(Prof St. Onge)—A key justification of the Fed — of Keynesian central banking — is that the way to make an economy grow is to print money. This is the “Philips Curve” — a tool that claims a trade-off between unemployment and inflation.
In that model, if you want economic growth, you print more money. If you printed too much and got inflation, you just print less. Typically by raising interest rates so banks create fewer loans.
The punchline, of course, is that central banks should print as much as possible, all the time. After all, if printing money creates prosperity, everybody wants prosperity. And then, when prices rise from all that printing, you just beg, borrow and steal to calm pesky voters down enough to get back to printing.
Of course, for non-Keynesian economists — Austrians and free marketers — it’s a lot simpler: money-printing is counterfeiting. And, like all counterfeiting, it steals from everybody else’s dollar, pouring water into the wine of their life savings. With a kicker for economic distortions — recessions — caused by how the new money was printed.
The “Inflation is Prosperity” Fallacy
The inflation-is-prosperity fallacy has been internalized by the ruling class. For example, whenever I advocate sound banking — where the bank actually has the money in the vault — I get attacked by Wall Street types complaining that if banks couldn’t counterfeit via fractional reserve, the economy would freeze up.
So where does it come from? Simple: it’s confusing activity and wealth. To illustrate, if Hunter Biden prints a million dollars and hits Vegas for the weekend, there will be a lot of very busy strippers. It’s be fantastic for the Las Vegas economy — tissue-fire level economic growth, an extra million in GDP in however many hours Hunter’s high lasts.
Of course, where did the money come from? It was siphoned from every other dollar holder. Diluted like water into wine. So grandma pays a little more for groceries, but at least Hunter had a hell of a weekend. Activity was created, wealth was not. And all that was left was the theft.
“Helicopter Money” and the Wallet Fairy
Now, there is a way around the theft, first proposed by Milton Friedman in 1969: “Helicopter Money.”
The idea is find some way to print money into the economy without distorting it. Milton used the image of a helicopter flying over the city dumping money.
Of course, even that distorts — if you happened to be walking on 2nd Avenue Thursday afternoon and the helicopter flew by you’re the new elite.So the closest government get is stimulus checks — which have the added bonus of buying votes.
Alas, even stimulus distort: the young and irresponsible spend fast — bubble tea sales take off and stripper work exra shifts. While the old and prudent save and get richer in future.
Fortunately, we have an elegant little thought experiment that we can test the whole idea whether printing money makes us rich: the Wallet Fairy.
This little critter sneaks in to every bedroom, bank vault, and payroll department across America on December 23 — the founding of the Fed — and draws an extra zero on the money.
So you went to bed with $10 in your pocket and wake up with $100. You laid down with $1,000 in the bank and woke up with $10,000. You went to bed making $12.50 as a customer associate at Best Buy, now you make $125.
Perfect helicopter money. So are we rich? Does the customer associate upgrade his house?
Of course not. Because everybody can see what happeend. Houses aren’t $400,000 any more, now they’re $4 million. Bubble teas are $50, rent is $15,000, strippers are too much. It would have absolutely zero impact.
We actually have proof from similar situations in countries that did the opposite, knocking zeros off the money. Mexico in the 1990’s, for example, lopped 3 zeros off the peso. So a dollar didn’t buy 3,000 pesos, now it only bought 3.
What happened? Nothing. Everybody adjusted overnight. A 5,000 peso coffee was now 5 pesos and nobody was dumb enough to think they got rich.
Unfortunately, in the real world, inflation is never so obvious as adding a zero or lopping off 3. In the real world inflation does, in fact, change things: Wages are slower to adjust than groceries, long-term contracts get effectively cancelled, pensions get gutted. Cantillon Effects divide every single person into winners and losers, draining those who have worked hard to build something of value, while rewarding those who did not.
Conclusion
Every inflation carries within a million human tragedies, a million dreams lost, a million life’s works squandered.
But the first step is understanding that printing money itself doesn’t create anything. Its one alleged benefit — the tissue fire — is a lie, an illusion that serves the politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists who, in reality, are aiming for the very redistribution inflation delivers.
Final point, the theft is only half the harm from money printing. Because, in reality, almost all new money comes in via asset markets, interest rate manipulation, and the privileging of bank credit over actual savings.
I’ll talk about these another week, but they are the source of our clockwork recessions — each delivering trillions in destroyed value and millions of jobless workers — of the permanent financial crashes that now stalk the American people, and of our exploding national debt.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.