Investors had their eyes to the skies last Friday riding Elon’s SpaceX rocket, making him the world’s first trillionaire. John D. Rockefeller was the first billionaire 110 years ago, and according to CoPilot Search the first millionaire was the world’s first Keynesian, long before Keynes’s birth, John Law whose “innovative financial schemes involved issuing paper money and trading shares, which allowed him to amass immense wealth, making him one of Europe’s first recognized millionaires,” in the early 18th century. Of course, he died broke after the Mississippi Bubble collapsed.
Both John Law and Elon Musk earned their fortunes under fiat money systems. Rockefeller earned his under a gold standard.
So, the early 1700’s –first millionaire, the early 1900’s-first billionaire, and 2026-first trillionaire. It took half the time to go from billionaire to trillionaire. How long until the first quadrillionaire? At this rate, maybe 50 years.
It seems impossible, but consider what Ryan McMaken wrote recently on mises.org, “Since 2009, in the wake of the global financial crisis, more than $12 trillion of the current money supply has been created. In other words, nearly two-thirds of the total existing money supply has been created just in the past thirteen years.”
There seems to be no stopping the Federal Reserve and the world’s other central banks. As more money is created out of thin air last year there were over 22–24 million millionaires in the U.S., nearly 1 in 10 adults.
But, the moniker millionaire, billionaire, and trillionaire are just a reflection of inflation. The “wealth gap” and the “K-shaped” economy are caused by money creation. As Murray Rothbard wrote, “Inflation, therefore, lowers the general standard of living in the very course of creating a tinsel atmosphere of ‘prosperity.’”
L. Albert Hahn wrote that fiat money and Keynesian economics policy, “represents not only illusionary economics but an ‘economics of illusion’ in a very specific sense. For it presupposes an economy whose members do not see through the changes brought about by monetary or fiscal manipulation—or, as some might say, the swindle. Above all, it presupposes that people are blinded by the idea that the value of money is stable—by the ‘money illusion,’ as Irving Fisher called it.”
When I was an adjunct instructor at Troy University and Georgia Military College, I was stunned by the number of students who thought the U.S. dollar was backed by gold. These days, my physical therapist was shocked when I told her, in between balance exercises, that money was created out of nowhere.
Last Friday someone posted on Linkedin “Happy SpaceX Day! It’s a great day for capitalism, liberty, America, and humanity!” Not hardly.
Rothbard defined our choices long ago.“… the issue is a stark one: we can either return to gold or we can pursue the fiat path and return to barter. It is perhaps not hyperbole to say that civilization itself is at stake in our decision.”
