Free markets are the lifeblood of any economy.

The Austrian business cycle starts with central banks artificially lowering interest rates below their natural market level. This floods the economy with cheap credit, distorting the crucial price signals that coordinate production across time. Entrepreneurs suddenly see long-term projects as profitable when they're actually maladaptive. The market didn't generate these savings, the printing press did. You get the boom. Construction companies launch massive developments, tech startups burn through venture capital, and everyone feels wealthy (for a while). The problem? Real resources haven't increased. The central bank created money, not actual capital goods or skilled workers or raw materials. The bust arrives when reality reasserts itself. Interest rates rise, credit tightens, and those seemingly profitable ventures reveal themselves as wealth destroyers. The 2008 housing bubble followed this script perfectly. Greenspan held rates at 1% for years, developers built houses nobody could actually afford, then Bernanke had to choose between hyperinflation or letting the malinvestments liquidate. We know which path he chose... and here we are again.

You need government permission to braid hair in 29 US states. To arrange flowers in Louisiana. To shampoo hair in Tennessee. This cannot be filed under "safety issues". They're cartels using state power to eliminate competition and jack up prices. Occupational licensing covered 5% of workers in 1950. Today? 30%. The Institute for Justice estimates these barriers destroy 2.85 million jobs and cost consumers $203 billion annually. Every licensed profession magically discovers why unlicensed competition threatens public safety (translation: threatens their margins). Want to cut someone's hair without 1,500 hours of government-approved training? Criminal. Want to teach kids without an education degree from the same universities that produced our literacy crisis? Also criminal. The state doesn't protect you from bad haircuts; it protects established businesses from you.

East Germany turned human misery into foreign exchange at $96,000 per head. Socialism requires capitalism to survive. Between 1963 and 1989, the German Democratic Republic sold 33,755 political prisoners to West Germany for hard currency. The going rate started at 40,000 Deutsche Marks per prisoner in the early years and climbed to 95,847 marks by the end. You can find the invoices in the Stasi archives today. Line items included "one dissident journalist" and "three church activists." The East German state needed every Deutschmark it could get because its command economy couldn't produce goods anyone wanted to buy. A government so desperate for foreign currency created a production line of human trafficking with bureaucratic precision. The Stasi arrested dissidents, processed the paperwork, and shipped them west like any other export commodity. Church groups and West German officials negotiated bulk discounts. The whole operation generated $3.4 billion over three decades. A socialist paradise that claimed to represent the workers had to sell its own citizens to the capitalist enemy to keep the lights on. East Germany couldn't manufacture anything that the world market valued except the bodies of people trying to escape socialism. Every transaction proved that their entire economic system was a fraud that survived only by parasitically extracting value from the very capitalism it claimed to oppose. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, but you still hear academics praise central planning and command economies today. They never mention that East Germany's most successful export program involved selling human beings by the pound to fund their workers' paradise.

The Left are furious at the thought of a private citizen who is a trillionaire. They think only general secretaries, union leaders and unelected bureaucrats should control of that amount of wealth.

Keynesian stimulus doesn't create wealth; it moves existing wealth from your pocket to Boeing's balance sheet. The $800 billion Obama stimulus went straight to construction companies with the right lobbyists, while you got higher taxes and inflation. It's a pure coincidence that the biggest recipients happened to be major campaign donors. The beautiful lie sells itself: "We're stimulating the economy!" You work harder for less purchasing power, while Lockheed Martin executives buy third vacation homes. They call this "aggregate demand management" in economics textbooks (apparently theft sounds more scientific with fancy terminology).

The political class has trained you to fear falling prices like vampires fear sunlight. They call it "deflation" and paint apocalyptic scenarios where everyone stops buying because prices might drop tomorrow. Complete nonsense, you don't postpone buying groceries because they might cost less next month. Falling prices signal abundance, not catastrophe. When farmers grow more food per acre, when factories automate production, when entrepreneurs find cheaper ways to deliver value, prices fall, and your purchasing power rises. The computer in your pocket costs a fraction of what far inferior machines cost decades ago. Yet, you still bought it knowing its price would fall. That's deflation working exactly as it should. Central bankers panic at falling prices because their entire model depends on currency debasement. They need inflation to transfer wealth from savers to debtors (guess which camp governments fall into). You benefit when the same paycheck buys more goods and services each year instead of fewer. Revolutionary concept, apparently.

Rent control advocates promise affordable housing but deliver the exact opposite. New York froze rents in 1943 as a "temporary" wartime measure. 81 years later, the city has a chronic housing shortage and the highest rents in America. You cannot repeal the law of supply and demand with good intentions. When you cap rents below market rates, landlords stop building new units and let existing ones deteriorate. Why invest $2 million in construction when the government limits your returns to below-market rates? Stockholm has rent control and a 20-year waiting list for apartments (not exaggerating - literally decades). The cruelest irony: rent control helps middle-class tenants who win the housing lottery while pricing out the poor entirely. Those "protected" units become inherited wealth passed down through families, while newcomers sleep in their cars. Economics doesn't care about your voting preferences.

Elon Musk is about to become a trillionaire. If he pays only $100b of that money in taxes to his birth country of South Africa, the @MYANC could squander it on black Mercedeses and KFC, while creating more racist laws and blocking economic growth, ensuring the population remains poor as fuck. Such a shame Elon is so selfish.

Elon being worth more than $1T is a truly remarkable feat. To put this into perspective, if you had spent $1m every single day since the day Jesus was born, you would have spent $739.78 billion in total. Insane.

You save money because you value future consumption over present consumption. That's time preference, and it drives everything in a capitalist economy. When you delay gratification, you create the capital that builds tomorrow's wealth. Under a sound money system, banks take your savings and lend them to entrepreneurs who build factories, develop software, and train workers. This transforms your sacrifice into productive capacity. The interest rate coordinates this whole dance between savers and investors; high rates reward patience, low rates signal "spend now." Modern banking, led by the Fed, destroys this mechanism when it prints money and suppresses rates to zero. Suddenly, everyone gets the signal to consume immediately, while savers get punished for their restraint. You end up with a consumption economy built on debt instead of a production economy built on savings. No wonder everything feels backward these days.

If you missed my conversation with @LawrenceLepard yesterday, you can listen to the recording below.

When you order Peter Schiff on Temu.

Governments do not obtain their revenue as payment for their services. Private individuals who want to acquire more goods and services from others must produce and sell more of what others want. Governments need only find some method of expropriating more goods without the owners' consent.

Property rights aren't some abstract legal concept. They're the operating system for human cooperation. When you can't secure the fruits of your labor, you stop producing beyond survival. Why build a better mousetrap when the village chief's nephew can just take it? Look at North Korea versus South Korea. Same people, same culture, different property regimes. The South protects what you create and earn. The North... doesn't. Result: $31,000 per capita GDP versus $1,300. That's not a rounding error. Every prosperous society in history built itself on this foundation. The Romans codified property law and conquered the Mediterranean (then abandoned it and collapsed). England secured property rights in 1688 and launched the Industrial Revolution. China started protecting private property in 1978 and lifted 800 million people out of poverty. The pattern never breaks because the incentives never change.

I have listened to hundreds of hours of interviews with @LawrenceLepard over the years. Today I had the honor of interviewing him myself! A big thank you to Larry for joining me on Hard Money, Hard Truths. You can listen to the show below. We discuss the evils of fiat money, current sentiment in gold and bitcoin, the performance of past Fed Chairmen, and the importance of staying fit and healthy! x.com/i/spaces/1aJbddLLjEnKX

The Fed destroyed $3.4 trillion in purchasing power since 2020 -- money you earned, saved, and deserved to keep. They called it "quantitative easing" because "grand theft" sounds less scientific. Your grandmother's pension increases 0.25% while inflation runs 3.2%? That's not market forces. That's central bankers systematically transferring wealth from savers to debtors, from the prudent to the reckless, from Main Street to Wall Street. The math is brutal: every dollar you saved in 2019 buys 85 cents of goods today. Meanwhile, asset prices exploded because all that printed money had to go somewhere. Real estate up 40%, stocks hitting record highs while your savings account dies a slow death. The people who leveraged themselves to the hilt got rich. The people who did everything right, who saved instead of borrowed, got punished.

About to go live with @LawrenceLepard Jump in!

Public school spending tripled since 1970 while test scores flatlined. You pour more money into a broken monopoly, you get more expensive failure. The education bureaucracy absorbed every extra dollar into administrative bloat and feel-good programs that teach kids nothing. Private schools spend half as much per student and deliver better results. Homeschool families operate on shoestring budgets and crush public school performance metrics. Competition works -- monopolies don't. The teachers unions scream about "underfunding" while sitting on $700 billion in annual spending. They've created a jobs program for adults, not an education system for children. Parents figured this out during COVID when they watched the Zoom classes... or lack thereof.

Cant wait for this discussion!! Set your reminders.