What Cant Be Printed

Two passengers. Two windows. Two worlds.

Punished by Prudence

Scene 9: The Breaking Point Lucas had texted Thomas that morning. Can we walk today? I’ve got something to tell you. Thomas replied with a time and a meeting spot at the park. Lucas moved quietly through the city—collar up, hands deep in his coat pockets, wind cutting between buildings. Daniel’s words from the day before still hung in his head—they were hard to shake. Daniel wasn’t blind to the cracks in the system. He’d seen volatility, downturns, panics—and kept going. Built a life, bought a duplex, rode the market. He called it adaptation. Said inflation could be outrun. That if you owned assets, stayed invested, trusted the arc—you’d be fine. And maybe he was right. If you owned enough. If you were already in. Lucas passed a man curled under a thin blanket outside a shuttered corner shop. A sign rested beside him: "Still Looking for Work. Still Hoping." Farther down, a young woman argued quietly on a cracked phone, a toddler on her hip and a grocery bag at her feet. Her voice was stretched, not angry—just worn. How were they adapting? They weren’t rebalancing portfolios. They were just trying to hold on. The billboard above the park entrance flashed bright and confident: “Experience More. Pay Later.” Lucas didn’t even look up. Thomas was waiting, hands clasped behind his back. They started walking without a word. After a few minutes, Lucas said, “I got laid off.” Thomas slowed. “I’m sorry.” “They said it wasn’t performance. Just headcount. Realignment.” He gave a bitter half-smile. “You know the language.” “I do,” Thomas said. “I always figured if I worked hard, kept my head down, I’d be fine. But suddenly... I’m not essential anymore.” Thomas didn’t respond. He let the quiet fill in the rest. “I’m not panicked,” Lucas added. “Not yet. I’ve got some savings. I’ll figure it out. But still—yesterday I’m debating Daniel about the structure of the system. Today I’m outside of it.” Thomas raised an eyebrow. “What did Daniel say?” Lucas shrugged. “That the system works—flawed but functional. That we’ve been through worse. That inflation’s bad, but manageable if you own assets. The usual stuff. That sound money sounds good until you hit a crisis and need the Fed to step in.” They reached a bench and sat. “Sounds like a man who’s never missed a paycheck,” Thomas said. Lucas didn’t reply. Thomas leaned forward. “I’ve heard it all. I believed it for years. But that ‘flexibility’ they praise—it’s not flexibility. It’s moral hazard dressed up as pragmatism. Every downturn becomes a license to print more money, push more debt. The system doesn’t save people. It saves asset prices. And people who don’t own those assets get left behind—quietly, but predictably.” Lucas said nothing. “You didn’t lose your job because of performance,” Thomas continued. “You lost it because risk and consequence no longer live in the same place. The system’s built to offload cost and concentrate reward. That’s what fiat enables. Not resilience. Transfer.” A breeze passed through the bare trees. “Daniel’s not wrong to want stability,” Thomas said. “But what he calls evolution—I call erosion. Since 2020, real wages are down. Stocks are up. Housing’s up. Groceries are up. But the people doing the work are standing still—or slipping.” He paused. “When the Fed prints, it enters at the top—through credit, through banks, through capital markets. The bottom gets inflation. The middle gets squeezed. That’s why the 401(k)s look okay and groceries look like theft.” He let that sit. “Fiat doesn’t just warp the economy—it warps trust. It rewards proximity to capital and punishes patience. It breaks the link between effort and reward. Quietly. Systematically.” Lucas stared at the ground. He felt the truth of it, not as a theory—but as a pressure behind the eyes. Thomas leaned back. “And deflation? That’s just prices falling because productivity improved. It rewards savers. It makes things cheaper. That’s not chaos—it’s sanity. But they fight it because the system runs on debt, and debt can’t survive falling prices. So they inflate. Always.” Lucas looked down at the path. “So what do I do?” Thomas’s voice softened. “First, stop waiting for the system to recognize your value. It won’t. It can’t. Learn how the rules work. Then step outside them—bit by bit.” Lucas didn’t nod. But he didn’t argue either. Thomas looked at him more gently now. “Look. I’ve spent most of my life as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. Made every mistake twice. But the market—it’s a truth machine. Eventually, it teaches you. If you’re willing to listen.” They sat in silence. Lucas wasn’t sure what he believed anymore. But the cracks in his old framework were no longer theoretical. They had found him.

Scene 8: Two Worlds - Systems Evolve. Or Erode. Lucas and Daniel grabbed a table by the window at a café near the office—two trays, burgers, fries, and two waters. Daniel took a bite of his burger and grinned. “Catch the game last night?” Lucas nodded but was slower to eat, distracted. His thoughts had been elsewhere all morning. After a few minutes of small talk—project delays, a new hire melting down over the ticketing system—Lucas shifted the conversation. “Hey,” he said. “Can I ask you something a little weird?” Daniel leaned back, amused. “Sure. That’s never stopped you before.” Lucas hesitated, then pushed a fry through ketchup. “I’ve been meeting with this guy I found through a Meetup. He’s been walking me through... well, how money actually works.” Daniel raised an eyebrow. “You mean like investing?” “No, more foundational than that. The whole system—how money’s created, who controls it, why it keeps expanding.” Daniel set his burger down and wiped his hands, his tone shifting from casual to curious. “Let me guess—he thinks inflation is theft, the Fed’s a scam, and we should all be stockpiling gold and bitcoin?” Lucas looked up, surprised. “You’ve heard this before?” Daniel nodded. “Oh, yeah. I’ve read the sound-money stuff—probably more than most. Listened to a few Ron Paul speeches in the car back in the day. I get the arguments. I just don’t buy the conclusions.” Lucas leaned forward slightly. “Why not?” Daniel took a breath. “Because I’ve lived through four recessions, two wars, a global financial crisis, and a pandemic. And the system—flawed as it is—held. While the doomers waited for collapse, I watched people who stayed invested quietly build real wealth.” He tapped the side of his water cup. “I’m not saying it’s fair. I’m saying it’s functional. Every system has trade-offs. Go back to a sound money standard, and you get rigidity. No flexibility in a crisis. Massive deflation when things go wrong. Sounds clean on paper—until your paycheck gets cut in half but your mortgage stays the same.” Lucas frowned. “So we just choose the slow bleed over the sudden collapse?” Daniel shook his head. “It’s not a bleed. It’s evolution. Yeah, the dollar’s lost value—but my portfolio’s up over 200% since 2020. My house has doubled in price. That’s not magic—it’s credit expansion, productivity, asset inflation. If you sit in cash, you get burned. But if you participate, you benefit.” Lucas didn’t respond, but the silence wasn’t disagreement—it was friction. He was processing. Daniel leaned in. “I don’t ignore the risks. I just don’t think we’re teetering on the edge. People have been betting against the dollar since Nixon closed the gold window. And yet—here we are. The dollar’s still the global safe haven.” He pushed his tray aside. “Japan’s at 250% debt-to-GDP and still chugging along. Europe had negative rates. China’s a mystery box. We’re not thriving because we’re flawless—we’re surviving because we can adapt.” Lucas turned to the window. A bus lumbered through the intersection, trailing a ribbon of gray exhaust. Daniel glanced over, then added, “You know, my dad—he wasn’t a finance guy. Worked with his hands. Saved what he could. Didn’t overthink it.” He gave a small shrug. “I guess I’m just trying to do the same. Buy index funds. Own a duplex. Keep showing up. Nothing heroic. Just... pragmatic.” He looked back at Lucas. “Most people—sound money guys included—just want a fair shot. A chance to save, maybe leave something behind. That’s not ideology. That’s survival.” Lucas studied him. For the first time, he saw the scaffolding beneath Daniel’s worldview. It wasn’t blind faith. It was inherited pattern. A quiet belief that the future might still rhyme with the past—not because of theory, but because it always had. Daniel’s voice softened. “I get why you’re drawn to it. The critique feels clarifying. The system’s broken—so burn it down. But what if this is just one of those awkward, transitional decades? What if we fix it—not all at once, but piece by piece?” Lucas said nothing. Daniel shrugged. “You don’t have to think everything’s fine. But believing it’s all doomed? That’s a luxury, too.” Lucas took another sip of water. It felt colder than before. Outside, people hurried by—heads down, faces lit by phone screens, pulled along by the pulse of the city. Lucas sat back, the weight of the conversation settling in. Not because Daniel was clearly wrong. But because he might be right.

Scene 7: The Missing Piece: How inflation erodes the value of money Thomas bent down, picking up a small stick from the side of the trail. He scratched a small circle in the dirt. “This circle is your money.” Then he drew a larger circle around it. “And this is the total money supply. Your money is one small part of the whole.” Lucas smirked. “Yeah, a very small part.” Thomas tapped the stick lightly against the ground. “Now imagine someone adds more money. A few digital keystrokes—poof.” He scratched out the first outer circle and drew a much bigger one. “Your piece didn’t change," Thomas said, tracing the inner circle again. "But compared to the whole, it's worth less. You hold the same handful—but it buys you a lot less.” Lucas stared at the simple drawing, feeling the weight of it settle in. It was like the value was leaking through his fingers—quietly, invisibly, but real. “That’s why scarcity matters," Thomas said. "Without it, the other traits—durability, transferability, divisibility, recognizability—mean nothing. Without scarcity, value slips away—the money doesn’t move value through time.” Lucas shifted his weight. “So that’s what the Mises quote meant? From the Meetup?” Thomas nodded, his voice steady. “Yeah. ‘When a government increases the quantity of paper money, the purchasing power of the monetary unit drops, and prices rise. That’s inflation.’” He stood, brushing his hands off. “So when we think about good money,” Thomas continued, “we want something that’s: durable, easily transferable, divisible, recognizable—and scarce.” Lucas stared down at the circles again—the small piece he thought he held, and the larger world that could shift around him without warning. He tapped his coffee lid absently, thinking. “Okay, I get it," he said slowly. "I definitely understand money better now. Why we use something like the dollar instead of... three-eyed fish." He hesitated, the old logic clashing with something he couldn’t yet name. “But still... what’s the point of all this? I mean, I came to you because things feel off. Like what used to work doesn’t work anymore. And you take me on this detour into money theory…” Thomas didn’t interrupt, letting the question hang in the air. Thomas smiled—not dismissive, but knowing. “Truth is," he said, "you can't fix a leaking boat until you see where the cracks are." Lucas said nothing. He looked again at the simple dirt circles, feeling something tighten inside him—a pressure, a weight he hadn’t noticed until now. As they walked on, the trees around them thinned, and the river widened ahead. But the ground beneath Lucas’s feet suddenly felt less certain.