The Logic of Everything. The Truth of Nothing.
How a logical fallacy, weaponized for two centuries, is turning the planet into a digital Alcatraz.
Imagine a famous economist who proves that giving all the money to twelve people will make everyone richer. The assumptions: the twelve are perfectly rational, markets always clear, there are no banks, and the twelve have promised, on their honor, to share. The model wins a Nobel Prize. Ninety-nine percent of all economists agree it is flawless. The twelve — being perfectly rational — do not share. The central banks scam the rest. Forty years later, when ninety percent of the population is living on the economic equivalent of carpet lint, a second equally prominent economist publishes a paper explaining that the model was correct — but the ninety percent were insufficiently rational to accept their role in it. A third economist is already working on the solution. He is being funded by the twelve.
Far-fetched? The opposite. The model is structurally identical to the ones governing policy for over a century — in economics, monetary policy, public health, climate science, agriculture, demography, development aid, criminal justice, education, real estate, pharmaceuticals, defense procurement, surveillance technology, and foreign affairs. The only difference is that the real models are more sophisticated, which makes the absurdity harder to spot.
The mechanism is always the same. Step one: list a sufficient number of assumptions, however improbable, to make any crazy shit that serves your goal sound logical. Step two: buy the institutions, the credentials, and the peer reviewers to confirm the model is valid. Step three: run the world at your leisure. Simpler than building an X-wing Lego model — if you have the necessary dough.
Once you see the logic employed in one industry or government regulation, you begin to see it everywhere. Then, if you’re even halfway conscious, you become aghast. You can’t unsee it. You realize, without doubt, that you’re getting FCKD. For what, exactly, and why?
THE INITIATION
At least two years of my life were wasted in an American business school chasing an MBA — an illusory degree not a single soul subsequently asked me for, or that benefited me in any shape or form, except in one short moment that came decades later. A light beam washed over me one early sleepless morning with the realization that most of my life had been spent in programs that normalized absurdity with arbitrary assumptions, for someone else’s benefit. Sixteen years of formal education to survive and exploit modern zero-sum games. I had swallowed all of it.
Holy mother.
What a joke. I was.
The last graduate university I attended in the US was a recruitment hotspot for AT&T and the CIA. I was approached from both corners — probably because I spoke languages and had the perfect signature for a successful psychopath. To the off-the-hinges party crew I ran with, the AT&T headhunters were walking corpses in grey suits. The spooks, on the other hand, knew how to blend. They controlled the grill stands where you could pick up a burger and a beer and drop into a genuine conversation. They wore beards, khaki shorts, and Hawaii shirts. They smiled a lot. They flipped patties, cracked jokes, and drilled into your Achilles heel. Easy to hang with, charismatic, likeable. It took me a while to figure out why, as a foreigner, I kept getting invites to their private dinners. I carried the right skill set. Namely, bullshit. I could crank out term papers, essays, and theses like toilet paper and still fetch B+ or A- for friends too occupied to bother with grades (I got compensated with free drinks at the local pool bar).
I had also excelled in an advanced finance class, where I extracted the highest profit from a developing nation in an economic simulation game. I didn’t officially win — the simulated economy crashed shortly after — but I was applauded anyway. I had walked away with a simulated gazillion.
I carried the optimal mindset to serve the uberlords. I believed that lying and deception were legitimate tools of progress, as long as they had a shot at becoming non-lies sometime in the future. All I had to do was justify the odds to myself — after that, no holds barred. Projection is not deception, I used to tell my less initiated colleagues.
College was a disaster for my liver and a cornucopia for my hormones. The party never stopped, it just took pauses in seminar rooms where grey old men with downward-facing smiles lectured us about statistics, marketing, finance, micro-macro economics, free trade, the invisible hand — all of it — while visibly contemplating their inevitable seppuku, judging by their facial muscles.
My guess: they didn‘t believe any of it.
Many of my friends went on believing all of it — becoming CEOs, bankers, wheeler-dealers, spooks — without a single suspicion about the core deception, otherwise known as…
RICARDO’S VICE
David Ricardo, known in economics as the father of free trade, was a bond trader in the City of London in the early nineteenth century. He was also the second-richest man in Britain, working in the orbit of Nathan Rothschild — the richest man in Britain. In 1815, as Napoleon met Wellington at Waterloo and the outcome of European history hung on a single afternoon, Ricardo was going long on British government paper, whose value had collapsed on rumors of a French victory. Rothschild’s agents carried the inside scoop, since they financed both sides of the war. The bonds were bought at rock bottom. Wellington won. The bonds recovered. Ricardo retired dirt rich, bought a 700-acre estate in Gloucestershire, and spent the rest of his leisurely life inventing modern economics with ancient brandy. Whether Nathan had a say in the work — study the wealth distribution that followed and decide for yourself.
Ricardo’s free trade model would govern global trade policy for two centuries — justifying the IMF’s prescriptions for developing nations, underpinning the consensus that moved manufacturing from America to China, serving as the philosophical foundation for the argument that markets, left alone, produce optimal outcomes for everyone.
Let‘s pause here for a moment. Did you get that? The man who made his fortune as a bond trader, working for the most powerful banking dynasty in European history, during a pivotal moment of information asymmetry between bankers and governments — built an economic framework in which banks do not appear. In which credit creation does not exist. In which the single most powerful lever in any economy — the decision about who gets money, for what purpose, at what price — is simply absent.
Not just that. Ricardo’s model requires eight to ten assumptions to hold simultaneously for the conclusion to be valid. Perfect information, complete markets, rational actors, zero transaction costs, freely mobile capital and labor, no externalities, competitive equilibrium, no power asymmetries. According to Richard Werner — Oxford-trained economist, author of Princes of the Yen, coiner of the term quantitative easing, and a man who has spent thirty years documenting what central banks actually do versus what they claim to do — each assumption has a probability of being true in the real world of less than one percent. The joint probability of all eight holding simultaneously is 0.01 raised to the eighth power. A decimal point followed by fifteen zeros and then a one. The model has never, at any point in human history, described a market that actually exists.
But it gets even nastier than the math. Ricardo’s comparative advantage theory tells developing countries to specialize in whatever they already produce. Grow cocoa. Mine copper. Don’t build factories — the math says you’re better off trading raw materials for manufactured goods from countries that already have them. Internally consistent. The outcome, documented across two centuries by economists Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer, is a trap. Commodity exporters face continuously declining terms of trade, getting relatively less for what they sell and paying relatively more for what they buy, every decade, indefinitely. Free trade faithfully applied locks poor countries into the bottom of the value chain and calls it optimal. Every country that escaped poverty — Germany, Japan, South Korea, China — ignored Ricardo completely, protected its infant industries, directed credit to manufacturing, and built the factories first. The model that keeps poor countries poor is the same model the IMF enforces as a condition of the loans those countries need to survive. David and Nathan would have approved. They understood exactly how compounding interest works.
But the logic is perfect.
This is Ricardo’s Vice. The practice of selecting your conclusion first, constructing assumptions that make your mathematics arrive there, and presenting the internally consistent logic as empirical truth about the world.
Yet. Logic is not truth. If there is one thing worth passing to our children, it is those four words.
THE VICE IN DEPLOYMENT
Ricardo’s Vice has penetrated every discipline we can name, to the point where it has become the algorithmic fence of our reality. Every day the fence closes in a little more — normalized absurdity delivered in careful increments. You can’t drop a load of bullshit on a population in one go. You microdose it, gently, over decades, until they forget what it smells like.
Examples.
CO2: The Gas of Life Becomes Public Enemy Number One
The assumption: carbon dioxide, the molecule plants breathe and without which the food chain collapses within weeks, is destroying the planet.
The weaponization: thirty years of energy policy, carbon taxation, and the systematic dismantling of energy infrastructure across the developed world.
The beneficiaries: carbon credit markets worth trillions, ESG frameworks concentrating capital in fewer hands, energy poverty normalized as virtue, and national energy independence rebranded as environmental irresponsibility.
Pandemics and Vaccines: The Vice in a Lab Coat
The assumption: two months of trial data establishes long-term vaccine safety and durable protection.
The weaponization: global emergency authorization of novel mRNA technology, liability-free mandates, and the suppression of every safety signal that followed — including peer-reviewed findings by some of the most credentialed voices in cardiology.
The beneficiaries: pharmaceutical companies shielded from liability, governments normalized to emergency powers, and the permanent transfer of wealth from small businesses to large platforms.
Population: The Original Vice
The assumption: population grows faster than food supply, therefore starvation is mathematically inevitable. Written in 1798. Wrong for 225 years.
The weaponization: two centuries of population control policy — from colonial India to China’s forced sterilizations — built on models commissioned by the institutions with the most to gain from fewer people.
The beneficiaries: a global institutional framework for fertility control, and the systematic demographic weakening of any population growing fast enough to threaten the arrangement.
Medicine: You Are What You Don’t Eat
The assumption: dietary fat causes heart disease — derived from six countries, out of a dataset of twenty-two, selected because they agreed.
The weaponization: fifty years of dietary guidelines replacing saturated fat with seed oils and refined carbohydrates, enforced by the same committee the author sat on.
The beneficiaries: the processed food industry, seed oil manufacturers, and a pharmaceutical sector selling lifetime treatments for the chronic diseases the guidelines produced.
Finance: The Crashless Market
The assumption: markets don’t crash — the load-bearing premise of the derivatives industry and its Nobel Prize-winning pricing models.
The weaponization: leverage at a scale that made the entire global financial system contingent on an assumption that reality periodically, violently disproves.
The beneficiaries: the institutions bailed out when it did. Not the homeowners.
Development Economics: The Poverty Trap
The assumption: free trade and austerity produce economic growth in developing nations.
The weaponization: IMF loan conditionality imposing on poor countries the precise policies no rich country ever used to get rich — while blocking the industrial policy and directed credit that every actual economic miracle required.
The beneficiaries: foreign investors acquiring privatized assets at distressed prices, and the permanent debt dependence of developing economies on the institutions extending the loans.
Monetary Policy: The Economy Without Banks
The assumption: an economy can be accurately modeled without banks or credit creation.
The weaponization: central bank policy built on models that could not see the 2008 crisis coming, followed by four trillion dollars in quantitative easing transferred from savers to financial institutions as the solution to a problem the models said couldn’t exist.
The beneficiaries: asset holders, financial institutions, and the quiet consolidation of credit creation power into fewer and fewer hands — six thousand European banks have disappeared since the ECB was founded.
Fourteen sectors. One mechanism. And that’s just the tip of the pyramid — which grows daily, covering every base, closing every gap, converging on the same endgame.
The FCKD Endgame
Ricardo‘s models are designed to prevent you from asking a specific type of question. Not even accidentally, dreaming, hallucinating, are you allowed to wonder about this one topic.
What would a world of genuinely thriving, sovereign, prosperous communities actually mean for the people at the top of the current arrangement?
Namely, a disaster. Because you cannot control prosperity. You can only control misery.
A genuinely thriving population — with access to productive credit, local decision-making, energy independence, and institutions accountable to the people they serve — has no need for the center. It does not need the IMF’s loans, because it generates its own capital. It does not need the central bank’s money, because it has its own. It does not need the approved narrative, because it can evaluate evidence for itself. Prosperous, educated, locally empowered people are, from the perspective of centralized control, essentially ungovernable. They have options. Options are the enemy of compliance.
This is why every successful decentralized model has been specifically targeted — not incidentally damaged, but specifically dismantled. Prussia’s small bank system. Germany’s Mittelstand. Japan’s cooperative banks. The Berlin-Baghdad Railway. The Belt and Road connections. Werner documents this in a recent interview with Joe Rogan. Six thousand European banks have disappeared since the ECB was founded. The ECB was modeled not on the Bundesbank — the most successful central bank in modern history, democratically accountable and growth-oriented — but on the Reichsbank, the privately owned, democratically unaccountable institution that ran Germany into hyperinflation and helped install Hitler. The choice was not accidental. The Bundesbank produced prosperity. The Reichsbank produced control.
Sovereignty is the specific target because sovereignty is the specific threat. A sovereign community generates its own prosperity. A dependent community consumes the prosperity the center permits. Ricardo’s Vice is the intellectual infrastructure that makes dependence look like freedom, scarcity look like inevitability, and the dismantling of every engine of broad prosperity look like the logical conclusion of impeccable mathematics.
Every war, every engineered famine, every manufactured financial crisis serves the same function: destroy whatever is equalizing wealth, return populations to dependence, and justify the next layer of central control as the logical response to the crisis. Werner’s reading of WWI is uncomfortable but documented: by 1914, Germany had built the most successful decentralized economy in the world — thousands of small local banks funding a thriving Mittelstand, scientific output dominating global publications, and a railway under construction from Berlin to Baghdad that would have connected German industry directly to Persian Gulf energy without ever touching a British-controlled sea lane. Werner argues, with evidence, that this — not the assassination of an archduke — was the actual casus belli. The war destroyed the German banking system, the railway, and roughly twenty million people. The threat of a prosperous, sovereign, energy-independent Germany was eliminated. Gulf of Tonkin built the American military-industrial apparatus for a generation. The WMD assessment in Iraq built the surveillance state. 9/11 normalized the suspension of civil liberties across the Western world. The 2008 crisis transferred four trillion dollars from citizens to banks. COVID built the biosecurity state and field-tested the infrastructure for programmable currency.
The energy infrastructure takedown deserves its own analysis, because it is the thread running from 1914 to the present. From the destruction of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway to the decades-long campaign to close European nuclear capacity, to the manufactured dependence on Russian gas, to the blowing up of Nord Stream in 2022, to the current war dismantling Belt and Road infrastructure across Iran — the single most consistent target across a century of geopolitical engineering has been energy independence. The country or region that controls its own energy controls its own destiny. Every major intervention since WWI has, one way or another, been an intervention against that control. Europe is now at the end of that trajectory. Energy prices that tripled after 2022 have not recovered. German industrial output is in structural decline. Agricultural input costs — fertilizer, fuel, transport — are compounding into food price inflation that is only beginning to register at the shelf. The projection for 2026 and beyond is not a prediction. It is arithmetic. And when the crisis is undeniable, when European governments are facing populations that cannot heat their homes or afford food, the helping hand will arrive. It will be digital. It will be conditional.
And it will be perfectly logical.
s, and the twelve have promised, on their honor, to share. The model wins a Nobel Prize. Ninety-nine percent of all economists agree it is flawless. The twelve — being perfectly rational — do not share. The central banks scam the rest. Forty years later, when ninety percent of the population is living on the economic equivalent of carpet lint, a second equally prominent economist publishes a paper explaining that the model was correct — but the ninety percent were insufficiently rational to accept their role in it. A third economist is already working on the solution. He is being funded by the twelve.
Far-fetched? The opposite. The model is structurally identical to the ones governing policy for over a century — in economics, monetary policy, public health, climate science, agriculture, demography, development aid, criminal justice, education, real estate, pharmaceuticals, defense procurement, surveillance technology, and foreign affairs. The only difference is that the real models are more sophisticated, which makes the absurdity harder to spot.
The mechanism is always the same. Step one: list a sufficient number of assumptions, however improbable, to make any crazy shit that serves your goal sound logical. Step two: buy the institutions, the credentials, and the peer reviewers to confirm the model is valid. Step three: run the world at your leisure. Simpler than building an X-wing Lego model — if you have the necessary dough.
Once you see the logic employed in one industry or government regulation, you begin to see it everywhere. Then, if you’re even halfway conscious, you become aghast. You can’t unsee it. You realize, without doubt, that you’re getting FCKD. For what, exactly, and why?
THE INITIATION
At least two years of my life were wasted in an American business school chasing an MBA — an illusory degree not a single soul subsequently asked me for, or that benefited me in any shape or form, except in one short moment that came decades later. A light beam washed over me one early sleepless morning with the realization that most of my life had been spent in programs that normalized absurdity with arbitrary assumptions, for someone else’s benefit. Sixteen years of formal education to survive and exploit modern zero-sum games. I had swallowed all of it.
Holy mother.
What a joke. I was.
The last graduate university I attended in the US was a recruitment hotspot for AT&T and the CIA. I was approached from both corners — probably because I spoke languages and had the perfect signature for a successful psychopath. To the off-the-hinges party crew I ran with, the AT&T headhunters were walking corpses in grey suits. The spooks, on the other hand, knew how to blend. They controlled the grill stands where you could pick up a burger and a beer and drop into a genuine conversation. They wore beards, khaki shorts, and Hawaii shirts. They smiled a lot. They flipped patties, cracked jokes, and drilled into your Achilles heel. Easy to hang with, charismatic, likeable. It took me a while to figure out why, as a foreigner, I kept getting invites to their private dinners. I carried the right skill set. Namely, bullshit. I could crank out term papers, essays, and theses like toilet paper and still fetch B+ or A- for friends too occupied to bother with grades (I got compensated with free drinks at the local pool bar).
I had also excelled in an advanced finance class, where I extracted the highest profit from a developing nation in an economic simulation game. I didn’t officially win — the simulated economy crashed shortly after — but I was applauded anyway. I had walked away with a simulated gazillion.
I carried the optimal mindset to serve the uberlords. I believed that lying and deception were legitimate tools of progress, as long as they had a shot at becoming non-lies sometime in the future. All I had to do was justify the odds to myself — after that, no holds barred. Projection is not deception, I used to tell my less initiated colleagues.
College was a disaster for my liver and a cornucopia for my hormones. The party never stopped, it just took pauses in seminar rooms where grey old men with downward-facing smiles lectured us about statistics, marketing, finance, micro-macro economics, free trade, the invisible hand — all of it — while visibly contemplating their inevitable seppuku, judging by their facial muscles.
My guess: they didn‘t believe any of it.
Many of my friends went on believing all of it — becoming CEOs, bankers, wheeler-dealers, spooks — without a single suspicion about the core deception, otherwise known as…
RICARDO’S VICE
David Ricardo, known in economics as the father of free trade, was a bond trader in the City of London in the early nineteenth century. He was also the second-richest man in Britain, working in the orbit of Nathan Rothschild — the richest man in Britain. In 1815, as Napoleon met Wellington at Waterloo and the outcome of European history hung on a single afternoon, Ricardo was going long on British government paper, whose value had collapsed on rumors of a French victory. Rothschild’s agents carried the inside scoop, since they financed both sides of the war. The bonds were bought at rock bottom. Wellington won. The bonds recovered. Ricardo retired dirt rich, bought a 700-acre estate in Gloucestershire, and spent the rest of his leisurely life inventing modern economics with ancient brandy. Whether Nathan had a say in the work — study the wealth distribution that followed and decide for yourself.
Ricardo’s free trade model would govern global trade policy for two centuries — justifying the IMF’s prescriptions for developing nations, underpinning the consensus that moved manufacturing from America to China, serving as the philosophical foundation for the argument that markets, left alone, produce optimal outcomes for everyone.
Let‘s pause here for a moment. Did you get that? The man who made his fortune as a bond trader, working for the most powerful banking dynasty in European history, during a pivotal moment of information asymmetry between bankers and governments — built an economic framework in which banks do not appear. In which credit creation does not exist. In which the single most powerful lever in any economy — the decision about who gets money, for what purpose, at what price — is simply absent.
Not just that. Ricardo’s model requires eight to ten assumptions to hold simultaneously for the conclusion to be valid. Perfect information, complete markets, rational actors, zero transaction costs, freely mobile capital and labor, no externalities, competitive equilibrium, no power asymmetries. According to Richard Werner — Oxford-trained economist, author of Princes of the Yen, coiner of the term quantitative easing, and a man who has spent thirty years documenting what central banks actually do versus what they claim to do — each assumption has a probability of being true in the real world of less than one percent. The joint probability of all eight holding simultaneously is 0.01 raised to the eighth power. A decimal point followed by fifteen zeros and then a one. The model has never, at any point in human history, described a market that actually exists.
But it gets even nastier than the math. Ricardo’s comparative advantage theory tells developing countries to specialize in whatever they already produce. Grow cocoa. Mine copper. Don’t build factories — the math says you’re better off trading raw materials for manufactured goods from countries that already have them. Internally consistent. The outcome, documented across two centuries by economists Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer, is a trap. Commodity exporters face continuously declining terms of trade, getting relatively less for what they sell and paying relatively more for what they buy, every decade, indefinitely. Free trade faithfully applied locks poor countries into the bottom of the value chain and calls it optimal. Every country that escaped poverty — Germany, Japan, South Korea, China — ignored Ricardo completely, protected its infant industries, directed credit to manufacturing, and built the factories first. The model that keeps poor countries poor is the same model the IMF enforces as a condition of the loans those countries need to survive. David and Nathan would have approved. They understood exactly how compounding interest works.
But the logic is perfect.
This is Ricardo’s Vice. The practice of selecting your conclusion first, constructing assumptions that make your mathematics arrive there, and presenting the internally consistent logic as empirical truth about the world.
Yet. Logic is not truth. If there is one thing worth passing to our children, it is those four words.
THE VICE IN DEPLOYMENT
Ricardo’s Vice has penetrated every discipline we can name, to the point where it has become the algorithmic fence of our reality. Every day the fence closes in a little more — normalized absurdity delivered in careful increments. You can’t drop a load of bullshit on a population in one go. You microdose it, gently, over decades, until they forget what it smells like.
Examples.
CO2: The Gas of Life Becomes Public Enemy Number One
The assumption: carbon dioxide, the molecule plants breathe and without which the food chain collapses within weeks, is destroying the planet.
The weaponization: thirty years of energy policy, carbon taxation, and the systematic dismantling of energy infrastructure across the developed world.
The beneficiaries: carbon credit markets worth trillions, ESG frameworks concentrating capital in fewer hands, energy poverty normalized as virtue, and national energy independence rebranded as environmental irresponsibility.
Pandemics and Vaccines: The Vice in a Lab Coat
The assumption: two months of trial data establishes long-term vaccine safety and durable protection.
The weaponization: global emergency authorization of novel mRNA technology, liability-free mandates, and the suppression of every safety signal that followed — including peer-reviewed findings by some of the most credentialed voices in cardiology.
The beneficiaries: pharmaceutical companies shielded from liability, governments normalized to emergency powers, and the permanent transfer of wealth from small businesses to large platforms.
Population: The Original Vice
The assumption: population grows faster than food supply, therefore starvation is mathematically inevitable. Written in 1798. Wrong for 225 years.
The weaponization: two centuries of population control policy — from colonial India to China’s forced sterilizations — built on models commissioned by the institutions with the most to gain from fewer people.
The beneficiaries: a global institutional framework for fertility control, and the systematic demographic weakening of any population growing fast enough to threaten the arrangement.
Medicine: You Are What You Don’t Eat
The assumption: dietary fat causes heart disease — derived from six countries, out of a dataset of twenty-two, selected because they agreed.
The weaponization: fifty years of dietary guidelines replacing saturated fat with seed oils and refined carbohydrates, enforced by the same committee the author sat on.
The beneficiaries: the processed food industry, seed oil manufacturers, and a pharmaceutical sector selling lifetime treatments for the chronic diseases the guidelines produced.
Finance: The Crashless Market
The assumption: markets don’t crash — the load-bearing premise of the derivatives industry and its Nobel Prize-winning pricing models.
The weaponization: leverage at a scale that made the entire global financial system contingent on an assumption that reality periodically, violently disproves.
The beneficiaries: the institutions bailed out when it did. Not the homeowners.
Development Economics: The Poverty Trap
The assumption: free trade and austerity produce economic growth in developing nations.
The weaponization: IMF loan conditionality imposing on poor countries the precise policies no rich country ever used to get rich — while blocking the industrial policy and directed credit that every actual economic miracle required.
The beneficiaries: foreign investors acquiring privatized assets at distressed prices, and the permanent debt dependence of developing economies on the institutions extending the loans.
Monetary Policy: The Economy Without Banks
The assumption: an economy can be accurately modeled without banks or credit creation.
The weaponization: central bank policy built on models that could not see the 2008 crisis coming, followed by four trillion dollars in quantitative easing transferred from savers to financial institutions as the solution to a problem the models said couldn’t exist.
The beneficiaries: asset holders, financial institutions, and the quiet consolidation of credit creation power into fewer and fewer hands — six thousand European banks have disappeared since the ECB was founded.
Fourteen sectors. One mechanism. And that’s just the tip of the pyramid — which grows daily, covering every base, closing every gap, converging on the same endgame.
The FCKD Endgame
Ricardo‘s models are designed to prevent you from asking a specific type of question. Not even accidentally, dreaming, hallucinating, are you allowed to wonder about this one topic.
What would a world of genuinely thriving, sovereign, prosperous communities actually mean for the people at the top of the current arrangement?
Namely, a disaster. Because you cannot control prosperity. You can only control misery.
A genuinely thriving population — with access to productive credit, local decision-making, energy independence, and institutions accountable to the people they serve — has no need for the center. It does not need the IMF’s loans, because it generates its own capital. It does not need the central bank’s money, because it has its own. It does not need the approved narrative, because it can evaluate evidence for itself. Prosperous, educated, locally empowered people are, from the perspective of centralized control, essentially ungovernable. They have options. Options are the enemy of compliance.
This is why every successful decentralized model has been specifically targeted — not incidentally damaged, but specifically dismantled. Prussia’s small bank system. Germany’s Mittelstand. Japan’s cooperative banks. The Berlin-Baghdad Railway. The Belt and Road connections. Werner documents this in a recent interview with Joe Rogan. Six thousand European banks have disappeared since the ECB was founded. The ECB was modeled not on the Bundesbank — the most successful central bank in modern history, democratically accountable and growth-oriented — but on the Reichsbank, the privately owned, democratically unaccountable institution that ran Germany into hyperinflation and helped install Hitler. The choice was not accidental. The Bundesbank produced prosperity. The Reichsbank produced control.
Sovereignty is the specific target because sovereignty is the specific threat. A sovereign community generates its own prosperity. A dependent community consumes the prosperity the center permits. Ricardo’s Vice is the intellectual infrastructure that makes dependence look like freedom, scarcity look like inevitability, and the dismantling of every engine of broad prosperity look like the logical conclusion of impeccable mathematics.
Every war, every engineered famine, every manufactured financial crisis serves the same function: destroy whatever is equalizing wealth, return populations to dependence, and justify the next layer of central control as the logical response to the crisis. Werner’s reading of WWI is uncomfortable but documented: by 1914, Germany had built the most successful decentralized economy in the world — thousands of small local banks funding a thriving Mittelstand, scientific output dominating global publications, and a railway under construction from Berlin to Baghdad that would have connected German industry directly to Persian Gulf energy without ever touching a British-controlled sea lane. Werner argues, with evidence, that this — not the assassination of an archduke — was the actual casus belli. The war destroyed the German banking system, the railway, and roughly twenty million people. The threat of a prosperous, sovereign, energy-independent Germany was eliminated. Gulf of Tonkin built the American military-industrial apparatus for a generation. The WMD assessment in Iraq built the surveillance state. 9/11 normalized the suspension of civil liberties across the Western world. The 2008 crisis transferred four trillion dollars from citizens to banks. COVID built the biosecurity state and field-tested the infrastructure for programmable currency.
The energy infrastructure takedown deserves its own analysis, because it is the thread running from 1914 to the present. From the destruction of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway to the decades-long campaign to close European nuclear capacity, to the manufactured dependence on Russian gas, to the blowing up of Nord Stream in 2022, to the current war dismantling Belt and Road infrastructure across Iran — the single most consistent target across a century of geopolitical engineering has been energy independence. The country or region that controls its own energy controls its own destiny. Every major intervention since WWI has, one way or another, been an intervention against that control. Europe is now at the end of that trajectory. Energy prices that tripled after 2022 have not recovered. German industrial output is in structural decline. Agricultural input costs — fertilizer, fuel, transport — are compounding into food price inflation that is only beginning to register at the shelf. The projection for 2026 and beyond is not a prediction. It is arithmetic. And when the crisis is undeniable, when European governments are facing populations that cannot heat their homes or afford food, the helping hand will arrive. It will be digital. It will be conditional.
And it will be perfectly logical.
I was fascinated by the article. I'm always amazed at how journalists manage to use big words and highfalutin concepts I need to look up!
Broadly, I agree with some of Jan’s criticisms of mainstream economics. In particular, I think it is right to question models that assume rational actors, efficient markets and banks as mere intermediaries. BTW, it's crazy that neoclassical economists don't actually have a place for currency creation or money in their models. Hence, they can never get it right, as the author writes in his "Monetary Policy: The Economy Without Banks" section!
As an MMTer (Modern Monetary Theory), I reckon that the author's understanding that "mainstream economics is wrong" leads him to the erroneous conclusion that "therefore there must be a coordinated system of control behind everything".
MMT already explains many of the same outcomes without requiring a grand conspiracy. Currency-issuing governments, economists and central bankers often act as though currency-issuing governments are financially constrained like households. That misunderstanding leads to unnecessary austerity, unemployment, privatisation and underinvestment in public services.
To me, the biggest revelation of MMT is not that hidden elites secretly control money. It's that elected currency-issuing governments already possess far more monetary capacity than they realise, but political choices and economic myths prevent them from using it effectively.
In other words, I think the article correctly identifies some problems but misidentifies their cause. MMT says the issue is largely a misunderstanding of how sovereign monetary systems actually work, rather than a coordinated plan by those in power.
Regarding the author's list under "THE VICE IN DEPLOYMENT", although I generally agree with the beneficiaries, he failed to mention that the COVID-19 vaccines saved countless lives. I reckon the question of correlation or causation in each of his seven vices needs to be fully examined. He has accepted causation. I don't agree with that.
I have some sympathy with his Endgame posits. However, the adage "Don't waste a crisis" is what engineered the responses of the ruling elite, not some sort of grand plan over many generations, in my view. The one per cent are opportunists and will take what's on offer. 🥴
Thank you for this excellent perspective. A reminder of why places like Substack are invaluable in providing alternative viewpoints that MSM miss - because they are part of the collusion!