Capital gains tax is theft, committed twice against the same dollar. You earn income. The government takes its cut immediately, in the US its between 22% and 37% depending on your bracket. What remains is yours, after-tax money, already processed through Washington's collection machine. You choose not to spend it. You save it, invest it, buy assets with it. The discipline required to delay consumption is precisely the behavior that funds capital formation across the economy. Then the asset grows. You sell it. The government appears again, demanding 20% (plus the 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax for higher earners) on the nominal gain, which often includes pure inflation adjustments that represent no real increase in purchasing power whatsoever. The IRS treats your patience as a second taxable event. The original dollar was already taxed. The "gain" frequently reflects nothing more than the dollar losing value while you held the asset. Murray Rothbard identified this pattern: the state punishes capital accumulation. Consider a simple case. You invest $50,000 of after-tax earnings in 2016 into an S&P 500 index fund. By 2026, it's worth $115,000. Inflation consumed a meaningful slice of that $65,000 gain. You pay capital gains tax on the full nominal figure regardless. Capital gains taxation suppresses investment, shrinks the capital pool available for productive enterprise, and forces entrepreneurs to seek financing from a shallower pond. Fewer productive investments get made. Workers carry that cost through lower wages and fewer opportunities. The state expands, while you suffer.

A short history of currency debasement: Debasement is the oldest con in government. Rome ran it better than anyone until the twentieth century came along and said, "hold my beer." Under Augustus, the denarius started at 4.5 grams of nearly pure silver. By Nero's reign in 64 AD, the emperor had shaved it down to about 90 percent silver. Nero had fire damage to repair and games to fund. His successors kept clipping. By the time Gallienus ruled around 260 AD, the denarius and its descendant, the antoninianus, carried around 5 percent silver, a copper slug dipped in a thin silver wash that rubbed off in your palm. Prices in the empire rose more than a thousandfold across the third century. Diocletian then responded with the Edict on Maximum Prices in 301 AD, threatening death to any merchant who charged what the debased coins were actually worth. Merchants did the sensible thing and stopped selling. Shelves emptied. This method never changed, only the technology. Henry VIII of England ran the Great Debasement from 1544 to 1551, dropping the silver content of his coinage from 92.5 percent to 25 percent and pocketing the difference. Londoners noticed the king's copper nose showing through the silver on his own portrait and nicknamed him Old Coppernose. Clipping coins requires effort. Running a printing press requires almost none, which is why the modern state loves paper and loves screens even more. John Law gave France a preview in 1720 with his Banque Royale and a flood of paper livres backed by Mississippi fantasies. The scheme collapsed within a year. The French liked the lesson so little they repeated it with the assignats of the 1790s, printing until the notes were worth essentially nothing and executing speculators in between runs of the press. Then came central banking, which industrialized the whole operation and gave it a respectable name. The Federal Reserve opened in 1914. A dollar from that year buys you about three cents of goods today, a 97 percent loss of value, achieved without clipping a single coin. Nixon closed the gold window on August 15, 1971, and after that nothing anchored the dollar except the promises of the people printing it. The Fed expanded its balance sheet from roughly 870 billion dollars in 2007 to nearly 9 trillion by 2022. Your savings account paid less interest than the currency lost. Debasement transfers wealth from whoever holds the money to whoever prints it first. That is the entire mechanism, from Nero's mint to the Fed's open market desk. The man who spends the new money early buys at old prices. By the time the fresh units reach your wages, the prices already moved. You hold the bag. Gold held its weight for five thousand years because no committee could vote it into existence, and governments abandoned it for exactly this reason.

Modern Monetary Theory is a permission slip governments write for themselves. The core claim MMT makes is that a sovereign currency issuer cannot go broke and therefore faces no real budget constraint, only an inflation constraint. Stephanie Kelton and Warren Mosler built careers on this. Zimbabwe, Argentina, Venezuela, and Weimar Germany ran the same experiment before they published a word. Prices coordinate billions of decisions simultaneously. When governments print money to fund spending, they corrupt that signal. Every dollar the Federal Reserve creates without a corresponding increase in real output transfers purchasing power away from you to whoever spends the new money first, which is always the government and its contractors. MMT advocates admit inflation is the constraint, then propose that Congress simply tax the excess money back. They trust the same institution that runs $1.8 trillion+ deficits in a fiscal year to accurately diagnose inflation and surgically remove purchasing power before it destroys your savings. The calculation problem identified in 1920 is this: central planners lack the price information needed to allocate resources efficiently. MMT does not solve this, it hands a sledgehammer to the institution destroying price signals. Capital formation requires real saving. You cannot print your way to a higher standard of living, and no journal article changes that constraint. Taking wealth away from productive people and handing it to bureaucrats always ends in more poverty, not less.

Private property is not a Western invention, a capitalist novelty, or a 19th-century philosophical construct. Sumerians were recording property rights on clay tablets in Mesopotamia around 3000 BCE, and the contracts they left behind destroy every collectivist myth about ownership being a recent imposition on some natural communal state. These tablets documented land sales, grain loans, labor agreements, and inheritance transfers. Specific people owned specific plots. A seller transferred title. A buyer paid silver by weight. Witnesses signed. Merchants and farmers built this system because voluntary exchange requires knowing who owns what before the trade happens. Clay fired in a kiln lasts millennia. Urukagina of Lagash, around 2350 BCE, recorded protections against officials seizing private property without consent. That is property theory in practice, predating Locke by roughly four thousand years. Property rights emerge spontaneously from human interaction, not from government charters. Sumer proves the point in baked earth. Every time a politician tells you that unregulated markets are a dangerous modern experiment, you are looking at someone ignorant of the oldest economic documents humanity possesses. Markets did not need permission then. They do not need it now.