax fell to 28 percent by 1994. Capital responded immediately. Investment returned. Productivity climbed. By the late 1990s Sweden posted some of the strongest growth in the OECD. The villain in this story is the Swedish Social Democrats, who spent four decades proving that governments cannot efficiently allocate capital, suppress price signals without distorting behavior, or tax production at confiscatory rates without destroying it. They tried anyway and ended with a collapsing economy by 1991. The recovery came from property rights, competition, and price signals directing resources toward their most productive uses. Sweden stopped fighting the market, and the market rewarded every Swede who survived the wreckage.

The New York Times told its readers in 1936 that Stalin's Moscow show trials were legitimate legal proceedings. Walter Duranty had already spent years laundering Soviet atrocities through the paper's pages, and the pattern held: the Times reported the confessions of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and fourteen other defendants as genuine admissions of guilt. Every single defendant had been tortured. NKVD interrogators used sleep deprivation, beatings, and threats against family members to extract confessions to crimes that never happened. Zinoviev and Kamenev were shot in August 1936 within days of their sentencing. Stalin bears responsibility. But so does a press institution that chose ideological sympathy over basic skepticism, and paid no price for that choice. The Times won a Pulitzer in 1932 partly on Duranty's work. It never returned that prize. This is what state power without accountability produces: mass murder dressed up in courtroom procedure, and credentialed journalists applauding the costume. You are living with the downstream consequences of a media culture that learned it could cover for state violence and face no professional reckoning. The incentive was set then, and it has never fully reversed.

In South Africa, we have very strict information privacy laws. So much so that the Homeowners Association where I live can't give me my neighbor’s phone number. Yet, almost everyone in this country gets between 5 and 20 unsolicited marketing phone calls every day. Complete failure of enforcement.

The freest economy in American history produced the greatest explosion of living standards the world had ever witnessed, and the people who benefited most were the poor. Between 1870 and 1900, real GDP per capita roughly doubled. Steel output went from 77,000 tons in 1870 to over 11 million tons by 1900. Kerosene dropped so cheap that even working-class families could light their homes at night. Carnegie drove down steel prices while paying wages that rose faster than inflation. The market did that. No regulator in Washington achieved this. Federal spending in 1870 sat at roughly 3.7% of GDP. Congress had no income tax until 1913. The regulatory state was microscopic. Capital formation exploded precisely because entrepreneurs kept what they built. But there is a villian here: the progressive revision of this history. Academics frame the Gilded Age as a catastrophe of exploitation, demanding the state as savior. The numbers destroy that story. Real wages for unskilled labor rose 50% between 1860 and 1890. Infant mortality fell. Life expectancy climbed. What about technology? Could some important things have been invented during that time? Only AC power, the lightbulb, the telephone, the camera, the automobile, the airplane... nothing really important. Property rights worked. Contract enforcement worked. Sound money, anchored to gold, kept capital allocation honest and prevented governments from inflating savings into dust. The progressives arrived after 1900 and systematically dismantled each pillar: the income tax in 1913, the Federal Reserve in 1913, regulatory agencies multiplying through the 1920s. Growth slowed. Then the Fed contracted the money supply and Congress passed Smoot-Hawley, and you got 1929. The state caused that collapse and later blamed it on the free market.

Every tariff puts a visible winner on TV and buries the losers where no camera follows. When Trump slapped 25% tariffs on Canadian steel in 2025, American steel producers cheered. Politicians pointed to those mills. Journalists photographed those workers. Nobody photographed the automakers in Michigan paying higher input costs, or the consumers absorbing those costs in vehicle prices averaging $1,200 more per unit according to Anderson Economic Group. Frédéric Bastiat laid this out in 1850. The seen is the protected industry. The unseen is every downstream producer who now operates with a cost disadvantage, every consumer who buys less, every dollar of capital that flows into a politically protected sector instead of somewhere it would have gone voluntarily. A tariff redirects production, at gunpoint, away from efficient allocation toward politically favored allocation. The steel worker keeps his job. The appliance manufacturer cuts ten jobs you never hear about. The net result is destruction of real wealth. Governments run this scam because the winners are concentrated and loud, and the losers are diffused and silent. You don't know which products you didn't buy because tariffs quietly raised their prices out of your range. That invisibility is the entire political mechanism. Politicians manufacture a crisis, protect an industry, and collect the credit. You pay the bill through higher prices, and you never even see the invoice.

California has the highest state income tax rate in the US at 13.3%; taxpayers pay it on top of federal rates that already gut their earnings. Texas charges zero state income tax. Yet, California's government spent $322 billion in its 2024-25 budget and still ran a deficit exceeding $45 billion. Texas ran a surplus. The productive capital that should compound in private hands instead funds a bureaucracy that delivers collapsing infrastructure, rolling blackouts, and some of the worst-funded public schools per outcome dollar in the developed world. Between 2020 and 2025, over 700,000 net residents left California, most heading to Texas, Florida, and Nevada. Companies including Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Tesla relocated headquarters to Texas. Capital and labor vote by moving, and they voted decisively. California's defenders call this cherry-picking and point to Silicon Valley GDP. Silicon Valley generates despite Sacramento, not because of it. Strip out a handful of legacy tech monopolies operating on network effects built before the regulatory state metastasized, and California's economic story collapses fast. High taxation transfers value from people who created it to administrators who consume it. California executes that transfer more aggressively than almost any jurisdiction outside Western Europe and the results are blatantly obvious to anyone who cares to notice.

Soon to New York: “Crises as delivery costs go through the roof.” Then “Mamdani announces price ceilings on delivery costs.” And finally “Crises in New York as delivery comes to a standstill; thousands of workers out of jobs.” Predictable and sad.

Every dollar the federal government takes from your paycheck destroys capital that would have funded something you never get to see. Frederic Bastiat laid this out in 1850. The seen is the road, the school, the government contract. The unseen is the business that never launched, the employee who never got hired, the machine that never got built because the investor couldn't fund it. The IRS collected $2.2 trillion in individual income taxes in fiscal year 2025. Politicians point to what that bought. Nobody points to what it killed. When the government taxes your income at 37%, it decides, on your behalf, that its priorities outrank yours. The entrepreneur who would have borrowed your invested capital now can't, because that capital no longer exists in the private market. This is the core violence of income taxation: it doesn't just redistribute wealth; it destroys the coordination signal that tells producers where demand actually lives. Prices stop reflecting real preferences. Capital migrates toward politically favored sectors instead of productive ones. Congress votes to confiscate your earnings before you touch them, through withholding introduced in 1943, specifically designed so you never feel the full weight of what gets taken. You never hold that money. You never mourn it. That is the design. Withholding tax should not be tolerated anywhere in the world.

The time to decentralize is upon us! Decentralization is the only political structure that actually disciplines government, and Switzerland's canton system proves it with 700 years of evidence. Twenty-six cantons compete for residents and businesses. Appenzell Innerrhoden runs differently from Zurich, which runs differently from Geneva. When Basel raises taxes past the tolerance of its engineers and entrepreneurs, those people move to Zug, which has kept its corporate tax rate under 12%. Basel loses the revenue. The lesson writes itself. Centralization is the villain. Every time a federal authority absorbs a decision that cantons once made, you lose the price signal. You lose the experiment. You lose the exit option. Brussels crushes this mechanism across the EU, which is why French farmers and German industrialists both scream at the same unresponsive bureaucracy with nowhere to go. Competition between governments constrains Leviathan the way competition between businesses constrains monopoly pricing. Strip away that competition and governments do exactly what monopolists always do: extract maximum value from captive subjects while delivering minimum service. The canton system works because it keeps power close to the people funding it and gives those people somewhere else to go. Take power and responsibility out of the hands of bureaucrats thousands of kilometers away. Localize it to within manageable sections, and watch your area flourish.

You cant predict the future by looking at lines on a chart! You also cant predict what will happen to you this week by looking at the stars. Both these statements are blatantly obvious.

But what they cant print: Property, gold, stocks, bitcoin.

Switzerland has 26 cantons, each with its own constitution, tax rates, and laws, and the result is one of the wealthiest, most stable countries on earth. That is not a coincidence. You want to understand why Swiss GDP per capita sits around $92,000 while the EU average hovers near $37,000? Start here. Cantons compete for residents and businesses the same way firms compete for customers. Zug kept its corporate tax rate at roughly 11.9%, attracted commodity traders and crypto firms, and watched its population and tax revenues grow. Cantons that taxed aggressively lost mobile capital and productive citizens to neighbors with lighter burdens. This is Tiebout competition working in real life, not a textbook diagram. The federal government in Bern handles defense, monetary policy, and some foreign affairs. Everything else defaults downward. Cantons set income taxes. Communes set property levies. Citizens in Appenzell Innerrhoden voted on local laws by a show of hands in the Landsgemeinde, an open-air assembly, until 1990 for most matters. The feedback loop between decision-makers and the people paying for those decisions stays tight. That tightness disciplines spending in ways no central auditor ever will. Free market thinkers have stressed this for generations: political units must be small enough that exit is credible. When the cost of leaving a bad jurisdiction drops, politicians face real consequences for bad policy. Switzerland kept that cost low by design. A business or family in Basel-Stadt dissatisfied with cantonal policy drives forty minutes to Baselland. No visa. No language barrier. No bureaucratic labyrinth. Just a move. The EU spent decades building the opposite architecture, consolidating regulatory power in Brussels and eliminating the jurisdictional diversity that forces governments to stay honest. Switzerland refused to join. Its per-capita wealth, its low public debt, and its functional civil society arrived because the Swiss preserved the one institutional feature every centralized state destroys first: the credible right to leave.

Roosevelt stole all US citizens' savings in January 1934 with one simple trick. The Gold Reserve Act handed all gold held by the Federal Reserve to the Treasury, then let Roosevelt reprice gold from $20.67 to $35 per ounce by executive proclamation. That single move cut the dollar's gold content by 41%. Every dollar you held lost 41% of its backing overnight. Roosevelt needed to inflate debt away and fund New Deal spending without going to you directly. Devaluation is taxation without a vote. The purchasing power comes from somewhere, and it came from every American holding dollars or dollar-denominated savings. The government had already made private gold ownership a crime under Executive Order 6102 in April 1933, forcing citizens to surrender gold at $20.67. Then, once the government held all the gold, Roosevelt repriced it upward by 69%. The profit, roughly $2.8 billion, went straight to the Exchange Stabilization Fund, a Treasury slush fund Congress never directly controlled. Inflation is a transfer mechanism. The first spender captures real value; every subsequent holder absorbs the loss. In 1934, the Treasury was the first spender. Your parents and grandparents were not. Sound money constrains government, and governments destroy it for that reason.

Athens bled itself dry financing the Peloponnesian War. When Syracuse trapped the Athenian fleet in 413 BCE, Athens had burned through its treasury reserve of 6,000 talents built under Pericles. The assembly's response was a direct wealth tax on the propertied class, the eisphorá, extracted under wartime pressure with no fixed rate and no credible end date. Capital does not wait around to be confiscated. Wealthy Athenians pulled investment from pottery workshops, silver mining at Laurion, and maritime trade. The Laurion mines, which had funded the fleet that won Salamis in 480 BCE, saw slave labor and equipment maintenance collapse as owners stopped committing capital to assets the state could loot next season. Forced liturgies compounded the damage. Athens conscripted rich citizens to finance triremes and festivals directly, turning visible wealth into a liability. The rational response was to hide wealth or consume it, exactly what Athenians did. Athenian politicians understood that taxes were unpopular. They imposed them anyway because war spending felt urgent and property rights felt abstract. The state prioritized its own military survival over the productive base that made Athenian power possible in the first place, and it got neither. Athens lost the war in 404 BCE, leaving its economy fractured and its treasury empty.

You heard that Juan Perón destroyed Argentina's economy, but what actually happened? Perón nationalized Argentina's central bank in March 1946 and handed price-setting power over beef and wheat exports to a state agency called IAPI. That single move strangled the two industries that fed the country. IAPI bought grain from farmers at prices it set, then sold that grain on world markets at actual prices, pocketing the spread. Farmers received roughly half the international price for wheat throughout the late 1940s. They responded the only rational way: they planted less. Cattle ranchers faced identical incentives and reduced their herds. Argentina's beef exports fell from 400,000 tons in 1946 to under 200,000 tons by 1952. The central bank nationalization meant Perón controlled credit allocation directly. He flooded industry with cheap loans while agriculture starved of capital. Foreign exchange reserves accumulated before 1946 were gone by 1952. The price signal is the only tool an economy has to communicate scarcity and opportunity across millions of producers simultaneously. Suppress that signal in two of your most productive sectors and output collapses. By 1955, when the military removed Perón, Argentina's share of world wheat trade had collapsed from a dominant position to near irrelevance. A country that once fed Europe had engineered its own agricultural decline through deliberate, economically illiterate, socialist policy.

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.