Journalists pretend to be truth-tellers exposing the lies of politicians, but they usually can’t even be bothered to adjust numbers for inflation. So, as long as the Fed keeps printing dollars, with or without vast increases in real productivity and wealth, Spider-Man: Brand New Day (or whatever the blockbuster of the moment happens to be) easily verges on becoming “the highest-grossing film of all time” (though adjusted for inflation, it’s still Gone with the Wind by a mile), stock prices are up by unprecedented numbers, etc.
And then people wonder why those crude metrics of success better correlate with skyrocketing grocery prices than with general happiness.
It’s not just stupidity or an oversight that leads to avoiding reminders of inflation’s omnipresent influence. There are both political and private-sector incentives for the code of silence. I encountered one of the rarely-mentioned private-sector examples when a real estate salesman explained to me, without a hint of guilt, that he loves continual, stealthy inflation because it helps subconsciously convince home-buyers that the long-term value of homes is booming, making current purchases more likely. He has a rather narrow conception of what constitutes a good outcome. (Some may recall periodic real estate crashes leading to broader problems.)
In the governmental sector, presidents, notoriously, want the artificial goosing of economic optimism to continue throughout their own presidencies (always pressing the Fed for low interest rates, fostering the impression of lots more easy dollars out there gushing around) and any “corrections” to happen on the next guy’s watch, consequences for the masses be damned. If the U.S. buying more and more of its own debt keeps up appearances for the time being, double-digit inflation somewhere down the line is the next administration’s or, even more harrowingly, the next generation’s problem.
Is it so strange, then, that political hucksters Trump and Mamdani, both believers in shafting the future to prop up the illusions of the present, keep sounding more like pals than enemies? Trump’s hunger for more federal-level deficit spending is so irresponsible (adding to the U.S. government’s $40 trillion in debt) that it’s easy to forget that a huge amount of government debt until just the other day was created by big-government-loving socialists (by whatever political label) such as Mamdani.
It would be a double tragedy if, as appears likely, the Trump movement leaves behind vastly increased debt and widespread amnesia about how expensive and debt-boosting socialism and conventional welfare-statism were even before short-sighted Trump came on the scene.
If the public recoils in horror from Trumpism, perhaps by refusing to vote for Vance in 2028, they’ll likely just jump out of the frying pan and into the fire by voting for someone like New York’s Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (neighbor to both Mayor Mamdani and me), whose mind-blowingly dangerous response to inflation (after a few ritual words of sympathy for poor people paying bills) is “Modern Monetary Theory,” essentially the claim that endlessly printing more dollars is fine as long as you give most of those dollars to big-government projects, which will greatly increase the productivity of civilization and quality of citizens’ lives, even though government projects haven’t worked out that way in the past. Quite the opposite.
Then, fueled by a vague socialist vision of a better future, we’ll likely have gone from Trumpflation to full-on hyper-inflation, followed by communist poverty, being harangued all the while for our lack of faith in ambitious government projects. In the meantime, Trump tells Mamdani he may prove to be a great mayor. We should all be more nervous after this show of bipartisan camaraderie. Trump may think he and AOC have already proven one need only be a big talker from Queens to make the world better, or at least more interesting. Political talk is almost always a distraction from the real problems.
An added irony in this sad tale is that even while Trump talks up the undeserving Mamdani, a growing number of Trump’s followers seem hellbent lately on denouncing Indian-descended people in general. This is startling—even if you patiently allow morons some space in which to be racist—given that Indians are among the least crime-prone and least welfare-dependent demographic groups in the U.S. We should be cheering them, aside from Mamdani. Historically, they didn’t even benefit much from affirmative action, since they tended to fall in between the black vs. white cracks.
None of that matters to the current anti-immigration nuts, of course. They pretend to like high-quality groups and dislike low-quality groups, but they’ll reverse course on a dime if the high-quality groups are numerous, come from too far away, or are so good they pose a competitive challenge to resentful locals. It’d be a shame if Republicans’ increased anti-Indian sentiment dragged their fellow Republican Vivek Ramaswamy down in his current close election race for Ohio governor. He should be living proof the Republicans are capable of transcending race, embracing people from immigrant families, and pushing pro-market policies instead of just “hooray for the current president’s pet projects” policies.
When Ramaswamy dared to say (in very mild fashion) that U.S. workers need to be well-educated and hard-working to compete, which sounds like thoroughly conservative common sense, he was pounced on by oversensitive conservatives such as the New York Post’s David Marcus, who whined that Ramaswamy was humiliating our (pitiable, outsmarted) native-born workers. In short, don’t insult our homegrown lazy American idiots! As dimwitted knee-jerk responses to harsh economic truths go, that’s almost as bad as a Mangione type thinking he can gun his way to egalitarianism and prosperity.
Let’s try sound money and free markets for a change. If rules against fraud and assault are strictly enforced and government doesn’t spend another dime on anyone, local or visitor, we can get back to real expansion and spend less time arguing about who doesn’t fit or why their money’s no good here.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey