Of Commerce, Counsel & the Coin

An Austrian Economist

All that glisters is not gold.

A sixteenth-century printing shop at full work: compositors at their cases, proof-readers at their table, the puller at the press, printed sheets hung to dry; Impressio Librorum, plate four of the Nova Reperta, engraved by Jan Collaert the First after Stradanus, about 1600. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

IMPRESSIO LIBRORUM · THE PRINTING OF BOOKS, AFTER STRADANUS, ABOUT 1600

The Essays

Long-form writing on Austrian economics, sound money, spontaneous order, and the ideas that shape markets. Published when they are ready, not when they are due.

IV

Markets · Monetary Theory

The Tale of Cantillon

In 1720 the world’s first paper-money bubble filled a narrow Paris street with princes, valets, and a new species the gazettes were learning to call millionaires. An Irish banker named Richard Cantillon traded the mania without believing in it and moved the winnings into monies the printer could not reach. What he set down afterward, in one short book, is the mechanism the modern reader still lives inside: new money enters a country at a point, enriches whoever stands nearest that point, and reaches the man on a wage last of all.

The toll appears in no budget, is voted by no parliament, and is collected from people who never see the gate, which is why it has outlasted every reform aimed at it.

16 MIN READ · JULY 1, 2026

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A man at a balcony’s ironwork balustrade letting a share sheet fall to the crowd below, the paper fluttering, a detail of the essay’s cover engraving; Rue Quinquempoix en l’année 1720, drawn and engraved by Antoine Humblot, published at Paris in 1720. Rijksmuseum.

III

Markets · Monetary Theory

Of Coin, Cannon and Code

An anatomy of the three engines that quietly govern the modern world: its money, its wars, and the rules by which it is taught to consent. A long-form examination of the Financial, Military, and Technical Industrial Complexes, the hierarchy that binds them, and the exit that remains.

A reserve currency is born in a coffee house, raised by a navy, and buried by an accountant.

24 MIN READ · APRIL 23, 2026

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The bored muzzle of a great cannon in the gun-founders' workshop, a detail of the essay's cover engraving; plate three of the Nova Reperta, inscribed Pulvis Pyrius, engraved by Theodor Galle after Stradanus. National Gallery of Art, Washington.

II

Austrian Economics · Monetary Theory

Deflation, the Bogeyman

For the better part of a century, the word “deflation” has been wielded like a talisman to justify endless money creation and the slow impoverishment of savers. But what if the story has been told backwards? What if deflation is not the disease, but the cure that a sick system refuses to take?

The inflation, it turns out, is in the money, not in the things.

18 MIN READ · MARCH 1, 2026

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A Bessemer converter in full blast, its spark fountain rising over the slag mound, a detail of the essay's cover engraving; Making Bessemer Steel at Pittsburgh, drawn by Charles Graham for Harper's Weekly, April 10, 1886. Library of Congress.

I

Monetary Theory · Philosophy

What is Money?

For over a century, two schools of monetary thought have waged a quiet war over the most deceptively simple question in all of economics. One traced the answer to the marketplace and the search for a universally saleable good; the other, to the ancient tablets where debts were first inscribed. Both were right, and both were wrong.

If money is a ledger, then controlling the ledger means controlling the economy.

18 MIN READ · FEBRUARY 28, 2026

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The receiver-general in his fur cap writing in a great account book, the assayer’s balance hanging beside him, a detail of the essay’s cover engraving; Rembrandt’s Gold Weigher, his 1639 etching of Jan Uytenbogaert at Amsterdam. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.