The Federal Reserve printed roughly $4 trillion between March 2020 and early 2022, expanding its balance sheet from $4.2 trillion to over $8.9 trillion, and Jerome Powell stood in front of cameras calling the resulting price explosion "transitory." Inflation is a tax. Every dollar created without corresponding production transfers purchasing power from savers to the first spenders. The government and its preferred financial institutions spent those fresh dollars before prices adjusted. You spent them after, at a grocery store already pricing in the damage. By June 2022, CPI hit 9.1 percent, the highest since 1981. Rent, food, used cars, energy: all of it ran hot simultaneously. Monetary expansion redistributes wealth rather than creating it, taking from your pocket to give to whoever holds newly printed money first. Powell's "transitory" call was deliberate. The Fed had every price signal and money supply number available. M2 grew 27 percent in 2020 alone. That expansion predicted exactly what followed. The Fed created this inflation deliberately, financing pandemic-era federal spending that Congress could not politically tax you to fund directly. Printing was the cowardly path. You paid through purchasing power destruction rather than a visible tax line on your return, which is precisely why they preferred it.

The freest economy in American history produced the greatest explosion of living standards the world had ever witnessed, and the people who benefited most were the poor. Between 1870 and 1900, real GDP per capita roughly doubled. Steel output went from 77,000 tons in 1870 to over 11 million tons by 1900. Kerosene dropped so cheap that even working-class families could light their homes at night. Carnegie drove down steel prices while paying wages that rose faster than inflation. The market did that. No regulator in Washington achieved this. Federal spending in 1870 sat at roughly 3.7% of GDP. Congress had no income tax until 1913. The regulatory state was microscopic. Capital formation exploded precisely because entrepreneurs kept what they built. But there is a villian here: the progressive revision of this history. Academics frame the Gilded Age as a catastrophe of exploitation, demanding the state as savior. The numbers destroy that story. Real wages for unskilled labor rose 50% between 1860 and 1890. Infant mortality fell. Life expectancy climbed. What about technology? Could some important things have been invented during that time? Only AC power, the lightbulb, the telephone, the camera, the automobile, the airplane... nothing really important. Property rights worked. Contract enforcement worked. Sound money, anchored to gold, kept capital allocation honest and prevented governments from inflating savings into dust. The progressives arrived after 1900 and systematically dismantled each pillar: the income tax in 1913, the Federal Reserve in 1913, regulatory agencies multiplying through the 1920s. Growth slowed. Then the Fed contracted the money supply and Congress passed Smoot-Hawley, and you got 1929. The state caused that collapse and later blamed it on the free market.

Roosevelt stole all US citizens' savings in January 1934 with one simple trick. The Gold Reserve Act handed all gold held by the Federal Reserve to the Treasury, then let Roosevelt reprice gold from $20.67 to $35 per ounce by executive proclamation. That single move cut the dollar's gold content by 41%. Every dollar you held lost 41% of its backing overnight. Roosevelt needed to inflate debt away and fund New Deal spending without going to you directly. Devaluation is taxation without a vote. The purchasing power comes from somewhere, and it came from every American holding dollars or dollar-denominated savings. The government had already made private gold ownership a crime under Executive Order 6102 in April 1933, forcing citizens to surrender gold at $20.67. Then, once the government held all the gold, Roosevelt repriced it upward by 69%. The profit, roughly $2.8 billion, went straight to the Exchange Stabilization Fund, a Treasury slush fund Congress never directly controlled. Inflation is a transfer mechanism. The first spender captures real value; every subsequent holder absorbs the loss. In 1934, the Treasury was the first spender. Your parents and grandparents were not. Sound money constrains government, and governments destroy it for that reason.

Every government-issued paper currency in history has collapsed. Every single one. Rome debased the denarius until it held almost no silver. Weimar Germany printed the mark into oblivion by 1923, destroying middle-class savings in under four years. The Continental dollar, the French assignat, the Zimbabwean dollar, the Venezuelan bolivar. The list runs long and the ending never changes. Central banks manage fiat currency to fund government spending that tax revenue cannot cover, not to protect your purchasing power. Inflation is a tax. Every dollar created without corresponding production transfers purchasing power from savers to first spenders, which is always the government and its connected institutions. The dollar has lost over 97% of its purchasing power since the Federal Reserve opened for business in 1913. That loss did not happen accidentally; the Fed ran the printing press, and you absorbed the damage. Defenders will argue that modern central banking is more sophisticated than Weimar. The math remains identical: spend beyond revenue, monetize the gap, dilute the currency. Sophistication only determines the speed of the destruction. No fiat currency has ever survived indefinitely. Not one government has voluntarily relinquished the power to inflate. Given those two facts, the current dollar's long-term trajectory requires no guesswork.