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A Response to Aurore Lalucq’s Monetary Authoritarianism

I have rarely encountered such a concentrated distillation of economic fallacy, political coercion, and anti-liberty sentiment as exists in Ms. Lalucq’s recent proclamation on the digital euro. Her statement deserves not mere disagreement but thorough intellectual demolition, for it represents everything that sound money principles and human freedom stands against.

The False Dichotomy: A Classic Statist Manipulation

“Anyone who opposes the digital euro is going against the euro and the European Union.”

This opening salvo reveals the authoritarian mindset at its finest. Let me translate: “Submit to our monetary surveillance apparatus, or you are an enemy of the state.” This is naked intimidation dressed in bureaucratic rhetoric.

The state’s monopolization of money has been history’s greatest theft. The digital euro represents the culmination of this theft, which is the conversion of monetary control into total monetary surveillance and control. To oppose this Orwellian nightmare is not to oppose Europe; it is to oppose the very debasement of European civilization.

The European Union is not synonymous with freedom, prosperity, or sound money. It is a bureaucratic monstrosity that has systematically eroded national sovereignty, individual liberty, and market coordination. To suggest that opposing a surveillance currency is tantamount to opposing Europe itself is to commit the most egregious conflation; equating a continent’s people, culture, and economy with a supranational political apparatus.

Money as “Political Institution”: The Core Falsehood

“Money is not just a means of payment. It is a political institution that must be protected and supported.”

Here we arrive at the ideological heart of darkness. Money, Ms. Lalucq declares, is a “political institution.” This statement is economically illiterate and historically reversed.

Money emerged from the market as a spontaneous order, as Carl Menger demonstrated in his ground-breaking work on the origins of money. It arose not from political decree but from the voluntary interactions of individuals seeking to overcome the double coincidence of wants problem inherent in barter. Money is fundamentally a market institution that political actors have hijacked, corrupted, and weaponized..

When Lalucq celebrates money as a “political institution,” she is celebrating theft, inflation, financial repression, and the systematic impoverishment of savers and wage earners. She is celebrating the mechanism by which governments finance wars, welfare states, and bureaucratic expansion without direct taxation, the invisible tax of inflation.

The digital euro doesn’t “protect” money, but it weaponizes it. It transforms currency from a medium of exchange into an instrument of total financial surveillance and control. Every transaction monitored. Every purchase tracked. Every economic decision subject to bureaucratic approval or denial.

The Myth of Democratic Money

“Mine is that of Europe, the euro and democracy.”

The invocation of “democracy” in defence of centralized monetary control is perhaps the most brazen Orwellian inversion in Lalucq’s statement.

Democracy, real democracy, means choice. It means the ability to vote with your feet, your wallet, your economic decisions. A truly democratic monetary system would allow individuals to choose which currencies they use, which forms of money best serve their needs, and which monetary networks align with their values.

The digital euro represents the opposite of monetary democracy. It is monetary totalitarianism; a single, mandated, surveilled currency issued by an unelected central banking cartel that has systematically destroyed the purchasing power of European savings through negative interest rates and quantitative easing. It’s democracy for the institutions not for the citizens.

The European Central Bank, like all central banks, operates under bureaucratic management, accountable not to market discipline or consumer choice but to political expediency and technocratic planning.

What True Monetary Freedom Looks Like

Contrast the vision Lalucq offers with the monetary revolution that Bitcoin represents. Satoshi Nakamoto’s whitepaper outlined a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that requires no trusted third party, no central authority, no political institution. It is money that cannot be inflated, cannot be seized without your consent, cannot be surveilled by default.

Sound money, money with reliably scarce supply, has been the foundation of every flourishing civilization. The gold standard’s abandonment didn’t free humanity; it enslaved us to central banking manipulation and perpetual currency debasement.

Bitcoin offers an escape route; not through politics but through mathematics, not through democracy but through voluntary adoption, not through institutions but through individuals. It is the denationalization of money that Hayek could only theorize about, made real through cryptographic innovation.

We live in an era of technological deflation where productivity gains should make goods cheaper and improve living standards. Instead, monetary inflation obscures these gains, transfers wealth from productive workers to financial speculators, and creates artificial boom-bust cycles.

The digital euro would amplify these destructive dynamics while adding surveillance and control mechanisms that previous monetary regimes could only dream of. It represents the perfection of monetary despotism.

The European Project: A Collectivist Fantasy Born in Envy

Let’s discuss the elephant in the room that Lalucq conveniently ignores: the European Union itself is a failed experiment in supranational collectivism, and the euro is its most spectacular economic failure.

The European Union didn’t emerge from spontaneous market cooperation or voluntary association. It was engineered by political elites seeking to create a bureaucratic superstate capable of rivaling American economic and geopolitical dominance. The project’s architects, Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, and their intellectual descendants, never trusted markets or individuals. They believed that technocratic planning from Brussels could somehow succeed where Soviet planning had failed.

Jean Monnet was explicitly clear about the main goal of forming the EU:

“The sovereign nations of the past can no longer solve the problems of the present. They must be merged into a federation.”

This was never about cooperation. It was about subsuming sovereignty under bureaucratic institutions headquartered far from the people they govern.

The strategy was diabolically simple; incrementally transfer sovereignty from nation-states to unelected European institutions under the guise of “integration” and “cooperation.” What began as a coal and steel community metastasized into a regulatory behemoth that now dictates everything from the curvature of bananas to the wattage of vacuum cleaners.

The euro itself, launched in 1999, was never primarily an economic project but it was a political project designed to irreversibly bind European nations together and create a monetary union that could challenge dollar hegemony. The economic warnings were ignored. The structural incompatibilities between Germanic and Mediterranean economies were dismissed. The inability to adjust exchange rates was handwaved away. Political ambition trumped economic reality.

The results? Catastrophic.

The Euro: A Quarter-Century of Monetary Destruction

Since its launch in 1999, the euro has been an unmitigated disaster for European prosperity, purchasing power, and economic dynamism. Let’s examine the empirical record that Lalucq’s ideological cheerleading conveniently omits:

Purchasing Power Annihilation: The euro has lost approximately 40% of its purchasing power since introduction. What cost €100 in 1999 now costs roughly €167. This is systematic theft from savers, pensioners, and wage earners. The ECB’s explicit 2% inflation target is a commitment to devalue your money by half every 35 years. This is monetary policy?

Economic Stagnation: Eurozone GDP growth has consistently lagged behind the United States. While America, for all its own monetary sins, at least maintained some dynamism, Europe has suffocated under the twin burden of monetary rigidity and regulatory excess. Youth unemployment in Spain, Greece, and Italy has regularly exceeded 40-50%, creating a lost generation.

The Sovereign Debt Trap: Unable to devalue their own currencies, peripheral European nations were forced into deflationary spirals and austerity programs that enriched Frankfurt banks while immiserating Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish citizens. The euro didn’t create prosperity, it created a creditor-debtor hierarchy with Germany as overlord.

Negative Interest Rate Insanity: The ECB’s negative interest rate policy, charging banks to hold reserves, destroyed the traditional banking model, punished savers, and created massive asset bubbles. This is what passes for monetary “stability” in Brussels’ Orwellian lexicon.

Capital Misallocation on Epic Scale: Through quantitative easing programs, the ECB purchased over €5 trillion in government and corporate bonds, systematically distorting price signals, subsidizing zombie companies, and creating artificial demand for government debt.

The euro hasn’t brought Europe closer to American prosperity levels but has accelerated European decline relative to America. This is the monetary union Lalucq demands Europeans rally behind? This track record of failure and impoverishment?

The Regulatory Strangulation of European Innovation

The euro’s failure is merely one symptom of Europe’s deeper disease which is the belief that bureaucratic regulation can substitute for market competition and entrepreneurial innovation.

Consider the recent spectacle where the European Union slapped a €140 million fine on X (formerly Twitter), not for genuine harm to consumers, but for alleged violations of the Digital Services Act’s reporting requirements. This is the Brussels model in microcosm:

• Can’t compete? Regulate.

• Can’t innovate? Fine those who do.

• Can’t build? Tear down.

It is the enforcement arm of a worldview that sees innovation as something to be tamed, not unleashed. This is the same worldview driving the digital euro. A worldview where the state monitors platforms, the state controls communication, the state designs money, the state monitors transactions, and the state punishes dissent through regulation and fines.

Where is the European Google? The European Amazon? The European Apple? The European SpaceX? They don’t exist because they can’t exist in Europe’s toxic regulatory environment. The EU’s response to its innovation deficit isn’t to reduce barriers, cut taxes, or unleash entrepreneurship; it’s to impose GDPR compliance costs, Digital Markets Act restrictions, and now, Digital Services Act penalties on companies that had the temerity to innovate elsewhere.

Europe’s digital policy is not about safety or fairness. It is about maintaining a managed, compliant society, where the bureaucratic class remains unchallenged and unaccountable

Instead of reforming, deregulating, or embracing market dynamism, the EU is doubling down on surveillance, monetary consolidation, and punitive governance. Why? Because once a bureaucratic superstructure begins to fail, it does not liberalize, but it clamps down.

The Geopolitical Reality: Europe’s Self-Inflicted Irrelevance

Lalucq invokes “the current political and geopolitical moment” as justification for the digital euro. Let’s be honest about Europe’s geopolitical position: it is becoming irrelevant precisely because of the policies Lalucq champions.

Europe has:

• Energy dependence created by abandoning nuclear power and sanctioning Russian gas without viable alternatives

• Military dependence on American protection while free-riding on defense

• Technological dependence on American and Chinese innovation

• Economic stagnation driven by regulatory excess and monetary manipulation

• Demographic decline exacerbated by welfare state distortions

The digital euro won’t fix any of this. It will merely give Brussels technocrats another control mechanism to manage decline rather than enable revival.

If Europe wants true monetary independence from dollar hegemony, the answer isn’t creating a European version of the same flawed fiat system. It’s embracing neutral, decentralized monetary networks that no nation-state controls. Bitcoin offers this path. The digital euro offers only a change of monetary masters from Washington’s Federal Reserve to Frankfurt’s ECB. Neither deserves your submission.

The genuine geopolitical threat to Europe isn’t lack of monetary centralization but the loss of economic competitiveness caused by excessive regulation, monetary manipulation, and bureaucratic sclerosis. Europe is falling behind not because it lacks a digital surveillance currency but because it has strangled innovation, entrepreneurship, and market dynamism under layers of political control.

Europe doesn’t need more centralization. It needs radical decentralization, deregulation, and a return to market principles. It needs less Brussels, not more Brussels with better surveillance tools.

Conclusion: Choose Freedom, Not Tyranny

The battle over the digital euro is the monetary front of a larger civilizational struggle between two visions: one where individuals are free to make their own economic decisions, build their own futures, and live their own lives; another where technocratic institutions manage, monitor, and control every aspect of economic existence “for our own good.”

To oppose the digital euro is not to oppose Europe, it is to defend the possibility of a free Europe. It is not to oppose monetary innovation, it is to defend genuine innovation over technocratic control. The digital euro must fail. Not because it won’t work technically, it probably will work perfectly at doing exactly what it’s designed to do. It must fail because what it’s designed to do is incompatible with human freedom, human dignity, and human flourishing.

Every person who opposes the digital euro, who refuses to use it, who adopts Bitcoin instead, who speaks out against financial surveillance, who demands monetary freedom, they are not enemies of Europe. They are defenders of everything Europe, at its best, has represented: individual liberty, cultural flourishing, technological innovation, and the dignity of free peoples.