Notes on a Borrowed Dollar

There is something obscene, and I mean obscene in the old ecclesiastical sense — a thing set apart from the sacred — about the spectacle of grown men and women gathering quarterly in a marble room in Washington to decide, by vote, what the price of money will be, as if the cost of borrowing were a matter not of markets and risk and the patient accumulation of savings but of committee sentiment, of tea leaves read by bureaucrats, of twenty-five basis points conjured or withheld from the air above the Eccles Building like rain from a rain god. The March minutes tell us the committee voted eleven to one to do nothing, which is what committees most often vote to do, and what passes for policy in our country is increasingly this: the careful, professional, credentialed performance of indecision, while inflation above the target line continues its slow, patient work of consuming the dollar in every pocket that holds one.

I grew up between two worlds that taught me the truth about money before any economics seminar could confuse me. My mother came from Kingston with a nurse's training and a Jamaican's refusal to mistake paper for wealth; my father, born in St. Croix and dressed in the uniform of the United States Army, understood that what a man earns he must also defend. Between them I learned that a dollar is a promise, and a nation which breaks its promises by degrees — a penny here, a quarter-point there, a trillion appended quietly to the deficit while nobody is looking — becomes, in the end, a nation that cannot be trusted by its own citizens, let alone by its creditors abroad.

The Fed, we are told, may cut rates soon. The Fed, we are told, is waiting on data. The Fed, we are told, is threading the needle. But the needle was lost a long time ago, and what the Fed is really doing is what every priesthood does when the old theology collapses: performing the rites with ever-greater solemnity, hoping no one notices that the god has left the temple. The god, in our case, was sound money — the simple, stern, unglamorous conviction that a dollar saved today should purchase tomorrow what it purchased yesterday.

We did not lose this god in a single act of apostasy. We lost him the way nations always lose their better selves: in small capitulations, each one defended as prudence, each one celebrated as sophistication. And now we are surprised that our savings do not grow, that our young cannot buy homes, that the entrepreneur who builds a business with his own two hands must compete against men who build nothing and borrow everything at subsidized rates. The tariffs now blamed for half the excess inflation above target are merely the latest costume worn by an older sin — the conviction that Washington can engineer, by decree, the prosperity which only free men and free markets have ever actually produced.

Let me say it plainly, because the plain things are the ones they hope we will forget. Prosperity is not printed. It is not voted on by committees. It is made — in workshops, in small businesses, in the quiet early mornings of people who still believe that what you earn is what you own. Every dollar the state borrows is a dollar stolen from a child not yet born, and every rate the Fed manipulates is a thumb laid, gently, professionally, expertly, on the scale of a country that once knew better.