Hard Money & The Non-Aggression Principle

Most of us grew up hearing some version of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." But what if our entire monetary system is a systematic violation of this golden rule?

In this episode, we explore how money printing violates the Non-Aggression Principle—the simple idea that you shouldn't initiate force or fraud against others. As Jack Mallers puts it, "Money is your time and energy in abstracted form." When the Federal Reserve creates trillions of dollars out of thin air, they're diluting the value you've already earned without your consent.

We'll cover:

• Why monetary debasement is theft, not policy
• The Cantillon Effect: how inflation transfers wealth from Main Street to Wall Street
• How legal tender laws force you to participate in a system that robs you
• The hidden cost: the multi-generational wealth and long-term thinking that monetary inflation has destroyed
• Why Bitcoin offers an alternative built on voluntary exchange instead of coercion

This isn't about politics. It's about the ethical foundation of how we exchange value—and what happens when that foundation is built on force instead of consent.

If you've ever wondered why it's so much harder to get ahead than it was for your parents' generation, this episode explains why. And more importantly, what you can do about it.

Ready to protect your business from monetary debasement? Visit www.satoshigeneral.com to learn how Bitcoin treasury strategies can help you preserve the value you've created.

www.satoshigeneral.com

linkedin.com/in/brian-bundy-b30a529

Transcript

Welcome back to Love and Hard Money. I'm Brian, and today we're going to talk about something that sounds philosophical, but has very practical implications for your business and your life. Whether our monetary system violates one of humanity's oldest ethical principles, most of us grew up hearing some version of do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Christians call it the Golden Rule, but this isn't just a Christian idea. The Jewish TAL mode says, what is hateful to you? Do not do to your fellow Islam? Teaches None of you truly believe until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself. Buddhism says, hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.

Across cultures, across millennia, humans have recognized this fundamental truth. We shouldn't treat people in ways we wouldn't want to be treated ourselves in modern political philosophy, particularly in libertarian circles. This principle has been refined and was called the non-aggression principle or the nap.

It's simple. Don't initiate force or fraud against other people or their property. Notice the word initiate. This isn't pacifism. It's a recognition that using force against someone who hasn't harmed you is fundamentally wrong. Now, you might be thinking, come on, Brian, why does libertarian philosophy matter to me?

Fair question. But here's the thing. The nap isn't just an abstract principle for political debates. Let's imagine you run a small business. The nap is the foundation of how healthy businesses operate. You don't force customers to buy from you. You don't steal from your suppliers. You create value and exchange it voluntarily.

The entire market runs on voluntary exchanges on the nap, so when that principle gets violated systemically, it doesn't just offend libertarian ideologues. It affects everyone doing business. Everyone trying to plan for the future. Everyone trying to build something that lasts, which brings us to our monetary system.

Jack Mallard's, founder of Bitcoin Financial Services Company, strike, has a good way of putting this. He says, money is your time and energy in abstracted form. Think about that. When you work, when you build, when you create value, you're trading your finite time and energy for money. That money represents hours of your life.

It represents the value you've created. It's stored life energy. Now, here's the uncomfortable question. What happens when someone can create that same money out of thin air? Since 2020, the Federal Reserve has expanded the money supplied by trillions of dollars, not through production, not through creating value, just creation.

Digital entries in a ledger. That's it. Some analysts estimate more than 40% of the dollars circulating in the economy today are newly created since the start of COVID. When that new money enters the economy, it doesn't announce itself. There's no line item on your tax return that says inflation tax, 15% of your savings.

But that's exactly what's happening. Your stored time and energy, the money you've already earned is being diluted, debased made less valuable. You are being made less valuable. But here's what makes this even worse. The theft isn't even distributed equally. There's an economic concept called the Canon Effect, named after an 18th century economist who noticed something important.

When new money enters the economy, it doesn't affect everyone at the same time, those closest to the source of the new money get to spend it first. Well, prices are still low. By the time that money reaches everyone else, prices have already adjusted upward. Think for a minute about what happened during 2020 and 2021.

The Federal Reserve created trillions of dollars. Who got that money? First? Major banks, large corporations, government contractors, wall Street. They got to deploy that capital immediately. Buying assets, making investments, expanding operations, all at pre inflation prices. Meanwhile, small businesses were applying for PPP loans and waiting workers.

Were waiting for stimulus checks. By the time that money trickled down to Main Street, the price of everything had already started to climb. This isn't just theft. This is regressive theft. It's a transfer of wealth from the people who can least afford it to the people who need it leased, and it's baked into the system.

As a business owner, unless you're in the top tier of companies with direct access to fed liquidity or major credit lines, you're on the wrong end of this. You're playing a rigged game where the big players get newly printed money first and you get inflation later, and that doesn't even account for the fraud in the system.

In an interview with Joe Rogan in March of 2025, while he was heading up. The efforts at the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk asserted that at least $1.5 trillion or roughly 20% of the federal budget is likely lost to fraud. Money printing, therefore, is not just a violation of the non-aggression principle.

It's a violation that specifically targets the productive middle class and transfers their wealth. Upwards the elite and outward to a parasitic class feeding off the good intentions of a compliant population. It's systemic, it's intentional in it's design, even if not in its stated purpose. And it is force.





And you can't even opt out. Legal tender laws don't just establish what money is. They compel you to accept it. If someone owes you a debt, you must accept dollars as payment. Even if you know those dollars are being debased, when it's time to pay your taxes, you must pay in dollars. If you want to operate a business in the United States, you must participate in this system.

This is explicit force, not implicit. The government doesn't just print money and hope you'll use it. They mandate that you use it by law, backed by the threat of fines or imprisonment. Imagine if I forced you to accept payment in a currency I controlled, and then I changed the value of that currency whenever it benefited me.

You would call that fraud, you would call that theft. But when it's done at a national scale, we call it monetary policy.

Now, some people will say, but Brian, we live in a society. We have a social contract. This is just part of the deal. Let's really think about that. When exactly did you sign this social contract? When were you given the opportunity to negotiate the terms you were born into a system told These are the rules and informed that leaving requires renouncing citizenship and potentially paying an exit tax up to 40% of your net worth on the date of renunciation.

Does that sound like a contract to you? In business, a contract requires voluntary agreement from all parties. There's negotiation. There's consideration. Both sides have to benefit or at least believe they're benefiting. And crucially, you can walk away before you sign. Imagine if you actually could negotiate your social contract as an individual.

What would you agree to? Maybe you'd accept some level of taxation for genuine public goods, infrastructure, courts, defense. You might even agree to progressive taxation, where those who earn more, pay a higher percentage. Reasonable people can disagree on these things, but would you agree to let those same authorities silently take an additional percentage of everything you've saved through monetary expansion?

Would you sign a contract that allows unlimited undisclosed debasement of your life's work? Would you agree to a system where the biggest beneficiaries of new money creation are the people who already have the most? I doubt it. Nobody would voluntarily agree to that, and that's the point. This isn't a contract.

This is an imposition. This is force masquerading as policy,

but the violation goes deeper than just the theft itself. Monetary debasement actually changes how you think and plan in a sound money system. Saving makes sense. You work, you set aside some of what you earn and that purchasing power is there for you in the future. This encourages long-term thinking, building for the future, investing in things that pay off over decades, not quarters, but in an inflationary system.

Saving is punished. Your money loses value, sitting still. So what do you do? You are pushed into risk. You're pushed into speculation. You're incentivized to borrow now and pay back with cheaper dollars later. This fundamentally alters human behavior. Economists call this time preference, your preference for present consumption versus future consumption.

Sound money allows you to choose your own time preference. Inflationary money forces you into a shorter time horizon than you might freely choose. For businesses. This is particularly destructive companies that want to build for the long term, that want to maintain strong balance sheets, that want to invest slowly and carefully.

They're punished relative to companies that leverage up chase growth at any cost and optimize for the next quarter. It forces businesses to chase profits over quality. And that is reflected in the declining options available to consumers. Plywood ship flat furniture instead of heirlooms solid wood items that will last generations.

This isn't just an economic effect, this is cognitive coercion. The system is forcing you to think differently than you would freely choose. It's forcing you to take risks you might not otherwise take. It's forcing you to prioritize the short term. Over the long term, that's a violation of the non-aggression principle in a subtle but profound way.

You're being forced to change your behavior, not through explicit law, but through the systemic debasement of your stored value. But here's what keeps me up at night and what I think is the deepest violation of all the opportunity cost. The thing is that were never built because people couldn't reliably plan for the future.

Think about what it takes to build something that lasts a multi-generational family business, a beautiful cathedral, a university endowment I will save now, and that value will be there for my children or their children to build upon. We see it in Renaissance Europe, but hardly at all in post 1950s America.

It used to be possible in the late 18 hundreds and early 19 hundreds under a gold standard, prices were remarkably stable. You could save money and it would have roughly the same purchasing power. Decades later, people built businesses with century long time horizons. They endowed institutions that still exist today.

They thought in terms of legacy, what happened to that mindset? Look at the data. A boomer entering the workforce in 1970 could buy a median priced house for roughly two to three times their annual income. A millennial today needs five to eight times their annual income for that same home. College costs about half a year's wages in 1980.

Now it's multiple years of income. A single income could support a middle class family. Now, two incomes barely manage it. And it's not because this generation works less hard or is less productive by many measures, productivity has increased dramatically, but the purchasing power of wages hasn't kept pace.

The ability to save has been systemically destroyed. The result. Millennials and Gen Z are the first generations in American history expected to be poorer than their parents. Not because of lack of education, not because of lack of work ethic, but because the money they earn today buys less than the money their parents earned, and the money they save today will buy even less tomorrow.

This breaks the multi-generational wealth building that used to be normal. Your grandparents could work a regular job, save diligently. Buy a home and pass something on to the next generation, that playbook doesn't work anymore. The rules changed, but nobody announced it. How many family businesses dissolved between generations?

Not because the business failed, but because the saved capital meant to fund the transition had been inflated away. How many young people who should be starting businesses are instead trapped in wage employment because they can't accumulate seed capital? How many second or third generation inherited assets that look substantial on paper have lost most of their real value?

Now, multiply that across an entire economy. Across multiple generations. What innovations never happened? Because the capital that should have funded them was inflated away. What businesses were never started Because saving for seed capital became irrational. What long-term research never got funded because investors needed returns.

Now, not in 20 years. Think about the medical research we might have, the infrastructure we might have built, the educational institutions. The arts and culture that depend on patient capital and long-term patronage. There's a concept in economics called opportunity costs, the value of the next best alternative you gave up, but how do you measure the opportunity cost of an entire civilization being forced into short term thinking for decades?

How do you quantify the compounding loss of all the things that were never built? We can't see what wasn't built. We can't measure what didn't happen, but I believe the cost is staggering. I believe we're living in a world that is vastly poorer, not just materially, but culturally, intellectually, spiritually, than the world that we could have had, had people been able to reliably plan across generations.

And that's perhaps the cruelest aspect of this violation of the non-aggression principle. The theft isn't just what's taken from you today. It's what's taken from your children and grandchildren. It's the future that was stolen before it could even be built. When you debase money, you don't just steal purchasing power, you steal possibility.

You steal the long-term vision that builds civilizations. Which brings us back to Jack Mallard's insight about money being time and energy in abstracted form. When your time and your energy are systematically debased, when you have to work more hours to maintain the same purchasing power, when you're forced onto a treadmill that keeps accelerating.

What is that? The old term for being forced to work for someone else's benefit without fair compensation was indentured servitude. You worked, but the fruits of your labor were extracted by someone else. You couldn't get ahead. You couldn't save your way to freedom. How is that different from a system where your savings are systematically debased, where you work more but fall further behind?

Where the purchasing power of your labor is extracted, not through honest taxes you can see, but through monetary expansion, you can't avoid, I'm not being hyperbolic here. I'm asking seriously, what's the ethical difference between forcing someone to work for you directly and forcing them to work in a system where their compensation is continuously diluted?

Both violate the non-aggression principle, both involve taking someone's time and energy. Without consent, one just has better branding.



And here's what might be the most insidious part. At least traditional theft is honest about what it is. When the government taxes you, there's transparency. You can see the rate, you can plan around it.

You can vote for representatives who promised to lower it. You can move to a jurisdiction with lower taxes. The taxes disclosed, debated, and subject to some level of democratic accountability Inflation. Is none of these things. The rate varies. It's unpredictable, and when it gets bad, who gets blamed? Not the people printing the money.

Instead, we're told it's supply chain issues. It's corporate greed, Putin's price hike, anything but the expansion of the money supply that preceded the price increases by a predictable leg. This is gaslighting on a national scale. The people causing the inflation deny responsibility for it, and then use it as justification for more intervention.

Price controls, windfall taxes, emergency spending, which often requires printing more money, which causes more inflation. You can't plan around something that's denied to exist even as you're experiencing it. You can't vote it away when people doing it won't acknowledge they're doing it. You can't escape it because legal tender laws trap you in the system.

This lack of transparency, this denial of reality, the shifting of blame, it might actually be a separate non-aggression principle violation beyond just the theft itself. It's fraud. It's lying about what's being done to you. Well, it's being done to you. At least a mugger is honest about mugging you. So what do we do about it?

This is where I start to get optimistic because for the first time in human history, really for the first time, we have an alternative. You can save your time and energy in a form of money that no one can debase, not the Federal Reserve. Not any government in the world, not any bank. Bitcoin has a fixed supply.

21 million coins. That's it. No one can print more. No one can dilute your holdings. The Canon effect can't exist when there's no new money creation to benefit the early recipients When you store your time and energy in Bitcoin. It remains your time and energy. Nobody can take it from you through monetary expansion.

This isn't about price speculation. This isn't about getting rich quick. This is about having the option for the first time to store your value in something that truly respects the non-aggression principle. Something that can't be inflated away, something that lets you plan for the long term. Something that might just maybe let us start building multi-generational value again, that might let us recover that long-term thinking our grandparents took for granted.

Look, I'm not telling you to put everything into Bitcoin tomorrow. I'm not even telling you that Bitcoin is perfect or without trade-offs. It's volatile. It's still early. There are real challenges. What I'm telling you is this. The current monetary system violates the non-aggression principle in multiple compounding ways.

It takes your stored time and energy without consent. It distributes that theft, regressively benefiting those who need at least it forces you to participate through legal tender laws. It destroys your ability to plan long term. It prevents the building of multi-generational value, and it gaslights you about all of this while it's happening.

You now have an alternative, an alternative that's built on a principle as simple as the golden rule. Don't take what isn't yours. Don't debase what others have saved. Don't force people into a system that violates their consent. Bitcoin is honest money for business leaders, for anyone planning for the future, for anyone who values time and energy, they've invested in building anything that alternative is worth understanding.

Maybe just, maybe it's the first step toward recovering the ability to build things that last to plan in generations instead of quarters. To leave behind more than we inherited.

That's it for today. Next time we'll talk about something practical inflation, what it really is, how to measure it, and most importantly, how to protect yourself from it. Until then, think about this. What would you build if you knew that your stored value would actually be there in 20 years? In 50 years, what would you build if you could plan like your great-grandfather did?

If you're enjoying the show and wanna learn more about Satoshi General, come check us out@satoshigeneral.com. Thanks for listening.