“Because the Soviets would just crank out a thousand shoes, or a thousand tanks, or whatever, and they'd have quantity over quality and be the crappiest shoes or tanks. That's what the planned economy did, and so on and so forth. And now, actually, I would argue, and you may disagree with this, today, American Keynesianism is actually like that, where the centralization, the money printing has gone to such a level that essentially the whole economy is centrally planned by the Fed and its allies, the Bank of Japan and so on and so forth.
And so they are, right? You agree, right?
Oh, yeah.
And so, as an example, General Motors doesn't exist without a bailout. The banks don't exist without a bailout. But even more fundamentally, the financial system really doesn't exist.
The stocks are buoyed by the plunge protection team, like Greenspan. And the thing is, they have a million shell games. They'll say, oh, the Fed didn't directly print money.
And it's like they extend the credit or Treasury does something, but if you map Fred and Treasury as essentially a unitary entity that coordinate closely enough for most purposes and most times, sometimes they'll have a bank buy it by proxy. They play a zillion shell games with this to fool themselves and others. But fundamentally, whether it's stocks, whether it's asset prices for mortgages, whether it's General Motors, the entire 20th century is being propped up by printing.
And American Keynesianism is like Soviet Communism at the end, where it's a zombie economy that's being propped up by the state.”
From The Bitcoin Standard Podcast: 303. The Network State with Balaji Srinivasan, Dec 9, 2025
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