Economics
Scientists often misuse words with multiple meanings. For instance, economists use terms like “debt,” “deficit,” “borrow,” “trust fund,” “taxes,” and “insolvent.” These words each can mean very different things when applied to a Monetarily Sovereign government (the U.S., Canada, Australia, the UK, etc.) versus a monetarily non-sovereign entity (you, New York, Walmart, France) etc.)
In the case of the U.S. government:
- Federal “debt” represents savings and is not a burden on the government.
- Federal taxes do not fund federal spending; the government does not spend “taxpayers’ dollars.”
- Federal “deficits” are necessary for economic growth and also are not a burden; they add growth dollars to the economy.
- The federal government does not “borrow” dollars but has the unlimited ability to create them through legislation and simple computer entries.
- A federal “trust fund” is not like a private trust fund, but instead it’s just a line item on a balance sheet, entirely controlled by the federal government.
- Neither the federal government, nor its agencies can become “insolvent” with regard to dollars. For example, Medicare cannot run short of dollars unless the government wills it.
Economists often treat inflation as a “too much money” or an “excessive demand” problem, while ignoring the historical reality that shortages in energy, food, housing, and production capacity are the main culprits.
The Federal Reserve’s approach to tackling inflation—raising interest rates—aims to curb demand by making it harder for everyday people to spend. While higher rates can may cut borrowing, they slow economic growth, drive up costs, shift income toward the wealthy, and do nothing to address shortages in oil, food, housing, or infrastructure.
No major inflationary episodes, including the 1970s stagflation, Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela, were caused by “money printing,” but rather by collapses in productive capacity, food production, energy supply, or other supply chains.
Yet popular wisdom holds that “too much money” is the cause of inflation, and the solution is to reduce the money supply. But because inflation is fundamentally about shortages, suppressing demand rather than expanding production amounts to applying leeches to cure anemia.
More specifically, inflation has been caused by shortages in foundational resources, especially energy. Oil prices and inflation move strikingly together because energy permeates transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, and nearly every economic activity.
Economics is a field in which failed predictions often survive because if a policy fails, economists claim it was not applied strongly enough or that outside variables interfered.
Example: to cure inflation, Ben Bernanke raised interest rates. When that worsened inflation, he raised them again. And again. And again. More leeches; worse anemia. Finally, inflation was cured when more oil began to flow.
Today, the Fed continues the same interest rate tradition.
Then consider tariffs. Under Donald Trump they are an example of policies that supporters defend regardless of contradictory outcomes. The deeper critique is that societies increasingly manipulate financial systems while neglecting real productive capacity.
Just as terms like “federal debt” and “trust fund” confuse, so do “dark energy,” “dark matter,” “wave-particle duality,” and “entanglement” mislead and conceal our ignorance. “Dark energy” is a phrase meaning, essentially, “the unknown thing causing cosmic acceleration.”
Once science names something, people often assume it has been explained, when in fact the label may merely restate the mystery in an inappropriate way.
The most difficult question in cosmology is not “what?” or “how?” but “why?” Science leans at describing mechanisms and patterns, but every explanation eventually terminates in another “why?”
One thought: perhaps the universe exists the way it does because it could not exist any other way. Entanglement, quantum uncertainty, physical laws, and even infinity itself may not be arbitrary oddities but necessary conditions for a stable, persistent universe.
Reality itself might be a mechanism for exploring “possibility space,” with unstable configurations disappearing while stable patterns persist. Evolution would then not merely occur on Earth or within the universe but characterize the universe itself. Laws, structures, and even physical constants might emerge through a kind of cosmic selection process.
Success = failure × infinity + 1. Nature does not seek perfect solutions, only solutions that survive. Thus, perhaps the universe itself is a giant computational or exploratory process repeatedly asking, “What if?”
Life, intelligence, and consciousness can be seen as the universe’s way to look at itself. Humans ask “why?” because the universe developed beings capable asking that question. This “theo-cosmology,” imagines that if God exists, they didn’t create a finished universe but one that’s constantly searching. In this view, the universe isn’t a solved equation, but an ongoing Darwinian journey of exploration and possibility.
“What/how?” leads to “What if?” which leads to “Why?” which leads to “Then what?” which generates a new “What/how?” This endless cycle contrasts with oblivion, the only true stopping point where no questions, no history, and no persistence remain.
Existence therefore can be framed not as a static noun but as an ongoing process—a continual conversion of possibility into history.
We learn by analogy. metaphor and simile. (A is a B and like a C.”) In each case, a less familiar thing is compared to a more familiar thing to clarify the less familiar thing. The two things are not identical, just comparable. We cannot learn anything if there is nothing familiar to which it is compared.
Because we have no word for exactly what an electron is, we give it the word, “particle,” though current belief is that the electron is nothing at all like a tiny piece of matter.
An atom often is pictured as a miniature solar system, with electrons circling protons. It is not like that. “So,” you might ask, “what does an atom “look like?” That very question begs for an analogy.
So does the question, “What is magnetism made of?”
We cannot understand how quantum entanglement works because it is not “like” anything we have experienced. And we describe the “wave-particle duality” as something that often “acts like” a wave acts and also “acts like” a particle acts. But “acts like” is not the same as “is.”
Consider pain, “Sharp” pain is not sharp in the way we understand something like a razor being sharp. In fact, being cut by a razor causes a pain that is different from a “sharp” pain. We don’t have a word for that pain.
In a similar vein, we are given the false analogy of “federal debt as being like personal debt,” though the two have virtually nothing in common.
Just as good analogy supports learning, a false analogy supports ignorance. Believing that federal debt is similar to personal debt, and electrons are similar to particles– that is like choosing the wrong fork in a road. It not only will not take you to your goal, but actually diverts you, taking you farther from your destination.
If I say, “she is the apple of his eye,” I expect you to understand that the word “apple” has different meanings. But President Obama once said, “If a family must live within its means, the federal government should live within its means.” He wanted you to believe falsely, that “means” for the federal government has the same restraints as does “means” for a family.
When you hear worries about the size of the federal “debt,” it can distract you from the fact that a growing federal debt (which is net dollars created by the federal government) boosts the economy, while reducing federal debt leads to recessions and depressions.
History shows that almost every recession has followed the lack of federal deficit growth, and every depression has followed reductions in federal debt.
When faced with the analogy, “A is like B,” we must ask ourselves, “Does that analogy apply in this particular case?” Or is it just a polysemic similarity — one word with different meanings.
The phrase “I am my history” captures a powerful idea: identity is the sum of accumulated experiences. This notion applies not only to individuals but also to civilizations, species, and even the universe. The universe isn’t apart from its past—it is its past.
You are different from me. From our beginnings, we have different histories. You also are different from a tree, the ocean, the Earth, the Sun . . . All have different histories and are defined by those differences — and for many of our differences, we have no words, no analogies, nothing that tells us what a thought looks like or what love tastes like.
The innocent child, who repeatedly asks “why?” eventually destabilizes every explanatory system because every answer generates another deeper question. Science, philosophy, economics, and religion all eventually reach a point where they can only say, “That’s just the way things are.”
The refusal to stop questioning is the essence of intelligence itself. We each have scant control over our histories, along with scant control over the illusion of control.
Begin with understanding that federal debt is completely unlike personal debt. And those who tell you otherwise are simply wrong.
Don’t be held hostage by semantics.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty
Twitter: @rodgermitchell
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https://www.academia.edu/
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