Rodney Schroeter

McDonald's announced they're replacing cashiers with kiosks in California just after the $20 minimum wage kicked in. Shocking to absolutely no one who understands basic economics. When you artificially price labor above its market value, employers find substitutes. Machines, automation, or they simply eliminate positions entirely. The teenagers who desperately need that first job experience? Gone. The single mother trying to re-enter the workforce after years away? Priced out by someone with more skills. You've just created a legal barrier that prevents the least skilled workers from competing on the one thing they had going for them: willingness to work for less while they build experience. Politicians pat themselves on the back for "helping workers" while unemployment among young minorities hits double digits. The workers who keep their jobs benefit (temporarily), but the invisible victims, those who never get hired in the first place, don't make headlines. Economics doesn't care about your good intentions.

Imagine becoming the first trillionaire without having added any value to the world.

Stacy Abrams started a NGO and 30 days later was given $2 BILLION dollars by the Biden Administration. To date, she has not had to return a penny. Even Elon Musk talks about the obvious FRAUD. Where is our money, Stacy?

The state didn't invent money. Carl Menger destroyed that myth in 1871 with his regression theorem, and statists have been seething ever since. Picture yourself in a primitive barter economy. You're a blacksmith who needs grain, but the farmer doesn't want your horseshoes. He wants pottery. The potter wants leather goods. The leather worker wants meat. You face what economists call the double coincidence of wants problem: finding someone who both has what you want and wants what you have. Barter works for simple trades, but complex economic coordination becomes impossible. Smart traders notice that certain goods get accepted more readily than others. Cattle, salt, shells, precious metals. These commodities share specific properties: durability, divisibility, portability, recognizability. Over generations, market participants gravitate toward the most marketable goods as media of exchange. No central authority decrees this. No committee meets to decide monetary policy. Individual actors pursuing their own interests spontaneously converge on the same solution. Money emerges from voluntary exchange, not government decree. Every unit of money traces its value back through an unbroken chain of exchanges to its original commodity value. Gold became money because people valued it first as jewelry, ornamentation, and industrial uses. Its monetary premium built on top of that foundation. When governments later monopolized monetary systems, they parasitically appropriated this organic market institution. You can observe this process today in Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Lebanon. When state currencies collapse, people don't wait for permission to adopt alternatives. They trade cigarettes, rice, Bitcoin. Markets route around monetary failure because human cooperation demands a medium of exchange.