Doug French, “The Moniker Millionaire, Billionaire, and Trillionaire are just a Reflection of Inflation,” DouglasinVegas.com, 2023/6/14

Investors had their eyes to the skies last Friday riding Elon’s SpaceX rocket, making him the world’s first trillionaire. John D. Rockefeller was the first billionaire 110 years ago, and according to CoPilot Search the first millionaire was the world’s first Keynesian, long before Keynes’s birth,  John Law whose “innovative financial schemes involved issuing paper money and trading shares, which allowed him to amass immense wealth, making him one of Europe’s first recognized millionaires,” in the early 18th century.  Of course, he died broke after the Mississippi Bubble collapsed.

Both John Law and Elon Musk earned their fortunes under fiat money systems. Rockefeller earned his under a gold standard.

So, the early 1700’s –first millionaire, the early 1900’s-first billionaire, and 2026-first trillionaire. It took half the time to go from billionaire to trillionaire. How long until the first quadrillionaire? At this rate, maybe 50 years.

It seems impossible, but consider what Ryan McMaken wrote recently on mises.org, “Since 2009, in the wake of the global financial crisis, more than $12 trillion of the current money supply has been created. In other words, nearly two-thirds of the total existing money supply has been created just in the past thirteen years.”

There seems to be no stopping the Federal Reserve and the world’s other central banks. As more money is created out of thin air last year there were over 22–24 million millionaires in the U.S., nearly 1 in 10 adults.

But, the moniker millionaire, billionaire, and trillionaire are just a reflection of inflation. The “wealth gap” and the “K-shaped” economy are caused by money creation. As Murray Rothbard wrote, “Inflation, therefore, lowers the general standard of living in the very course of creating a tinsel atmosphere of ‘prosperity.’”

L. Albert Hahn wrote that fiat money and Keynesian economics policy, “represents not only illusionary economics but an ‘economics of illusion’ in a very specific sense. For it presupposes an economy whose members do not see through the changes brought about by monetary or fiscal manipulation—or, as some might say, the swindle. Above all, it presupposes that people are blinded by the idea that the value of money is stable—by the ‘money illusion,’ as Irving Fisher called it.”

When I was an adjunct instructor at Troy University and Georgia Military College, I was stunned by the number of students who thought the  U.S. dollar was backed by gold. These days, my physical therapist was shocked when I told her, in between balance exercises, that money was created out of nowhere.

Last Friday someone posted on Linkedin “Happy SpaceX Day! It’s a great day for capitalism, liberty, America, and humanity!” Not hardly.

Rothbard defined our choices long ago.“… the issue is a stark one: we can either return to gold or we can pursue the fiat path and return to barter. It is perhaps not hyperbole to say that civilization itself is at stake in our decision.”

From PFS member Andreas Tögel, a translation of Original Commentary

Property, Right to Self-Defense, and Perpetrator Protection:
A Debate on Private Property and Self-Protection

By Andreas Tögel

Self-Defense: Conflict over Property Defense

A pending court case in Salzburg is currently sparking fierce debates about how far a person is allowed to go to protect their life and property. After a burglar was caught in the act by the burglary victim and shot dead, the shooter stood before the jury court on charges of murder. On the afternoon of May 11, after hours of deliberation by the eight jurors, the verdict was delivered: Acquittal. It was therefore self-defense—not murder.

The facts: A 31-year-old man and his partner broke into the house of the subsequent shooter on July 31, 2025. They entered the garden through a cut chain-link fence and proceeded to the terrace. There, they stole valuables. After the first theft, the couple returned to the house a second time. At this point, the 66-year-old homeowner returned home and noticed signs of a break-in (an open door and a missing decorative blanket). The burglary victim assumed that the perpetrator or perpetrators were still inside the house, reached for his legally owned 9 mm caliber pistol, and fired a warning shot, prompting the two burglars to flee. The defendant ran after them. On the terrace, he is said to have fired two more warning shots. Then he knelt down to get a better aim. Apparently, the two criminals were already in full flight when the fatal shot hit one of them in the back of the head from a distance of about nine meters. The burglar died shortly afterwards in the hospital.

In social media and in the comment sections of various press publications, a heated debate promptly erupted over the legality of the shooting, with the majority of entries defending the position of the fatal shooter, whose lawyer asserted self-defense.

The legal basis for self-defense in Austria is formed by § 3 of the Criminal Code (StGB), which states:

(1) A person does not act unlawfully who merely makes use of the defense that is necessary to ward off an imminent or directly threatening unlawful attack on life, health, physical integrity, sexual integrity and self-determination, freedom, or property of themselves or another. However, the action is not justified if it is obvious that the person attacked is threatened with only minor harm and the defense is disproportionate, particularly given the severity of the injury required to ward off the attacker.

(2) Anyone who exceeds the justified level of defense or makes use of an obviously disproportionate defense (paragraph 1) is only punishable if this occurs solely out of consternation, fear, or terror, if the excess is due to negligence and the negligent act is punishable by law.

In Germany, self-defense is regulated in sections 32 and 33, similarly to Austria.

Given the course of events and the wording of the law, the murder charge was obviously completely exaggerated—for several reasons: First, a motive for the crime was lacking (a circumstance that does not stand in the way of a murder charge, however). The shooter is a man of unblemished character who until now showed no criminal inclinations whatsoever. Second—and particularly important—property is an asset eligible for protection under self-defense law! It is therefore principally permissible to prevent its theft with the use of weapons if necessary—meaning, for instance, by shooting at a perpetrator fleeing with the loot. Third, the circumstances present at the crime scene must be taken into account. Unlike the court, which can spend days dealing with the case and drawing its conclusions from it, a burglary victim is always under considerable time pressure, which given the extraordinary nature of the situation can naturally lead to errors in judgment. In the present case, this could have consisted of an ‘excess of self-defense,’ as apostrophized in § 3, paragraph 2 of the Criminal Code (StGB).

Are there cases in which justice must yield to injustice?

Regardless of the outcome of the current murder trial—which is gratifying from the perspective of the Salzburg pensioner and any future burglary victim—and the circumstances in self-defense situations that always vary from case to case, a fundamental question is of central importance: Are there cases in which justice must yield to injustice? Must someone—even though they could prevent it through the use of potentially lethal force—accept as a burglary victim that substantial assets are stolen by a criminal attacker because the court values the life of the perpetrator more highly than material goods?

In the USA, the so-called ‘Stand-Your-Ground Law’ applies in 30 of the 50 federal states, which fundamentally grants the victim of a criminal assault every right of defense. This means that no burglar can expect to leave the crime scene alive and uninjured. The Salzburg pensioner would not even have faced an indictment like the one described above there.

The matter is fundamentally very simple: The burglar (any criminal) has the choice of whether to commit a crime or not. His victim, on the other hand, is forced into a predicament by him and faces heavily restricted alternatives for action. One of them is precisely the use of a firearm—if available.

The fact that it has become common practice in Europe to indulge more and more in perpetrator protection, while the fate of crime victims is largely ignored, is a devastating development. The first question of journalists, who are as clueless as they are woke, in cases like the one described above is: Did there really have to be a shooting? Couldn’t one have just reasoned with the perpetrator? And if you have to shoot—why not just in the legs?

Parliaments and governments have lost a great deal of credibility in recent years. If citizens, due to hair-raisingly lenient, scandalous verdicts, such as those recently handed down multiple times against migrant violent offenders while at the same time ‘hate postings’ on the internet are met with draconian punishments, now also lose confidence in the judiciary, the signs point to a storm.

The loss of all respect for private property is an evil caused by excessive welfare state policies. Without property—a fact that is often overlooked—the individual is at the complete mercy of the arbitrariness of an increasingly intrusive state bureaucracy.

Because private property makes people free, it is under permanent fire from all enemies of freedom: left-wing parties and NGOs. The fact that the acquisition of property requires intellect, risk, and effort does not interest them. Property is simply there and is declared by the government to be a self-service resource. Consequently, expropriations—under whatever ‘social-sounding’ title they are promoted—have meanwhile become the favorite topic of the redistribution factions resident in all parties.

Perpetrator protection instead of a ‘Stand-Your-Ground Law’ fits the picture perfectly here. A burglary theft is fundamentally nothing other than material redistribution, so it cannot be bad, since it forms the core of all state activities.

The acquittal in the recent Salzburg murder trial against an unblemished burglary victim is a true ray of hope. It confirms that justice does not have to yield to injustice after all!

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Although trucking deregulation has significantly reduced the Teamsters’ power, not a little bit of that power remains in place. Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.

Editor:

Unionized truck-driver Keith Hernandez writes that, in an attempt to “put profits over people,” driverless-truck companies threaten his and other Teamster members’ “good union wages and benefits” (Letters, June 18).

Mr. Hernandez should look in the mirror, for it is he and his fellow Teamsters who put profits over people. The profits are Teamster members’ excessively high wages paid as a result of their union protecting them from competition. The people are the millions of Americans who now pay for delivery services the unnecessarily high prices that result from this restriction of competition.

If driverless-truck companies successfully break this hold of the Teamsters, these companies will indeed profit, but they’ll do so only insofar as they lower the prices that hundreds of millions of American people pay for delivery services.

Labor unions generate profits for their members at the expense of the people. Successful entrepreneurs generate profits for themselves only by enriching the people.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

The post Who Puts “Profits Over People”? appeared first on Cafe Hayek.

HOUSTON, TX — News broke this afternoon that Pastor Joel Osteen kicked congregant Jeff Janovec off the church softball team after Janovec reportedly wrote a Bible verse on his Lakewood Church team hat.

NASHVILLE, TN — While commemorating the film's 20th anniversary, former Vice President Al Gore explained that while An Inconvenient Truth did not prove to be accurate, it did make him incredibly rich.