“Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.” — George Washington, on the states’ paper money, 1787
“Paper is poverty. It is only the ghost of money, and not money itself.” — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Edward Carrington, 1788
“I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.” — Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Taylor, 1816
“Paper money is unjust. It is unconstitutional, for it affects the rights of property as much as taking away equal value in land.” — James Madison, notes opposing paper money, 1786
Today is Independence Day, and this year is a big one. 250 years ago, the founding fathers declared their independence from the crown.
In the midst of the barbecues, fireworks, beach days, lake days, and time with family and friends, it is worth remembering what 1776 actually meant. Especially now, with a political protest movement gaining serious traction in this country under a familiar name.
1776 was a declaration. It said we would no longer be governed by a king. It was a refusal to be ruled without consent, by a distant taxing authority we never chose. It was about no kings.
And this past year, that exact phrase has come back into the political conversation. Millions of Americans have marched under a “No Kings” banner. Before I get to the deeper significance of that, one honest observation.
No Kings, Except Our Kings
The political landscape right now is not really “no kings.” It is “no kings except our kings.”
This is not a partisan point. Both sides of the aisle love to impose their own rules, laws, and regulations on the rest of the country. We are all anti-king when the other side holds the throne, and strangely comfortable with power the moment it shifts to our side.
Consider that many of the people marching under the No Kings banner today are the same people who were entirely supportive of mandates and lockdowns a few years ago.
In 2021, the Biden administration framed the Fourth of July itself as “independence from the virus,” and told Americans they could gather with friends and family again, as long as they got vaccinated. Your freedom to celebrate this very holiday was made conditional on compliance. The irony is that the same people who cheered that are now the ones marching against kings.
Nobody is consistent about this. That is the point.
But here is the thing that actually matters.
The One King Nobody Names
There is a king nobody names, and neither party will touch him, because they both feed on him.
The money printer.
Every single administration, red or blue, runs on the same machine and answers to the same crown. The money printer funds wars. It bails out the rich at the expense of the masses. It creates money out of thin air, resulting in inflation and quietly destroying the hard-earned savings, purchasing power, and labor of the American people.
This is the most significant problem this country faces. Not one problem among many. The one. Nearly every issue people argue about is downstream of it.
Here is why. Inflation is not simply prices going up. At its root, it is an increase in the money supply. More dollars chasing the same goods, and prices rise to meet them. Higher rent. Higher groceries. Higher home prices. Higher everything. It quietly erodes people’s quality of life and their ability to build the life they actually want.
It is the reason younger generations are struggling to match, let alone surpass, the lives their parents and grandparents had. A few generations ago, a single blue-collar income could support a family of four, a home, and a decent life. Today most households need two incomes just to stay afloat. Families are smaller. It is more expensive to have children. It is more expensive to simply be alive.
And here is where most people reach for the wrong villain. They see the widening gap between the rich and everyone else and they blame capitalism. But this is not capitalism. We don’t even have a remotely capitalist system. We have a system where the state, through the money printer, extracts wealth from the masses and hands it to those closest to the throne, and it does this under both parties, election after election.
Over the past century, the dollar has lost more than 97% of its purchasing power. You did not get a vote on the matter. Just like taxation without representation, inflation is a hidden tax, and as a citizen you have no say in it at all. On top of that, both parties keep spending money we do not have, shackling future generations with debt. Nearly $40 trillion of it already.
The money printer is the most kingly power that exists in America, and it destroys the value of people’s savings and labor without their consent.
It is not only that money loses value over time. It is who gets the new money first.
When new dollars are created, they flow first to whoever sits closest to the process. Banks. The government. The asset-owning class. They buy and invest at today’s prices, before those prices adjust.
By the time the money reaches everyone else, it shows up as higher home prices, a stock market that has tripled in a decade, and the ultra-wealthy lining their pockets, while wages rise last, long after purchasing power has already slipped away. This is why the top 0.1% have seen their wealth grow more than 13x in fifty years, while the bottom half of the country held negative net worth from the mid-1990s all the way until COVID.
It has a name. The Cantillon Effect, after Richard Cantillon, the 18th-century economist who first described it. It is not an error. It is the system working exactly as designed. A rigged transfer of wealth, by design, from the people of Main Street America to those closest to the throne.
And this king keeps his throne no matter who wins every four years.
You Can Petition, or You Can Exit
Here is how I think about all of this in the context of 1776.
A protest, at its core, is a petition. You are asking for things to change. But however loud you get, you are still operating inside the system and still asking its permission. You are appealing to a king who does not care about you.
The founders knew this firsthand. They petitioned the crown for years. They sent grievances and appeals and pleas for fair treatment, and they were ignored every time. In the end, the only exit available to them was violence. They had to fight an eight-year war, and tens of thousands died, because in 1776 there was no other way out from under a king.
That is what makes this moment different. For the first time in human history, the exit is peaceful. You do not need a war, a militia, or anyone’s permission. You just leave.
That exit is Bitcoin. An alternative to a money system built on theft. An alternative to the machine that shackles, enslaves, and destroys people’s livelihoods. Anyone who reads this publication knows how systemic those issues are.
Read those quotes at the top again. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison did not write those words as theory. They lived it. They watched the Continental dollar, the paper money that funded the Revolution, hyperinflate until it was worthless, giving us the phrase “not worth a Continental.” It was said that a wagonload of that currency would barely buy a wagonload of provisions. They learned the hard way that money the state can conjure at will is a weapon, a tool of theft, and a threat to liberty.
But as time passed, we drifted from what they learned. The state inserted itself back into the creation of money, and we drifted all the way into the exact system they warned us against.
Bitcoin does not ask for a better king. It does not petition, and it does not beg. It removes the power entirely. There is no printer. There is no ruler. There is no company or government that can control it. Twenty-one million, fixed, for everyone, forever.
Bitcoin is today’s declaration of independence.
The Fourth of July is about independence, and this year marks 250 years of it. But there is a personal kind of independence available to you right now, and it does not require a war or anyone’s permission. It is opting out of a money you do not control, that is diluted without your consent, and cannot be changed within the system.
That is real no kings protest. That is the declaration worth making.
Happy Independence Day.
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Bitcoin is 4th of July 2.0 independence from the money printer and every dollar we buy and hold and spend with each other is a more effective protest than protesting. Bitcoin puts action to words.
The original one, yes.