Michael Matulef

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. nostr:nevent1qqspxlea9txrfl56pnxcahak53rnnulymt5ckea9ef6fqt6c5qjrtscpz9mhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejj7q3qh8nk2346qezka5cpm8jjh3yl5j88pf4ly2ptu7s6uu55wcfqy0wqxpqqqqqqzzlh95z

In the wilderness of the New World, the Plymouth Pilgrims had progressed from the false dream of communism to the sound realism of capitalism. At a time of economic uncertainty and growing political paternalism, it is worthwhile recalling this beginning of the American experiment and experience with economic freedom. This is the lesson of the First Thanksgiving. This year, when we, Americans sit around our dining table with family and friends, we should also remember that what we are really celebrating is the birth of free men and free enterprise in that New World of America. The true meaning of Thanksgiving, in other words, is the triumph of Capitalism over the failure of Collectivism in all its forms. https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/thanksgiving-celebrating-birth-american-free-enterprise/

A world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth.” — Friedrich Hayek

The path forward is not mysterious; it is a choice. Societies that wish to recover from inflation’s moral and economic wreckage must begin where the corruption began: with money itself. The Austrian remedy demands the restoration of honest money—money that cannot be inflated at will, that holds its value across time, and that reconnects effort with reward. To call for sound money is to demand the reestablishment of truth as the foundation of economic life. Inflation is first and foremost a lie—a lie embedded in the very medium we use to communicate value. When that medium is corrupted, the moral architecture of society collapses with it. Restoring sound money means restoring the conditions under which civilization can flourish: where savings accumulate rather than decay, where long-term planning replaces short-term desperation, and where currency becomes an ally of virtue rather than an engine of vice. The inflation that impoverishes and demoralizes continues, not by economic necessity, but by political will and public acquiescence. History offers no comfort to those who ignore economic law indefinitely. To choose sound money is to choose civilization over decay. The Austrian School offers no utopian promises, only stark clarity: sound money is the precondition for a free and civilized society, and its absence is the precondition for barbarism. nostr:nevent1qqsw0yzzwn2gk7vmykhjm8pm5u4a7ha2s97vsansl8l4krze7w86vsgppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgs964yyepyk02krnpkd2y403hxa2fpn6zgp4kamty3kqyvgg2p658srqsqqqqqpu00ncf

The calamity is not merely higher prices but confused values and distorted choices. Inflation is, in essence, a lie against time and value, and, like all lies, it eventually collapses under its own contradictions. nostr:nevent1qqsw0yzzwn2gk7vmykhjm8pm5u4a7ha2s97vsansl8l4krze7w86vsgpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygza2jzvsjt84tpesmx4z2hcmnw4yseapyq6mwa4jgmqzxyy9qa2rcpsgqqqqqqs8zwdz5

There is nowadays a very reprehensible, even dangerous, semantic confusion that makes it extremely difficult for the non-expert to grasp the true state of affairs. Inflation, as this term was always used everywhere and especially in this country [the United States], means increasing the quantity of money and bank notes in circulation and the quantity of bank deposits subject to check. But people today use the term “inflation” to refer to the phenomenon that is an inevitable consequence of inflation, that is the tendency of all prices and wage rates to rise. The result of this deplorable confusion is that there is no term left to signify the cause of this rise in prices and wages. There is no longer any word available to signify the phenomenon that has been, up to now, called inflation. It follows that nobody cares about inflation in the traditional sense of the term. As you cannot talk about something that has no name, you cannot fight it. Those who pretend to fight inflation are in fact only fighting what is the inevitable consequence of inflation, rising prices. Their ventures are doomed to failure because they do not attack the root of the evil. nostr:nevent1qqsw0yzzwn2gk7vmykhjm8pm5u4a7ha2s97vsansl8l4krze7w86vsgpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygza2jzvsjt84tpesmx4z2hcmnw4yseapyq6mwa4jgmqzxyy9qa2rcpsgqqqqqqs8zwdz5

The Road to De-Civilization: Inflation and the Moral Erosion of Society My latest with the Mises Institute https://mises.org/mises-wire/road-de-civilization-inflation-and-moral-erosion-society

The same boiling water that softens the potato hardens the egg. — Roald Dahl

The great revolution of the market economy is not that it makes some people very rich. It is that it makes ordinary exchange—the millions of small transactions that occur daily—vehicles for peaceful cooperation and mutual improvement. Every time a merchant sells to a customer, a worker accepts employment, a farmer brings goods to market, an artisan creates something for distant buyers; these are acts of peace. They are transactions between people who have found it more profitable to cooperate than to conflict. In an age of rising tensions and declining faith in institutions, this message is urgent. We must recover the understanding that economics is fundamentally about peace, about how billions of strangers can coordinate their actions, satisfy each other’s needs, and improve their conditions together. When we grasp this, we realize that defending markets is not about defending greed or selfishness. It is about defending the greatest engine of peaceful cooperation humanity has ever known. nostr:nevent1qqsvlgnj36ruqtu974u030xqelnhzmaz6t7vuh8hdgu7rp96nagrs5qpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygza2jzvsjt84tpesmx4z2hcmnw4yseapyq6mwa4jgmqzxyy9qa2rcpsgqqqqqqslk9p2w

Markets thus accomplish what diplomacy, treaties, and moral exhortation cannot: they make cooperation more profitable than conflict. They do not require that we love our neighbors or share their values, they simply align incentives. When I profit from your prosperity, I have reason to wish you well. When your poverty impoverishes me, I have reason to help you escape it. These incentives are far more reliable than appeals to universal brotherhood. nostr:nevent1qqsvlgnj36ruqtu974u030xqelnhzmaz6t7vuh8hdgu7rp96nagrs5qpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsygza2jzvsjt84tpesmx4z2hcmnw4yseapyq6mwa4jgmqzxyy9qa2rcpsgqqqqqqslk9p2w

The Architecture of Peace: How Markets Transform Conflict into Cooperation My latest piece with Mises https://mises.org/mises-wire/architecture-peace-how-markets-transform-conflict-cooperation

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 a result of the voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved

Economics is the study of how human beings cooperate peacefully to improve their conditions.

Markets Transform Conflict into Cooperation