Gloria Steinem, who founded the feminist movement and did more to destroy the traditional American family while conveniently creating two taxpayers instead of one, died this week at the age of 92 in New York City. Most people don’t realize that she was an admitted CIA agent who took money from the CIA’s International Organizations Division, run by Cord Meyer. Its whole function was manufacturing “independent” civil-society vehicles funded through pass-through foundations so the money appeared to be private.Gloria Steinhem discusses her work for the CIA in a CBS News special In the Pay of the CIA: An American Dilemma, broadcast March 13, 1967The CIA was caught running a daisy-chain of dummy foundations (Borden Trust, Price Fund, Edsel Fund, Beacon Fund, Kentfield Fund), which funded the Independence Foundation, run out of the Boston law firm Hale & Dorr, which then funded the Independent Research Service and the National Student Association. Later, when Steinem would found Ms. Magazine, which is widely credited with promoting everything from abortion (eugenics) to women in the workplace, she would get the money from the intelligence agency-adjacent Ford Foundation. While there is no direct evidence that the CIA was involved, Ford was then headed by McGeorge Bundy, former National Security Advisor.I broke down Steinem’s history (with links!) in my article Chumped: The Unfortunate Truth About the 2017 Women’s March on Washington – How and Why 500,000 Women Were Brought to DC and Tricked Into Wearing “Pussy Hats.In what was her last major undertaking on the world stage, she helped “front-run” and render ineffective the opposition to Donald Trump after his 2016 election to the Presidency as an honorary co-chair of what became the Women’s March on Washington. She helped make opposition to Trump a “Woman’s Thing” (Divide & Conquer), brought 500,000 women to Washington, DC and steered them into worthless slogans, scummy speakers, and “acceptance of suffering.” For the pièce de résistance of the event, the organizers dressed the crowd in “Pussy Hats!”I break it all down in my article below! Chumped: The Unfortunate Truth About the 2017 Women’s March on WashingtonHow and Why 500,000 Women Were Brought to DC and Tricked Into Wearing “Pussy Hats”By Etienne de la Boetie2, Author of “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed!The murderous communist Vladimir Lenin famously said, “The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.” This tactic was used to bring half a million women to Washington, DC, in January of 2017 for the Women’s March on Washington, waste their time, and steer them into a dead end.The organized crime cabal knew that there would be opposition to the installation of their newest puppet, Donald Trump, so they were ready and waiting to divide and conquer the opposition and steer them into a dead-end.So, who funded (and therefore controlled) the Women’s March? George Soros!Former WSJ reporter Asra Q. Nomani, writing in the New York Times, has identified at least 56 organizations that receive funding from George Soros. Since the publication of the article and the open-source investigation triggered by the publication of Ms. Nomani’s spreadsheet of Women’s March partners, the number of groups linked to Soros has climbed to 62 as of this writing. George Soros is a billionaire off-shore hedge fund operator and currency speculator and convicted felon (insider trading) who, as a 14 year old, was a Nazi collaborator in World War 2 where he helped confiscate the property of fellow Jews. He has personally confirmed his time as a Nazi collaborator in a 60 Minutes interview with Steve Kroft in 1998 and referred to his time helping the Nazis as the “happiest year of his life.”George Soros is the King of “Divide & Conquer”Soros is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Bilderberg Group, which are two of the key components of the shadow government. For at least 7 decades, it has not mattered which side of the fake left-right paradigm is in power, Republican or Democrat, a CFR member, a Bilderberg member or a member of the Trilateral Commission has held the majority of key cabinet positions, intelligence agency positions, Federal Reserve, and virtually every other important position of political, banking, or media power in the US.George Soros’s Open Society Institute and the dozens of other Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that he funds have been implicated in financing many “Color Revolutions” in countries ranging from Serbia to Croatia to Egypt. A color revolution is a destabilization and overthrow of a country where the “revolutionaries,” funded and controlled from outside, get some percentage of the targeted country’s population to unite behind a specific color or flower. The “Rose Revolution” of November 2003 in Georgia forced Edouard Shevardnadze from power and installed the then 36-year-old US university graduate Mikhail Saakashvili as President was run and financed by the US State Department, the Soros Foundations, and agencies tied to the Pentagon and US intelligence community. Soros-funded groups also participated in the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, pouring more than $100 million into financing opposition groups and the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution, stoking violence that saw more than 100 killed in 2014’s Euromaidan clashes.Soros Working to Divide and Conquer the US as WellSoros’ tactics are to “divide and conquer” a nation by investing in groups that create and/or stoke opposition forces in the target country to divide the population. He has been using the same tactics here in the United States, where he has poured at least $650,000 into Black Lives Matter to agitate and stoke black-white hatred and violence. Other Soros-funded groups made it their job to remotely monitor and exploit anything related to the incident that they could portray as a conservative misstep and to develop academic research and editorials to disseminate to the news media to keep the story alive.Soros’ Connections to Donald TrumpSoros is also a friend and a former business partner of Donald Trump. The pair’s relationship goes back more than a decade. In 2004, Soros lent Trump $160 million to help with the construction of the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, the Chicago Tribune reported. The two were also named in a lawsuit over the sale of the General Motors building, which alleged that the two (and others) were working together, alleging a widespread racketeering and fraud conspiracy by the defendant group, which also includes Deutsche Bank, Cerberus Capital Management LP, Lazard Ltd., Freres and Co. Inc. and Kirkland and Ellis LLP.The New York Post reported in 2009 that Trump spent Christmas Eve that year at a private party with George Soros, Steve Schwartzman, a billionaire, fellow Bilderberg Group member, and member of Skull and Bones, who is partnered with Pete Peterson, the former Secretary of Commerce in the Nixon administration and Chairman Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, and liberal Hollywood director Oliver Stone, among others.What other People and Groups Were Behind the March, OR were March Participants Steered/Introduced to?The short answer is CIA operatives, socialists/communists, identity-politics agitators, felons, and abortionists. A group of depraved scum guaranteed to alienate intelligent people who understand their background and politics while potentially corrupting those who don’t. Since I assume an overwhelming majority of march participants didn’t have any idea who the speakers or sponsoring groups were, let’s examine the background of a few of the speakers:Gloria SteinemOne of the honorary co-chairs of the event has admitted herself, on-camera, that she was a CIA operative and is a self-described Marxist. Steinem was part of the CIA front group the “Congress for Cultural Freedom,” which created magazines like “Encounter” and “Partisan Review” to promote a left-liberal chic to oppose/control/steer the Marxist movement. Steinem attended Communist-sponsored youth festivals in Europe, published a newspaper, reported on other participants, and helped to provoke riots.In 1970, she launched Ms. Magazine, a CIA Operation Mockingbird publication that helped create the “feminist revolution,” which promoted “divide and conquer” between men and women and contributed to the rise and acceptance of divorce, which produced two tax slaves instead of one and splits up families, which makes the population easier to manage. She also heavily promoted and continues to promote abortion, which is part of the slave master’s eugenics and population reduction agenda.Women’s March Co-Chair Gloria Steinem making the Illuminati/Masonic “Triangle” symbol and wearing a t-shirt celebrating the killing of her unborn child.Donna Hylton – Speaker – Convicted felon who participated in the 20 day kidnapping and torture of a man where his testicles were crushed with pliers, where he was beaten, burned, and held for ransom. They shoved a 3 foot metal rod up his rectum.Angela Davis – Speaker and Honorary Co-chair of the March – In 1980 and 1984, Davis ran for vice-president of the United States on the Communist Party ticket together with Gus Hall. In 1979, Davis was awarded the International Lenin Peace Prize (formerly the International Stalin Peace Prize) by then-communist East Germany. She was on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list for buying a shotgun used in an armed takeover of a courtroom where four people were killed and two injured. Angela Davis had bought a shotgun used in the kidnapping two days prior. She was also a vocal supporter of the Jim Jones cult in Guyana, which, to many scholars of the incident, appears to be a CIA-backed mind control experiment that resulted in the deaths of 900+ people where hundreds appear to have been hunted down and killed to cover up the crimes.Cecile Richards – Speaker – President of Planned Parenthood of America – Abortionist – Planned Parenthood kills over 320,000 babies a year while taking over half a billion dollars from the taxpayers even though a majority of Americans, 58% in a recent Harvard/Politico poll, oppose having tax money go to abortion. Planned Parenthood was exposed in 2016 through a series of undercover videos to be selling body parts from dead babies in violation of federal law. Planned Parenthood was founded by Margaret Sanger, a racist and eugenicist who wrote that blacks, immigrants, and indigents were “…human weeds,’ ‘reckless breeders,’ and ‘spawning… human beings who never should have been born.” Ms. Richards is also a trustee of the Ford Foundation, a multi-billion dollar “philanthropic” foundation that has served as a front organization and funding mechanism for the CIA since the 1950s. Barack Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, worked at the Ford Foundation along with Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner’s father.Linda Sarsour – March Organizer and Speaker – Muslim terrorist supporter Linda Sarsour, president of the Arab American Association of New York, was deeply involved in planning march-related events. Sarsour has familial ties to HAMAS and works with the terrorist front group Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).Madonna – Speaker and Performer at the March – As an added “present” to those women who brought their children and teens to the march, the organizers elevated Madonna to the role of spokesperson. Not exactly the role model you want for young, impressionable kids.How the Scam Worked1. Divert legitimate criticism into worthless criticism – The real problem with Trump (and the indoctrinated belief in Statism in general) is the poisonous indoctrinated belief that it is legitimate for one person or group of people to rule everyone else. The women of the march were absolutely right in their indignation over having a narcissistic, misogynist imposed on them as their ruler, BUT are intellectually crippled by the fact that the mandatory government school system, the Catholic school system, and most private schools taught them that they must obey because 26% of people in the US were duped into voting for him in a political ritual.The government’s mandatory schools indoctrinate kids that because a couple of dozen slave owners in a nation of three million people wrote down on a piece of paper that they have the right to make up rules for everyone and steal the wealth of others, it is legitimate for them to be the tax-slave of whoever wins the easily rigged contest. Instead of a principled defense of their own self-ownership and individual liberty, the marchers were steered into whining at and begging the government (organized crime).2. Promote Identity Politics and Divide and Conquer – The main “divide and conquer” was men vs. women. Opposition to the new regime was promoted to be a women’s thing, sapping 50ish percent of its potential strength. If you look at the speakers and the groups that promoted the march, they were ideologically similar to white separatists: La Raza, LGBT pressure groups, communists, and dozens of other groups chosen to divide and alienate good people.3. Focus on Non-violence and “Acceptance of Suffering – If you read the published Mission Statement of the March, you will see that it specifically advocates non-violence and “acceptance of suffering,” which is exactly the message you would expect promoted by the organized crime syndicate that funded the march. Even though women are forced into tax slavery, have mercury and aluminum-laced vaccines that cause autism pushed on their kids, are having the money they earn and save devalued through the bankster’s fractional reserve banking swindle and the inflation it causes, and are having their husbands, fathers, and brothers killed in wars based on lies and manufactured intelligence the March’s message is: Just roll over and take it…Don’t fight back.. stay non-violent… accept your suffering.4. Make the Crowd Look Like Idiots with Demeaning and Ineffective Slogans/Memes – Using what I am assuming was an organized social media effort of the Soros-funded march partners, the organizers were able to promote three of the dumbest memes/slogans in the history of organized protests guaranteed to alienate and offend intelligent people of all persuasions:Idiotic Meme/Slogan #1 – Pussy Grabs Back – The most popular meme/slogan at the rally. Neither a cohesive demand nor an intelligent expose of the core problem, this meme/slogan spawned idiot women dressing themselves as vaginas.What were these women trying to promote/expose?Idiotic Meme/Slogan #2 – I’m a Nasty Woman – Probably the 2nd most popular slogan/meme at the march and the 2nd dumbest slogan/meme in the history of political protest. Again, it is demeaning and ineffective by design.Idiotic Meme #3 – Dressing the Crowd (including men) as Pussies! – Supposedly, the “Pussyhat Project” was a grassroots effort by a yarn store owner that saw women knitting “Pussy Hats” for marchers. The idea was either: A. one of the dumbest political protest ideas in history B. she just wanted to sell a bunch of yarn or, most likely, C. there are a bunch of folks at the CIA who are rolling on the floor laughing like crazy that they were able to get the protestors to dress up like a bunch of pussies! And… For the piece de resistance… They tricked the women into knitting the hats themselves!! Triple Chumped!Good People Chumped into Dressing Up as Pussies…5. Focus on Government Solutions – Write your Congressman… March in the street… waste your time in the completely mafia-controlled government system. During the debate on the 2008 “bailout” that transferred trillions to private banks, the semi-honest Congressmen releasing the ratio of calls to their offices showed that over 90% of their constituents opposed the “bailout.” Congress went ahead and did it anyway… What makes these women think that Congress is going to support policies supported by around 50%, especially when they know that the whiners and complainers are a bunch of pussies?The Shame of the Overwhelming Majority of ProtestorsWhat was especially pathetic about the overwhelming majority of the protestors who turned out to protest Donald Trump specifically is that they voted for and worked to elect Barack Obama to be their ruler in 2008 and 2012 and then stood silent as he bombed seven countries in 8 years after lying to them… to their literal and proverbial faces… repeatedly promising to end the wars that continue to rage to this day.Meme References: https://artofliberty.org/fact-check/created-legend/barack_obama/They stood silent as his administration used torture, put corporate lobbyists in key administration positions, prosecuted whistle-blowers who brought government corruption to light, imprisoned non-violent pot smokers in for-profit prisons where they worked as slave labor, assassinated American citizens without trial, and committed scores of other crimes..Why? Because he looked good on tell-a-vision doing it and American society has been desensitized to the realities of the violence that organized crime’s military is committing all over the world.Obama was simply an entertainer… a frontman for the same criminal interests that control Donald Trump today, promoted by the weaponized media system that has been distracting and deceiving the population for decades.What Intelligent and Effective Protest Looks LikeI knew before I headed down that the protest was a controlled opposition event to steer well-meaning but naive people into an alley, but I went anyway because it was an opportunity to reach tens of thousands of (somewhat) politically active people with an effective message.My friend and I took my 60+ foot sign (recipe here) and set up on the dais between the Capital and the Capital reflecting pool, where tens of thousands of march participants would stream past us from the Union Station Metro stop on their way to the event. It was a non-stop river of people.. tens of thousands of which we could see 5-10 stopping to take pictures of the sign at any given time, and I estimate that over 1000+ took photos of the sign throughout our time at the event. Two People… Striking the root…The message was succinct… The basics… That, unfortunately, most Americans haven’t figured out… The organized crime cabal that is looting the country for trillions has bought and paid for the government and the media and is controlling the information that the tax slaves receive to give them an “artificial reality” concerning what is really going on in the world and the reality of their tax slavery.We passed out a few copies of my book: Government- The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! comparing the techniques used to control the American tax slaves demonstrating that they are the exact same techniques used to control the tax slaves in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and East Germany.About The AuthorEtienne de la Boetie2 is the founder of the Art of Liberty Foundation, and the editor of the Art of Liberty Daily News on Substack and Five Meme Friday, which delivers hard-hitting voluntaryist memes and the best of the alternative media. He is an internationally recognized expert and speaker on voluntaryism and government illegitimacy, criminality and corruption. His original writings and research can be found at ArtOfLiberty.org and ArtOfLiberty.Substack.comHe is the author of To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many which exposes an inter-generational psychological operation by the “government,” Hollywood, and the monopoly media to indoctrinate the population with the pseudo-religion of Statism using dozens of unethically manipulative techniques ranging from subliminal content in television programming to a hidden curriculum in the mandatory “government” schools, scouting, and police/military training.He has also authored: “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! which breaks down how inter-generational organized crime centered around banking and central banking is robbing and controlling the population using the technique of “government” with puppet politicians and monopoly media/academia. His upcoming book: Voluntaryism – How the Only “ISM” Fair for Everyone Leads to Harmony, Prosperity and Good Karma for All! explains how REAL freedom (voluntaryism) can provide all the legitimate non-redistributive services provided by “government” without the waste, fraud, abuse, indoctrination and extortion.About The Art Of Liberty FoundationThe Art of Liberty Foundation is dedicated to exposing the illegitimacy and criminality of monopoly “government” and central banking/fractional reserve banking and promoting voluntaryism — the only system of social organization based entirely on consent and REAL freedom — as the alternative.See ArtOfLiberty.org.PLEASE Support Our Work By Going Paid on Substack AND/OR Supporting the Foundation as a Sponsor (Get Perks!) @ ArtOfLiberty.org/SponsorThe Best “Go Paid” Deal on Substack! You Get REAL Stuff!!Go paid at the $5 a month level, and we will send you both the PDF and e-Pub versions of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many and a coupon code for 10% off anything in the https://artofliberty.org/store/.Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many OR “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR a 64GB Liberator flash drive if you live in the US. If you are international, we will give you a $10 credit towards shipping if you agree to pay the remainder.Support us at the $250 Founding Member Level and get a signed high-resolution hardcover of “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! + Liberator flash drive + a signed high-resolution hardcover of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many + everything else in our “Everything Bundle” of the best in voluntaryist thought delivered domestically. International pays shipping. Our only option for signed copies besides catching Etienne at an event.

[OR… Why Central Planning is Doomed to Fail Even in the Age of Technocracy and AI ] Chapter 3 from our FREE paperback book: Hayek for the 21st CenturyEtienne Note: This is the 4th Article in our tribute to the great Austrian Economist Friedrich August von Hayek better known as F.A. Hayek. Some of Hayek’s core insights were that knowledge is dispersed across millions of individuals and cannot be aggregated by any central authority. Prices are information signals. When you override them with planning, you don’t just misallocate resources — you destroy the very mechanism by which society coordinates itself.But beyond economics, Hayek was a philosopher of spontaneous order — the idea that complex, functional systems emerge from human action without human design. Language, common law, markets, social norms — none are “planned,” and all work better than their planned alternatives. Hayek explained a sophisticated intellectual framework for voluntaryism operating in practice.In this essay, Hayek describes why central planning, by “governments” or “technocrats” isn’t just a bad idea… but impossible. Hayek’s central move is to reframe the economic problem. The problem isn’t “how do we allocate known resources efficiently” — a math problem a smart planner could in principle solve. It’s that the relevant knowledge never exists in one place. It exists only as dispersed, fragmentary, often contradictory bits held by millions of individuals, much of it tacit “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place” that can’t be written down or transmitted to a central authority. The planner’s problem isn’t insufficient intelligence or insufficient computing power. It’s structural: the information the planner would need is destroyed the moment you try to centralize it, because much of it only exists in the act of a local person deciding to utilize (or not) utilize what he has on hand.Hayek’s critique still applies even in the age of AI: No amount of expert AI brilliance fixes a problem that is about the location of knowledge and individual preference, not the quantity of it.Hayek’s Example of a Tin ShortageA tin shortage appears somewhere in the world. Almost no one who reacts to it knows the cause — war, a new use, a mine collapse. They don’t need to. The price rises, and thousands of people who’ve never met economize on tin and its substitutes, passing the signal down the chain. Hayek’s line: the price system works “as a kind of machinery for registering change,” a system of telecommunications compressing a mountain of dispersed facts into one number that tells people what to do without telling them why. This is Chapter Three from Hayek for the 21st Century – Paperback available for Free with any purchase from ArtOfLiberty.org/Store, “Going Paid” on any of our Substacks or by paying S&H for the book. The copies are free thanks to the generosity of a donor to the Mises Institute and they have an offer with free S&H Here.Previous Chapters from Hayek for the 21st Century:Introduction by Thomas J DiLorenzo, President of the Mises Institute & Editor of Hayek for the 21st Century + Hayek bio, quotes, rap battles and memes!Chapter 1: The Intellectuals and Socialism by F.A. Hayek, Chapter 2: Why the Worst Get On Top [In “Government”] by F.A. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in SocietyIWhat is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order?On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough. If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic. That is, the answer to the question of what is the best use of the available means is implicit in our assumptions. The conditions which the solution of this optimum problem must satisfy have been fully worked out and can be stated best in mathematical form: put at their briefest, they are that the marginal rates of substitution between any two commodities or factors must be the same in all their different uses.This, however, is emphatically not the economic problem which society faces. And the economic calculus which we have developed to solve this logical problem, though an important step toward the solution of the economic problem of society, does not yet provide an answer to it. The reason for this is that the “data” from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society “given” to a single mind which could work out the implications, and can never be so given.The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources—if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.This character of the fundamental problem has, I am afraid, been obscured rather than illuminated by many of the recent refinements of economic theory, particularly by many of the uses made of mathematics. Though the problem with which I want primarily to deal in this paper is the problem of a rational economic organization, I shall in its course be led again and again to point to its close connections with certain methodological questions. Many of the points I wish to make are indeed conclusions toward which diverse paths of reasoning have unexpectedly converged. But as I now see these problems, this is no accident. It seems to me that many of the current disputes with regard to both economic theory and economic policy have their common origin in a misconception about the nature of the economic problem of society. This misconception in turn is due to an erroneous transfer to social phenomena of the habits of thought we have developed in dealing with the phenomena of nature.IIIn ordinary language we describe by the word “planning” the complex of interrelated decisions about the allocation of our available resources. All economic activity is in this sense planning; and in any society in which many people collaborate, this planning, whoever does it, will in some measure have to be based on knowledge which, in the first instance, is not given to the planner but to somebody else, and which somehow will have to be conveyed to the planner. The various ways in which the knowledge on which people base their plans is communicated to them is the crucial problem for any theory explaining the economic process. And the problem of what is the best way of utilizing knowledge initially dispersed among all the people is at least one of the main problems of economic policy—or of designing an efficient economic system.The answer to this question is closely connected with that other question which arises here, that of who is to do the planning. It is about this question that all the dispute about “economic planning” centers. This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals. Planning in the specific sense in which the term is used in contemporary controversy necessarily means central planning—direction of the whole economic system according to one unified plan. Competition, on the other hand, means decentralized planning by many separate persons. The half-way house between the two, about which many people talk but which few like when they see it, is the delegation of planning to organized industries, or, in other words, monopoly.Which of these systems is likely to be more efficient depends mainly on the question of under which of them we can expect that fuller use will be made of the existing knowledge. And this, in turn, depends on whether we are more likely to succeed in putting at the disposal of a single central authority all the knowledge which ought to be used but which is initially dispersed among many different individuals, or in conveying to the individuals such additional knowledge as they need in order to enable them to fit their plans in with those of others.IIIIt will at once be evident that on this point the position will be different with respect to different kinds of knowledge; and the answer to our question will therefore largely turn on the relative importance of the different kinds of knowledge; those more likely to be at the disposal of particular individuals and those which we should with greater confidence expect to find in the possession of an authority made up of suitably chosen experts. If it is today so widely assumed that the latter will be in a better position, this is because one kind of knowledge, namely, scientific knowledge, occupies now so prominent a place in public imagination that we tend to forget that it is not the only kind that is relevant. It may be admitted that, so far as scientific knowledge is concerned, a body of suitably chosen experts may be in the best position to command all the best knowledge available—though this is of course merely shifting the difficulty to the problem of selecting the experts. What I wish to point out is that, even assuming that this problem can be readily solved, it is only a small part of the wider problem.Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. It is with respect to this that practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active cooperation. We need only to remember how much we have to learn in any occupation after we have completed our theoretical training, how big a part of our working life we spend learning particular jobs, and how valuable an asset in all walks of life is knowledge of people, of local conditions, and of special circumstances. To know of and put to use a machine not fully employed, or somebody’s skill which could be better utilized, or to be aware of a surplus stock which can be drawn upon during an interruption of supplies, is socially quite as useful as the knowledge of better alternative techniques. And the shipper who earns his living from using otherwise empty or half-filled journeys of tramp steamers, or the estate agent whose whole knowledge is almost exclusively one of temporary opportunities, or the arbitrageur who gains from local differences of commodity prices, are all performing eminently useful functions based on special knowledge of circumstances of the fleeting moment not known to others.It is a curious fact that this sort of knowledge should today be generally regarded with a kind of contempt, and that anyone who by such knowledge gains an advantage over somebody better equipped with theoretical or technical knowledge is thought to have acted almost disreputably. To gain an advantage from better knowledge of facilities of communication or transport is sometimes regarded as almost dishonest, although it is quite as important that society make use of the best opportunities in this respect as in using the latest scientific discoveries. This prejudice has in a considerable measure affected the attitude toward commerce in general compared with that toward production. Even economists who regard themselves as definitely above the crude materialist fallacies of the past constantly commit the same mistake where activities directed toward the acquisition of such practical knowledge are concerned—apparently because in their scheme of things all such knowledge is supposed to be “given.” The common idea now seems to be that all such knowledge should as a matter of course be readily at the command of everybody, and the reproach of irrationality leveled against the existing economic order is frequently based on the fact that it is not so available. This view disregards the fact that the method by which such knowledge can be made as widely available as possible is precisely the problem to which we have to find an answer.IVIf it is fashionable today to minimize the importance of the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place, this is closely connected with the smaller importance which is now attached to change as such. Indeed, there are few points on which the assumptions made (usually only implicitly) by the “planners” differ from those of their opponents as much as with regard to the significance and frequency of changes which will make substantial alterations of production plans necessary. Of course, if detailed economic plans could be laid down for fairly long periods in advance and then closely adhered to, so that no further economic decisions of importance would be required, the task of drawing up a comprehensive plan governing all economic activity would appear much less formidable.It is, perhaps, worth stressing that economic problems arise always and only in consequence of change. So long as things continue as before, or at least as they were expected to, there arise no new problems requiring a decision, no need to form a new plan. The belief that changes, or at least day-to-day adjustments, have become less important in modern times implies the contention that economic problems also have become less important. This belief in the decreasing importance of change is, for that reason, usually held by the same people who argue that the importance of economic considerations has been driven into the background by the growing importance of technological knowledge.Is it true that, with the elaborate apparatus of modern production, economic decisions are required only at long intervals, as when a new factory is to be erected or a new process to be introduced? Is it true that, once a plant has been built, the rest is all more or less mechanical, determined by the character of the plant, and leaving little to be changed in adapting to the ever-changing circumstances of the moment?The fairly widespread belief in the affirmative is not, so far as I can ascertain, borne out by the practical experience of the business man. In a competitive industry at any rate—and such an industry alone can serve as a test—the task of keeping cost from rising requires constant struggle, absorbing a great part of the energy of the manager. How easy it is for an inefficient manager to dissipate the differentials on which profitability rests, and that it is possible, with the same technical facilities, to produce with a great variety of costs, are among the commonplaces of business experience which do not seem to be equally familiar in the study of the economist. The very strength of the desire, constantly voiced by producers and engineers, to be able to proceed untrammeled by considerations of money costs is eloquent testimony to the extent to which these factors enter into their daily work.One reason why economists are increasingly apt to forget about the constant small changes which make up the whole economic picture is probably their growing preoccupation with statistical aggregates, which show a very much greater stability than the movements of the detail. The comparative stability of the aggregates cannot, however, be accounted for—as the statisticians occasionally seem to be inclined to do—by the “law of large numbers” or the mutual compensation of random changes. The number of elements with which we have to deal is not large enough for such accidental forces to produce stability. The continuous flow of goods and services is maintained by constant deliberate adjustments, by new dispositions made every day in the light of circumstances not known the day before, by B stepping in at once when A fails to deliver. Even the large and highly mechanized plant keeps going largely because of an environment upon which it can draw for all sorts of unexpected needs; tiles for its roof, stationery for its forms, and all the thousand and one kinds of equipment in which it cannot be self-contained and which the plans for the operation of the plant require to be readily available in the market.This is, perhaps, also the point where I should briefly mention the fact that the sort of knowledge with which I have been concerned is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form. The statistics which such a central authority would have to use would have to be arrived at precisely by abstracting from minor differences between the things, by lumping together, as resources of one kind, items which differ as regards location, quality, and other particulars, in a way which may be very significant for the specific decision. It follows from this that central planning based on statistical information by its nature cannot take direct account of these circumstances of time and place, and that the central planner will have to find some way or other in which the decisions depending on them can be left to the “man on the spot.”VIf we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders. We must solve it by some form of decentralization. But this answers only part of our problem. We need decentralization because only thus can we ensure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used. But the “man on the spot” cannot decide solely on the basis of his limited but intimate knowledge of the facts of his immediate surroundings. There still remains the problem of communicating to him such further information as he needs to fit his decisions into the whole pattern of changes of the larger economic system.How much knowledge does he need to do so successfully? Which of the events which happen beyond the horizon of his immediate knowledge are of relevance to his immediate decision, and how much of them need he know?There is hardly anything that happens anywhere in the world that might not have an effect on the decision he ought to make. But he need not know of these events as such, nor of all their effects. It does not matter for him why at the particular moment more screws of one size than of another are wanted, why paper bags are more readily available than canvas bags, or why skilled labor, or particular machine tools, have for the moment become more difficult to acquire. All that is significant for him is how much more or less difficult to procure they have become compared with other things with which he is also concerned, or how much more or less urgently wanted are the alternative things he produces or uses. It is always a question of the relative importance of the particular things with which he is concerned, and the causes which alter their relative importance are of no interest to him beyond the effect on those concrete things of his own environment.It is in this connection that what I have called the economic calculus proper helps us, at least by analogy, to see how this problem can be solved, and in fact is being solved, by the price system. Even the single controlling mind, in possession of all the data for some small, self-contained economic system, would not—every time some small adjustment in the allocation of resources had to be made—go explicitly through all the relations between ends and means which might possibly be affected. It is indeed the great contribution of the pure logic of choice that it has demonstrated conclusively that even such a single mind could solve this kind of problem only by constructing and constantly using rates of equivalence (or “values,” or “marginal rates of substitution”), i.e., by attaching to each kind of scarce resource a numerical index which cannot be derived from any property possessed by that particular thing, but which reflects, or in which is condensed, its significance in view of the whole means-end structure. In any small change he will have to consider only these quantitative indices (or “values”) in which all the relevant information is concentrated; and by adjusting the quantities one by one, he can appropriately rearrange his dispositions without having to solve the whole puzzle ab initio, or without needing at any stage to survey it at once in all its ramifications.Fundamentally, in a system in which the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coordinate the parts of his plan. It is worth contemplating for a moment a very simple and commonplace instance of the action of the price system to see what precisely it accomplishes. Assume that somewhere in the world a new opportunity for the use of some raw material, say tin, has arisen, or that one of the sources of supply of tin has been eliminated. It does not matter for our purpose—and it is very significant that it does not matter—which of these two causes has made tin more scarce. All that the users of tin need to know is that some of the tin they used to consume is now more profitably employed elsewhere, and that in consequence they must economize tin. There is no need for the great majority of them even to know where the more urgent need has arisen, or in favor of what other needs they ought to husband the supply. If only some of them know directly of the new demand, and switch resources over to it, and if the people who are aware of the new gap thus created in turn fill it from still other sources, the effect will rapidly spread throughout the whole economic system and influence not only all the uses of tin but also those of its substitutes and the substitutes of these substitutes, the supply of all the things made of tin, and their substitutes, and so on; and all this without the great majority of those instrumental in bringing about these substitutions knowing anything at all about the original cause of these changes. The whole acts as one market, not because any of its members survey the whole field, but because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all. The mere fact that there is one price for any commodity—or rather that local prices are connected in a manner determined by the cost of transport, etc.—brings about the solution which (it is just conceptually possible) might have been arrived at by one single mind possessing all the information which is in fact dispersed among all the people involved in the process.VIWe must look at the price system as such a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function—a function which, of course, it fulfills less perfectly as prices grow more rigid. (Even when quoted prices have become quite rigid, however, the forces which would operate through changes in price still operate to a considerable extent through changes in the other terms of the contract.) The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on, and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.Of course, these adjustments are probably never “perfect” in the sense in which the economist conceives of them in his equilibrium analysis. But I fear that our theoretical habit of approaching the problem with the assumption of more or less perfect knowledge on the part of almost everyone has made us somewhat blind to the true function of the price mechanism and led us to apply rather misleading standards in judging its efficiency. The marvel is that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; i.e., they move in the right direction. This is enough of a marvel even if, in a constantly changing world, not all will hit it off so perfectly that their profit rates will always be maintained at the same constant or “normal” level.I have deliberately used the word “marvel” to shock the reader out of the complacency with which we often take the working of this mechanism for granted. I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. Its misfortune is the double one that it is not the product of human design and that the people guided by it usually do not know why they are made to do what they do. But those who clamor for “conscious direction”—and who cannot believe that anything which has evolved without design (and even without our understanding it) should solve problems which we should not be able to solve consciously—should remember this: The problem is precisely how to extend the span of our utilization of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind; and, therefore, how to dispense with the need of conscious control and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do.The problem which we meet here is by no means peculiar to economics but arises in connection with nearly all truly social phenomena, with language and with most of our cultural inheritance, and constitutes really the central theoretical problem of all social science. As Alfred Whitehead has said in another connection, “It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” This is of profound significance in the social field. We make constant use of formulas, symbols, and rules whose meaning we do not understand and through the use of which we avail ourselves of the assistance of knowledge which individually we do not possess. We have developed these practices and institutions by building upon habits and institutions which have proved successful in their own sphere and which have in turn become the foundation of the civilization we have built up.The price system is just one of those formations which man has learned to use (though he is still very far from having learned to make the best use of it) after he had stumbled upon it without understanding it. Through it not only a division of labor but also a coordinated utilization of resources based on an equally divided knowledge has become possible. The people who like to deride any suggestion that this may be so usually distort the argument by insinuating that it asserts that by some miracle just that sort of system has spontaneously grown up which is best suited to modern civilization. It is the other way round: man has been able to develop that division of labor on which our civilization is based because he happened to stumble upon a method which made it possible. Had he not done so he might still have developed some other, altogether different, type of civilization, something like the “state” of the termite ants, or some other altogether unimaginable type. All that we can say is that nobody has yet succeeded in designing an alternative system in which certain features of the existing one can be preserved which are dear even to those who most violently assail it—such as particularly the extent to which the individual can choose his pursuits and consequently freely use his own knowledge and skill.VIIIt is in many ways fortunate that the dispute about the indispensability of the price system for any rational calculation in a complex society is now no longer conducted entirely between camps holding different political views. The thesis that without the price system we could not preserve a society based on such extensive division of labor as ours was greeted with a howl of derision when it was first advanced by von Mises twenty-five years ago. Today the difficulties which some still find in accepting it are no longer mainly political, and this makes for an atmosphere much more conducive to reasonable discussion. When we find Leon Trotsky arguing that “economic accounting is unthinkable without market relations”; when Professor Oscar Lange promises Professor von Mises a statue in the marble halls of the future Central Planning Board; and when Professor Abba P. Lerner rediscovers Adam Smith and emphasizes that the essential utility of the price system consists in inducing the individual, while seeking his own interest, to do what is in the general interest, the differences can indeed no longer be ascribed to political prejudice. The remaining dissent seems clearly to be due to purely intellectual, and more particularly methodological, differences.A recent statement by Professor Joseph Schumpeter in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy provides a clear illustration of one of the methodological differences which I have in mind. Its author is pre-eminent among those economists who approach economic phenomena in the light of a certain branch of positivism. To him these phenomena accordingly appear as objectively given quantities of commodities impinging directly upon each other, almost, it would seem, without any intervention of human minds. Only against this background can I account for the following (to me startling) pronouncement. Professor Schumpeter argues that the possibility of a rational calculation in the absence of markets for the factors of production follows for the theorist “from the elementary proposition that consumers in evaluating (‘demanding’) consumers’ goods ipso facto also evaluate the means of production which enter into the production of these goods.”¹Taken literally, this statement is simply untrue. The consumers do nothing of the kind. What Professor Schumpeter’s “ipso facto” presumably means is that the valuation of the factors of production is implied in, or follows necessarily from, the valuation of consumers’ goods. But this, too, is not correct. Implication is a logical relationship which can be meaningfully asserted only of propositions simultaneously present to one and the same mind. It is evident, however, that the values of the factors of production do not depend solely on the valuation of the consumers’ goods but also on the conditions of supply of the various factors of production. Only to a mind to which all these facts were simultaneously known would the answer necessarily follow from the facts given to it. The practical problem, however, arises precisely because these facts are never so given to a single mind, and because, in consequence, it is necessary that in the solution of the problem knowledge should be used that is dispersed among many people.The problem is thus in no way solved if we can show that all the facts, if they were known to a single mind (as we hypothetically assume them to be given to the observing economist), would uniquely determine the solution; instead we must show how a solution is produced by the interactions of people each of whom possesses only partial knowledge. To assume all the knowledge to be given to a single mind in the same manner in which we assume it to be given to us as the explaining economists is to assume the problem away and to disregard everything that is important and significant in the real world.That an economist of Professor Schumpeter’s standing should thus have fallen into a trap which the ambiguity of the term “datum” sets to the unwary can hardly be explained as a simple error. It suggests rather that there is something fundamentally wrong with an approach which habitually disregards an essential part of the phenomena with which we have to deal: the unavoidable imperfection of man’s knowledge and the consequent need for a process by which knowledge is constantly communicated and acquired. Any approach, such as that of much of mathematical economics with its simultaneous equations, which in effect starts from the assumption that people’s knowledge corresponds with the objective facts of the situation, systematically leaves out what is our main task to explain. I am far from denying that in our system equilibrium analysis has a useful function to perform. But when it comes to the point where it misleadsThe peculiar character of the problem some of our leading thinkers into believing that the situation which it describes has direct relevance to the solution of practical problems, it is high time that we remember that it does not deal with the social process at all and that it is no more than a useful preliminary to the study of the main problem.The Art of Liberty Foundation is honoring the Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek, one of the most important economists to have ever lived, with a campaign that will both syndicate the new book: Hayek for the 21st Century – Essays in Political Economy and provide free paperback copies of the book to anyone who goes paid on our Substack as an annual member and/or orders anything from ArtOfLiberty.org/store.This introduction to F.A. Hayek includes his biography, memes, quotes, “Rap Battles” with economist Lord John Maynard Keynes, and the first installment of our syndication of Hayek for the 21st Century – Essays in Political Economy: The Introduction to the book by Thomas J DiLorenzo, President of the Mises Institute & Editor of Hayek for the 21st CenturyWe are also adding the full PDF of Hayek for the 21st Century to our uncensorable flash drive of Freedom: The Liberator.BiographyF. A. Hayek’s life spanned the twentieth century, and he made his home in some of the great intellectual communities of the period.Born Friedrich August von Hayek in 1899 to a distinguished family of Viennese intellectuals, Hayek attended the University of Vienna, earning doctorates in 1921 and 1923. Hayek came to the University at age 19 just after World War I, when it was one of the three best places in the world to study economics (the others being Stockholm and Cambridge).Like many students of economics then and since, Hayek chose the subject not for its own sake, but because he wanted to improve social conditions—the poverty of postwar Vienna serving as a daily reminder of such a need. Socialism seemed to provide a solution. Then in 1922 Mises published his Die Gemeinwirtschaft, later translated as Socialism. “To none of us young men who read the book when it appeared,” Hayek recalled, “the world was ever the same again.” It was around this time that Hayek began attending Mises’s famed Privatseminar. For several years the Privatseminar was the center of the economics community in Vienna.Later, Hayek became the first of this group to leave Vienna; most of the others, along with Mises himself, were also gone by the start of World War II.At the L.S.E. Hayek lectured on Mises’s business-cycle theory, which he was refining and which, until Keynes’s General Theory came out in 1936, was rapidly gaining adherents in Britain and the U.S. and was becoming the preferred explanation of the Depression. Hayek and Keynes had sparred in the early 1930s in the pages of the Economic Journal, over Keynes’s Treatise on Money.Within a very few years, however, the fortunes of the Austrian School suffered a dramatic reversal. Mises left Vienna in 1934 for Geneva and then New York, where he continued to work in isolation; Hayek remained at the L.S.E. until 1950, when he joined the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Other Austrians of Hayek’s generation became prominent in the U.S. but their work no longer seemed to show distinct traces of the tradition founded by Carl Menger.At Chicago Hayek again found himself among a dazzling group. But economic theory, in particular its style of reasoning, was rapidly changing. In addition, Hayek had ceased to work on economic theory, concentrating instead on psychology, philosophy, and politics, and Austrian economics entered a prolonged eclipse.When the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics went to Hayek, interest in the Austrian School was suddenly and unexpectedly revived. Hayek’s writings were taught to new generations, and Hayek himself appeared at the early Institute for Humane Studies conferences in the mid-1970s. He continued to write, producing The Fatal Conceit in 1988, at the age of 89.Hayek died in 1992 in Freiburg, Germany, where he had lived since leaving Chicago in 1961.Among mainstream economists, he is mainly known for his popular The Road to Serfdom (1944) and for his work on knowledge in the 1930s and 1940s. Specialists in business cycle theory recognize his early work on industrial fluctuations, and modern information theorists often acknowledge Hayek’s work on prices as signals, although his conclusions are typically disputed. Hayek’s work is also known in political philosophy, legal theory, and psychology.Within the Austrian School of economics, Hayek’s influence, while undeniably immense, has very recently become the subject of some controversy. His emphasis on spontaneous order and his work on complex systems has been widely influential among many Austrians. Others have preferred to stress Hayek’s work in technical economics, particularly on capital and the business cycle, citing a tension between some of Hayek’s and Mises’s views on the social order.Hayek’s writings on capital, money, and the business cycle are widely regarded as his most important contributions to economics. Building on Mises’s Theory of Money and Credit (1912), Hayek showed how fluctuations in economy-wide output and employment are related to the economy’s capital structure. In Prices and Production (1931) he introduced the famous “Hayekian triangles” to illustrate the relationship between the value of capital goods and their place in the temporal sequence of production.In Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1933) Hayek showed how monetary injections, by lowering the rate of interest below what Mises (following Wicksell) called its “natural rate,” distort the economy’s intertemporal structure of production. Most theories of the effects of money on prices and output (then and since) consider only the effects of the total money supply on the price level and aggregate output or investment.Hayek’s writings on dispersed knowledge and spontaneous order are also widely known, but more controversial. In “Economics and Knowledge” (1937) and “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945) Hayek argued that the central economic problem facing society is not, as is commonly expressed in textbooks, the allocation of given resources among competing ends.It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only those individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality.Clearly, the Austrian revival owes much to Hayek. He ranks among the greatest members of the Austrian School, and among the leading economists of the twentieth century. His work continues to be influential in business cycle theory, comparative economic systems, political and social philosophy, legal theory, and even cognitive psychology. Hayek remains one of the most intriguing intellectual figures of our time.Fear the Boom and Bust: Keynes vs. Hayek – The Original Economics Rap Battle!F.A Hayek vs. John Maynard Keynes square off in Fear the Boom and Bust – The Original Economics Rap Battle where Keynes, who advocated “government” action during periods of recession and depression and “wants to steer markets” squares off against F.A Hayek, who advocates for low taxation and savings-led investment by those who best understand their industries… Hayek “wants them set free”Full Lyrics Here: https://genius.com/John-papola-fear-the-boom-and-bust-hayek-vs-keynes-lyricsFight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek – Economics Rap Battle Round TwoFull Lyrics Here: https://genius.com/Econstories-fight-of-the-century-lyricsWhich way should we choose?More bottom-up or more top-down?The fight continuesKeynes and Hayek, second roundIt’s time to weigh inMore from the top or from the ground?Let’s listen to the greatsKeynes and Hayek throwin’ downIntroduction to Hayek for the 21st CenturyIntroduction by Thomas J DiLorenzo, President of the Mises Institute & Editor of Hayek for the 21st CenturyThe rest of Hayek for the 21st Century will be syndicated in the coming weeks.In a February 7, 2000, article in The New Yorker, journalist John Cassidy wrote that “it is hardly an exaggeration to refer to the twentieth century as the Hayek century.” He said this because of Friedrich Hayek’s prominent role throughout the century in defending free market capitalism and his critiques of socialism, especially his writings on the importance of decentralized knowledge in economic decision-making. Hayek lived to see his ideas proven correct with the worldwide collapse of socialism in the late eighties and early nineties. Watching the images of the collapse on television he said to his son, “I told you so.”The Knowledge ProblemThe “knowledge problem” is Hayek’s key contribution to the critique of socialism. It recognizes the commonsense notion that what makes the economic world go around is the use of knowledge by all kinds of people with different abilities, educations, experiences, and skills. Thanks to this international division of labor and knowledge, we collaborate “as though led by an invisible hand” in order to mutually prosper. It all depends of course on freedom—the freedom to own property, to pursue a profession of your Introduction 7 8 Hayek for the 21st Century choosing, to start and run a business, to buy and sell, to be guided in your decisions by free market prices. By contrast, socialism in all of its varieties is based on the opposite idea—that what is supposedly needed for prosperity is totalitarian powers in the hands of a small number of politicians and “planners” who will forcefully impose a single plan on an entire society. Hayek labeled this “the fatal conceit” of socialism in his last book. The entire world now knows that he was right, and all of the socialist tyrants and their propagandists and court historians were (and are) wrong.Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society” and “The Pretense of Knowledge,” reprinted here, are the two best expositions of the Hayekian knowledge problem. Indeed, John Cassidy credited Hayek with providing an explanation of the workings of “the information age” of the internet that would develop some fifty years after he first started writing about the importance of decentralized information in society. This is not mere speculation on Cassidy’s part. As just one example, the cofounder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, claims to have gotten the idea for Wikipedia as an Auburn University undergraduate finance student aft er Mises Institute Research Fellow Mark Thornton got him to read “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” Hayek called free market capitalism guided by private property and free market prices a “telecommunications system,” which Cassidy suggested was “one of the great insights of the [twentieth] century.”Hayek’s Demolition of Socialists and Their IdeasHayek wrote in a 1961 Southern Economic Journal article (“The Non Sequitur of the ‘Dependence Effect,’” republished here) that for over a hundred years socialists had argued that “the problem of production” had been solved, so that “only the problem of distribution remains.” At the time, the “latest form of this old contention” was in the form of numerous books by the socialist Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, the best known of which was The Affluent Society. Galbraith argued in books and articles that all “essential needs” are already met, and that most of what people think are other “needs” are really fake needs created by the brainwashing effects of advertising. Only “innate” needs that we think of ourselves are useful, said Galbraith; everything else that is brought to our attention by others is therefore useless and wasteful. Therefore, the argument went, government should tax more and spend more for what it deems to be our genuinely useful needs. What is genuinely useful would of course be determined by politicians—presumably with the assistance of John Kenneth Galbraith.Hayek called this argument “a complete non sequitur.” It implies for one thing that “the whole cultural achievement of man is not important.” The only genuinely innate human needs, said Hayek, are food, shelter, and sex. Everything else is brought to our attention by someone. Hayek’s article is a complete demolition of the Galbraithian system and his life’s work of promoting what Hayek called increasing “the share of the resources whose use is determined by political authority and the coercion of any dissenting minority.”In 1949 Hayek authored “The Intellectuals and Socialism” in The University of Chicago Law Review. His argument is as relevant today as it was then—if not more relevant. Contrary to the common argument that “intellectuals” have little influence on day-to-day discussions about public policy, Hayek argued that “over somewhat longer periods they have probably never exercised so great an influence as they do today.” He pointed out that socialism was never a “working class” movement but was always hatched from the utopian dreams of “theorists” who spent 10 decades preaching their socialist utopianism in university classrooms and all throughout the culture. In many countries the result of this decades-long propagandizing for socialism was that the views held by socialist intellectuals became “the governing force of politics,” wrote Hayek. The “intellectual” spreaders of socialist ideas were not just academics but also “journalists, teachers, ministers, lecturers, publicists, radio commentators, writers of fiction, cartoonists, and artists,” among many others, including “scientists and doctors.” It is “the intellectuals in this sense who decide what views and opinions are to reach us.”Eventually, so many institutions are taken over by socialists that an intellectual who espouses the philosophical foundations of a free society, by contrast, “soon discovers that it is unsafe to associate too closely with those who seem to share most of his convictions and he is driven into isolation.” This sounds like a perfect description of today’s American university world. Nevertheless, all is not lost, Hayek concluded. What is needed is education about a classical “liberal Utopia” to counter the endless promises of socialist utopias—not a “diluted kind of socialism,” he wrote, but a “truly liberal radicalism” that does not pull punches to please any special interest group. Leave the compromising to the politicians, he advised.Hayek was relentless in his devastating critiques of socialism and interventionism, and nowhere is this more on display than in his essay “The Meaning of Competition.” By the 1940s the academic economics profession had adopted a straw-man argument version of competition. Rather than the Austrian School conception of competition as a dynamic, rivalrous discovery process, competition was newly defined as a static situation where “many” business firms all produced a homogeneous product and charged identical prices in a world where all market participants had “perfect knowledge” of everything—what consumers wanted, how to minimize costs and maximize profits, and so on. They called it “perfect competition.” In his essay Hayek explained that “‘perfect’ competition means indeed the absence of all competitive activities” because all of it—product differentiation, price cutting, mergers, advertising—was all assumed away by the perfect competition “model.”This method of analysis was later labeled a “nirvana fallacy” by UCLA economist Harold Demsetz. Positing a utopian never-never land and comparing it to the real world, and then condemning real-world markets as “failed” because they are “imperfect,” is one of the biggest hoaxes ever perpetrated by the economics profession.In “Choice in Currency” Hayek did not oppose government issuance of money but instead opposed governmental monopoly and governments’ “power to limit the kinds of money in which contracts may be concluded.” Competing currencies could be valued “in seconds” with “electronic calculators,” Hayek wrote, long before the invention of the cell phone. Competition in currencies would be the path to honest money, for “even the slightest deviation from the path of honesty would reduce the demand for their product.” It is little wonder that Hayek’s writings on competing currencies have become enormously popular among advocates of cryptocurrencies.Hayekian Political PhilosophyOddly enough, despite all of his contributions to economic science and his Nobel Prize, what Friedrich Hayek is most known for among the general public is his writings on political philosophy, in particular his infamous book The Road to Serfdom, a critique of collectivism in all its forms. Hayek did not distinguish between fascism and socialism, the former being just a variant of the latter, with a common hatred of private property, free enterprise, economic freedom in general, constitutionalism, and the rule of law. The most famous chapter of The Road to Serfdom is chapter 10, “Why the Worst Get on Top,” republished here. Since any kind of socialism requires a central plan for all of society, it also requires the use of massive governmental force (and censorship of critics) to implement the plan. Consequently, the kind of people who would rise to the top of such a system are those with the fewest qualms about coercing, imprisoning, and brutalizing (or worse) their fellow citizens, wrote Hayek. That is why, he wrote, “the practice of socialism is everywhere totalitarian.”Hopefully, this brief introduction has helped the reader to understand why the journalist John Cassidy was so inspired by the power of Hayek’s scholarship and writings that he made a case that the entire twentieth century (the good parts of it, anyway) should be thought of as “the Hayek century.” Ludwig von Mises was surely right when, he said that “Doctor Hayek . . . will be remembered as one of the great economists of all time”.Thomas J. DiLorenzoQuotes & Memes“From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be to treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time”― Friedrich August von Hayek, Constitution of Liberty“Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion.”― Friedrich von Hayek“The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.”― Friedrich August von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine the can design.”― F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism“Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another. In any society freedom of thought will probably be of direct significance only for a small minority. But this does not mean that anyone is competent, or ought to have power, to select those to whom this freedom is to be reserved. It certainly does not justify the presumption of any group of people to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe.”― Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom“The more the state “plans” the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.”― Friedrich A. Hayek“Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his absolute mercy. And an authority directing the whole economic system of the country would be the most powerful monopolist conceivable…it would have complete power to decide what we are to be given and on what terms. It would not only decide what commodities and services were to be available and in what quantities; it would be able to direct their distributions between persons to any degree it liked.”― Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom“It is true that the virtues which are less esteemed and practiced now–independence, self-reliance, and the willingness to bear risks, the readiness to back one’s own conviction against a majority, and the willingness to voluntary cooperation with one’s neighbors–are essentially those on which an individualist society rests. Collectivism has nothing to put in their place, and in so far as it already has destroyed then it has left a void filled by nothing but the demand for obedience and the compulsion of the individual to what is collectively decided to be good.” ― Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom“I am certain, however, that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.”― F.A. Hayek“I was quite depressed two weeks ago when I spent an afternoon at Brentano’s Bookshop in New York and was looking at the kind of books most people read. Once you see that you lose all hope..”― Friedrich August von Hayek“Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded.”― Friedrich Hayek“While an equality of rights under a limited government is possible and an essential condition of individual freedom, a claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.”― Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice“Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad.”― Friedrich A. Hayek“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.”― Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism“It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.”― Friedrich August von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty“From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.”― Friedrich A. von Hayek“It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark.”― Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom“To act on behalf of a group seems to free people of many of the moral restraints which control their behaviour as individuals within the group.”― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom“Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions and will receive praise or blame for them. Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.”― Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty“Although we had been warned by some of the greatest political thinkers of the nineteenth century, by Tocqueville and Lord Acton, that socialism means slavery, we have steadily moved in the direction of socialism.”― Friedrich Hayek, The Road to SerfdomGet a paperback copy of Hayek for the 21st Century for FREEAs part of the Art of Liberty Foundation’s Tribute to Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek, in cooperation with the Mises Institute and the US Justice Charitable Foundation who provided free copies, the Art of Liberty Foundation is helping promote and distribute the book to anyone who “Goes Paid” as an annual member on Substack OR makes a purchase at ArtOfLiberty.org/Store.Go paid at the $5 a month level, and we will send you both the PDF and e-Pub versions of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many, the PDF of Hayek for the 21st Century and a coupon code for 10% off anything in the https://artofliberty.org/store/.Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many OR “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR a 64GB Liberator flash drive PLUS a paperback copy of Hayek for the 21st Century if you live in the US. If you are international, we will give you a $10 credit towards shipping if you agree to pay the remainder.Support us at the $250 Founding Member Level and get a signed high-resolution hardcover of “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! + Liberator flash drive + a signed high-resolution hardcover of Etienne’s new book: To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many PLUS everything else in our “Everything Bundle” of the best in voluntaryist thought PLUS a paperback copy of Hayek for the 21st Century delivered domestically. International pays shipping. Our only option for signed copies besides catching Etienne @ an event.

How the Banks & “Gov’t” will Steal $3.5 million “Legally” through inflation, taxes, and Social Security shenanigans – Who is Behind the Theft? We will be Streaming LIVE tonight at 5:00 PM PST / 8:00 PM EST.Tickets: $25 Tickets and Event Info: https://artofliberty.org/an-evening-with-etienne/OR Get a Ticket Included with any Art of Liberty Foundation Sponsorship + a Copy of the NEW 5.5 version of “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History.. Exposed! + Perks! at ArtOfLiberty.org/SponsorThe Greatest Theft in Human History! The Banks and Government Are Stealing $3.5 Million From the Average Worker.Article: Here and BelowPress Release: Here.Full Analysis in PDF: Here & ArtOfLiberty.org/InflationFull Analysis in HTML: ArtOfLiberty.org/InflationHow the fractional reserve banking system, government taxation, and a manipulated inflation number combine to extract more than a full lifetime of earnings from every American worker — confirmed by four independent AI systems.By Etienne de la Boetie2Founder, Art of Liberty FoundationWith research assistance from Anthropic’s Claude, xAI’s Grok, Google’s Gemini, and OpenAI’s GPT – Full Analysis Available at ArtOfLiberty.org/InflationLet’s start with a number: $3,520,000.That is the amount the median American worker earning $60,000 per year will lose — over a 40-year career and 20-year retirement — to the fractional reserve banking system, government taxation, and Social Security benefit manipulation. Combined, these mechanisms extract 147% of gross lifetime earnings. More than you will ever earn. The system doesn’t just take your money — it takes money you haven’t earned yet, your purchasing power vs. an honest monetary system, and then rips you off in retirement by underpaying you what you are really owed in Social Security benefits.This is not a political opinion. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is an accounting — calculated independently by four separate AI systems using audited primary-source data from the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, the BLS, and the GAO. When Claude, Grok, Gemini, and GPT-5.2 all produce the same order of magnitude without coordination, the pattern is not noise. It’s signal.Today, the Art of Liberty Foundation is releasing The Greatest Theft in Human History — the most comprehensive public accounting of monetary extraction ever attempted. Here’s what we found.The Number That Should End the ConversationThe dollar has lost 97% of its purchasing power since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913. That’s not an estimate. That’s from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own CPI Calculator.During that same period, the M2 money supply expanded approximately 1,380 times— from roughly $25 billion to $21.5 trillion. Real GDP grew approximately 100 times. The gap — 43 times more money than economic output — represents purchasing power transferred from everyone who holds dollars to those who created the new ones.Those new dollars were not created democratically. They were created by banks — private institutions that generate money by typing numbers into computers when making loans — and injected into the economy through a network of 24 “Primary Dealers” who get access to newly created money first, before prices adjust. By the time that money reaches your paycheck, prices have already risen.This is the Cantillon Effect: a 300-year-old observation that new money doesn’t enter the economy neutrally. It enriches those closest to its creation and impoverishes those furthest from it. In 2024, U.S. banks earned $268 billion in net income — confirmed by FDIC audited data. Over the full period since 1913, cumulative bank profits run to an estimated $15–25 trillion in today’s dollars.“Every dollar the banking system extracts is a dollar that, under honest money, would have gone to the person who earned it.”Your Missing MillionsHere is what the extraction looks like, by income level, over a 40-year career using the Fed’s own conservative 2% inflation target:Understanding the Cantillon Effect & The Compound TrapThe purchasing power that evaporates under inflation is only one aspect of the theft of fractional reserve banking. The system also extracts using the aforementioned Cantillon Effect where the banks (Primary Dealers) who receive the new money created out of thin air are able to capture the maximum purchasing power of that money which is reduced considerably once it reaches the average worker.Banks and their borrowers receive new money FIRST, before prices adjust. They buy at pre-inflation prices; workers receive wages last, at post-inflation prices. This is a directional wealth transfer, not neutral dilution. Think about the 500,000+ single-family homes that private equity has bought since 2012, driving up costs for everyone. The institutional single-family rental (SFR) industry is the Cantillon Effect made flesh — in the one asset class workers historically used to escape inflation.The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 produced roughly 3.8 million foreclosures by 2010, with 7+ million eventual foreclosures by 2014. Median home prices dropped 33%. The people losing those homes couldn’t get credit to buy them back because mortgage standards had tightened. The institutions that received the Fed’s QE money could.The key government catalyst: Fannie Mae’s REO-to-Rental Initiative (2012) allowed pre-qualified investors to bid on large portfolios of foreclosed properties at bulk auction — an arrangement that individual families physically could not participate in. The government sold foreclosed American homes in bulk to the exact institutions that had just received the Fed’s newly created money.By 2024, institutional investors owned approximately 450,000 single-family rental units (GAO-24-106643). The Philadelphia Fed documented that institutional investors raise rents 60% faster than individual landlords.The same cheap money that erodes your wages also inflates the assets you can’t afford to own — and the institutions that received that money first are now your landlord.The Compound TrapThe Compound Trap is the mechanism by which the inflation created by fractional reserve banking forces workers to borrow at interest — from the very institutions that created the inflation — to afford assets whose prices have been inflated by the money creation process itself.Examples:Housing: A home that cost $25,000 in 1971 costs $400,000+ today — not because the home is 16x better, but because the money supply expanded 1,380x while GDP grew only ~100x. The worker must borrow $320,000 at interest from a bank that created the money out of thin air. Over 30 years at 7%, they pay $446,000 in interest alone — more than the house. The bank risked nothing.Education: College tuition has risen 1,200% since 1980, far outpacing general inflation. Students borrow $37,000 on average (and often much more) to purchase credentials in a labor market that has not kept pace with credential inflation. The loans are made in bank-created money; the interest is real.Healthcare and Consumer Debt: Medical costs, auto loans, and credit card balances all compound the trap. Each dollar borrowed is a dollar that was created by the banking system, and each dollar of interest is a transfer from the worker to the bank that created the principal from nothing.The median worker at $60,000/year pays approximately $173,000 in compound trap costs over a 40-year career — in mortgage interest, student loan interest, and consumer debt interest — all on money that was created out of thin air.Under alternative inflation indexes (ShadowStats/Chapwood 7–10%), these figures multiply 3–5x.The Monopoly Government’s Confiscatory Taxes: $818,000 from the Median Worker Adds to the ExtractionFederal, state, and local governments extract approximately $818,000 from the median worker earning $60,000 over a 40-year career: $240,000 in federal income taxes, $367,000 in payroll taxes (the full economic burden, including the employer share that would otherwise be wages), and $211,000 in state and local taxes. For the $250K earner, the figure reaches $4.46 million. For the $1M earner, $19.7 million.The Honest Acknowledgment: You Received Some ServicesUnlike the fractional reserve banking extraction — where the wealth transfer produces no benefit whatsoever for the worker — government taxation does fund services that people use. Roads, courts, national defense, law enforcement, fire protection, public schools, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are real services delivered to real people. Our analysis does not pretend otherwise.But acknowledging that services exist is not the same as accepting that the price was fair, the delivery was efficient, or the arrangement was voluntary.Three structural problems make the tax extraction far more damaging than it appears:Problem 1: The Waste Is StaggeringThe GAO’s own auditors — not libertarian critics, but the government’s internal watchdog — estimated that the federal government loses between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud alone (U.S. GAO, based on fiscal years 2018–2022). In FY 2024, agencies reported $162 billion in improper payments across 68 programs, with 84% being overpayments (U.S. GAO). Since FY 2003, cumulative improper payment estimates have totaled approximately $2.8 trillion (U.S. GAO) — and the GAO acknowledges this is a substantial undercount because many susceptible programs don’t report at all.In a scandal that came to be known as the Pentagon’s Bishops Fund scandal, the Department of Defense was caught buying fuel in bulk and then reselling it to the individual armed services at a cost significantly higher than if they services just bought fuel on the open market. They took the “profits” and put them into a slush fund.That means the federal government admits to losing roughly $162–$521 billion per year to waste, fraud, and improper payments. The median worker’s $240,000 in lifetime federal income taxes includes their proportional share of this waste: approximately $30,000–$80,000 over a career that went to payments the government itself says should never have been made.Problem 2: Monopoly PricingGovernment services operate as coercive monopolies — you pay whether you use them or not, and you cannot choose a competing provider. Economic theory and empirical evidence consistently show that monopoly providers charge more and deliver less than competitive alternatives.Private sector administrative overhead runs 5–17% depending on the industry; the federal government’s effective overhead — including compliance costs imposed on citizens and businesses — has been estimated at 20–35% when hidden regulatory burdens are included.A conservative estimate: if the services currently provided by government were delivered through competitive markets at private-sector efficiency levels, the cost savings would be 30–50% on the service-delivery components — representing roughly $250,000–$400,000 of the median worker’s lifetime tax burden that purchased bureaucratic overhead, waste, and monopoly pricing rather than actual services.Problem 3: The Seen and the UnseenThe most devastating cost of taxation is not what the government spent badly — it’s what the economy never produced. Every dollar extracted in taxes is a dollar that was not saved, invested, or spent by the person who earned it. The cumulative effect of removing $818,000 from the median worker’s lifetime economic activity — and trillions from the economy as a whole — is reduced capital formation, less entrepreneurship, fewer innovations, and slower productivity growth.Economists call this the “deadweight loss” of taxation — the economic activity that is destroyed, not merely transferred. Estimates of the deadweight loss range from $0.20 to $0.50 per dollar of tax revenue raised, meaning that for every dollar the government collects, an additional $0.20–$0.50 in economic value is destroyed in the process. Applied to the median worker’s $818,000 lifetime tax burden, this represents an additional $164,000–$409,000 in economic value that simply ceased to exist — jobs not created, businesses not started, innovations not pursued, and compounding growth never realized.Under a voluntaryist free-market alternative, the services people actually want — roads, dispute resolution, security, education, healthcare, retirement savings — would be provided by competing firms, mutual aid societies, and voluntary associations at market prices, with the discipline of consumer choice replacing the inertia of monopoly.Fraternal societies and mutual aid associations provided healthcare insurance, disability insurance, pensions, and other safety net services before they were crowded out by the monopoly “free” services mandated by “government.” The various organizations competed vigorously with each other to see who could provide better benefits at the most cost-effective prices.Historical examples are not hypothetical: private roads, private courts (arbitration handles more commercial disputes than government courts today), private schools (which educate at roughly 50–70% of the per-pupil cost of public schools), and fraternal societies that provided healthcare and life insurance to working-class Americans before government programs crowded them out in the mid-20th century.The $818,000 is not the price of civilization. It is the price of monopoly — and the monopolist has $2.8 trillion in admitted payment errors to show for it.The Government’s $190 Billion Incentive to Lie About the Actual Rate of Inflation to Steal Grandma’s Social SecurityThe BLS’s “official” inflation number drives Social Security COLAs, federal pension adjustments, military retirement, TIPS bond yields, and more. If that number is systematically low, the government saves money — at the direct expense of retirees and veterans.Our analysis — confirmed independently by all four AI models — finds that using real inflation rates (as measured by the ShadowStats SGS-Alternate or the Chapwood Index, both of which show 9–11%/yr versus the BLS’s 2–3%) would increase federal CPI-linked obligations by approximately $182–198 billion per year. Social Security alone accounts for roughly $112–115 billion of that gap.The mechanism is elegant in its dishonesty. The Social Security Act requires COLAs to be based on the CPI-W “as published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.” The law doesn’t specify how the BLS calculates it. So when the BLS introduced Owner’s Equivalent Rent (1983), geometric mean weighting (1999), hedonic adjustments, and substitution bias — each of which independently lowers measured inflation — it automatically reduced every COLA payment in the federal budget without a single Congressional vote.The compounding effect is devastating. A retiree who began collecting Social Security in 2004 receives approximately $2,032/month today under BLS-based COLAs. Under ShadowStats-level adjustments applied to the same starting benefit, they would receive approximately $4,500–5,000/month. The cumulative lifetime underpayment for a single retiree exceeds $200,000 — and the median worker retiring today will have a 20-year retirement COLA shortfall of approximately $810,000.The two numbers aren’t contradictory — they’re the same mechanism at two different scales. The $200,000 is a historical example anchored to a real retiree who started collecting in 2004 at the then-average benefit of $922/month. The $810,000 is a forward projection for today’s median worker retiring at roughly $2,100/month — more than double that baseline.Since the annual COLA shortfall is a percentage gap applied to the monthly benefit, a higher starting benefit produces a proportionally larger dollar shortfall every year. That shortfall then compounds geometrically over 20 years because each year’s understated COLA reduces the base from which the next year’s adjustment is calculated. Same theft, two different scales.How Many Years Did You Work For Free?Here is the clearest way to see the scale of the extraction. After a 40-year career and 20-year retirement, how many of those 60 years did you work just to cover the wealth transferred to the banking system, the government, and the CPI manipulation that reduces your retirement benefits?For the median worker at $60K, the combined extraction represents 42.8 years of labor — more than the entire 40-year career. The worker keeps only 27% of lifetime earnings.Every income level from $35K to $1M exceeds 40 years of extraction because of two dynamics:1. Under an honest monetary system like the historical gold standard where dollars can’t be created digitally or on a printing press, prices are benignly deflationary. The costs of the luxuries and necessities of life go DOWN each and every year 1-2% reflecting the innovations in better manufacturing, cheaper materials and more effective distribution. The average worker would be getting richer, the Cantillon Effect would be eliminated, and workers wouldn’t have to borrow (Or would borrow much LESS for houses, education, and healthcare)2. The SS COLA underpayment continues extracting value during retirement. The system doesn’t stop taking when you stop working. The government continues stealing from you by underpaying you what you are due from mandatory Cost-Of-Living-Adjustments by lying about what the REAL rate of inflation is.The extraction is most devastating for those who can least afford it. The $35K earner loses 17.7 years to SS COLA underpayment alone — 44% of lifetime earnings — while the $1M earner loses only 1.5 years to the same mechanism. The system is regressive by design.This Is Not AccidentalThe report documents five hallmarks of organized crime that sustain this extraction:Regulatory Capture: 304 revolving-door hires between the 20 largest U.S. banks and regulatory agencies, representing 2,256 cumulative years of public office (Cambridge University Press / Journal of Institutional Economics, 2019).Capture of the Economics Profession: The Federal Reserve spends hundreds of millions annually funding economists at universities, journals, and conferences. 84 of 190 editorial board members across top economics journals have Fed ties. The field cannot produce independent criticism of the institution funding it.Capture of Government: The FIRE sector has been the largest or second-largest source of federal campaign contributions in nearly every election cycle since 1990, totaling over $20 billion since tracking began — producing a 180:1 return on political investment. Industry executives cycle in and out of government at the highest levels.Capture of Academia: Compulsory schooling systems presents “government” as legitimate, desirable and necessary before kids are old enough to evaluate the logic and morality of the claim. The schools present the Federal Reserve as a neutral public institution, never teach that banks create money through lending, and never question or debate the legitimacy of the system.Monopolization of Media: Six corporations now control approximately 90% of what Americans see, hear, and read. The consolidation was financed with cheap debt from the very banking system being normalized. No major network has produced a serious investigative piece on fractional reserve banking as a mechanism of wealth transfer.What You Can Do Right NowFirst: verify it yourself. Open any AI model — Claude, Grok, Gemini, or ChatGPT — and ask it to calculate the lifetime cost of the fractional reserve banking system to a median worker at your income level. We have specific prompts in the report. You will get a number in the same range documented in this report. The directional transfer from wage-earners to money-creators is a consensus finding across every model tested.Second: share this report. It is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 — reproduce and distribute freely with attribution. You can download the full PDF with hyperlinks at ArtOfLiberty.org/Inflation. You can buy printed copies at ArtOfLiberty.org/Store.Third: support the Art of Liberty Foundation! We are an independent organization with no government funding, no banking-sector advertising revenue, and no institutional dependencies. The work described in this report — and the investigative journalism that will follow — depends entirely on voluntary support. Become a sponsor at ArtOfLiberty.org/Sponsor.“The magicians can only fool the audience until the audience understands the trick.That moment is now.”— Etienne de la Boetie², Art of Liberty FoundationArtOfLiberty.org · ArtOfLiberty.org/InflationReleased under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 — reproduce and distributeAbout The AuthorsEtienne de la Boetie² is the founder of the Art of Liberty Foundation and an internationally recognized expert and speaker on voluntaryism and government illegitimacy, criminality, and corruption. He is the author of “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! – How Inter-Generational Organized Crime Runs the “Government,”Media and Academiaand To See the Cage Is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many, and the editor of the Art of Liberty Daily News and Five Meme Friday, which delivers hard-hitting voluntaryist memes and the best of the alternative media. His original writing and research can be found at ArtOfLiberty.Foundation and, in Spanish, at ArteDeLaLibertad.org.About The Ai Co-Authors/ResearchersThis analysis was conducted with four independent AI models: Anthropic’s Claude (Sonnet), xAI’s Grok, Google’s Gemini, and OpenAI’s GPT. Each was prompted independently with identical data and methodology parameters. Their convergent results strengthen the findings by demonstrating that the extraction pattern is visible to any sufficiently capable analytical system, regardless of corporate ownership or training bias.Thursday Night, March 26th – Live Event in Memphis – Global Live StreamOn Thursday night Etienne will be breaking down The Greatest Theft in Human History. Who is behind it? How do they get away with it? What can we do about it?Get tickets at https://artofliberty.org/an-evening-with-etienne/ORGet Tickets with a Sponsorship of the Art of Liberty Foundation + the New Version 5.5 of Etienne’s book: “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! + PerksArtOfLiberty.org/Sponsor“Government” is and has been “The Biggest Scam in History” and it has enabled The Greatest Theft in Human History… There wouldn’t be fractional reserve banking, the Federal Reserve, the 1933 theft of the people’s gold, legal tender laws, or fiat currency without “government”

Using AI to Calculate the Cost to Society of Our Crooked Fractional Reserve Banking & Primary Dealer-Centric Monetary SystemBy Etienne de la Boetie2, Founder of the Art of Liberty Foundation, Anthropic’s Claude, and XAI’s Grok (Bitch-ass CIA Google Gemini refused to even speculate on our premise that fractional reserve banking was a criminal enterprise… I didn’t trust Open AI’s ChatGPT enough to even ask) Grok Vs Claude – How much has fractional reserve banking extracted from society in the US and globally from 1913 – 2025 and how much have the organized crime banks stolen through the process. Executive Summary – The organized crime banks appeared to have lobbied and bribed the “government” (and potentially installed and propagandized/indoctrinated/normalized a federal “government” in the United States) to allow them to engage in a financial scheme known as fractional reserve banking where they are allowed to create money out of thin air and loan it at interest even though the process is inflationary and steals the value of the money earned and saved by everyone else.This process has dramatically impoverished the average worker costing them, according to analysis done by the Grok and Claude AI models, between $500K-$1.2 million dollars over their lifetime vs. what they would have received through an honest non-inflationary monetary system. Under a gold standard system, workers could have done even better as the gold standard has been proven to be deflationary, reducing the costs of the luxuries and necessities of life year-over-year more fully transmitting the savings from innovations and productivity Improvements. The AI model predicts a lifetime delta across wages, savings erosion, inflated asset costs (housing, healthcare, education), and foregone compound purchasing power plausibly exceeds $2 million for a median worker.These losses includes the inflation/loss of purchasing power from excess money creation, the well recognized Cantillon effect of new dollars created being worth more to those who receive the funds first then losing value, and the compounding trap where worker must now borrow/borrow more to purchase assets and services driven up by inflation including housing, education, and healthcare.The system has simultaneously made the banks over $20 TRILLION dollars between 1913-2025 in 2025 dollars. It is an exorbitant privilege only afforded a favored few who are granted a “government” banking license. There is a 90-97% rejection rate in the US and European Union even after you meet the minimum reserve requirements of $10-100M dollars depending on your business plan/bank type.The System Has Many of the Hallmarks of an Organized Crime Partnership with the Federal Government and Monopoly Media/Academia.We believe these organized crime banks have used these “profits” in a variety of additionally criminal ways to both cement their exorbitant privilege and their hold on power including:Regulatory capture – On January 18, 2019 the Cambridge University Press published a stunning research paper from the Journal of Institutional Economics showing an amazing revolving door between regulators and the financial industry: The authors write: “Looking at the revolving door in the 20 biggest US diversified banks, we identified 304 revolvers, among which 155 are considered as prominent. These revolvers have undertaken 384 revolving door movements between public and private positions and vice versa, mostly undertaken between 1960 and 2015, corresponding to a total of 2,256 years of experience in public office.” This pattern is structural, not incidental. Consider the architecture of the capture: Timothy Geithner went from President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank directly to Treasury Secretary, then to Warburg Pincus private equity. Robert Rubin spent 26 years at Goldman Sachs, became Treasury Secretary under Clinton (where he repealed Glass-Steagall separating commercial and investment banking), then joined Citigroup’s board — a bank that immediately benefited from deregulation he championed. Hank Paulson was CEO of Goldman Sachs before becoming Treasury Secretary and administering the 2008 bailout that saved Goldman from its own bad bets. These are not anomalies; they are the system operating as designed. The revolving door is not corruption of the regulatory process — it is the regulatory process.Capture of the Economics Profession – 2015 EPI Report: ~30% top academics consulted for Federal Reserve. 2021 Stanford Hoover (Foote et al.): 42% of top 50 macro PhDs (1980s-2010s) held Fed research/staff roles. AEA 2023 Survey: ~25% of AEA members report Fed experience (consulting/visiting > full-time). The implications are profound: when virtually every prominent macroeconomist has either worked for the Federal Reserve, received Fed research grants, or depends on Fed data access for publication, the field cannot produce independent criticism of central banking. This dynamic was documented starkly in the 2010 documentary “Inside Job,” in which Columbia economist Frederic Mishkin — a former Fed governor — was shown to have been paid $124,000 by the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce to write a paper praising Iceland’s financial system shortly before its collapse. Mishkin had listed the paper on his CV as “Financial Stability in Iceland” but changed the title to “Financial Instability in Iceland” after the crash. The economics profession’s dependency on central bank funding is the primary reason mainstream economics has never seriously challenged the legitimacy of money creation ex nihilo.

Get Amazing Gifts That Will Be Remembered AND Spread Liberty AND Support the Art of Liberty FoundationWant to give some gifts that will be remembered for years to come and help your friends, family and colleagues better understand the scam of “Government?”Happy Holidays from the Art of Liberty Foundation! Get 20% off until December 12th using the discount code: Liberty20, 15% off from December 13th-16th using the discount code: Liberty15, and 10% off from December 17th until Christmas using the discount code: Liberty10! Shop for unique books and gifts now at ArtOfLiberty.org/StoreThe discount brings the price per copy down to under $10 for books and flash drives in our “Friends Bundles”! “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! – How Inter-Generational Organized Crime Runs the “Government,” Media and Academia. The best-selling book at over two dozen liberty-oriented conferences and events! Sales to 25+ countries! “Government” reveals the hidden control system and pseudo-religion of Statism used by an inter-generational organized crime system centered around banking and central banking to rob and control populations. This book distills 20+ years of research and open-source intelligence into short, easily digestible treatises on individual subjects and optimizes the information for the 65% of society who are visual learners.The book is designed to “wake up” friends, family and colleagues by using media ownership charts, visualizations, Venn diagrams and memes to shortcut visual learners to the moment of insight and make what was invisible now visible through visualization. Paperback Version – Usually $30.00 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $24.00High-Resolution Hardcover Version – Usually $50 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $40To See the Cage is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many To See the Cage is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many To See the Cage Is to Leave It, author and truth advocate Etienne de la Boetie2 takes you deep inside the methods and tricks used to manufacture our consent—from the classroom to the newsroom, from the ballot box to the battlefield. This book pulls back the curtain on the world’s most successful mass manipulation: Statism—the indoctrinated, pseudo-religious belief in the desirability, necessity and legitimacy of “government”.Book WebsitePress Release & Book SummaryPaperback Version of To See the Cage – Usually $19.84 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $15.87High-Resolution Hardcover Version of To See the Cage – Usually $40 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $32The Liberator – A 64GB uncensorable, credit card-sized flash drive crammed with evidence of “government” and media criminality. that can be easily copied for friends, relatives, and colleagues. Includes the ePub 5th edition of “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! and To See the Cage is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many. Along with companion and reference material that is disappearing off the internet. Chock full of essential books in PDF, documentaries in MP4, short videos, 1500+ dank memes, truth music from the liberty movement’s hottest artists, and HUNDREDS of prepping and survivalism resources.We are widely distributing evidence of “government,” media, and academic criminality, including instructions and stickers for making your own Liberators using low-cost, commodity 64GB flash drives available on eBay, Best Buy, or other computer retailers. You are authorized and encouraged to make copies for your friends! The Liberator’s content is split up into Five primary folders:1.“Government”– Companion media to “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! and To See the Cage is to Leave It , 2. False Flag Terrorism for Police State and Hoax Shootings for Gun Control, 3. “The Covid” – Plandemic & Economic Warfare, 4. Voluntaryism – The Only Political “ISM” Fair For All, 5. Prepping and Survivalism. Preview the entire contents at Government-Scam.com/LiberatorThe Liberator – Uncensorable Credit Card-Sized Flashdrive(included ePubs of both “Government”- The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! AND To See the Cage is to Leave It)Usually $30.00 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $24.00Money Saving Bundles“Government” + Liberator Bundle! – A Paperback Copy of “Government” and a Liberator Flash Drive – Usually $45.00 Holiday Sale Price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $36.00High-Resolution “Government” Hardcover Version + Liberator Bundle – Usually $65 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $52.00The Paperback Trifecta – To See the Cage + “Government” + a 64GB Liberator Flash Drive – Usually $60 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $48.00The High-Resolution Hardcover Collector’s Trifecta – To See the Cage + “Government” + a 64GB Liberator Flash Drive- Usually $100 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $80.00The Everything Bundle -Give me Liberty… and give me more! The Everything Bundle includes both of Etienne’s books: “Government” and To See the Cage, The Best of Larken Rose, along with a collection of potentially life-altering introductions to voluntaryism. 1 × “Government”- The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed!, 1 × The Liberator 64GB, 1 × The Most Dangerous Superstition by Larken Rose, 1 × Sedition, Subversion, and Sabotage – Field Manual No. 1 – A Three Part Solution To The State – By Ben Stone, 1 × What Anarchy Isn’t – By Larken Rose, 1 × Three Friends Free – A Children’s Story of Voluntaryism, 1 × Anarchy Exposed – A former police office reports on his investigative journeyUsually $115.00 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $92.00Friends Bundles – Low Cost Bulk Copies for Friends, Family & ColleaguesFun Fact: Over 10% of our books and flash drives are sold as viral “Friends Bundles” where readers realize the importance and uniqueness of our work and share with friends, family and colleagues. Donors to the Art of Liberty Foundation make these bulk copies available at prices as low as $11 per copy. Many are donated to libraries and mini-neighborhood libraries, made into coffee table books in Airbnbs, or left in waiting rooms or the back seats of Ubers and Cabs. You can donate to support this at ArtOfLiberty.org/sponsor“Government” Five Pack “Friends’ Bundle”- Five Copies of “Government”Usually $65 Holiday Sale price withLiberty20 20% Discount Code: $52.00To See the Cage – Five Pack “Friends’ Bundle”- Five Copies of To See the Cage is to Leave ItUsually $50 Holiday Sale price withLiberty20 20% Discount Code: $40.0064GB Liberator Flash Drive Five Pack “Friends Bundle”- Five Liberator Flash Drives – The Perfect Stocking Stuffer Usually $65 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $52.00Five Copies of What Anarchy Isn’t by Larken Rose – We have the ONLY stock of these anywhere. Usually $20 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $16.00Five Everything Bundles – Five copies of (almost) Everything, including Liberator Flashdrives, Stickers, and the best introductions to voluntaryism anywhere. Usually $555 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $444.00Ten Packs of Books and Flash Drive’sThe Ten Pack of “Government” Friends Bundle – 10 Copies of “Government”Usually $115 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $92.00To See The Cage is to Leave It – Ten Copy “Friends Bundle”Usually $100 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $80.0064GB Liberator Flash Drive Ten Pack “Friends Bundle”- Five Liberator Flash Drives – The Perfect Stocking Stuffer Usually $115 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $92.0010 Books and 10 Liberators “Friends Bundle” (and Pop Up Guerrilla Bookstore Refill) – The refill for our Pop Up Guerrilla Bookstore is also the lowest cost option for getting copies for friends, family and colleaguesUsually $100 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $80.00Cop Block Shiny Badges(Still Doesn’t Grant Extra Rights!)Own a piece of libertarian activist history! In 2013, Cop Block produced a one-time run of “Shiny Badges” modeled after the Keene, New Hampshire’s police department badge from a manufacturer of “real” police badges. The heavy-weight badge features the cop block logo and the words: “Shiny Badges Don’t Grant Extra Rights,” reminding police of the incredible delusion required to believe a shiny badge grants an exception from morality or the “right” to imprison peaceful people for victimless crimes, among other transgressions. We have the last five four (4) of these available anywhere! The badge comes with an “Everything Bundle” that includes our best books on voluntaryism. The Cop Block Shiny Badge – Only Five Four Three (4 3) Left… Anywhere!!Usually $250 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $200.00The Best of Larken RosePolitical philosopher Larken Rose’s master works on the moral, utilitarian, and logical case for voluntaryism. All are included in the “Everything Bundle”. “The Most Dangerous Superstition” shows how nearly everyone, as a result of one particular unquestioned assumption, is directly contributing to violence and oppression without even realizing it. If you imagine yourself to be a compassionate, peace-loving, civilized human being, you must read this book.The Most Dangerous Superstition – By Larken RoseUsually $14 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $11.20What Anarchy Isn’t– A short pamphlet by Larken Rose… The perfect introduction to peaceful anarchy and voluntaryism by exposing What Anarchy ISN’TUsually $5 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $4Anarchy Exposed! – A former police officer reports on his investigative journey by Shepard the Voluntaryist and Larken Rose – Help the cops and sheriffs in your life and town understand the case for voluntaryism/peaceful anarchy and the immorality of “government”! Usually $9 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $7.20PLUS.. So Much More Available at ArtOfLiberty.org/StoreDid You Miss Us on Giving Tuesday?Did you miss us on Giving Tuesday? We hope you will consider supporting the Art of Liberty Foundation this holiday season. We simply can’t do what we do without the support of our sponsors. Substack has started censoring ourselves and other freedom movement journalists on the platform. It has been a bait & switch to get us on a platform where we were initially allowed to build an audience and earn money. Once they had us they have turned us off algorithmically similar to the same shadow banning we see on Twitter/X, Facebook and other platforms that will put tempting content from controlled opposition voices into your “Feed.”The BEST way to support us is directly here: https://artofliberty.org/sponsorship-program/ We will give you the same or better perks for “Going Paid” direct, including granting Paid Access to all four of our Substacks for sponsoring at the same level as Substack. Sponsor at the $50 a year tire-kicker level and get the same Black Friday Deal we are offering for “Going Paid” on Substack: This month get a free high-resolution hardcopy of either “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR To See the Cage is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many. This deal end on Christmas Day so act now to help amplify the voices of Liberty.

20% Off Until Dec. 12th, 15% off from Dec 13th-16th, and 10% off from Dec 17th-Christmas!Want to give some gifts that will be remembered for years to come and help your friends, family and colleagues better understand the scam of “Government?”Happy Holidays from the Art of Liberty Foundation! Get 20% off until December 12th using the discount code: Liberty20, 15% off from December 13th-16th using the discount code: Liberty15, and 10% off from December 17th until Christmas using the discount code: Liberty10! Shop for unique books and gifts now at ArtOfLiberty.org/StoreThe discount brings the price per copy down to under $10 for books and flash drives in our “Friends Bundles”! “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! – How Inter-Generational Organized Crime Runs the “Government,” Media and Academia. The best-selling book at over two dozen liberty-oriented conferences and events! Sales to 25+ countries! “Government” reveals the hidden control system and pseudo-religion of Statism used by an inter-generational organized crime system centered around banking and central banking to rob and control populations. This book distills 20+ years of research and open-source intelligence into short, easily digestible treatises on individual subjects and optimizes the information for the 65% of society who are visual learners.The book is designed to “wake up” friends, family and colleagues by using media ownership charts, visualizations, Venn diagrams and memes to shortcut visual learners to the moment of insight and make what was invisible now visible through visualization. Paperback Version – Usually $30.00 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $24.00High-Resolution Hardcover Version – Usually $50 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $40To See the Cage is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many To See the Cage is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many To See the Cage Is to Leave It, author and truth advocate Etienne de la Boetie2 takes you deep inside the methods and tricks used to manufacture our consent—from the classroom to the newsroom, from the ballot box to the battlefield. This book pulls back the curtain on the world’s most successful mass manipulation: Statism—the indoctrinated, pseudo-religious belief in the desirability, necessity and legitimacy of “government”.Book WebsitePress Release & Book SummaryPaperback Version of To See the Cage – Usually $19.84 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $15.87High-Resolution Hardcover Version of To See the Cage – Usually $40 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $32The Liberator – A 64GB uncensorable, credit card-sized flash drive crammed with evidence of “government” and media criminality. that can be easily copied for friends, relatives, and colleagues. Includes the ePub 5th edition of “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! and To See the Cage is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many. Along with companion and reference material that is disappearing off the internet. Chock full of essential books in PDF, documentaries in MP4, short videos, 1500+ dank memes, truth music from the liberty movement’s hottest artists, and HUNDREDS of prepping and survivalism resources.We are widely distributing evidence of “government,” media, and academic criminality, including instructions and stickers for making your own Liberators using low-cost, commodity 64GB flash drives available on eBay, Best Buy, or other computer retailers. You are authorized and encouraged to make copies for your friends! The Liberator’s content is split up into Five primary folders:1.“Government”– Companion media to “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! and To See the Cage is to Leave It , 2. False Flag Terrorism for Police State and Hoax Shootings for Gun Control, 3. “The Covid” – Plandemic & Economic Warfare, 4. Voluntaryism – The Only Political “ISM” Fair For All, 5. Prepping and Survivalism. Preview the entire contents at Government-Scam.com/LiberatorThe Liberator – Uncensorable Credit Card-Sized Flashdrive(included ePubs of both “Government”- The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! AND To See the Cage is to Leave It)Usually $30.00 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $24.00Money Saving Bundles“Government” + Liberator Bundle! – A Paperback Copy of “Government” and a Liberator Flash Drive – Usually $45.00 Holiday Sale Price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $36.00High-Resolution “Government” Hardcover Version + Liberator Bundle – Usually $65 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $52.00The Paperback Trifecta – To See the Cage + “Government” + a 64GB Liberator Flash Drive – Usually $60 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $48.00The High-Resolution Hardcover Collector’s Trifecta – To See the Cage + “Government” + a 64GB Liberator Flash Drive- Usually $100 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $80.00The Everything Bundle -Give me Liberty… and give me more! The Everything Bundle includes both of Etienne’s books: “Government” and To See the Cage, The Best of Larken Rose, along with a collection of potentially life-altering introductions to voluntaryism. 1 × “Government”- The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed!, 1 × The Liberator 64GB, 1 × The Most Dangerous Superstition by Larken Rose, 1 × Sedition, Subversion, and Sabotage – Field Manual No. 1 – A Three Part Solution To The State – By Ben Stone, 1 × What Anarchy Isn’t – By Larken Rose, 1 × Three Friends Free – A Children’s Story of Voluntaryism, 1 × Anarchy Exposed – A former police office reports on his investigative journeyUsually $115.00 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $92.00Friends Bundles – Low Cost Bulk Copies for Friends, Family & ColleaguesFun Fact: Over 10% of our books and flash drives are sold as viral “Friends Bundles” where readers realize the importance and uniqueness of our work and share with friends, family and colleagues. Donors to the Art of Liberty Foundation make these bulk copies available at prices as low as $11 per copy. Many are donated to libraries and mini-neighborhood libraries, made into coffee table books in Airbnbs, or left in waiting rooms or the back seats of Ubers and Cabs. You can donate to support this at ArtOfLiberty.org/sponsor“Government” Five Pack “Friends’ Bundle”- Five Copies of “Government”Usually $65 Holiday Sale price withLiberty20 20% Discount Code: $52.00To See the Cage – Five Pack “Friends’ Bundle”- Five Copies of To See the Cage is to Leave ItUsually $50 Holiday Sale price withLiberty20 20% Discount Code: $40.0064GB Liberator Flash Drive Five Pack “Friends Bundle”- Five Liberator Flash Drives – The Perfect Stocking Stuffer Usually $65 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $52.00Five Copies of What Anarchy Isn’t by Larken Rose – We have the ONLY stock of these anywhere. Usually $20 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $16.00Five Everything Bundles – Five copies of (almost) Everything, including Liberator Flashdrives, Stickers, and the best introductions to voluntaryism anywhere. Usually $555 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $444.00Ten Packs of Books and Flash Drive’sThe Ten Pack of “Government” Friends Bundle – 10 Copies of “Government”Usually $115 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $92.00To See The Cage is to Leave It – Ten Copy “Friends Bundle”Usually $100 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $80.0064GB Liberator Flash Drive Ten Pack “Friends Bundle”- Five Liberator Flash Drives – The Perfect Stocking Stuffer Usually $115 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $92.0010 Books and 10 Liberators “Friends Bundle” (and Pop Up Guerrilla Bookstore Refill) – The refill for our Pop Up Guerrilla Bookstore is also the lowest cost option for getting copies for friends, family and colleaguesUsually $100 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $80.00Cop Block Shiny Badges(Still Doesn’t Grant Extra Rights!)Own a piece of libertarian activist history! In 2013, Cop Block produced a one-time run of “Shiny Badges” modeled after the Keene, New Hampshire’s police department badge from a manufacturer of “real” police badges. The heavy-weight badge features the cop block logo and the words: “Shiny Badges Don’t Grant Extra Rights,” reminding police of the incredible delusion required to believe a shiny badge grants an exception from morality or the “right” to imprison peaceful people for victimless crimes, among other transgressions. We have the last five four (4) of these available anywhere! The badge comes with an “Everything Bundle” that includes our best books on voluntaryism. The Cop Block Shiny Badge – Only Five Four (4) Left… Anywhere!!Usually $250 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $200.00The Best of Larken RosePolitical philosopher Larken Rose’s master works on the moral, utilitarian, and logical case for voluntaryism. All are included in the “Everything Bundle”. “The Most Dangerous Superstition” shows how nearly everyone, as a result of one particular unquestioned assumption, is directly contributing to violence and oppression without even realizing it. If you imagine yourself to be a compassionate, peace-loving, civilized human being, you must read this book.The Most Dangerous Superstition – By Larken RoseUsually $14 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $11.20What Anarchy Isn’t– A short pamphlet by Larken Rose… The perfect introduction to peaceful anarchy and voluntaryism by exposing What Anarchy ISN’TUsually $5 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $4Anarchy Exposed! – A former police officer reports on his investigative journey by Shepard the Voluntaryist and Larken Rose – Help the cops and sheriffs in your life and town understand the case for voluntaryism/peaceful anarchy and the immorality of “government”! Usually $9 Holiday Sale price with Liberty20 20% Discount Code: $7.20PLUS.. So Much More Available at ArtOfLiberty.org/StoreDid You Miss Us on Giving Tuesday?Did you miss us on Giving Tuesday? We hope you will consider supporting the Art of Liberty Foundation this holiday season. We simply can’t do what we do without the support of our sponsors. Substack has started censoring ourselves and other freedom movement journalists on the platform. It has been a bait & switch to get us on a platform where we were initially allowed to build an audience and earn money. Once they had us they have turned us off algorithmically similar to the same shadow banning we see on Twitter/X, Facebook and other platforms that will put tempting content from controlled opposition voices into your “Feed.”The BEST way to support us is directly here: https://artofliberty.org/sponsorship-program/ We will give you the same or better perks for “Going Paid” direct, including granting Paid Access to all four of our Substacks for sponsoring at the same level as Substack. Sponsor at the $50 a year tire-kicker level and get the same Black Friday Deal we are offering for “Going Paid” on Substack: This month get a free high-resolution hardcopy of either “Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! OR To See the Cage is to Leave It – 25 Techniques the Few Use to Control the Many. This deal end on Christmas Day so act now to help amplify the voices of Liberty.