“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
ethics
Repeat after Milton /
“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”
“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”
“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.”
“Inflation is a disease. It’s a dangerous disease for a society. It is sometimes a fatal disease for a society. It’s a disease that if allowed to rage unchecked can destroy a society, and we have many such examples.”
And one of these examples is the once beautiful country in which I was born.*
Viruses do not wreck economies. Government overreaction wrecks economies. People do not “lose their jobs” to a pandemic. People’s jobs are stolen from them by governments which enforce scientifically and morally unjustifiable lockdowns. Governments follow this injury by printing enormous sums of money to support the people that they have forced into unemployment. In this one-two punch, governments decrease the production of goods while simultaneously increasing the supply of money chasing those goods. This causes inflation. Inflation is not merely a disease. It is theft on a grand scale. Government reserves to itself the monopoly right to print money, and therefore only government can debase the currency. Debasement does not happen by accident. It is carried out as a willful act by those in power over us. It is morally corrupt. It is evil.
Related reading: The Ethics of Money Production by Jörg Guido Hülsmann.
*In Zimbabwe, inflation rose from an annual rate of 32% in 1998, to an estimated high of 11,200,000% in August 2008 according to the Central Statistical Office. This represented a state of hyperinflation, and the central bank introduced a new 100 trillion dollar note. In January 2009, in an effort to counteract runaway inflation, acting Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa announced that Zimbabweans would be permitted to use other, more stable currencies to do business, alongside the Zimbabwean dollar. In an effort to combat inflation and foster economic growth the Zimbabwean dollar was suspended indefinitely in April 2009. In 2016, Zimbabwe allowed trade in the United States dollar and various other currencies such as the rand (South Africa), the pula (Botswana), the euro, and the pound sterling (UK).