Sublime

The dominant regime of political economy in the West since 1971, and particularly acute since 2009, has been built on a set of related economic fallacies: There are no adverse consequences to manipulating the price and supply of money; economic well-being can be measured by increases in flows of revenue rather than the growth rate of profit over ca

But, to anachronistically borrow our function metaphor once more, Hayek points out that the projection from the n-dimensions of information to the one dimension of price destroys an enormous amount of information.

Fractional reserve banking, or maturity mismatching more generally, is likely to continue to cause financial crises without a central bank using an elastic money supply to bail out these banks. But the presence of a central bank able to bail out the banks creates a major problem of moral hazard for these banks. They can now take excessive risks kno

Government‐issued unsound money, however, can stall this process, keeping unproductive firms undead but not truly alive, the economic equivalent of zombies or vampires drawing on the resources of the alive and productive firms to produce things of less value than the resources needed to make them. It creates a new societal caste that exists accordi

Even as this limit is reached and its presence is well‐publicized, the growth in the value of the currency and the value of daily transactions has not abated. This suggests that Bitcoin adopters value it more as a store of value than a medium of exchange, as will be discussed in Chapter 9

The projects that beat inflation but do not offer positive real returns effectively reduce society's capital stock, but are nonetheless a rational alternative for investors because they reduce their capital slower than the depreciating currency. These investments are what Ludwig von Mises terms malinvestments—unprofitable projects and investments t