I graduated from high school in 1971 and attended college for three years, through 1974, yet, during all of that time, the names of these two prominent economists were never mentioned, not even once, and I took economics in high school and college. The names Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson were common, especially the latter. As a matter of fact, Samuelson’s book, “Economics” was used as a textbook in both my high school and college economics classes. Incidentally, Hayek won he Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, shared with Keynesian-leaning Gunnar Myrdal.

Later on, after dropping out of college, for reasons that seemed obvious to me if no one else (Syracuse’s standards were far below adequate), I began looking into economic matters. Having always been a student of the stock market and money in general, I took upon the task of self-educating in the rigors of economics. This pursuit began after years spent in the business world, around 1999, and continues to this day.

The primary reason I began an economics study was my suspicion that the U.S. economy was rigged, corrupted, and designed not to reward enterprise and achievement, but to punish those who strove for something better through taxation and over-regulation. In 1999, after 46 years on the planet and a series of business start-ups and failures, I had given up on trying to engage the system, my path leading to working around it instead of within it.

I went through a number of years of severe hardship, barely making ends meet, but, by persevering, finally found solid footing around the time of my father’s death in 2009. Together we had made some worthwhile investments and gambling profits playing puts and calls on individual stocks. Just before he died, my father handed over his small collection of silver, which included Morgan silver dollars and some pre-1964 quarters. The total value of the collection at the time was probably less than $150. Today, it’s worth considerably more, and I still have all of it.

Somewhere in the early 2000s, I discovered the Austrians - von Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, Henry Hazlitt - and my questioning of the Western economies was heightened. There was a very good reason the Austrians were never mentioned in high school, colleges, or in polite conversations at exclusive clubs. They weren’t Keynesians and they favored a system that didn’t include suppression of gold and silver, fractional reserve banking, central banks, and fiat currencies. The parties in power - not Democrats and Republicans, but the real power brokers within the circle of the Federal Reserve - treated them as heretics, unsupportive of the lend and spend notions favored by followers of Keynes, whose political and economic theories shaped the world after World War II.

Not to get too deep into the woods here with comparisons of economic theories, it occurred to me, after reading an essay by Murray Rothbard, “The Case for a 100 Percent Gold Dollar”, that for most of my life, since my birth in 1953 to the present, I’ve been living in an unfair economic system and still am today. Free enterprise, free markets, free thinking, and meritocracy were systematically downgraded, replaced, and nearly criminalized by central banking, government regulation, taxes, fiat currency, and Keynesian economics until what exists today is a centrally-planned economy in which Americans are “workers” or “consumers” rather than entrepreneurs and business builders.

Certainly, there have been success stories of great magnitude from the 1950s through the 2020s, but they have grown fewer and further between. The panopticon of licensing, fees, taxes, regulations and reporting burdens faced by small business enterprises today is overwhelming, to the point of exhaustion before one even has a letterhead or logo designed. It was easier in the 1960s and 70s. Today, it’s a blur of paperwork and filings that take up more and more of a businessman’s valuable time. Starting a business and running a business in America has become an oddity rather than a standard, and that’s even before facing an unsure market for goods and/or services and pressure from corporate competitors in every conceivable niche or market segment.

Over the years, legislation has been written by big enterprises, passed along to politicians and enacted into law, codifying regulations in every sector, favoring size over innovation and creating barriers to competition. The business world is ruled by big companies. Smaller ones are denied entry into markets, buried under process, and kept from gaining share by local regulations and courts. The days of mom-and-pop shops, DBAs and partnerships are long gone. The shutdown of hundreds of thousands of small enterprises nationally during COVID proved that the system is ultimately rigged against free enterprise and small business. The popular PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) loans were abused. The SBA’s own Inspector General estimated more than $200 billion in potentially fraudulent pandemic loans across PPP and the related EIDL program. Well-connected recipients like the LA Lakers and Shake Shack also took loans, and some returned them under public pressure. Some of the elite took advantage of public money and government largesse to enhance their wealth. According to ProPublica, of $793 billion in loans approved, $763 billion was forgiven, a public bailout to many people and companies that didn’t even need the money.

Many of the pandemic’s temporary forced business closures became permanent. A Federal Reserve study counted some 200,000 businesses that closed and never reopened, mostly the small, local kind. Market share and more money flowed to big businesses. Fast food operations replaced family-run diners and restaurants. Community banks were gobbled up by megabucks. Hairdressers and barber shops fell victim to Great Clips and Super Cuts franchises. Whether by design or not, the result is the same: to turn American entrepreneurs into bankruptcy petitioners… and, it’s working.

Here at idleguy.com, I say, piss on them all, from the government bureaucrats to the Federal Reserve governors, to the SEC insiders who favor the too-big-to fail Walmarts and JP Morgans of the world. I’ll keep fighting the fight for freedom and economic liberty as a happy warrior questing for the return of real money. I’m not the only one who lived a life under an economic system that punishes creativity and individualism. Sometimes, I feel like Don Quixote, tilting at the windmills of banking and bureaucracy. Through it all, I end up being not so much a legend of futility, but more of an Everyman.

Featured in this month’s idleguy.com are free downloads of Friedrich August von Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” and Ludwig Heinrich von Mises’ “Human Action” on page 10 Books.

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