"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
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/
The distinction rests on whether power is dynamic or static. A wealthy entrepreneur can lose their wealth if they fail to serve consumers well. An entrenched power holder protected from competition cannot.
These scenarios are fundamentally different because they involve different mechanisms of power acquisition.
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
Economics is the study of how human beings cooperate peacefully to improve their conditions.
Sound money is the precondition for a free and civilized society, and its absence is the precondition for barbarism.
Beyond economic disruption, the real concern with AI lies in privacy and data control. Most AI models capture and store everything users share, often making that data accessible to governments upon request. What individuals disclose to AI systems is thus rarely private. While privacy-focused encrypted models like nostr:nprofile1qqs8msutuusu385l6wpdzf2473d2zlh750yfayfseqwryr6mfazqvmgpy4mhxue69uhkvet9v3ejumn0wd68ytnzv9hxgtm0d4hxjh6lwejkuar4wfjhxqfswaehxw309a5hgcmg0ykkwmmvv3jkuun0vskkvatjvdhkuargdacxsct8w4ejuumrv9exzc3wd9kj7qfpwaehxw309ahx7um5wgkhyetvv9ujuar90pshx6r9v3nk2tnc09az7em0qzz seek to protect user data, it remains uncertain whether they can compete with larger, closed-source models backed by powerful corporations.
This uncertainty reflects a deeper market reality that Austrian economists would recognize: revealed preferences often contradict stated preferences. Despite widespread expressions of concern about privacy and surveillance, the market consistently rewards the most convenient and capable AI systems regardless of their data practices. Users continue flocking to platforms that offer superior functionality while harvesting extensive personal information, suggesting that most consumers value performance and convenience over data protection. At that point, the concern is government opportunism. Whether entrepreneurial innovation will eventually satisfy latent demand for privacy-first alternatives, or whether the market will continue prioritizing capability over confidentiality, remains an open question that only time and consumer choice can resolve.
nostr:nprofile1qqsqyredyxhqn0e4ln0mvh0v79rchpr0taeg4vcvt64te4kssx5pc0spzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5hstpyv82 
Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us. But within that inch, we are free.
The whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson: we cannot escape scarcity.
Math doesn't care about your feelings or your fairy tale ideology.
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“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
— Friedrich Hayek
And this is the perennial genius of the State: it not only seizes power through deception, but maintains it through the willing self-deception of its subjects. The bamboozle becomes not merely a passing fraud, but the very foundation of political legitimacy. Once the public has been conditioned to equate the State’s coercion with social order, they will defend their own shackles and denounce anyone who points to the lock.
The State is not an unfortunate accident that can be corrected by ‘better men’ in office; it is a permanent machinery of plunder and control, inherently hostile to truth and liberty. To grant it power, no matter how small, is to grant it the means to grow, to entrench the bamboozle ever deeper—until, at last, the parasite destroys the host.
Alan Watts 
