The blind leading the blind with...

Editor's note: ...the socialists and neoliberals arguing endlessly over how money should be spent, but almost never over who gets to create it in the first place, and that silence has a cost every generation now feels directly. Under the current fiat system, new money enters the economy first through central banks and commercial bank lending, inflating asset prices, especially housing, before wages ever catch up, which is precisely why young people today are being priced out of homeownership while carrying record debt. This isn't a left or right problem: an Austrian economist worried about currency debasement and a young progressive worried about unaffordable rent are, whether they realize it or not, pointing at the same mechanism. Until the question of who creates money and who benefits first from that creation is put back on the table, no amount of redistributing or deregulating the money we already have will fix what's actually broken. Almost none of these people involved in the rise of socialism are entirely aware of how the Cantillon effect is impacting them financially or in their arguments. Monetary reform isn't a niche policy footnote; it's the missing piece both camps keep arguing around. Monetary reform: Let's roll our sleeves up and get the job done instead of these endless intellectual debates.
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How Neoliberals Fueled the Rise of Socialism

By Connor O'Keeffe | September 2, 2026

The rising popularity of politicians on the American left who either explicitly identify as socialist or, at least, don't shy away from or disavow the term appears to be causing genuine concern within the Washington establishment.

That is, of course, entirely justified. Socialism is profoundly unjust and destructive.

These days, the socialists like to present their entire ideology as nothing more than having a bit of empathy for those in need or an interest in seeing everyone "have" access to services like modern healthcare.

Look any deeper, though, or ask some follow-up questions, and the truth will eventually surface. What the socialists actually want is a massive increase in government interventionism that would see nearly every aspect of life politicized and the remaining productive components of the economy hollowed out into a zero-sum lobbying battle to claim some of the diminishing loot of a much larger, more powerful, and tax-happy federal government.

Any step towards socialism needs to be energetically opposed by everyone who cares about the rights and material well-being of everyday Americans.

However, the concern we're seeing from the neoliberal and neoconservative establishment is frustrating. Because the political order that they have built and preserved over the last half century has made the growing popularity of this kind of "democratic socialism" all but inevitable.

Scholars like Gabriel Kolko, Murray Rothbard, and Patrick Newman have written extensively about how the powerful, centralized federal government that we live under today originated in the so-called Progressive Era in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And, importantly, it was not grassroots reformers who spurred the growth of the federal government at the time, but well-connected business interests.

The narrative many of us were taught in school of government officials reluctantly giving themselves more power over the economy at the turn of the century to placate a public demanding an end to laissez-faire capitalism is merely a convenient creation myth to justify what has always been a scheme to use state power to redistribute wealth from the broader public to a small caste of well-connected families and firms.

As nearly all of human history makes clear, these sorts of crony, state-empowered redistributive schemes tend to be rather unstable.

That’s in part because people typically aren't all that pleased when it starts to become clear that the government is transferring some of their wealth to people that are already far wealthier—requiring the opinion molders of the political class to frequently scramble to find some new way to excuse the policies making up the racket.

But also, the government doing things like warping credit markets to benefit certain industries or launching unnecessary wars to enrich weapons companies and empower foreign leaders who are good at lobbying has plunged the country into several economic and geopolitical crises.

So far, the American political class has done a remarkable job using these crises to greatly expand and accelerate their self-enriching redistributive rackets. But every crisis is unique. Different situations have required different responses.

Which brings us to the rise of what's often called the neoliberal "Washington consensus."

The political establishment's well-known embrace of neoliberalism in the 1980s was primarily a response to the events of the 1970s. For much of that decade, the country was forced to endure a prolonged period of high price inflation that was caused by the Federal Reserve's extensive money printing in the 60s and early 70s to help finance the Vietnam War and Johnson's Great Society programs. That economic chaos was then intensified by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the OPEC oil shocks, and Nixon's wage and price controls.

As we've seen in the past few years, inflation alone is more than enough to create strong public demand for political change. But in the 70s, previous credit expansion combined with the government's persistent unwillingness to allow the economy to correct itself also resulted in a stagnant economy. And that combination of high inflation and stagnant economic growth, or "stagflation" as it's come to be known, was considered economically impossible by Keynesian economists.

Please go to Mises Institute to continue reading.
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And while we are on the subject of monetary policy and money, what about those taxes?

You Cannot Own What the Government Can Take for Not Paying Rent

This is what happens ultimately when the state claims all wealth and productivity is the state's property:

Authoritarianism Rises as Government Fear Losing Power