Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest
By William Easterly
Basic Books, 2025; 448 pp.

This article is adapted from a lecture presented at the 2025 Supporters Summit in Delray Beach, Florida.

I want to start with a confession: I love falling prices. I love deflation. I want all prices to go down to a nickel.

I stole that line from Murray Rothbard. It’s not inflation that we should fear, it’s the opposite— deflationphobia, which is the fear of falling prices. We should fear deflationphobia because it leads to a very dangerous institutional monetary policy: inflation targeting.

So, let me begin with some facts about deflation.

In a recent interview, Tarek Mansour, the co-founder of Kalshi—a company with a marketplace where users gamble on the outcome of future events—said “the long-term vision [of the company] is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.”

This article is adapted from a lecture presented at the 2025 Supporters Summit in Delray Beach, Florida.

Economic freedom should include freedom in money. It’s a freedom even, as we say these days, that advanced economies don’t have. My guiding text for this talk is Friedrich Hayek’s celebrated essay “Choice in Currency.” That is chapter 7 of this excellent book—Hayek for the 21st Century: Essays in Political Economy—that the Mises Institute has published. It’s a classic text, and I hope you’ll all take a look at it if you haven’t.

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This article is adapted from a lecture presented at the 2025 Supporters Summit in Delray Beach, Florida.

Anyone who is paying a modicum of attention can see we live in troubled times. We have inherited a civilization made possible by peace and prosperity, but presently man is everywhere in conflict. It may seem that this is a recent phenomenon, but the idea that conflict between social groups is normal and inevitable goes back a long time.

In a 1787 letter, Benjamin Franklin wrote to a colleague, “I am of the same opinion with you respecting the freedom of commerce. . . . Nothing can be better expressed than your sentiments are on this point, where you prefer liberty of trading, cultivating, manufacturing, etc., even to civil liberty, this being affected but rarely, the other every hour.”