Freedom is like inflation: you lose 2-3% every year.

My grandfather was born on April 19, 1915 in a dirty, one-room shack in the town of Bonham, Texas.  Given the era, they had no electricity and no running water. And the family considered themselves fortunate that both mother and baby survived childbirth.

Pretty much everyone in the area was a farm laborer; they worked long, hard days in the unforgiving Texas heat trying to beckon life from ungenerous soil. But it was a living– one that my grandfather joined at an early age.

He was 14 years old– considered a “man” by the standards of his time– when the Great Depression struck.

Few people, including my grandfather, would have understood that the worst economic crisis in American history was a manmade virus cooked up in the laboratory of political incompetence. All he knew was that banks in his home town failed… and many of his neighbors lost their life savings overnight.

This led to a lifelong mistrust of the banking system– not just for my grandfather, but for an entire generation.

Throughout his life he kept his savings in an old coffee can. It wasn’t a lockbox or combination safe. He didn’t even bother hiding it; my grandfather literally just stuffed bills and coins into a metal can under the kitchen sink. He didn’t worry much about security because everyone in town knew and trusted one another, and no one would dare violate another man’s home… let alone his coffee can.

The other thing he did was save. If there was one thing my grandfather hated, it was spending money. On anything. You name it.

Food? He grew it himself and fished at the nearby lake. Medical care? The man barely ever went to the doctor in his entire life. Insurance? He had no concept of what that even was. Recreation? No one had time for such trivialities.

So, he saved just about everything he earned, depositing his meager wages with a satisfying and encouraging ka-ching into the ‘Bank of the Coffee Can’ week after week.

Whenever the coffee can became overly full, he knew it was time to invest his savings into something more durable and long-lasting.

But I’m not talking about stocks. In fact, given that he lived through the Crash of 1929, my grandfather believed that only a reckless, crazy person would buy stocks. And this trauma was shared by much of his generation.

So instead, he emptied out the old coffee can and invested in the one thing that he truly understood: land, i.e. one of the realest of real assets.

He always knew, worst case, he could plant more food on his new land. And this security had far more value to him than any other asset.

Then the cycle would begin anew: work, save, work, save… until, eventually, the coffee can would fill up again. He’d then use that money to buy building material and then build a small house on the land. No construction crew, no contractors. Just his own two hands and some basic tools.

Once complete, he’d put the house up for rent– I remember he typically charged by the week to coincide with the farm laborers’ weekly pay. And, again, everything was settled in cash… so the coffee can began to fill more quickly.

Soon there was enough money to build another small house. Then another. And another. This man was living a real-life version of the old board game Monopoly; the only thing he didn’t do was trade his houses out for hotels.

But he wasn’t unique. My grandfather was extremely typical of his generation: highly productive, self-reliant savers who worked hard and never expected anything for free.

In their value system, being unproductive was frowned upon. Vagrancy was a crime. If there were any jobs available, you were expected to have one, no matter what it was. If there were no jobs available, you were expected to be looking for one– or figure out how to produce something of value on your own.

My grandmother was cut from the same cloth. And the two of them eventually had a pretty substantial real estate portfolio of rental homes.

One particular complex had about a dozen or so houses on it, and my grandmother was in charge of collecting all the rent. They built her a small office near the entrance of the property, and not being one to waste resources, my grandmother decided to open a beauty salon there.

Bear in mind, my grandmother never went to cosmetology school. She didn’t have a license. She didn’t pass through a myriad of state and local permitting inspectors. She just hung her shingle out one day and customers started showing up. And because she provided good service, the customers kept showing up.

This is the sort of thing you used to be able to do in America. The government didn’t smother its citizens with endless regulations; if you wanted to start a business, you started one. No one asked permission to produce.

This is an incredible contrast to the America of today. God help you if you want to start a restaurant in the State of California, where you’ll spend years in the permitting, licensing, and inspection process, only to have employees go on strike over Gaza while customers brazenly steal from you with legal impunity.

That may be an extreme example, but government regulation at the federal, state, and local levels continues to strangle businesses– small and solo businesses in particular.

A few years ago, the Institute for Justice sampled 102 lower-income occupations in American and found a total of 2,749 license requirements across the fifty states, demanding hundreds of dollars in fees, exams, and an average 362 days of bureaucracy.

These are for vocations like tree-trimmer, hair-braider, fisherman, auctioneer, locksmith, upholsterer, florist, and even farm laborer.

(Neil Gorsuch, sitting US Supreme Court Justice, bemoans similar statistics in his excellent book Overruled, which I can’t recommend enough.)   

But this didn’t happen overnight. From my grandparents’ era to today, the bureaucratic, administrative state crept in little by little.

The effect is much like inflation where you lose 2-3% of your purchasing power year after year. One year’s inflation is no big deal; it’s only after looking back 10 or 20 years can we see how expensive things have become.

I really appreciate the tremendous efforts by Elon Musk and the people at DOGE to cut government spending. It needs to happen– responsible spending is critical to solving America’s $36+ trillion debt crisis.

But perhaps even more important is turning back the clock on regulations… and going back to an era where you didn’t need to ask permission to be productive.

Source

Simon Black is an international investor, entrepreneur and permanent traveler. His daily letter is both educational and entertaining, and we suggest that those who want unbiased, actionable information about global opportunities sign up for Sovereign Man’s free, actionable newsletter at http://www.SovereignMan.com.

From Simon Black of SovereignMan.com

Source: https://www.schiffsovereign.com/trends/freedom-is-like-inflation-you-lose-2-3-every-year-152295/