In Asheville, North Carolina there is a home of gargantuan proportions known as Biltmore. It has 175,000 square feet (4 acres) of floorspace under its roof. The drive up to the stunning stone citadel is gorgeous. A winding road through a planned forest and garden that passes under a stone bridge and over a small river. The home was built by George Washington Vanderbilt and completed in 1895.
Everything about the home, from the structure itself to the grounds and gardens, were designed with future generations in mind, though it ceased being a residence in 1956. I don’t know the personal backstory of Vanderbilt or what he did to create the wealth that it took to build such an imposing castle, but it was a breathtaking achievement.
I took a private tour of Biltmore years ago. The tour guide was enamored with the house and loved to tell its stories. As we were entering the main building, he pointed out the stonework. The blocks were huge and sculpted with a precision that’s hard to imagine being accomplished without power tools. “You couldn’t build a house like this today,” he said, “and not just because of the expense. The artisans don’t exist anymore.”
It's true. You don’t see structures today crafted in the way Biltmore was constructed. Cheap buildings are erected in record time using flimsy materials. Trees are cut down as soon as they’re big enough to be hewn into lumber so it’s hard to even find a straight 2x4 at the home improvement store. A while back I was chatting with a man who ran a greenhouse and had done so for decades. He told me that people hardly ever bought seedlings for things like oak trees anymore. They wanted trees that would grow quickly rather than ones that grew slowly but would last long enough for their children or grandchildren. Contrast that with the planned Biltmore gardens that Vanderbilt knew wouldn’t come into their own until after he was dead.
What caused this change in time preference? Why does everyone want everything now now now rather than taking the time to build for a lasting future? It’s rather simple, really. Our money is unsound and what little people are left with is taxed out of existence.
In Vanderbilt’s day the US dollar was backed by gold and there was no income tax. Today money is printed out of thin air, causing inflation that robs people of their savings. In 1913 the 16th amendment allowed the taxation of personal incomes without state apportionment. Prior to that, any income tax would have to be divided up among the states based on population. Because it can create money out of thin air and level heavy taxes on your personal income, the federal government has become the nation’s largest employer with over 9 million employees (about 6% of the total US workforce). Instead of people keeping their money and building their personal futures with it, it's been siphoned away through unlegislated taxation (inflation) to fund wars and create the massive bureaucracy that is the US government today.
When the foundation of your house is quicksand, you don’t build with stone. Knowing that your money is worth less each year does not inspire or incentivize working for a brighter future. Rather, it motivates survival thinking. Get what you can while you can because you don’t know if you’ll be able to get it again tomorrow. People recognize that it’s harder to make ends meet – even if they don’t understand why – and they behave according to this conditioning.
The effects of unsound money aren’t limited to construction projects, though. Pick up a novel written prior to the 20th century and see the difference in time preference. If you’re a consumer of modern action novels, they will bore you to tears with how long it takes for anything to happen. In the past credits were shown at the beginning of films rather than at the end. Today many movies open with immediate action.
One of my first jobs was working for a small newspaper in rural Louisiana. Each week I was tasked with finding interesting stories from the newspaper in the early part of the 20th century that the paper would republish to amuse the modern reader. The articles were long, the language rich and the pictures few. News articles today are short and target a middle school reading level. Soundbite culture lacking all nuance pervades society. Why do you think that is? Now now now.
It's easy to blame the younger generation (“Kids these days!”) but the fault lies at the feet of our predecessors, not our children. Building for the next generation requires hope and trust. Unsound fiat money provides neither, resulting in lives of hedonism and impulse. I’m not passing moral judgement on this behavior. It’s understandable given the foundation of quicksand that we’ve built our society on. But it doesn’t have to be this way, nor do I believe it will remain so for much longer.
The major world economies are in a fiat debt spiral. Hyperinflation will inevitably follow, with the US dollar being the last to go because it’s the strongest, but its end is coming, too. The great fiat experiment of the last 50 years will end in catastrophic failure, as all fiat does, and good riddance. I shudder to think of the social mayhem this will cause, and I pray that it is short lived, and people can regroup and rebuild with better materials.
In her call for global Bitcoin regulations in 2021, the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, said that “if there is an escape [from fiat money], that escape will be used.” She said this as if it was a bad thing, but in fact it’s exactly what the world needs: an escape hatch from the fiat airplane careening toward the mountainside of debt. Bitcoin is both the escape hatch and the parachute.
At every turn your fiat dollars are stolen from you. Inflation caused by money printing steals it. Excessive taxation to fund big government steals it. Fees from your bank steals it. Bitcoin is sound money that cannot be coopted by governments or printed out of thin air. It requires no bank – you are your own bank. As fiat implodes Bitcoin will explode in value as people and governments race to escape. Lagarde saw this coming, but she and other bankers like her are incentivized to try and stop it. For the sake of our children, we cannot let her.
A sound money standard won’t magically fix all the problems of the world. If it could, then the world of the past would have been Utopian, and clearly it was not. However, the amount of knowledge humanity possesses has grown tremendously since the last time the world used sound money. There is greater respect for human rights and less tolerance of bigotry and hatred. These are good things, but you don’t solve the world’s problems through theft, and we live in a world built on theft from inflation and taxation.
I was on Telegram yesterday chatting with Nikko Laamanen from the Bitcoin publisher konsensus.network. I told him that it's humbling to be in an environment like the Bitcoin community that has so many supportive people. I said that if the whole world was as supportive as this community is to those who are trying to do good in it, we could solve so many of the world's problems. I truly believe that.
Fiat doesn’t make bad people out of good people, but it does suppress their goodness by forcing them to struggle to keep their head above water. You can’t throw a life preserver to someone else if you’re drowning yourself. Returning to a hard, secure, sound money standard like Bitcoin will give the world solid ground to stand on. A sturdy platform to apply all the knowledge we’ve gained over the past 50 years and more.
Imagine a world built on fair economics with money that can’t be stolen from you at the whim of the government. A world where people are incentivized to work hard and save for their future and that of their children and grandchildren because their money is worth more with each passing year rather than less. Where people can take the time to stop and smell the roses or lend a helping hand because they’re no longer in the modern rat race required for economic survival. Where debt isn’t required to buy a car or even a house and you’re no longer enslaved to the banks that keep you on the ever-turning hamster wheel of fiat. Where perpetual warfare no longer exists because the government can’t steal your hard-earned work through money printing to fund the conflicts without your permission.
My vision for the future may be naive, but as the saying goes, “if you shoot for the stars, you might make it to the moon.” I would rather set my goals too high and achieve as much as I can on my journey to that future than to settle for the world of theft and debasement wrought on us by those would have us plant shrubs rather than oak trees and build shanties rather than castles. May it be so.