By Erik Prince & Dave Ramaswamy · 29 October 2025
On Fiat Experts: How the Priesthood of Failure cost America $38 Trillion of Administrative Bloat
The COVID pandemic provided a natural experiment in experts’ competence. The results were unambiguous. Every major government recommendation was proven wrong: masks did not work, then they were essential, then two were better than one. The virus did not spread asymptotically; then, asymptomatic spread became the primary driver. Two weeks to flatten the curve became two years of flattening.
The curve remained unimpressed. Models predicted tens of millions of deaths in the immediate near-term, though the natural case fatality rate proved to be a fraction of those initial dire estimates. Much of the death toll ended up as an outcome of the public health establishment’s recommendations: their warnings to stay indoors to avoid getting sick, their war on doctors promoting early self-treatment at home, and their encouragement of the widespread use of ventilators, which caused tremendous harm.
The models were wrong about the baseline, the intervention, and the outcome, despite being ‘peer-reviewed’ (another word for ‘immune to reality’).
When the interventions failed, America’s 80,000 health bureaucrats did not resign in disgrace or apologize. The CDC requested larger budgets. The FDA approved more emergency authorizations. Several officials were promoted, while parents who questioned school closures at board meetings were investigated as potential domestic terrorists. How did Anthony Fauci—whose record on AIDS, swine flu, and COVID was at best uneven—end up the highest-paid federal employee and a media celebrity? Why does failure never disqualify these experts?
The answer lies on August 15, 1971, when President Richard Nixon appeared on television. President Nixon announced a temporary suspension of the convertibility of the dollar into gold, which would then become permanent. This decision removed the last constraint on money creation. Between 1971 and 2024, the Fed’s balance sheet expanded from $80 billion to over $8 trillion—a hundredfold increase —causing not only inflation in goods and services but also in expertise.
Thus, a new species of bureaucrat was born: the fiat expert.
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The Priesthood
Before 1971, the gold standard imposed discipline. The government could only spend what it taxed or borrowed from real savings. This natural limit constrained the number of expert bureaucrats a society could support. But after 1971, the Federal Reserve could create unlimited (fiat) dollars. These fiat dollars created positions, which in turn created fiat experts, who in turn created policies that destroyed businesses, lost wars, and locked down the country.
This is how it works: the Federal Reserve prints money. The money funds universities that grant credentials. The credentials qualify people for government positions. The positions grant authority over people who actually know how to do things.
A 23,000-person Federal Reserve—our central bank (“the Fed”)—sets interest rates for every farmer, manufacturer, and business owner in America. But few among them have ever grown food, made products, or met a payroll. The distinction between office space and field space explains why some people face no consequences for catastrophic failure, while others face consequences for even minor mistakes.
Farmers, carpenters, plumbers, and soldiers operate in field space where physics, mathematics, biology, and bullets provide immediate feedback on the quality of decisions. Fiat experts, like fiat currency, derive their value from government decree rather than demonstrated competence. They proliferate in office spaces where bureaucrats, think tank fellows, and college academics write reports about reality without ever witnessing it.
The institutional decay is starkly visible across elite American education. In 1970, American universities granted roughly 1,000 doctoral degrees in sociology annually. By 2020, that number had quintupled, bearing no equivalent result. When was the last significant sociological discovery? This expansion affected virtually every major U.S. research institution, including Ivy League institutions, which recorded a massive increase in non-STEM doctoral programs and administrative roles since 1971.
But just as printing money devalues currency, printing credentials devalues expertise. The influx of fiat funding and the pursuit of fiat expertise have driven up costs, inflated credentials, and shifted the universities’ focus from teaching students and producing foundational research to managing compliance and churning out more administrators.
The more credentials America’s top universities dispense, the less meaningful the actual education becomes. Today, an Ivy League degree costs roughly $95,000 annually, subsidized by government loans the Fed happily monetizes. The result? More courses that teach students about gender theory, encourage statue-toppling as civic engagement, while canceling professors for supporting free speech.
The professional class bloat extends directly to the “ideas industry.” Liberal and conservative think tanks multiplied dramatically over the decades. In 1970, D.C. hosted two dozen policy institutes. By 2020, over 400 organizations will compete to influence policy, funding a vast intellectual infrastructure, each employing hundreds of people solely to produce thousands of dense policy proposal papers every year. For what? Has this translated into effective governance? Can anyone name how a single one of these policy papers improved the country?
Federal agencies followed the same trajectory. The Department of War (formerly Defense) provides a glaring analogy. The military’s active-duty fighting force has shrunk dramatically since the Cold War. In 1971, the U.S. had about 2.7 million active-duty personnel. Today, that number is roughly 1.3 million—a cut of more than half. Yet, the administrative overhead has soared. In the early 1970s, the DoD employed approximately 1 million civilian personnel. Today, the total administrative workforce (federal civilians plus full-time equivalent contractors) stands at approximately 1.32 million (760,000 civilians + 560,000 contractors).
This means the Department of War now funds more administrators and bureaucrats than active-duty soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines—comprising a massive, expensive bureaucracy that is slower, more complex, and less efficient than the system it replaced.
It gets worse. The Department of Education (ED), created in 1979, now employs over 4,000 people. The ED’s mission is to promote excellence and equal access. But national academic data (NAEP) shows a negative trend. Student scores have largely stagnated for decades, with recent data indicating sharp declines. Math standards and reading comprehension have both deteriorated. It seems the more education bureaucrats America employs, the less educated Americans become.
The bureaucrats create policies that prevent education while expanding their own ranks. Does America really need a Department of Education? How did Americans get educated before 1979?
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has grown from 5,000 employees in 1970 to over 17,000 today. During this period, it produced 30,000 pages of regulations. Yet these regulations failed to prevent Love Canal, the Exxon Valdez spill, the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the Flint water crisis, or the East Palestine chemical derailment. Not only did they fail, but each failure justified more employees, more regulations, more failure.
The cycle is not accidental. It is the business model.
The Federal Reserve itself represents peak fiat expertise. Today, 23,000 employees set the price of money for 342 million Americans, manipulating interest rates that determine whether families can afford homes, whether businesses can expand, and whether retirees can live on savings. Yet again, not one of these people has ever operated a company or met a payroll. These credentialed bureaucrats are the economic equivalent of celibate marriage counselors: technically qualified, practically clueless.
The Fiat experts share defining characteristics: they work in climate-controlled offices (as opposed to farms, factories, or battlefields). They produce papers (as opposed to products). They attend conferences (as opposed to customer meetings). Most importantly, they face ‘peer review’—rather than profit and loss statements. When their recommendations fail, they recommend more recommendations. When their models are proven wrong, they build more complex models. When reality contradicts their theories, they conclude reality is flawed.
The most telling characteristic is that Fiat experts are never fired for being wrong. A farmer who cannot grow food goes hungry. A manufacturer that cannot satisfy customers goes bankrupt. A soldier who cannot fight effectively goes home in a box. But a fiat expert who recommends policies that destroy farms, bankrupt manufacturers, and lose wars? He receives tenure, grants, and speaking fees.
In field space, failure has consequences. In office space, failure has rewards.
***
Field Space vs. Office Space
When protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death filled the streets, the same experts who had ordered small businesses closed and family restaurants locked down suddenly declared mass gatherings safe (as if the virus respected the righteousness of the cause).
The lockdowns created two categories of humans: essential and non-essential. Essential meant government employees, healthcare workers, and employees of large corporations in office spaces. Non-essential meant small business owners, independent contractors, and anyone who worked with their hands in the field. The economic consequences of the bureaucratic Office Space were immediate and devastating for Field Space America.
Consider the case of Karl Manke, a 77-year-old barber in Owosso, Michigan, who became a national symbol of resistance. Manke defied the state’s lockdown by simply going to work. His income, like that of all small business owners, stopped instantly when the lockdown mandate arrived. Unlike government employees who continued drawing salaries while “working” from home, Manke had to choose between his license and feeding himself.
The Office Space response was immediate and overwhelming. The Michigan Attorney General and health departments issued misdemeanor citations, ordered his shop closed, and summarily suspended his barber license. This bureaucratic use of paper power—the fiat license—was deployed to crush a physical livelihood. The enforcement officers—the lawyers and the judges who signed the orders—all retained their full salary and benefits, whereas Manke was deemed ‘non-essential’.
Meanwhile, a few miles away from every shuttered small retailer, a Target store remained open. It sold groceries, which made it ‘essential’. It also sold clothing, electronics, home goods, and everything else Manke’s neighbors might have purchased from small businesses. Amazon’s revenue increased by 200 billion dollars during the pandemic. Jeff Bezos’s net worth increased by $70 billion. Every small retail business forced to close transferred its customers to large corporations permitted to operate.
Was this a public health measure, or a deliberate wealth transfer, powered by bureaucratic decree?
What you learn when you operate in hostile environments such as Mogadishu, Baghdad, or Kabul is that plans that work on PowerPoint slides often fail in practice.
The California Restaurant Association’s legal challenge against Governor Newsom’s mandates magnified this. The stroke of a regulatory pen wiped out thousands of field-space businesses. One example is Alioto’s on San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, a family-owned restaurant that had served its community since 1925 before the mandates forced its temporary closure in March 2020. It officially closed its lease in April 2022, after 97 years.
San Francisco’s own health department later reported that restaurants accounted for less than 2 percent of COVID-19 transmission. The vast majority occurred in private homes and institutional settings. A professional kitchen, with its commercial ventilation and professional sanitation, was infinitely safer than the private gatherings that replaced it. But safety was never the point. Control was. The fiat experts dictated the terms of survival from their office space, eradicating decades of field space enterprise with zero accountability for the devastation.
According to Federal Reserve data, the top 1 percent gained approximately $6.5 trillion in wealth during the pandemic, while the bottom half saw their already negligible share of total wealth evaporate under inflationary pressure. This was not a pandemic outcome. This was a policy outcome structurally guaranteed by fiat experts who faced no economic or criminal consequences for the savings and income theft they wrought on real experts.
The pattern holds across domains. What you learn when you operate in hostile environments such as Mogadishu, Baghdad, or Kabul is that plans that work on PowerPoint slides often fail in practice. You learn that the sixteen-step approval process developed by lawyers in Northern Virginia becomes irrelevant when armed militants attack a convoy, and that theoretical expertise divorced from operational experience produces catastrophic decisions.
Outside the office, you learn the difference between mistakes that translate into revised reports and mistakes that translate into coffins. I (Erik Prince) have spent three decades in field space across four continents: Afghanistan during the Taliban insurgency, Iraq during the civil war, Somalia, South Africa, and other environments. In all of these places, theoretical expertise meant nothing. There is no peer review process for an ambush. There is no tenure protection from an Improvised Explosive Device (IED).
In the real world, either your decisions work, or people die.
***
Wars Without Victory
The Global War on Terror (GWOT) provides another case study in fiat expertise. Between 2001 and 2021, the United States spent over 8 trillion dollars on wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and associated conflicts. For context, 8 trillion dollars could have rebuilt America’s entire infrastructure twice, provided free college education for every American for a century, or even ended homelessness permanently.
Instead, it brought failure.
In Afghanistan, the stated goal was to deny safe haven to terrorists. Yet after twenty years and 2.3 trillion dollars spent, the Taliban is back in power and controls more territory than it did on September 11, 2001. Al-Qaeda has reconstituted. ISIS K has emerged. The terrorist threat is worse, not better. Every metric of success moved in the wrong direction. Girls who attended school during the American occupation now sit at home. Women who once worked cannot leave their homes without male escorts. Allies who assisted American forces now hide from retribution or lie dead in unmarked graves.
The Afghanistan Papers revealed that senior officials knew the war was unwinnable for years. They lied to Congress. They lied to the public. They lied to the soldiers they sent to die. General after general testified about progress that did not exist. Districts marked as under government control existed only on maps in air-conditioned offices. On the ground, the Taliban collected taxes and enforced law.
Having operated in Afghanistan, I can attest to the delusion. A military briefing would show a district in green, indicating it is under government control. On patrol in that same district, we would encounter Taliban checkpoints. The disconnect between PowerPoint and patrol was absolute. But which version made it back to Washington, determined funding, or shaped policy?
The Hindu Kush mountains perfectly encapsulate the futility. For twenty years, American soldiers patrolled valleys that Alexander the Great could not conquer, that the British Empire could not hold, and that the Soviet Union could not pacify. But did anyone at the State Department or the Department of Defense read a history book by someone who has countered an actual insurgency, or were they too busy attending conferences on ‘insurgency theory’?
When Kabul fell in August 2021, the collapse was so rapid that Americans and allies were abandoned. Tens of billions in military equipment were left behind. The Taliban now operates American helicopters, drives American vehicles, and carries American weapons.
The humiliation was complete.
Which general was fired for this catastrophe? None. Which defense official was prosecuted for lying to Congress? None. Which think tank expert who advocated for continued occupation admitted error? Why did General Milley stay as Chairman after Kabul fell? Why did Lloyd Austin keep the Pentagon after leaving Americans and allies behind? Why did Antony Blinken remain Secretary of State when the diplomatic ledger showed only red ink from Kabul to Kyiv?
The architects of strategic failure retained their corner offices. Meanwhile, junior officers who executed their orders faced investigation. Enlisted personnel who conducted the evacuation faced criticism. The accountability flowed downward, never upward. In the fiat expert system, rank protects from responsibility.
Iraq tells a similar story. The invasion was justified by weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. The experts who claimed certainty about WMDs faced no consequences when proven wrong. The war cost over 2 trillion dollars and killed over 4,500 American troops and thousands more contractors. Suicides among returning veterans skyrocketed. It destabilized the entire Middle East, created ISIS, and strengthened Iran. How did Paul Wolfowitz, who promised Iraqis would greet Americans as liberators and said that Iraqi oil would fund the invasion, move on to the presidency of the World Bank? Why did Dick Cheney, who helped orchestrate the invasion, retire to wealth and comfort and face no accountability?
The pattern holds across every intervention: experts with no military experience design wars. Think tank fellows who have never heard a shot fired in anger advocate for others to fight—generals who have never won a war plan the next one. Intelligence officials who missed 9/11, missed ISIS, missed the Taliban resurgence, lecture about threats. The failure is systematic because the system selects for failure. Success would end the wars. Ending the wars would end the funding. Ending the funding would end their careers. So the wars continue, and the failures compound.
Once again, having operated in these environments, I witnessed alternative approaches that could have succeeded: local solutions that would have cost a fraction of the trillions spent, and empowering tribal structures that actually functioned, rather than imposing democratic frameworks that existed only in think-tank fantasies.
These were rejected. They did not route funding through Beltway contractors or provide jobs for State Department bureaucrats, so the Pentagon preferred spending tens of billions of dollars in failure rather than circumventing the established system and possibly succeeding.
***
The Health Bureaucracy
The same engine of fiat money powers the entire health bureaucracy and serves the same class of fiat experts.
America’s federal health agencies employ approximately 80,000 bureaucrats. These agencies include the CDC, FDA, NIH, and various other acronyms that proliferate rapidly. Under their expert guidance, America has achieved a remarkable feat. The nation represents roughly 4% of the world’s population but accounts for approximately 45% of global pharmaceutical sales. This is not a typo. Four percent of people. Forty-five percent of prescription drug revenue.
Americans consume more antidepressants, more opioids, more diabetes medications, more statins, more hypertensives, and more anti-anxiety medications than any other population in human history. This raises a crucial question about the physical authority of this class. How many of these 80,000 health bureaucrats can run a single mile without stopping? How many can do a single pull-up or properly deadlift their own body weight? How many are themselves on multiple prescription medications? The experts advising America on wellness often embody the very lack of health they claim to combat.
The same agencies that oversaw this transformation into pharmaceutical dependency promised that more pharmaceutical intervention was the solution to COVID. Reports indicate that NIH-funded Gain-of-Function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducted through EcoHealth Alliance. But when questioned about this under oath, officials did not provide clear answers; instead, they parsed words like lawyers.
The revolving door between health agencies and pharmaceutical companies spins rapidly.
Scott Gottlieb left the FDA in 2019 and joined Pfizer’s board that same year. During the pandemic, he appeared regularly on television as a medical expert, yet the news chyrons never disclosed his Pfizer affiliation. Why did Gottlieb, fresh from running the FDA, walk straight onto Pfizer’s board and then onto cable news sets as an “independent” medical voice? Did the revolving door just happen to spin in his favor?
Former CDC directors routinely join pharmaceutical companies or consulting firms serving pharmaceutical clients. This is public service conducted from office space, where conflicts of interest are managed through disclosure forms rather than avoided through separation.
The Fed could have saved homeowners for a fraction of what it spent saving banks, yet it chose not to. This was not economics. It was politics dressed in economic terminology.
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The Economic Priesthood
The Federal Reserve (“The Fed”) stands as the ultimate fiat expert institution. Created in 1913 to prevent financial panics, it has presided over the Great Depression, the 1970s stagflation, the savings and loan crisis, the dot-com bubble, the 2008 financial crisis, and the current post-COVID inflation surge. Its record is perfect: perfectly wrong. Yet its power only grows with each failure.
The Fed employs 23,000 people, including hundreds of PhD economists. These economists build models of extraordinary complexity. They track thousands of variables. They produce millions of data points. They hold conferences where they present papers to each other about their models. Nonetheless, they have been wrong about every major economic event for decades.
In 2007, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke assured Congress that subprime mortgages were contained. By 2008, the global financial system required unprecedented bailouts. In 2021, then-Fed Chairman Jerome Powell insisted that inflation was transitory. By 2022, inflation reached forty-year highs. In both cases, the Fed had access to more data, more computing power, and more expertise than any institution in history. In both cases, a small business owner with common sense would have been more accurate.
Consider the response to 2008. Banks that made catastrophic decisions received trillions in support. Executives who destroyed their firms received bonuses—homeowners who were victimized by predatory lending received foreclosure notices. The Fed could have saved homeowners for a fraction of what it spent saving banks, yet it chose not to. This was not economics. It was politics dressed in economic terminology.
The inflation of 2021-2024 provides the latest example. The Fed printed over 5 trillion dollars in response to COVID-19. Anyone with elementary arithmetic skills could see that increasing the money supply 35 percent while production declined would cause prices to rise. Yet when inflation arrived—precisely as predicted—officials blamed supply chains, Putin, and corporate greed. In other words, everything except the apparent cause.
Asset prices inflated first and foremost. The wealthy, who own assets, became more affluent. Wages lagged. Prices for necessities rose fastest. The poor, who own only their labor, became poorer.
The Fed calls this “the wealth effect”—without irony.
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The Asset Management Leviathan
The endless bureaucratic bloat funded by the confluence of fiat money and fiat expertise does not merely create inefficiency in government. It powers the financial aristocracy.
While the Fed creates the currency, asset managers control its flow. BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street collectively manage over $20 trillion in assets. This figure exceeds the GDP of every nation except the United States.
This Leviathan wasn’t built by winning in competitive markets — it was built by siphoning trillions in mandatory retirement contributions from every paycheck in the developed world. Your 401(k). Your pension. Your IRA. Not earned. Not bid for. Just collected — by law.
They didn’t just collect your money — they weaponized it. Your retirement savings became their voting bloc, their policy lever, their moral cudgel.
Larry Fink, Blackrock’s CEO, doesn’t need to win elections. He just needs to threaten to sell your shares if a company won’t adopt his ESG theology. Vanguard doesn’t need to pass laws. It just votes your proxies for racial quotas, net-zero pledges, and boardroom purges — whether you agree or not. BlackRock doesn’t need to own the company. It just controls the price of not obeying.
You fund the machine. They pull the levers. You eat the consequences.
How did Larry Fink become the unofficial regulator of American business, writing annual letters that dictate corporate behavior more effectively than any statute? Why must CEOs adopt costlier environmental policies, social initiatives with no bottom-line rationale, and governance rules that entrench management, merely because BlackRock controls their share price?
The Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) movement exemplifies this dynamic. ESG scoring systems pressure companies to adopt progressive policies. High ESG scores require reducing carbon emissions, increasing diversity hiring, and implementing stakeholder governance. While these may sound benign, in practice, they often mean closing factories, discriminating against qualified candidates, and ignoring shareholder interests.
Why do the same people who impose ESG mandates fly more than 1,000 private jets to these global summits, feast on steak and lobster, and then insist that ordinary citizens trade steak for cricket-flour protein bars? Why is everybody flying a private jet to discuss the climate crisis? Why can’t these climate summits be held over Zoom? Humans cannot calibrate the temperature in a skyscraper between the top and bottom floors to within 2°—yet these same people claim they can calibrate global atmospheric temperature 25 years from now to within 2° of pre-industrial levels.
But this isn’t just hypocrisy — it’s hierarchy. The same people who can’t control a thermostat now control the flow of capital, the rules of business, and the energy that powers your life.
When politicians speak at these events, abandon their motorcades, and billionaires sell their seaside mansions to buy mountain top retreats and ride bicycles, maybe the average person will take the climate crisis more seriously.
Germany shut down nuclear plants and became dependent on Russian natural gas. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Germany restarted coal plants. Emissions increased. Energy prices soared. Industrial production declined. Manufacturers began relocating. California embraced renewable mandates and began experiencing blackouts. Residents were told to avoid charging electric vehicles during peak hours.
The climate-friendly policies were designed by asset managers, activists, and consultants who are insulated from consequences. When electricity prices soar, they can afford them. When blackouts occur, they have backup power. The costs fall on working families and small businesses, whereas the benefits primarily accrue to consulting firms and asset managers.
Failure leads to budget increases to study the failure, implement lessons learned, and prepare for the next opportunity to fail.
***
Institutional Antibodies
When the COVID response failed, Anthony Fauci became a celebrity, the CDC requested larger budgets, governors who imposed the strictest lockdowns won re-election, and the public health establishment declared the pandemic response a ‘success’. At last, the system had developed antibodies against accountability.
This happened because the system controls credentials. Challenging fiat expert consensus requires credentials, and obtaining credentials in the first place requires approval from existing fiat experts. In other words, gatekeeping creates a perfect circle: dissent equals a lack of expertise, and expertise equals agreement with the consensus.
The system also controls funding. Contradicting expert consensus requires research funding, and funding comes from government agencies, universities, and foundations controlled by the fiat expert class. Research questioning whether lockdowns caused more harm than benefit will not be funded by officials who implemented them.
The system has effectively unlimited resources thanks to the Fed. When policies fail catastrophically, budgets increase. When the Afghanistan withdrawal became indefensible, the Pentagon budget grew. When pandemic responses faced criticism, the CDC requested more funding. When the Fed’s policies created inflation, it expanded its staff. Failure leads to budget increases to study the failure, implement lessons learned, and prepare for the next opportunity to fail.
The same fiat currency funding failing agencies also bankrolls Big Tech’s office space gatekeepers. These firms spend massive sums on lobbying, buying bipartisan silence that allows them to function as enforcers of institutional orthodoxy. They wield this power to de-platform, de-bank, and demonetize field space critics who question official consensus, whether on pandemic policy or election integrity, as seen in the freezing of accounts related to the Canadian trucker protests and to parents questioning school closures. In this system, the First Amendment becomes collateral damage in the state’s effort to manage public discourse.
This creates a ratchet effect. Each crisis expands the fiat expert class. The expansion persists after the crisis. New experts need to justify their positions. They discover or manufacture new crises. Rinse and repeat.
As a consequence, the number of experts is ever-growing, and the distance between fiat experts and reality is ever-widening. The only constant is expansion.
Failure equals Fiat money, times Credential squared.
Anthony Fauci departs after hours of testimony before a congressional panel that both applauded and decried his work during the COVID-19 pandemic. (June 2024)
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Reckoning
Mathematical reality is undefeated. The United States carries over 38 trillion dollars in debt. Unfunded liabilities exceed 200 trillion dollars. The Federal Reserve holds 8 trillion dollars in assets that it cannot sell without crashing markets. Interest payments exceed 1 trillion dollars annually. These numbers are neither sustainable nor manageable, and they cannot be fixed through growth. They represent the terminal phase of a fiat currency experiment.
A tax cut without a spending cut is merely a tax shift. The Federal Government spends more than 7 trillion dollars annually but collects less than 5 trillion dollars in revenue, creating a structural annual deficit of roughly 2 trillion dollars. Cutting spending is politically impossible. Even Elon Musk, who built reusable rockets, has publicly sought and failed to achieve this, as every program has its own entrenched constituency.
Some argue that raising taxes is economically destructive, leading to lower collections and slower growth, thereby posing a fundamental challenge for the government. As a result, the 2 trillion deficit is paid for not through revenue or reductions, but through borrowing, effectively shifting the bill for today’s spending onto future generations via increased national debt.
The only way out is inflation—not the transitory kind, but the permanent type. The debt cannot be paid in real terms, so it must be inflated away. Unless it is restructured—which is unlikely—the purchasing power of the dollar must decline, and the standard of living must fall. The fiat experts who created this problem will not admit it, but mathematics does not require their consent.
When the currency crisis arrives, the fiat expert system collapses with it.
Positions funded by money printing disappear when the printing stops. The 80,000 health bureaucrats, 23,000 Fed employees, 17,000 EPA regulators, and millions of other fiat experts in government and academia will discover that reality has reasserted itself. Their credentials will mean nothing. Their expertise will be worthless. Their authority will evaporate.
Every fiat currency in history has failed, causing a total loss of purchasing power. The Roman denarius collapsed. The Continental collapsed (leaving the fledgling American revolutionaries with worthless paper that gave rise to the phrase “not worth a Continental”). The Assignat collapsed (destroying the wealth of the French Revolution’s middle class through hyperinflation backed only by seized land). The Weimar Papiermark in Germany collapsed—so did the Argentine Peso and the Venezuelan Bolivar. This is a mathematical certainty woven into the design. Will the dollar (or the euro, or the yen) be the exception to this universal law?
The only questions are timing and severity.
This systemic purge is a feature, not a bug, of the currency cycle. Every historical hyperinflationary event was followed by a political and social reckoning in which the class that championed the fiat system was dissolved. When the loss of purchasing power finally shuts off the funding tap, the entire economic model reverses. Capital is forcibly reallocated away from the State and its convoluted regulatory regime. Production, trade, and the use of scarce resources become essential. Regulatory compliance, virtue signaling, and paper shuffling become obsolete. The skills of fiat experts have no application in a post-inflationary, sound-money world.
***
Blunders, Bungles, and Bamboozlement
Field space America is at a breaking point—not from external enemies, but from the blunders, bungles, and pure bamboozlement of office space mandarins over five decades who have never wired a breaker, bled a brake line, or balanced a diner till at 2 am.
The blunders are everywhere.
Take the East Palestine derailment. The crash was caused by a failure of the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) safety system. A mechanical failure of a railcar’s wheel bearing was missed by maintenance and inadequate trackside detectors. This lapse in practical safety oversight resulted in a massive environmental crisis when officials, acting on flawed information, decided to intentionally vent and burn a railcar full of toxic vinyl chloride in a populated area.
Or consider the permanent war budget. Eight trillion dollars in nation-building that created nothing but Kabul’s bank accounts and Arlington’s headstones. Not to mention energy policies. Renewable mandates shutter mines in Wyoming so we can buy cobalt from Congolese forced labor mines and call it “moral foreign policy.”
Every time an office space genius issues another 800-page rule, a field space worker spends an eight-hour shift filling out forms instead of turning a wrench or moving dirt. Every time a Fed PhD hits print, a rig hand in North Dakota gets laid off so a hedge fund can buy back shares. Every time a think tank fellow tweets “green transition”, a lineman in Ohio watches his pension evaporate while Beijing builds another coal plant.
The belt is jammed, full of paper. The chamber is clogged with credentials. The magazine is loaded with regulations, each round more useless than the last. Field space workers face triple B warfare—blunders that break their businesses, bungles that bankrupt their towns, bamboozlement that blinds their leaders.
Still, when the paper jam becomes unbearable, the belt finally snaps. When the entire fiat expert-filled office space apparatus seizes, then field space reasserts itself with mechanical certainty. The welder picks up his torch, the farmer plants his crop, the miner drills his seam, and the engineer designs his solution.
Reality always wins.
This remained true as long as the dollar was anchored to gold. Gold is the ultimate field space asset. You cannot print it. You cannot decree it into existence. You must dig it from the ground through hard labor, refine it using energy, and obey the law of physics. It imposes discipline because it exists in physical reality, not bureaucratic fantasy.
Since 1971, we have drifted from field space to office space, from creators to credentialed, from builders to bureaucrats, and from real experts to fiat experts. The result is crumbling infrastructure that the Corps of Engineers cannot maintain, failed schools that the Department of Education cannot fix, lost wars that the Pentagon cannot win, economic crises that the Federal Reserve cannot prevent, and health disasters that the CDC cannot manage.
The correction is already beginning. Foreign central banks now hold more gold than US Treasuries for the first time in 30 years. They are voting with their reserves for tangible assets over paper promises. As gold slowly reclaims its role as de facto reserve currency, the entire fiat system faces unwinding.
Reform must reconnect authority with accountability. Public officials who recommend policies should face consequences when those policies fail. Symmetric risk must replace asymmetric reward. If lockdowns succeed, their architects benefit. If lockdowns fail, their architects suffer proportionally. This is not vengeance. It is alignment.
Decentralization must replace centralization. Fifty states experimenting produce better outcomes than one federal government dictating. Local practical knowledge trumps distant expertise. The mayor understands his city better than Washington, D.C., does. The governor knows her state better than federal bureaucrats do. Pushing decisions down brings them closer to reality and accountability.
Time limits must constrain agencies. No bureaucracy should exist in perpetuity. Sunset provisions should automatically terminate programs unless explicitly renewed by Congress. This forces periodic justification. Does the Department of Education improve education? Prove it, or close. Does the Department of Energy achieve energy independence? Demonstrate value, or disappear. Bureaucracies that cannot justify their existence should not exist.
Competition must discipline expertise. Private weather services outperform the National Weather Service. Package delivery companies outperform the Postal Service. Private security often outperforms police. When government monopolies face competition, they improve or become irrelevant. The decentralized competitive market provides accountability that centralized monopolistic politics cannot.
Most importantly, we must restore the distinction between field space and office space expertise. The farmer knows more about farming than the agriculture regulator. The doctor who sees patients knows more about medicine than the health bureaucrat. The soldier who has seen combat knows more about war than the think tank fellow. Practical knowledge gained through experience must regain precedence over theoretical knowledge gained through credentialing.
This is not anti-intellectualism. It is pro-reality. Theory has value when grounded in practice—expertise matters when proven through results. But theory divorced from practice and expertise without accomplishment is not only useless but also dangerous. It creates the illusion of knowledge while destroying actual knowledge.
The path forward will not be gentle. Fiscal crises loom. Currency devaluation approaches. Institutional collapse accelerates. But these are birth pains, not death throes. From the wreckage of fiat expertise, real expertise will emerge. From the collapse of credentialism, competence will rise. From the end of abstraction, achievement will return.
America must rise from the ashes.
***
Conclusion
Every month, before you even see your paycheck, the priesthood collects its tithe. This is not a suggestion or a subscription—it’s a seizure. Mandatory payroll taxes—deducted by law, non-negotiable, non-cancellable—flow automatically into the salaries of the 80,000 health bureaucrats who locked you down, the 23,000 Fed economists who inflated your savings away, the 17,000 EPA regulators who shut your mines, and the thousands of think-tank priests who write 800-page hymns to energy transitions they’ve never touched.
There is no off switch. No ballot can defund them. No candidate can fire them. No protest can stop the deduction. They are permanently funded—by you—to fail you permanently. This is not taxation—it is a tithe to a failed church without representation. It is ritual extraction by a priesthood that never dies, never delivers, and never disappears. You pay. They rule. You lose. Every month. Forever.
You fund both Leviathans—the government priesthood and the asset management church. One steals your present with taxes. The other steals your future with fees. Both are funded by force. Neither can be fired by a vote. This is why nothing changes. It’s not because voters are stupid, nor because politicians are corrupt. But because the funding is hardwired—and you are the wire.
That is, until the currency dies—and it is dying.
When fiat money no longer funds fiat experts, real expertise regains value. When credentials mean nothing, competence means everything. The farmer, the mechanic, the builder, the family business owner—everyone who operates in field space rather than office space—becomes essential. The reversion to reality will be painful but necessary.
As we approach America’s 250th anniversary of independence, we face a choice between office space and field space, reports and results, abstraction and reality. America’s founders were field space people, not credentialed bureaucrats. George Washington: surveyor and soldier. Thomas Jefferson: farmer and inventor. Benjamin Franklin: printer and experimenter.
America was built by hand, fought for beliefs, and created from direct experience. The soldiers, farmers, craftsmen, and explorers who built it understood that value comes from creating tangible goods and services, not from writing reports about them.
It is time to close the laptop and leave the office. It is time to look away from the screen and enter the field where reality lives, consequences matter, and results count. It is time to build again with our hands, heads, and hearts to make things that work, businesses that profit, and communities that thrive.
The time has come to build American energy, minerals, manufacturing, and prosperity, and rebuild the industrial base that won World War II and the Cold War. It is time to create the abundance that defeats scarcity, and the freedom that defeats tyranny. Clear the chamber, slam in a fresh magazine of reality, and let field space surge again. Let’s reignite prosperity and return to the Field.
The $38 trillion question isn’t whether this transition happens, but whether America leads it. The answer determines whether we emerge stronger or weaker, freer or less free, more prosperous or more impoverished.
Whatever the answer, one thing is sure: America’s next chapter will be written by those who build, not those who bureaucratize.
Time to build. Time to drill. Time to mine. Time to refine. Time to manufacture.
Time to win.
See you in the field.
Erik D. Prince is a former Navy SEAL officer and the founder of private military company Blackwater.