What’s being called “new” today isn’t new at all. It’s a repeat. A rerun. A reboot of ideas that failed the first time, failed the second time, and will fail this time too. The latest wave of monetary and economic theorizing isn’t a breakthrough—it is an echo. The sound of past errors returning in slightly trendier packaging.

Every time a system collapses under its own contradictions, the response is rarely humility. It’s not: “Perhaps we misunderstood the nature of money.” It’s never: “Maybe there are economic laws we can’t rewrite.” Instead, it’s always: “The tools weren’t used properly.” Or better yet: “This time we have better tools.”

This is the eternal recurrence of economic folly. A Nietzschean loop—not of strength or greatness—but of error, forgetting, and arrogance.

There is always a push to break the link between money and value. It’s the same dream every time. If only money could be completely abstract—just numbers, just code, just agreement—then maybe scarcity itself could be abolished. Then maybe the limits of reality could finally be overcome. Money, in this view, isn’t rooted in anything real. It exists because people believe in it. It works because people trust it. So, the next logical step is to unmoor it entirely. Untether it from value. Untether it from goods. Untether it from work, from production, from anything concrete at all.

Money never really worked that way. It didn’t emerge from trust. It didn’t emerge from agreement. It emerged from value. From real things. Gold. Silver. Commodities. Titles to goods. To wealth that actually existed. Not promises. Not theories. Not code.

When money is treated like it’s simply a tool of policy—a kind of programmable credit score for society—the system starts to rot. The signals that money is supposed to send get distorted. Prices lose their information content. Production is misdirected. Savings are punished. Consumption is subsidized. Sooner or later, the disconnect between real wealth and artificial money leads to crisis.

That’s where we are now. The response from the architects of this disaster is not to return to sound principles, but to double down. To build a new system—even more artificial than the last—in the hopes that this time the fantasy will hold.

You can already guess what they’ll call it. The next system will be branded as “dynamic,” or “inclusive,” or “resilient.” These words sound like virtues. What they really mean is that the system will be explicitly designed to override the laws of economics. “Dynamic” doesn’t mean responsive to reality. It means hostile to it.

Entrepreneurship is dynamic. Prices in a free market are dynamic. Economic law isn’t. Scarcity isn’t. Incentives aren’t. Trade-offs aren’t. These are hard constraints, not variables you can toggle.

In the end, the same fate awaits this next system as all the others that tried to escape reality. It will fail for the same reasons. It will crumble under the same forces. The dream of money without value will die the same death it always dies — slowly at first, then suddenly.

When it does, there will be no mystery about why it happened. Only amnesia. Only the eternal return of the same errors, marching under new names, dressed in new slogans, promising a new world.

It won’t be new. It never is.

Reference

Henry Hazlitt; The Failure of the “New Economics”