Florin Hilbay

The men who wrote the Constitution owned guns, distrusted bankers, and believed taxation without consent was worth dying over. They would not recognize the country operating under their name today. Federal spending crossed $7 trillion per year. The income tax, which the founders explicitly rejected, now reaches into every paycheck you earn before you touch a dollar of it. The Federal Reserve, a central bank of the exact type Jefferson warned would strip citizens of property through inflation, has spent the last two decades aggressively expanding the money supply and handing you the bill through rising prices. The founders drew the federal government's powers in a short, specific list. Congress could coin money, raise an army, and regulate interstate trade. What it could not do is not in that list, because the founders assumed the limits were obvious. They were wrong to assume that. Today the federal government licenses your profession, subsidizes your competitor, dictates your health plan, and surveils your financial transactions above $600. The administrative state, staffed by unelected bureaucrats at the FDA, SEC, EPA, and an estimated 430 other agencies, writes rules carrying the force of law without a single congressional vote. Madison called this precise arrangement tyranny in The Federalist Papers(No. 47). The founders risked hanging to escape a government that taxed tea at 3%. You hand over 30 percent of your income and are supposed to thank the state for the privilege of keeping the rest.

Keynes gave governments the intellectual permission slip they had always wanted: Spend during recessions, stimulate demand, prime the pump, and prosperity follows. It doesn't work. Ludwig von Mises explained exactly why before the ink on the General Theory dried. The core Keynesian error is treating consumption as the engine of wealth. Keynes fixated on aggregate demand, the total spending flowing through an economy, as the variable governments must manage. Boost it artificially, and you rescue the economy. Production precedes consumption. You cannot spend your way to wealth any more than you can eat your way to a full refrigerator. Government stimulus spending doesn't create resources. It redirects them. When Washington borrows a billion dollars and injects it into infrastructure or green energy, it pulls that capital away from whatever private actors would have funded. The seen benefit (the bridge, the solar panel factory) obscures the unseen cost: the businesses never launched, the technologies never developed, because the capital was conscripted first. Keynes also treated interest rates as a policy lever rather than a price signal. Central banks suppress rates below what the market would set, and businesses respond by launching long-term projects that the actual pool of savings cannot support. Mises called this the business cycle. Cheap credit manufactures a boom built on false signals. When the central bank eventually tightens, the malinvestments collapse. The 2008 housing crash followed this script precisely: a decade of Federal Reserve rate suppression funded mortgages the underlying economy could never sustain. The Keynesian model endures politically because it flatters the powerful. Every recession becomes a reason to spend more, hire more bureaucrats, and expand government reach. Mises simply followed the incentives and found the fraud.