On April 26, 1984, a half-mile-wide tornado swept through tiny Morris, Oklahoma.
The sirens gave us a little warning. And I remember patiently shuffling my grandmother off the back porch and down to the basement with all the calm I could muster. Meanwhile, the sound of a thousand freight trains rising just out of sight behind the woods to the east injected urgency to our combined pace.
The tornado passed directly over our house within minutes, thankfully still high enough in the atmosphere to spare us any damage. An incredible roar rose overhead – a stark contrast to the electric calm of the evening just a few minutes sooner. And, within seconds, stillness returned.
Seven miles away, however, destruction followed. That same tornado made a beeline across the pastures and wheat fields separating our house from my hometown before ultimately touching down and leveling 80% of Morris in the process.
Extensive physical damage marred the city, though the human toll was not nearly as bad you might expect. Fair warning coupled with most Okies knowing how to respond to a tornado saved lives.
But putting the tragic consequences aside, the whole affair left me in awe of just how far nature will go to find equilibrium. After all, a tornado is one of nature’s many ways of resolving opposing forces. In this case, warm, moist air up against a cold front.
The bigger the difference, the more turbulent the resolution.
And when you listen closely to the world today, you can’t help but hear the sirens of extreme opposites rising all around us…
Control and Its Opposition
On one side, you have surging authoritarianism bent on advancing the old order into a system of control.
The flooding tide of opportunistic COVID-19 mandates makes for just one example. And just like a positively charged pole lacks potential without its negative, opposition to these mandates rises accordingly.
To wit, thousands of people are rioting in response to the meddler’s vaccine mandates and absurdly long lockdowns in Australia. Over 150,000 protestors have turned out in France for seven weeks straight to protest the “Health Pass.”
In the U.K. and Italy…the story plays the same. And as one side increases its demands for submission, the other responds with justifiable demands to reclaim the right to decide for oneself.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., corporations now routinely bend the knee to their political cronies without whom they couldn’t maintain valuable government contracts or advance their anti-competitive regulatory moats.
Or the threat of fines leaves them with no choice.
Whatever way corporations rationalize complicity, the rising resistance of employees refusing the transition from citizen to subject only compounds the manufactured chaos engulfing the supply of goods and services around the globe.
But top-down commandments cost money to enforce.
And the ultimate enabler fueling the rise of centralized authority lies in the only money system most of us have ever known – nation-backed fiat currency.
Money by Decree
Fiat money gets borrowed into existence. It doesn’t have to be, but that’s the system dominating the world we have today.
Now, the market once served as a useful foil against monetary excess. Bond vigilantes held central banks accountable by shorting bonds and currencies while letting price discovery do the rest.
But that discipline is gone. Since 2008, central banks have done nothing more than serve their government masters, basically directly monetizing any debt the legislature conjures up.
The long-touted central bank independence – the core justification for central bank fiat systems – is dead.
And with this limiting influence of capital markets swept aside, bailouts, direct government payments to everyone, and pork-barrel spending traipsed around as massive infrastructure bills can now reach levels far exceeding the wildest dreams of the most ambitious utopian central planners of the past.
Oh, what Stalin could have done with a global reserve currency and a complicit banking system.
As the ambition of authoritarian planners grows unconstrained, so too do the consequences of their meddling. The only way to fund this ambition comes from a likewise unconstrained growth in the fiat money upon which it all depends.
This rising flood of fiat creates yet another front of opposition. This one rising to protect itself from the consequences of economic meddling on a global scale.
But a beautiful irony lies in the fact that centralized power sows the seed of its demise.
And helping you navigate this inevitable turbulence is why we launched The Prosperity Project.
One Big Bet Against the System
The system no longer works.
It can’t work.
The cost to maintain it grows exponentially.
And the spiraling cost of maintaining this Old Order will destroy money as we know it.
But bottom-up initiative does work – that person working day-by-day to make each new day better than the last.
Indeed, individual action has always been the source of prosperity.
It always will be, despite the chaos rising around it.
And that source invariably leads to a new equilibrium – a more stable order.
The Prosperity Project is here to help you make One Big Bet against an unsustainable system and bet for the future that lies beyond it.
We do that by helping you bet on yourself. To help you bet on value creators like you. And to help you navigate the onset of turbulence.
I want you to prosper from the inevitable collapse of a global control system that no longer meets the needs of the individuals it pretends to serve. So, join us at The Prosperity Project.
You are free to join right here.
Because as rising differences resolve themselves into a more stable, decentralized equilibrium, you’ll want a clear path through the turbulence.
