The Price of Other People's Wars

There is a number on the gas pump, and there is a number in the Federal Reserve's minutes, and the distance between these two numbers — the one you see with your own eyes and the one they discuss in rooms you will never enter — is the precise measure of the lie they are telling you about the economy.

In March, gasoline prices surged twenty-one percent in a single month. The Consumer Price Index leapt to 3.3 percent year-over-year, nearly a full point higher than the month before, and the energy index — that cold, clinical phrase for the thing that determines whether a single mother can afford to drive to work — rose almost eleven percent. This is not an abstraction. This is the cost of the Iran war arriving at every kitchen table in America, settling itself into every household budget like an uninvited guest who has no intention of leaving.

And yet the Federal Reserve, that great cathedral of monetary authority, sits in its marble sanctum and contemplates — of all things — raising interest rates. The minutes from the March meeting reveal that more officials than before are willing to consider hikes, not cuts, because the inflation they helped engineer through years of easy money is now being reignited by a war whose costs cascade through energy, shipping, food, and semiconductor supply chains all at once. The Fed, which spent the better part of a decade flooding the economy with cheap dollars, which held rates at the floor while asset prices soared and the working class fell further behind, now finds itself trapped in a cage of its own making. It cannot cut rates without stoking the inflation that is already devouring paychecks. It cannot raise them without strangling an economy that grew at a pitiful 0.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025 — a number so anemic it barely registers as growth at all.

This is the arithmetic of empire and easy money, and it is not new. Every war inflates. Every central bank that prints its way through a crisis eventually meets the crisis that printing cannot solve. What is new, perhaps, is the particular cruelty of the timing — a ceasefire negotiated in Islamabad while American families negotiate which bills to pay first, a two-week pause in hostilities offered as though it were generosity while the price of everything continues its relentless climb.

My mother came to this country from Kingston, Jamaica, with a nurse's degree and the unshakeable conviction that work — real work, disciplined and daily — was the only honest path to anything worth having. She did not believe in windfalls or bailouts or the benevolence of institutions. She believed in showing up. And when I think about what inflation truly is, beneath the charts and the policy jargon, I think it is the slow, systemic punishment of people who do exactly what she did — who earn their money honestly, who save it carefully, who watch its value erode because someone in Washington decided that fiscal discipline was less important than political expedience.

The trade deficit widened again in February — $57.3 billion — because we remain a nation that consumes more than it creates, that imports more than it builds, that has confused financial engineering with actual engineering. And this, too, is a kind of war, quieter than the one in the Strait of Hormuz but no less consequential: the war against productive enterprise, against the entrepreneur who builds something real, against the small business owner who cannot hedge energy costs the way Goldman Sachs can, who does not have a lobbyist in Washington or a seat at the Fed's table.

The free market is not a theory. It is the lived reality of every person who wakes up and builds something — a business, a career, a family's future — without the luxury of a printing press or the power to set interest rates by committee. What we are witnessing now, in the convergence of war and inflation and institutional paralysis, is the cost of abandoning that reality in favor of managed economies and managed conflicts, both of which produce the same result: the managed decline of the people who can least afford it.

The gas pump does not lie. The Fed minutes equivocate, the press conferences parse, the projections shift like sand — but the number on the pump is the number on the pump. And if you want to understand the true state of this economy, do not read the minutes. Stand at the pump. Watch the numbers climb. That is the sermon no one in Washington wants to preach, and it is the only one worth hearing.