Michael Matulef

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

"Every man must have freedom, must have the scope to form, test, and act upon his own choices, for any sort of development of his own personality to take place. He must, in short, be free in order that he may be fully human."

— Murray N. Rothbard

The flowering of human society depends on two factors: the intellectual power of outstanding men to conceive sound social and economic theories, and the ability of these or other men to make these ideologies palatable to the majority.

• Mises

"We must recognize that such necessary truths are not simply categories of our mind, but that our mind is one of acting persons... As categories of action, they must be mental things as much as they are characteristics of reality: For it is through actions that the mind and reality make contact."

Economic literacy matters because it teaches you to think past the first effect — to ask what happens next, to whom, and at what cost.

If you don’t ask that question, you’ll cheer what’s seen and end up living inside the unseen consequences. Making that question a habit is the difference between being informed and being fooled.

Economic ignorance is not an accident, it is the operating system of the modern state.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0w4f99eqvA4lMeC23byvIv

Fireworks for the Regime: What July 4th Actually Celebrates

My latest with Mises Institute

https://mises.org/mises-wire/fireworks-regime-what-july-4th-actually-celebrates

When people forget why prosperity was created, they lose the will to maintain the conditions that sustain it.

On “Independence Day” we celebrate a revolution against one gang of thieves… that eventually empowered another. The spirit of 1776 wasn’t about changing the faces in charge; it was about asserting that peaceful people own themselves.

The Declaration didn’t say “we want nicer rulers,” it said there are rights that no ruler can legitimately touch, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, because the individual is prior to the state. In that sense, July 4th is less about swapping flags and more about the radical claim that peaceful people are not property of kings, parliaments, or bureaucracies.

Yet every empire dresses up its extraction in patriotic colors. Today’s tax codes, regulations, and wars are justified with the same kind of language the Crown used: security, order, the “common good.” Independence Day is a good moment to remember that coercion doesn’t become moral simply because it gets rebranded as “democracy” or “public policy.”

If the Revolution means anything, it’s this: genuine liberty is the condition where individuals can live, trade, speak, and associate without being managed like livestock by whoever currently holds the guns and the legal titles. Fireworks are nice; questioning the legitimacy of all peaceful people being ruled by a permanent class of political owners is the deeper way to honor 1776.

https://open.spotify.com/track/4cYOJqJBmsXFjB2I5MNKdP

Good economics teaches that scarcity can be reduced. Bad economics teaches that scarcity can be eliminated. In other words, good economics tries to harness the logic of human action, while bad economics tries to ignore it.

Entrepreneurship is the art of turning strangers into collaborators. Politics is the art of turning neighbors into enemies.

You are the tree. What you are losing may simply be leaves.

This is Fine.

Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.

Fist my bump

Even if AI seems superior at many specific tasks, it cannot replace the human ability to set aims, make judgments, and shoulder uncertainty. In that sense, AI remains a tool—a powerful one—while humans supply the values and intentions that steer it. The relationship between them is not rivalry but interdependence.

Scarcity and the Machine: Opportunity Cost in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

My latest piece with the Mises Institute

https://mises.org/mises-wire/scarcity-and-machine-opportunity-cost-age-artificial-intelligence

The challenge, then, isn’t to beat the machines but to learn to work meaningfully alongside them.

https://open.spotify.com/track/3MebYJnEDK4XdnCj3VMLjL

What individualism teaches us is that society is greater than the individual only in so far as it is free. In so far as it is controlled or directed, it is limited to the powers of the individual minds which control or direct it. If the presumption of the modern mind, which will not respect anything that is not consciously controlled by individual reason, does not learn in time where to stop, we may, as Edmund Burke warned us, “be well assured that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds.”

• F. A. Hayek

While it may not be difficult to destroy the spontaneous formations which are the indispensable bases of a free civilization, it may be beyond our power deliberately to reconstruct such a civilization once these foundations are destroyed.

• F. A. Hayek

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien

The real lesson is to accept scarcity, respect prices, and seek your comparative advantage in a world where AI is just another tool—not to retreat into a lonely, inefficient attempt to do by hand what your tools could help you transcend.

Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment

https://propertyandfreedom.org/books/rothbard-100/

Regardless of the advancements in AI, the central question does not change: given scarcity, what should you do with your time, and what should you let the tools do?

Whenever people differ—and they always do—in skills, tools, knowledge, and circumstances, there exists some pattern of specialization and exchange that makes all of them better off than they would be alone.

Crucially, no one needs to know this pattern in advance. No one has to sit down with a spreadsheet and assign roles. The market is the discovery process that finds and constantly updates the pattern of comparative advantages.

We trade not because we are poor and lack things, but because trade expands the range of ends we can achieve.

"Only because men are in fact unequal can we treat them equally. If all men were completely equal in their gifts and inclinations, we should have to treat them differently in order to achieve any sort of social organization. Fortunately, they are not equal; and it is only owing to this that the differentiation of functions need not be determined by the arbitrary decision of some organizing will but that, after creating formal equality of the rules applying in the same manner to all, we can leave each individual to find his own level.

There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means, as De Tocqueville described it, “a new form of servitude.”"

F. A. Hayek

"The real question, therefore, is not whether man is, or ought to be, guided by selfish motives but whether we can allow him to be guided in his actions by those immediate consequences which he can know and care for or whether he ought to be made to do what seems appropriate to somebody else who is supposed to possess a fuller comprehension of the significance of of these actions to society as a whole."

F. A. Hayek

"true individualism believes on the contrary that, if left free, men will often achieve more than individual human reason could design or foresee."

F. A. Hayek

"What, then, are the essential characteristics of true individualism? The first thing that should be said is that it is primarily a theory of society, an attempt to understand the forces which determine the social life of man, and only in the second instance a set of political maxims derived from this view of society. This fact should by itself be sufficient to refute the silliest of the common misunderstandings: the belief that individualism postulates (or bases its arguments on the assumption of) the existence of isolated or self-contained individuals, instead of starting from men whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society. If that were true, it would indeed have nothing to contribute to our understanding of society. But its basic contention is quite a different one; it is that there is no other way toward an understanding of social phenomena but through our understanding of individual actions directed toward other people and guided by their expected behavior. This argument is directed primarily against the properly collectivist theories of society which pretend to be able directly to comprehend social wholes like society, etc., as entities sui generis which exist independently of the individuals which compose them."

• F. A. Hayek

What emerges from this collapse depends on what we build before it’s complete. If we spend our time fighting each other, a new strongman will step in to “restore order.” If we spend our time trying to reform the system, we simply delay its failure while it extracts more wealth and freedom. But if we spend our time building alternatives—real alternatives based on voluntary cooperation and private property—we create the possibility of something genuinely different.

This isn’t a call to passivity. It’s a call to redirect your energy away from defending the indefensible and toward building the possible. Stop trying to win arguments with people trained to see you as an enemy. Build something they can join instead. Stop waiting for the right leader or perfect policy. Build the world you want to live in, one transaction, one conversation, one community at a time. That is the only revolution worth having. That is the only one that actually works.

None of this requires political change or violence. It only requires you to cooperate directly with others rather than through the bureaucratic middleman. Every transaction you conduct outside the system—every bitcoin payment, every handshake deal, every favor traded in a network of trust—is a vote for a different world.

It also means refusing the tribes the state creates for you. You don’t have to choose between corrupt political factions. You don’t have to participate in culture wars that keep you distracted. You don’t have to treat your neighbor as an enemy because you disagree about which emergency to panic about.

https://fountain.fm/episode/beNonr3NSxj4dN5Z2Vhu

As the old systems crumble under their own contradictions, the state grows more desperate—more authoritarian—cloaking its decay in patriotic slogans and moral crusades. Yet no volume of coercion can conjure what has been systematically undermined: a society grounded in self‑ownership, reciprocal respect, and the willingness to deal with one another as equals rather than enemies.

"A system built on coercion needs division like oxygen. It must invent internal enemies to justify its dominance, to keep people dependent on its “protection.” When citizens are busy fighting one another—over politics, culture, race, or faith—they are not asking the fundamental question: why should anyone rule them at all?"

Stop Fighting Your Neighbor: The Mechanics of State Power and How to Opt Out

My latest with Mises

https://mises.org/mises-wire/stop-fighting-your-neighbor-mechanics-state-power-and-how-opt-out

Why do we need to give money to taxes and social security?

That money needs to go to fun stuff, like chicken nuggies and milkshakes.

“The State is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” — Frédéric Bastiat

A fractured society cannot effectively resist centralized authority because resistance requires coordination, and coordination requires trust.

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

I love being a dad

"Rothbard considered the classical-liberal solution to the fundamental human problem of protection—of a minimal or night-watchman state, or an otherwise “constitutionally limited” government—as a hopelessly confused and naive idea. Every minimal state has the inherent tendency to become a maximal state, for once an agency is permitted to collect any taxes, however small and for whatever purpose, it will naturally tend to employ its current tax revenue for the collection of ever more future taxes for the same and/or other purposes. Similarly, once an agency possesses any judiciary monopoly, it will naturally tend to employ this privileged position for the further expansion of its range of jurisdiction. Constitutions, after all, are state-constitutions, and whatever limitations they may contain—what is or is not constitutional—is determined by state courts and judges. Hence, there is no other possible way of limiting state power except by eliminating the state altogether and, in accordance with justice and economics, establishing a free market in protection and security services."

—Hans-Hermann Hoppe

https://open.spotify.com/track/7M3e0FJX7tyI3M0CNcRlvN

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Defending markets is not about defending greed or selfishness. It is about defending the greatest engine of peaceful cooperation humanity has ever known.

We cooperate because we are different, not despite our differences.

In a market economy, one accumulates wealth by enriching others through the exchange of goods and services, otherwise known as trade. As long as this act is voluntary, it is driven by self-interest...all trade is mutually beneficial.