(Mises Institute)—Imagine someone giving a State of the World address that begins with a reminder that people possess free will and ought to be doing a better job of exercising it. This could possibly raise doubts about the speaker’s mental stability—at least until the talk went into the dark details of civilization’s condition.
If the state of the world reflects the choices people make, and if those choices are autonomous, originating from within the minds of individuals, then the speaker is making a solid point. But if we’re at the mercy of forces we regard as beyond our control, then the world couldn’t be other than it is.
So, which is it?
If we consult the philosophers who have discussed free will we will get a wide range of views, including the denial that it exists (as one example see the book Free Will, by Sam Harris), but everyday people accept its truth in an Aristotelian sense even if they’ve never heard of Aristotle.
In his writing on ethics, Aristotle distinguished voluntary and involuntary actions. When a person acts voluntarily he becomes “the cause and source of his acts. . . . And all that he does from deliberate choice he clearly does voluntarily. It is clear then that virtue and vice have to do with voluntary acts.” He continues, “Things done on the spur of the moment, and things done by animals and children can be willing [voluntary], but driven by desire and spirit and not what we would normally call true choice.”
For Aristotle and most of us, deliberate choice is what is meant by free will.
- Let’s take a look at the world we’ve created and ask some questions:
- Is the current economic and political landscape an accurate reflection of our choices?
- Have we, as members of a democracy, chosen to participate in the wars of the past and current century?
- Have we chosen to outlaw honest money and substitute bureaucratic control of easily counterfeited digits?
- Have we decided as a group that prices should rise continuously to allow big market players to get rich while the rest of us slowly decline?
- Are we okay with bailing them out when things blow up?
- Do most of us like seeing the Federal Reserve Note lose 98 percent of its value since the Fed’s inception?
Have most of us decided that merit is racist and diversity, equity, and inclusion is the solution? Are most of us on board with the need to severely curtail the economy to save the planet from human activity? Are we in agreement that social media needs to be regulated by people calling themselves fact-checkers, who will claim to spot untruthful and hateful posts, then have them censored and their authors permanently expelled?
Did we decide, through majority vote, that the Constitution’s interpretation is up for grabs, that certain amendments don’t mean what they say?
It might be that we find ourselves trapped in an alien world. It might be very far from what we wanted. It might even be a living nightmare.
Clearly, other people highjacked our choices. Other people, mostly politicians and professional busybodies, have exercised their choices while denying us the right to ours. Isn’t that how democracies work? We settle for an approximation of what we want by voting, and after repeated attempts at free will by proxy we end up with the near opposite of what we intended.
Free markets and honest money prevailed in the late nineteenth century, and prosperity abounded. In 1912 Americans went to the polls and elected Woodrow Wilson, who in his second term promised to keep them out of war but changed his mind—not the people’s minds, his mind. In his first term he gave us the income tax and the Fed, which covered the monetary demands of the war.
The economy seemed to roar during the 1920s, but it was built on monetary fallacy. As Hans Sennholz explains,
In 1924, after a sharp decline in business, the Reserve banks suddenly created some $500 million in new credit, which led to a bank credit expansion of over $4 billion in less than one year. While the immediate effects of this new powerful expansion of the nation’s money and credit were seemingly beneficial, initiating a new economic boom and effacing the 1924 decline, the ultimate outcome was most disastrous.
Thus, the crash, and a little later the New Deal, and with it the end of honest money. Recovery lingered always in the future until the Japanese surprised the living daylights out of the administration at Pearl Harbor. It continued to linger in the future during the second bloodbath.
To borrow a word from Lee Harvey Oswald two days before he was assassinated, we’ve been patsies. We’ve been set up.
But we can’t push all the blame on our princes. We’re responsible for our lives, not them, even if we give them vague proxy power through elections. We’re ultimately the guilty party.
For instance, why didn’t Americans put up a fight when Franklin D. Roosevelt issued his decree to turn in their gold? There should have been riots in the streets, with Roosevelt and the Fed burned in effigy.
But what would they riot about, exactly? They were told gold caused the Depression. Was it true? They didn’t know. Who are they to argue with court economists? Somehow it didn’t feel right, but they were cold and hungry. Nothing felt right.
To make a deliberate choice to defend their right to own gold required knowledge most of them didn’t have. Instead, they trusted the experts, among them phobic deflationist John Maynard Keynes.
Keynes missed out on the Nobel Prize, but his überdevotee, Paul Samuelson, swept it up for him. Samuelson reviewed The General Theory in Econometrica in 1946:
Herein lies the secret of the General Theory. It is a badly written book, poorly organized; any layman who, beguiled by the author’s previous reputation, bought the book was cheated of his five shillings. It is not well suited for classroom use. It is arrogant, bad-tempered, polemical, and not overly generous in its acknowledgments. It abounds in mares’ nests or confusions.
Keynes was the most influential economist of the twentieth century. We’re being ruled by frauds.
Everyday people possess Aristotle’s deliberate choice, but their choices have been commandeered. Our Ivy League overlords claim to know better. Even adhering to the government’s famed food pyramid has backfired.
It may be true that most people will do anything if the price is right, as the Godfather clearly understood. But they still weigh the consequences. Money or even one’s life isn’t always the driver of choices. In Atlas Shrugged, productive people abandoned their jobs or took less demanding ones because they were on strike against a world that considered them sacrificial fodder.
Conclusion
One of the reasons so many people admire Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard was their uncompromising resilience to ideological rot. They stood tall. They did not go along to get along, and we are infinitely better for it. In their vast repertoire of written works, available for a download on mises.org, they’ve provided us a robust Austrian economic theory.
We fight in the shadow of giants. Let’s not let them down.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
