Saifedean Ammous Quotes

“A good that assumes the role of a widely accepted medium of exchange is called money.”

“A government which raises taxes to fund a monarch's lavish lifestyle will engender mass resentment among his population, endangering the legitimacy of his rule and making it ever more precarious.”

“A money that is easy to produce is no money at all, and easy money does not make a society richer; on the contrary, it makes it poorer by placing all its hard-earned wealth for sale in exchange for something easy to produce.”

“According to Cantillon, the beneficiaries from the expansion of the money supply are the first recipients of the new money, who are able to spend it before it has caused prices to rise.

Whoever receives it from them is then able to spend it facing a small increase in the price level. As the money is spent more, the price level rises, until the later recipients suffer a reduction in their real purchasing power. This is the best explanation for why inflation hurts the poorest and helps the richest in the modern economy.”

“Any industry in which people complain about their *sshole boss is likely part of the bezzle, because bosses can only really afford to be *ssholes in the economic fake reality of the bezzle. In a productive firm offering valuable service to society, success depends on pleasing customers.

Workers are rewarded for how well they do that essential task, and bosses who mistreat their workers will either lose the workers to competitors or destroy their business quickly. In an unproductive firm that does not serve society and relies on bureaucratic largesse for its survival.”

“As an economics professor, I make it a point to teach the marshmallow experiment in every course I teach, as I believe this is the most important lesson that economics can teach individuals, and I am amazed that this lesson is ignored as part of the university curriculum in economics, to the point where many academic economists are completely unfamiliar with the term time preference or its importance.”

“As Friedrich Hayek put it: I don't believe we'll ever have good money again until we get the thing out of the government's hands, that is, we can't violently take it out of the government's hands, all we can do is somehow cunningly introduce something that they can't stop.”

“As H. L. Mencken put it: Every election is an advanced auction on stolen goods.”

“As it stands, a large number of firms in all advanced economies specialize in warfare as a business, and are thus reliant on perpetuating war to continue being in business. They live off government spending exclusively, and have their entire existence reliant on there being perpetual wars necessitating ever‐larger arms spending.

In the United States, whose defense spending is almost equal to that of the rest of the planet combined, these industries have a vested interest in keeping the U.S. government involved in some form of military adventure or other. This, more than any strategic, cultural, ideological, or security operations, explains why the United States has been involved in so many conflicts in parts of the world that cannot possibly have any bearing on the life of the average American.

Only with unsound money can these firms grow to such enormous magnitude that they can influence the press, academia, and think tanks to continuously beat the drums of more war.”

“As with Rome, the fall of Constantinople happened only after its rulers had started devaluing the currency, a process that historians believe began in the reign of Constantine IX Monomachos (1042–1055).

Along with monetary decline came the fiscal, military, cultural, and spiritual decline of the Empire, as it trudged on with increasing crises until it was overtaken by the Ottomans in 1453.”

“Bitcoin can be best understood as distributed software that allows for transfer of value using a currency protected from unexpected inflation without relying on trusted third parties.

In other words, Bitcoin automates the functions of a modern central bank and makes them predictable and virtually immutable by programming them into code decentralized among thousands of network members, none of whom can alter the code without the consent of the rest.

This makes Bitcoin the first demonstrably reliable operational example of digital cash and digital hard money.”

“Capitalism is what happens when people drop their time preference, defer immediate gratification, and invest in the future. Debt‐fueled mass consumption is as much a normal part of capitalism as asphyxiation is a normal part of respiration.”

“Civilization is not about more capital accumulation per se; rather, it is about what capital accumulation allows humans to achieve, the flourishing and freedom to seek higher meaning in life when their base needs are met and most pressing dangers averted.”

“Civilization no longer means capital accumulation per se; rather, it means what capital accumulation allows humans to achieve, flourishing and the freedom to seek greater meaning in life when their basic needs are assured and the most immediate dangers are under control.”

“For as long as the government could print more money and have that money accepted by its citizens and foreigners, it could keep financing the war.”

“French economist Jacques Reuff coined the phrase 'deficit without tears' to describe the new economic reality that the United States inhabited, where it could purchase whatever it wanted from the world and finance it through debt monetized by inflating the currency that the entire world used.”

“History has shown that governments will inevitably succumb to the temptation of inflating the money supply.”

“History has shown that governments will inevitably succumb to the temptation to inflate the money supply.

Whether because of outright corruption, a 'national emergency' or an infestation of inflationary schools of economics, the government will always find a reason and a way to print more money, expanding the government's power and reducing the wealth of currency holders.”

“History shows that you cannot insulate yourself from the consequences of other people having a stronger currency than yours.”

“In the twentieth century, government control of money has meant a new and very important criterion being added to salability, and that is the salability of money according to the will of its holder and not some other party.”

“In their seminal work, 'The History of Science and Technology', Bunch and Hellemans compile a list of the 8,583 most important innovations and inventions in the history of science and technology.

Physicist Jonathan Huebner analyzed all these events along with the years in which they happened and global population at that year, and measured the rate of occurrence of these events per year per capita since the Dark Ages.

Huebner found that while the total number of innovations rose in the twentieth century, the number of innovations per capita peaked in the nineteenth century.

A closer look at the innovations of the pre-1914 world lends support to Huebner's data. It is no exaggeration to say that our modern world was invented in the gold standard years preceding World War I.”

“It should be of interest to modern Keynesian economists, as well as to the present generation of investors, that although the emperors of Rome frantically tried to 'manage' their economies, they only succeeded in making matters worse.

Price and wage controls and legal tender laws were passed, but it was like trying to hold back the tides. Rioting, corruption, lawlessness and a mindless mania for speculation and gambling engulfed the empire like a plague.

With money so unreliable and debased, speculation in commodities became far more attractive than producing them.”

“It was in the city-states that humans could live with the freedom to work, produce, trade, and flourish, and that was to a large extent the result of these city-states adopting a sound monetary standard.

It all began in Florence in 1252, when the city minted the florin, the first major European sound coinage since Julius Caesar's aureus. Florence's rise made it the commercial center of Europe, with its florin becoming the prime European medium of exchange, allowing its banks to flourish across the entire continent.

Venice was the first to follow Florence's example with its minting of the ducat, of the same specifications as the florin, in 1270, and by the end of the fourteenth century more than 150 European cities and states had minted coins of the same specifications as the florin, allowing their citizens the dignity and freedom to accumulate wealth and trade with a sound money that was highly salable across time and space, and divided into small coins, allowing for easy divisibility.”

“Its mere existence is an insurance policy that will remind governments that the last object the establishment could control, namely, the currency, is no longer their monopoly. This gives us, the crowd, an insurance policy against an Orwellian future.”

“Money that is easy to produce is no money at all, and easy money does not make a society richer; on the contrary, it makes it poorer by placing all its hard‐earned wealth for sale in exchange for something easy to produce.”

“Nero, who ruled from 54–68 AD, had found the formula to solve this, which was highly similar to Keynes's solution to Britain's and the U.S.'s problems after World War I: devaluing the currency would at once reduce the real wages of workers, reduce the burden of the government in subsidizing staples, and provide increased money for financing other government expenditure.

The aureus coin was reduced from 8 to 7.2 grams, while the denarius's silver content was reduced from 3.9 to 3.41g. This provided some temporary relief, but had set in motion the highly destructive self-reinforcing cycle of popular anger, price controls, coin debasement, and price rises, following one another with the predictable regularity of the four seasons.”

“One of the fundamental laws of economics is the law of diminishing marginal utility, which means that purchasing more of any good reduces the marginal utility of each extra unit of that good.

Money, which is not kept for its own sake, but to be exchanged for other goods, will have its marginal utility diminished at a slower rate than any other good, because it can always be exchanged for another good.”

“Sound money allows people to think about the long term and to save and invest more for the future. Saving and investing for the long run are the key to capital accumulation and the advance of human civilization.”

“Sound money is also an essential element of a free society as it provides for an effective bulwark against despotic government.”

“The astonishing domes of Europe's churches, built and decorated over decades of inspired meticulous work by incomparable architects and artists like Filippo Brunelleschi and Michelangelo, were all financed with sound money by patrons with very low time preference.

The only way to impress these patrons was to build artwork that would last long enough to immortalize their names as the owners of great collections and patrons of great artists.”