The Biden administration claims it wants to get out in front of the development of artificial intelligence. However, the likely scenario is that AI will leave government regulators in its wake.
Original Article: Can Government Regulate Artificial Super Intelligence?

Advocates of unbacked paper money claim that theirs is the “civilized” choice, as opposed to gold, or what Keynes called “that barbarous relic.” These inflationists, however, are the ones wrecking civilization as we have known it.
Original Article: From the Invisible Hand to the Invisible Sleight-of-Hand

The role of the infinitely small is infinitely large.”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, “MAXIMS FOR REVOLUTIONISTS”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
Government as we know it likely won’t be around when artificial super intelligence (ASI) arrives. As I’ve argued elsewhere, states are fading fast from war, fiat money and debt, and I believe people will develop non-coercive solutions to social life when states finally collapse. Our “government” of the future will of necessity be a laissez-faire social order.
Meanwhile, AI

Governments regularly suppress freedom—yet few complain. One wonders if Stockholm syndrome is at work.
Original Article: Liberty: Stifled by the Stockholm Syndrome

​Why are we using state money instead of market money? Put another way, why can’t we select the money we want to use? Cryptocurrencies are a market alternative, but they haven’t put state money out of business yet. If they ever threaten to do so, the state can prohibit them.
Market money is sound because of two essential features. First, it represents the market’s choice of a universally accepted medium of exchange, and second, it shackles government to a great extent, liberating the people. A state that prowls foreign lands in the name of freedom and democracy and keeps its domestic population in line with free stuff and threats has no interest in a currency it can’t will into existence. For this reason, governments hate sound money.
Even worse, people hate sound money. Sound money means

The leviathan US state would not be possible without the Fed underwriting its growth. But the Fed is not all-powerful, nor can it continue to exist by only creating chaos.
Original Article: If the Fed Goes, The State Will Soon Follow

“Whenever and however [government] is instituted, the people must cede to it some of their natural rights in order to vest it with requisite powers.” (emphasis added)
—John Jay, “Federalist No. 2”
“Like breathing, [government] is not permitted to depend on our volition. Necessity will force it on all communities in some one form or another.”
—John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government
“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain—that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”
—Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority
Across the globe governments without exception are territorial rulers holding a supremacy of physical force over the

The boom-and-bust cycles are not natural to a market economy, contra Keynes. Instead, government through monetary manipulation creates them—and then politicians blame markets themselves.
Original Article: How the Fed Undermines Prosperity

A central bank is not a natural product of banking development. It is imposed from the outside or comes into being as a result of government favors.
—Vera Smith, The Rationale of Central Banking and the Free Banking Alternative
Anarchy, the absence of coercive government, must not be confused with chaos.
—Robert P. Murphy, Chaos Theory
The Federal Reserve is dying from monetary mischief. The Fed recently made a woke mandate that will only accelerate its own demise. The Fed never should have existed. As a central bank, the Fed is a rogue institution that functions as a giant counterfeiter for hegemonic government and special interests.
Government signed off on the Fed long ago and soon found it indispensable for funding whatever politicians could dream up. Together they have destroyed the

Infamous hyperinflations like what hit Germany in 1923 did not begin as a flood. Instead, they started as smaller bouts of inflation initiated by governments that printed money to pay for deficit spending.
Original Article: How a Trickle Can Turn into a Flood

The term “roundabout” is not normally associated with efficiency, unless you’re an economist. Yet roundabout methods—when applied to production—are the key to prosperity.
Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, the great Austrian economist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, provided examples illustrating how this idea works. Consider a farmer whose source of drinking water is some distance from his house. Whenever he gets thirsty, he can go to the spring and drink from his cupped hands—a nice, direct satisfaction of his needs. If “efficient” means to act directly to produce an effect, then it might appear the farmer has behaved most efficiently. However, he’ll need to slake his thirst several times a day, plus he has other uses for the water.
How efficient is his direct means now?
So,

While court economists such as Paul Krugman insist that inflation is government’s way of ensuring full employment, in reality, inflation is one of the many ways governments steal from productive people.

Original Article: Inflation: Government’s Insidious Form of Theft

In 1903, a lawyer in Germany took out an insurance policy and made payments on it faithfully. When the policy came due in twenty years, he cashed it in and bought a single loaf of bread with the proceeds. He was fortunate. If he had waited a few days longer, the money he received would have bought no more than a few crumbs.
Germany had been on the usual fractional reserve gold standard prior to World War I, with the Reichsbank—its central bank—expanding the money supply at a “mild” 1–2 percent inflation rate. When war broke out in 1914, the government followed the standard policy of deficit spending rather than attempting to raise taxes. The Reichsbank’s role was to monetize the government debt—that is, pay for new treasury obligations by printing more money.
At the war’s end, the number

The state is held together by violence and nothing else. There is no such thing as "the social contract." But even violence cannot make a state last past its time, as we saw with the USSR.

Original Article: States Are Dying from Corruption and the Exponential

But once a commodity is established as a money on the market, no more money at all is needed.
—Murray Rothbard, Taking Money Back
The Fed’s distinguishing characteristic is its grant of privilege to buy assets with money it doesn’t have. No other person or institution can legally do this; those that tried would be indicted for counterfeiting.
At the very least you might think this would raise eyebrows, but it doesn’t except in fringe quarters. It is simply part of modern monetary gospel, never to be examined too closely.
Another part of the gospel is fractional reserve banking, wherein commercial banks create multiple claims to the same dollar through their lending activities. (See Alan Greenspan’s implicit endorsement of fractional reserve banking in his famous defense of gold.)

In the global Ponzi scheme, thin air and deceit substitute for sound money. As hedge-fund manager Mitch Feierstein wrote in Planet Ponzi, “You don’t solve a Ponzi scheme; you end it.”
Original Article: "The Coming Collapse of the Global Ponzi Scheme"

No one today talks about the death penalty for debasing gold or silver coins as established by section 19 of the Coinage Act of 1792, nor do they usually bring up Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution, which authorizes only “gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.” Instead, we’ve come so far as to establish a “gold standard” for the monetary policy of inflating currency at roughly two percent per annum to be carried out solely by the Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve System.
When we glance between the lines, we see that the Fed holds a monopoly of money creation. And since the government no longer regards gold or silver as money but instead issues paper bills or their electronic equivalent (not as substitutes for real money but as money itself), the United

Technology is the main reason why so many of us are still alive to complain about technology.
—Garry Kasparov
If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion.
—Ray Kurzweil
While world leaders try to decide whether their interests are best served by World War III or some other imposed atrocity, various forces have states targeted for extinction. Chief among these forces is the exponential nature of evolution and technology, working together to advance human life. The other threat to the state’s existence is untreated self-inflicted wounds, which I’ll discuss later.
Let’s start with evolution. Shortly after the big bang, atoms started forming, then later, atoms combined into molecules. Carbon in particular gave rise to more complicated

It won’t be long before governments around the world, including the one in Washington, self-destruct.
Strong words, but anything less would be naïve.
As economist Herbert Stein once said, “If something cannot go on forever, it has a tendency to stop.” Case in point: fiat money political regimes. Interventionist economies of the West are in a fatal downward spiral, comparable to that of the Roman Empire in the second century, burdened with unsustainable debt and the antiprosperity policies of governments, especially the Green New Deal.
In the global Ponzi scheme, thin air and deceit substitute for sound money. As hedge-fund manager Mitch Feierstein wrote in Planet Ponzi, “You don’t solve a Ponzi scheme; you end it.” Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff
made some of their investors a whole lot

Rothbard on the American Revolution: "There was no particular need for the formal trappings and permanent investing of a centralized government, even for victory in war."

Original Article: "The American Revolutionaries Didn’t Need a Central Government. Neither Do We."

You’re driving on a two-lane road and see cars headed your way. Do you drive off the road to protect yourself or your family? Probably not. You stay on your side, while they stay on theirs. In most cases you’re in a situation of mutually assured destruction if either one crosses the center line. It is not from the benevolence of the other drivers that we expect them to stay in their lane but from their regard to their own self-interest.
It’s self-interest, usually condemned as morally reprehensible but without being clearly articulated, that guides us throughout the days of our life. Self-interest, in a rational sense, is devoid of sacrifice, where “sacrifice” refers to surrendering higher values to lower ones. A value is that which one acts to acquire or defend. The mother who risks her

Einstein might have been one of history’s most brilliant men, but even his great mind could not have made socialism work. Unfortunately, he wasn’t smart enough to see that.

Original Article: "A Great Man Cannot Salvage a Bad Idea"

Everything possible is done to prevent the fraud of the monetary system from being exposed to the masses who suffer from it.
—Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), before the US House of Representatives, February 15, 2006
In the mid-sixties, having read about gold in Atlas Shrugged, I decided to find out something about inflation and wrote to the United States Treasury Department to request a brochure that purported to lay inflation out in terms anyone could understand. In reply, they sent me a Peanuts comic book.
Though I didn’t know it at the time, using cartoon stars to promote government viewpoints was nothing new. In 1942, the US Treasury had commissioned Walt Disney to produce a film called The New Spirit in which Donald Duck’s radio tells him it is “your privilege, not just your duty, but your

When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.
—1970s TV commercial
Imagine if your surname was synonymous with genius. And not just genius, but creative genius. Is there anything you could write or say that could be seriously challenged? Among your colleagues, certainly. Science is never closed, always debated, always contingent on certain postulates. But the lay public is apt to regard you as infallible.
Such has been the fate of Albert Einstein who today is best known for his theory of relativity and especially his equation E = mc2: the energy (E) of a body at rest is its mass (m) times the square of the speed of light (c). As astrophysicist Ethan Siegel explains it, “For every 1 kilogram of mass you turn into energy, you get 9 × 1016 joules of energy out, which is the equivalent of 21 megatons

In 1948, Ludwig Erhardt rescued a German economy that was in shambles simply by invoking free markets and currency reform. Our economy needs its Rothbard moment.

Original Article: "Rothbard’s Button Doesn’t Exist, but It Needs to Be Invented"

The real issue we face is not whether we should be in the red tribe or the blue tribe, but rather what will be the constituency for freedom.

Original Article: "Neither Red nor Blue, but Free"

With totalitarianism accelerating on a global scale and having kicked off in earnest with government attacks on their own populations during the still-running ruse of the covid vaccine, the state as a necessary feature of civilization stands before us shamelessly as a blood-dripping monster.
And acting as tyranny’s bulldog is the state’s handmaiden and echo chamber, the legacy media.
Are future generations destined to live in an Orwellian nightmare?
Relying on the constitution and electing “good people” into office will not remove the source of our problems, which is: the government we inherited, the only organization that claims the legal right to fund itself coercively through taxes and bank counterfeiting. We’re attempting to live by a double standard—what’s legal for the state is

The human tendency to kill what one fears asserted itself on April 4, 2023, as a Manhattan district attorney called Donald Trump into his office to issue a vague threat.
What crime Trump was being charged with is known only to Alvin Bragg, but the rest of the world is left playing a guessing game.
Trump supporters are rallying everyone with a heartbeat to support their candidate. It’s survival time. Even a few Trump haters are finding a way to support Trump. Not that they want him back in the White House, perish the thought, but the Bragg travesty is more than even they can stand.
If Trump doesn’t win in 2024, the crumbling edifice that was once this country will come to rival the sack of Rome. Policies will amount to anything and everything that will wipe out the economy. Joe Biden or

My grandson will graduate from a public school in May, and my daughter, his mom, asked me to write a senior letter for him. He’s been part of my life since he was born, and we’re all very proud of him. But what do I tell him about the world he’s about to enter?
Right off he already knows his life itself has a claim on it by the State. If he fails to register for the draft, he could be sent to prison and fined $250,000. With enlistments falling off and the regime’s insatiable appetite for war, it’s possible his future would be cut short as a conscript fighting impoverished foreigners thousands of miles away, “defending our freedom” while sustaining the revenue flow of the Congressional/Military/Industrial/God-knows-what-else racket.
My grandson is too young to remember Pat Tillman, the NFL

As long as states are around, money will never be sound. But first, some clarity.
Sound money, per Ludwig von Mises, has two aspects: It serves as a commonly accepted medium of exchange, while also making it difficult for governments to meddle with it. We can see immediately that sound money is nowhere to be found in today’s world. All the current rhetoric about banks and their systemic risks are about money that’s subject to political expediency, the kind that brings civilization to its knees.
There is at least one group, however, putting up a good fight. In the US the Sound Money Defense League is working at a state level to bring gold and silver coin back as legal tender. According to their website:
. . . sound money activists are launching exciting initiatives at the state level to

Western governments seem to relish a clash with Russia, despite the specter of nuclear war. If so, it will be a conflict built on government lies.

Original Article: "The Last Lie Government Will Ever Tell"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

The more powerful a government, the more likely it is to engage in war and conquest. Case in point: US involvement in Ukraine.
In 2014 the US led a coup that displaced a “democratically elected” president, Viktor Yanukovych.
In November 2013, . . . Yanukovych rejected a major economic deal he had been negotiating with the EU and decided to accept a $15 billion Russian counteroffer instead. That decision gave rise to antigovernment demonstrations that escalated over the following three months.
Instead of waiting around for the next election, Yanukovych fled to Russia on February 22, 2014.
The new government in Kiev was pro-Western and anti-Russian to the core, and it contained four high-ranking members who could legitimately be labeled neofascists. . . .
[It was] clear that Washington

If we have learned anything from hundreds of years of government oppression and atrocities, one thing is certain: government isn’t our friend.

Original Article: "Government Is as Government Does"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

Get beyond the PhDs running the Federal Reserve or the way people treat the Fed with deference. In the end, it is nothing but a legal counterfeiting ring.

Original Article: "We Are All Counterfeiters Now"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

People say government is corrupt. If it were corrupt, it would be acting in ways contrary and detrimental to its purpose, and it would be possible to right the course. In truth, government acts in ways that befit its nature.
Today’s governments are states ruling by legal coercion. There is another, unacknowledged “government” that works to govern our behavior peacefully, and it’s usually called the free market. But to states, the market—whether free or otherwise—is the farm from which they extract wealth and distribute it according to their perceived needs. States are plundering gangs that wouldn’t exist without something to plunder—a market. But can markets exist without states?
We might never know. States will not step aside—the setup is far too rewarding for those in charge. So, we

Intellectuals and politicians often try to verbally summarize or justify conventional thinking in pithy ways. Milton Friedman (in 1965) and Richard Nixon (in 1971) both said different versions of the phrase “we are all Keynesians now.” . . . Friedman and Nixon were describing the thoughts behind the implementation of Great Society redistribution programs and an inflationary monetary policy designed to offset the cost of those programs.
—Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein, We Are All Keynesians Now
If there is one central myth supporting the folly that passes for monetary policy and by extension fiscal policy, it would have to be the unchallenged assumption that money should be defined and controlled by government.
Given the role of money in the economy—that it serves as a trade intermediary,

Judge Andrew Napolitano looks at the history of government and race relations in our nation’s history. It’s not a pleasant or uplifting story.

Original Article: "The Forgotten Lessons of Government-Enforced Race Relations"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

Anticapitalist politicians claim intervention can "level the playing field," but when we look closely, we realize that government itself creates the imbalances.

Original Article: "Does Government Create a "Level Playing Field" or Does It Make the Field More Uneven?"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

On April 23, 2003, in South Side Chicago, Reverend Jeremiah Wright cursed America for treating blacks as less than human.
Such harsh rhetoric should not seem surprising given the US government’s history of involvement in race relations. Judge Andrew P. Napolitano takes us through that history in his book Dred Scott’s Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America.
Most readers have heard about black lynchings that gripped the South for generations following the War for Southern Independence. But how many know lynchings were often a major social event? “Witnesses often included the entire white community,” Napolitano tells us,
and, in many cases, the victim’s body was cut up and pieces were handed out as souvenirs. . . .
The local police, governments of each Southern state, and

These days, the Fed and Chairman Jerome Powell are claiming the title of "inflation fighters." The more appropriate moniker should be "inflationists."

Original Article: "Fighting Inflation Really Means Fighting the Federal Reserve"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

Bernie Sanders and other politicians have made socialism attractive to voters, especially young ones, because it promises to eliminate the injustices of capitalism. As to what socialism and capitalism mean, no one seems to care much, other than that by socialism, they mean a kinder, caring society without income extremes, whereas capitalism is the preferred system of ruthless exploiters who amass obscene fortunes while real workers struggle to survive.

There are surely other worlds than this—other thoughts than the thoughts of the multitude—other speculations than the speculations of the sophist.
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Assignation”
Nothing brings out misleading or false narratives like the subject of money. Prices over the last twenty-five months have shot up, and this development is roundly called inflation. Why? Because prices have shot up. The criminals running the government even passed an inflationary omnibus spending bill under the pretext of fighting inflation.

The culprit responsible for the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression can be easily identified—the government. To protect fractional reserve banking and generate a buyer for its debt, the US government created the Federal Reserve System in 1913 and put it in charge of the money supply.

We think of thieves as conducting their work when no one is looking, such as breaking into a house while the owners are away. But the most successful thieves have done their stealing in plain sight, on a grand scale, while the owners were home and often with their tacit approval, though with sleights of hand that few are able to detect. Such a theft occurred when Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law on December 23, 1913.
A central bank such as the Fed has a remarkable character. According to establishment boilerplate, its purpose is to stabilize the economy and ensure prosperity and “full employment.” The decision makers at the Fed are of necessity selected for their superhuman brilliance and neutrality of judgment, thus qualifying them to adjust the amount of money

One of history’s greatest ironies is that gold detractors refer to the metal as the barbarous relic. In fact, the abandonment of gold has put civilization as we know it at risk of extinction. The gold coin standard that had served Western economies so brilliantly throughout most of the nineteenth century hit a brick wall in 1914 and was never able to recover, or so the story goes.

There’s an idea rooted among some libertarians that the Federal Reserve was originally a sound institution but has grown corrupt. As a bankers’ bank, it was fine, they believe, but not as the monster it has grown to be. If we could only go back to the Fed’s founding charter, all would be well.

Commentaries about World War I frequently discuss causes and consequences but almost never mention the enablers. At best, they might mention them approvingly, as if we were fortunate to have had the Fed and the income tax, along with the ingenuity of the liberty bond programs, to finance our glorious role in that bloodbath.

For those who would find relief knowing the Bible sanctions a market-derived medium of exchange, Gary North’s Honest Money will come as a godsend (no pun intended). Even for those reprobates who forswear a religious worldview, his book will provide a solid grounding in monetary theory and history.

Tom Woods’ bestseller Meltdown placed the blame for the financial debacle of 2008–09 on the government’s counterfeiter, the Federal Reserve. It was the Fed’s policies that created the problems, although most economists and economic talking heads didn’t see it that way. The Fed’s loose monetary policies funded the meltdown and became the “elephant in the living room” most pundits couldn’t see.