The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking

by Saifedean Ammous

government‐directed failures. As governments controlled money, they controlled most economic, political, cultural, and educational activity. Having never studied economics or researched it professionally, Keynes captured the zeitgeist of omnipotent government to come up with the definitive track that gave governments what they wanted to hear. Gone were all the foundations of economic knowledge acquired over centuries of scholarship around the world, to be replaced with the new faith with the ever‐so‐convenient conclusions that suited high time‐preference politicians and totalitarian governments: the state of the economy is determined by the lever of aggregate spending, and any rise in unemployment or slowdown in production had no underlying causes in the structure of production or in the distortion of markets by central planners; rather it was all a shortage of spending, and the remedy is the debauching of the currency and the increase of government spending.