The main assembly was packed as the doors closed behind the Right Reverend Sage. He continued to huff down the side corridor of the main sanctuary with the determination of Pheidippides. He was not there to declare victory like that runner from the Battle of Marathon who broadcast Sparta’s victory over the Persians. He was there to speak a warning, something he had considered for several weeks, but now had the determination and will to confront those church members, many of whom would not agree with or like the message. They were ready and opened up their Gospel of Austrian Economics (the titles of each book contained inside the PDF) in anticipation of what Reverend Sage was about to pontificate on.
“Brethren, it is time that we talked about the deepest meanings of Saint Carl Menger’s words about the principles of subjective value and how that has been fully perverted, especially now, as we approach 2026! Open your Gospels to First Menger!”
There was a rumbling as the books opened, even the kid up front disappointed that the pretty blonde did not show up for the service, shifted his concentration on what the Right Reverend Sage was about to throw down. The screens behind the pulpit were now fully illuminated, and the charts were coming into focus.
“Taken from the forward of Saint Menger’s masterwork ‘Principles of Economics‘, Ludwig Von Mises said: ”
“Menger favored an approach that was deductive, teleological, and, in a primary sense, humanistic. While Menger shared his contemporaries’ preference for abstract reasoning, he was primarily interested in explaining the real world actions of real people, not in creating artificial, stylized representations of reality. Economics, for Menger, is the study of purposeful human choice, the relationship between means and ends. “All things are subject to the law of cause and effect,” he begins his treatise. “This great principle knows no exception.” Jevons and Walras rejected cause and effect in favor of simultaneous determination, the technique of modeling complex relations as systems of simultaneous equations in which no variable “causes” another. Theirs has become the standard approach in contemporary economics, accepted by nearly all economists but the followers of Carl Menger. Menger sought to explain prices as the outcome of the purposeful, voluntary interactions of buyers and sellers, each guided by their own subjective evaluations of the usefulness of various goods and services (what we now call marginal utility, a term later coined by Friedrich von Wieser)”
“Brethren, because America has become addicted to convenience and removed the work it takes to feed and clothe ourselves daily to a few segments of the domestic and world economy, our government has slowly destroyed the mechanism of slow and rational wealth creation and market-based marginal utility by creating an entire welfare and entitlement state. That state makes people dependent upon its largess and not on individual choice or individual effort. In the process, all notions of value analysis and time value have been turned into a grab bag of forever-rising prices and the addition of FOMO (fear of missing out). FOMO captured an entire nation in its evil vortex! Deflation and disinflation, necessary actions for price to move through in a market economy that responds to natural cycles, are eliminated at the expense of the real value investors who understand their local and regional markets and make rational longer-term (6 months or more) decisions about where to invest for a positive outcome. That perversion of market process leads to zombie companies using cheap money to provide worthless product and distorts true economic value and business enterprise value!”
The right reverend Sage then pointed to a large screen on the right behind the pulpit.
“Do the accelerated levels of money supply in this nation making sense to you? Whose notion of marginal utility does it represent? The public’s or a financier’s?”
“And what is worse, does the manic accumulation of national debt make sense to you? Would any business or private individual increase debt levels in such an accelerated rate, nearly all of which has happened in the last 15 years, while the republic reaches its 249th birthday? Could individuals or small businesses survive such an accumulation without an eventual total collapse of positive cash flow or earnings? I think NOT!”
“Remember brethren, a nation’s currency is to remain stable in terms of its intrinsic value, backed by a specie of some kind that is limited in supply and is considered valuable in any market place. At the beginning of the United States of America as a republic, the value of the United States Dollar was pegged at 371.25 grains of pure silver or 24.75 grains of pure gold (a 15:1 silver-to-gold ratio) by the Coinage Act of 1792. In 2025 U.S. Dollars, the original value of the dollar was 1.03125 troy ounces, and on Friday’s price of 3,289.70/troy ounce of gold, would be worth $3392.50 today. But what happened?
“Of course, over time, government began to devalue the dollar particularly during and after the Civil War and into the 1930s and ending with complete abandonment of the gold standard under Richard Nixon, as he used his agreements to get crude oil priced in dollars by the Saudi Arabian government in exchange for defense agreements in August of 1971, establishing the “petro-dollar” as the currency of choice among oil trading nations. To see this progression, read your handout. That virtually guaranteed that the United States Dollar would be the lone currency used in world trade, as oil was foundational to the lifeblood of any economy. As the Doomberg Postulate states, ‘Energy is life!’
“Having seen the first move toward a permanent entitlement state created by Lyndon Baines Johnson with Medicare/Medicaid and “The Great Society” programs, that too was added to the debt, some 22 trillion U.S. dollars over all, and it was paid for by tax dollars and not directly by productive activity. Our wild and ungoverned “defense spending” is also a problem, one that I will also cover soon.”
“Since the U.S. Dollar is now basically a valueless or in fact worthless currency, let’s do a thought exercise for a moment. If we could compare median family income in any one year to the price of gold over time, how could be calculate the equivalent buying power of median family income over time? THIS is how!:”
The formula would look like this: (and this formula jumped on the center screen, causing many to begin mumbling in the background as they read it.)
“Through this formula, you can now look across vast stretches of time to see the real buying power that an American family had at any one point in time! The results will SHOCK you brethren!”
There was even more chatter in the crowd as it seemed the center screen had for some reason locked up. Those mumbles turned to loud shrieks as these numbers appeared:
“You see brethren, in the year of our Lord 2025, you are 4.37 times POORER NOW than you were in the depression year of 1920. Your relative purchasing power even in the years just after World War I were nearly $352,313 as opposed to the equivalent buying power of $80,610 dollars today! We were in the midst of a post war DEPRESSION in 1920, one of the deepest and the shortest in American history!”
“Now, given this information comparing a scarce and valuable specie to today’s median income, can you now understand why these facts about Gen Z are true?”
How in the world should anyone need assistance with food in a nation so blessed with agricultural and natural bounties that it can produce like no other nation in the history of mankind? Is it because of those evil Democrats or those selfish Republicans? How can that be, when you see THIS chart?
“This chart is missing a couple of essential lines of course, but the answer is quite clear, the criminal accumulation of debt is caused by the cabal of BOTH MAJOR PARTIES as red represents Republican federal debt addition and blue represents Democratic federal debt addition since 1977!
Now brethren, peer into the U.S. Debt Clock!: (and this showed up on the center screen):
“As you can see. currently, each one of you, if you are a citizen of the United States, individually owe over 108,000 United States Dollars! If you are a family of four, you are bankrupt if your income does not exceed $432,000 dollars or your net worth does not exceed that level! The other thing to realize is that next years Congressional budget office projection is that passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill” will lead to an added debt load of nearly $3 trillion more dollars, driving national debt to over $40 trillion dollars! That is another 8% increase, and much of that will be printed to pay these debts! That is implicit inflation built in before anything is spent. This is not a Biden or a Trump problem, it is an undisciplined and imbalanced spending problem!”
The crowd, somewhat partisan on both sides, began grumbling and arguing and the Right Reverend Sage would up again to quell the disquiet among the congregation.
“And yet many talk show hosts boast that inflation is falling below 2%? That is BALDERDASH, brethren! The fuse of inflation is fully lit and expanding!”
“And what is most frightening, brethren, is that according to Kiplinger’s magazine, the median IRA accounts are woefully short if people wish to live a 30-year or longer retirement on what savings they have, and those savings are not growing fast enough to capture the built in inflation of debt expansion. At the current time, a comfortable retirement is out or reach for most every American!”
“The current debt crisis foundations are not found in human action, but in the meddling of governmental and corporate elites that have stripped America of its wealth. First, it must be exposed! And I think I have done so, in a little more depth than you may have understood before.”
But HOW did we get here? The answer will upset many of you and will have you upset with me, but the Right Reverend has his big boy pants on, and I will elaborate fully as to how it is happening and how it WILL STILL HAPPEN until it cannot any further!”
The congregation, a rather civil but also partisan bunch, were grumbling as the Right Reverend Sage carried on, and they were partly angered by the heat in the main sanctuary, but they were also considering the fire about what was to come, and some might not be willing to put up with it.
I have to leave it here for now, but the series will continue, and I will discuss the financialization of your wealth into the hands of criminal elites and HOW it has been and is STILL being done.
Thank you for supporting the Buffalo Trader’s Writing Desk! I will continue to cover some diverse topics and some of my own personal opinions about economics, investments, and life in general. I know I will piss a few of you off, but I think that is a good thing. If it helps you to consider a new perspective, getting pissed off just might be just what the doctor ordered! At any rate, thank you for reading! I want to find my 1000 readers willing to pay $8 a month to read what I write. I am still on that quest!
(I may at some point write a series of books, aimed at newbies to the subject of economics called “The Gospel of Austrian Economics” that can cover essential parts of the practical aspects of that subject matter. It is not taught in public schools, but it should be. It might be the only way to save the republic from authoritarian claptrap.)
Excellent!