We’ve been taught to worry about stupid people in power. That’s the wrong fear. Broken systems don’t survive because nobody is smart enough to see through them. They survive because the people best-positioned to expose them are usually the people most rewarded for keeping them intact. The threat isn’t a shortage of intelligence, it’s intelligence that’s been bought—quietly and gradually, through incentives and status and the slow comfort of institutional belonging. This includes, it should be said, the intelligence of whoever is making this argument.

The divide between Ludwig von Mises and John Maynard Keynes is not merely a disagreement over policy, but a deeper conflict about the nature of economic reality itself. Mises—building on the tradition of Jean-Baptiste Say—understands the economy as an intertemporal process, where production, savings, and investment must be aligned through genuine price signals, especially the interest rate.

(This is based upon a talk I gave at a recent Mises Circle meeting in San Diego.)

I have lived in California for more than four years, having married a lifelong California girl a while back, having come here after retiring from being a college economics professor in Western Maryland at the end of 2021. Presently, we live in Roseville, a city of nearly 150,000 that has been called one of the country’s most livable cities.