I’d like to tell you a story – one that may bring clarity to the current moment in history that we find ourselves in.
This is a story that I’ve only recently learned… and I’m still fleshing out the nuances. But the heart of the story is this:
America is actively engaged in a hidden economic war that began 250 years ago and never ended. This is a real war, fought between real people who comprise overlapping networks of institutions across the Western world.
Yet, this war is completely unspoken. Nobody talks about it.
Thus, very few people realize it’s happening. All they can see is the war’s effects, which they can only attribute to other causes… because they have no concept of the hidden economic war itself. All they see are the shadows on the wall.
Have you observed any current events recently and had the feeling that they seemed completely out of place? Like they didn’t match what you thought you knew about how American politics or geopolitical relations worked?
I certainly have… and that’s how I came to see beyond the shadows.
The reason this story brought clarity for me is that I’ve been conditioned to view both history and current events through the lens of a somewhat binary framework. Humans are wired this way.
Our mind naturally seeks to break complex observations into a simple, easy-to-understand framework. When we observe something, our natural instinct is to try to determine whether it is “good” or “bad” as quickly as possible. I tend to think this is a healthy defense mechanism.
However, this urge to break complex observations down into a binary framework creates a situation where we necessarily lose nuance and context.
What’s more, it limits our ability to recognize when something might exist outside of our innately understood framework altogether… and that’s where our conditioning can be a major limiting factor.
For example, our initial conditioning comes from what we learn in primary school textbooks. For those of us who went through the public education system, this is our default perspective.
Speaking from the American perspective, our school textbooks treat American history almost explicitly as the gradual rise and evolution of the federal government and the American political system. Perhaps some may see that as a conspiracy… but it makes perfect sense to me.
After all, the government is the publisher’s largest customer. It buys all the textbooks. Naturally, the textbook publishers want to make sure their prime customer is happy with the product.
As such, American textbooks present history through the lens of someone who views the growth of government power and regulation over American society as a good thing. Then they boil historical events down into cartoonish versions of themselves, necessarily stripping out all the nuance and complexities.
Of course, this default view of history only sticks with us beyond our schooling if we make no effort to study history from other points of view. When we do that, we start to see that American history is quite fascinating, and that there are many subtleties that the textbooks omit.
Personally, I studied numerous works on American history written by historians of the Austrian School of Economics. Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroomis a great resource for this. And Murray Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty 5-volume series is as well. It’s a fascinating look at the American founding and its early decades from a different perspective.
These works present history through the lens of Austrian free market economics and libertarian philosophy. Thus, they tend to look at events from the perspective of whether they explicitly increased the freedom of individuals in society versus increasing the power of government and later its aligned corporations. The implication is that expanding government power necessarily aggresses against individual liberty.
I’m far more sympathetic to this “liberty vs. power” framework as compared to the textbook view of history. And viewing history in this way offers a deeper understanding of the American founding and how the American republic has evolved from its original structure.
However, this framework has its own limitations… which is perfectly understandable. I don’t think we should expect any single view to provide us with an all-encompassing understanding of everything.
Still, I couldn’t understand certain current events exclusively from within this framework. And as an analyst, that bothered me.
It started when the Federal Reserve broke ranks with the globally coordinated financial system by raising its target interest rate aggressively in 2022 – after SOFR had replaced LIBOR as our interest rate benchmark here in the US. I explored this dynamic in more detail in my book Beyond the Nest Egg.
That situation couldn’t be cleanly distilled into my existing framework.
Then came the Maduro situation… what’s happening in Iran… the US moving to secure the Panama Canal, the Strait of Malacca, and the Strait of Gibraltar – none of these events distill cleanly either… because they don’t signal the aggressive expansion of government power at the explicit expense of freedom in America.
But here’s the thing – these events don’t map to America’s pre-Trump foreign policy, either. They are clearly from a different agenda. Yet, they also seem to contradict the Trump administration’s “America First” promise at the same time. So they just seem out of place.
This stumped me at first. But this apparent enigma prompted me to dig deeper into perspectives and primary sources that I hadn’t explored previously. That’s how I discovered the 250-year hidden economic war that’s playing out right in front of us.
We just don’t have any name for this war, and nobody has ever suggested to us that it exists. Thus, it’s hidden in plain sight – like the purloined letter.
We don’t perceive it even though it’s playing out right in front of our eyes… nor would we have the terminology to describe it if we did. So all we do is observe the war’s effects as though they were shadows dancing on the wall.
That’s the story I would like to share with you in an upcoming essay series. But before I point you toward the first installment, let me give you the single most important thing I learned — the insight that reframed everything else.
We are taught that the primary economic systems in the world are capitalism and socialism… but those “isms” are so broad as to have very little real meaning. What I think of as capitalism may be completely different than what you believe the term to mean.
What’s more, the words “capitalism” and “socialism” weren’t coined until the mid-1800s – after the Industrial Revolution had already begun driving rapid economic development. Thus, these words tend to obscure more than they reveal.
The reality is that two far more specific economic systems have been at war with one another since the American founding. These are specific systems with very specific policy prescriptions and goals… and their goals stand in direct opposition to one another.
That’s the 250-year hidden economic war we are going to examine, starting later this week. We’ll then lay the story out in one or two essays each week until we’ve arrived at our destination – what’s happening today.
I think this will be quite the journey… but I do have one request to make to you.
As we dive into the nuances of this hidden economic war, please don’t take my analysis and assessment as a blatant endorsement for anything. My goal is to present this story from the perspective of an objective analyst – not to inject my own opinions or commentary.
With that said, please buckle up. Once again, we’re going to venture down a path where the roads aren’t paved.
Look for our first installment later this week…
-Joe Withrow
P.S. Episode 3 of the Phoenician League podcast will drop tomorrow at 6:00 am Eastern. We’ll talk about how I escaped the rat race after seeing the depravity of the corporate banking industry first-hand, which we discussed in the first two episodes.
If you would like to join the conversation, the podcast is available on all the major platforms. This includes Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all the others. The video version is available on our YouTube channel as well.
Please subscribe to the podcast on whichever channel you use to get notified when a new episode is released each week. The first several episodes will lay the foundation, and then we’ll get into timely macro talk and feature some great guests afterwards.