“Transmutation” is the process of changing one substance, element, or form into another. We owe this word to the ancient pursuit of alchemy, which sought to accomplish the artificial production of gold from base metals. While it is now considered a pseudo-science, in our rational age, its aspirations survive in currently popular proposals for taxing billionaires.

According to many, the key cause of a general increase in prices is inflationary expectations. For instance, if there is a large increase in the prices of oil, individuals, it is held, will start forming expectations for higher inflation ahead. Consequently, individuals will speed up their purchases of goods and services at present thereby raising the demand for goods and services. This, it is held, will set-in motion general increases in prices.

The following speech from a renegade Fed chairman is excerpted from The Flight of the Barbarous Relic.

There should be a sign on the front of the Eccles Building in Washington saying, “We work for the elites—the commercial bankers and government—at the expense of everyone else. Try and stop us.”

Let’s try, shall we?

The genius of his 1790 debt assumption was not fiscal, it was psychological. When he forced the federal government to absorb the states’ war obligations at par, speculators who had bought Revolutionary War certificates at ten cents on the dollar suddenly held federal bonds worth face value. They had not bought America out of patriotism. They had a position in it.

Ever since the sanctions onto Russia over the invasion of Ukraine, combined with real domestic economic anxieties of the post-pandemic era and declining institutional trust, a handful of libertarians and a mix of anti-war conservatives and the far-left have been announcing that de-dollarization was inevitable, prompted by BRICS’s desire to pursue a gold-backed currency.

For more than a century, modern societies have operated on a remarkably persistent assumption: that greater administrative capacity inevitably yields better outcomes. More information, more regulation, more coordination, and more sophisticated planning are widely believed to generate greater prosperity, security, and ultimately greater human progress. This conviction has become so deeply embedded in contemporary governance that it is rarely questioned.