Brian Salmon

Communism never needed to win the Cold War. It just needed a discipline that makes central planning sound like science. That discipline exists. It's called macroeconomics, and it's the most effective tool the planners ever built. No tanks, no gulags. Just equations, a PhD, and a monopoly on money. Here's why. Macroeconomics rests on a handful of primitives: core concepts presented as self-evident truths, on which the whole edifice is built. Remove them one by one, and nothing is left standing. Let's go. GDP. The sacred metric, the one that decides whether a government succeeded or failed. Except it measures activity, not wealth. A hurricane that flattens a city makes GDP go up, because everything has to be rebuilt. Bastiat explained this back in 1850 with the broken window: you see the glazier's work, you don't see what the owner would have done with his money if the window had stayed intact. Worse, government spending enters GDP at cost, regardless of whether it's useful. A bureaucrat filling out forms nobody reads "produces" exactly as much as his salary. Keynes himself, in the General Theory, explained that burying banknotes in old coal mines and letting private enterprise dig them back up would cure unemployment. When your main metric can't tell the difference between digging holes and creating value, it's not a measuring tool. It's a justification tool. The aggregate. All of macro rests on the idea that you can add up things that don't add up. "Demand." "Investment." "Consumption." As if a waiter and an engineer building a datacenter were doing the same thing because they sit in the same column. The economy only exists in its structure: who produces what, for whom, with what capital, at what moment. Aggregation erases exactly what matters. It's like studying a forest by computing the average height of the trees. The representative agent. For decades, the models guiding central banks assumed a single household representing the entire population. One. Eight billion people with different tastes, plans, constraints and knowledge, reduced to a single equation. But the economy is heterogeneity. If everyone were identical, nobody would trade anything. Equilibrium. The models describe an economy that tends toward a stable state. Reality never stops. Every day an entrepreneur discovers an opportunity, another goes bankrupt, a technology makes a job obsolete. The economy is a discovery process, not a state. Building your theory on equilibrium is like studying a river by assuming it doesn't flow. The multiplier. The Keynesian primitive par excellence: one dollar of government spending creates more than one dollar of activity. If that were true, France would be the richest country on earth. It spends around 57% of GDP through the state, the highest in the OECD, with debt above 110% of GDP and anemic growth for twenty years. Many empirical studies find a multiplier below 1, sometimes close to zero. Of course they do: every dollar the state spends was first taken from someone, either today through taxes or tomorrow through debt. The paradox of thrift. They tell you saving is dangerous because it reduces demand. It's the exact opposite. Savings are tomorrow's capital. They fund the factory, the machine, the startup. No civilization ever got rich by eating its seed corn. A theory that turns prudence into a vice and spending into a virtue isn't an economic theory. It's a theory of debt. The general price level. Inflation is measured by an average index, chosen and calculated by the state. In the eurozone, the official index doesn't even include the cost of owning your home. The biggest expense of your life, missing from the measurement. And an average hides everything: when money printing sends real estate and stocks to the moon while TVs get cheaper, the index says "inflation under control." The young guy who can't buy an apartment says something else. The 2% target. They present as a success a policy whose explicit goal is to destroy the value of your money. At 2% a year, your savings lose half their purchasing power in 35 years. That's the target. Not the failure. The target. The natural rate. Central bankers set rates based on a "neutral interest rate," r-star. Nobody has ever observed it. It's estimated by models, with enormous error bands, by the very people who set the rates. They steer the economy by a variable that's invisible and that they compute themselves. It's an astrologer reading the future in a star chart he drew himself. Now, the high priests. Piketty. His entire thesis fits in r > g: the return on capital exceeds growth, so inequality mechanically explodes. Problem: he compares the return on a stock with the growth of a flow. Piketty's r is a gross return, before taxes, before heirs consume it, before it's split among children, before bankruptcies. In real life, fortunes don't compound forever: companies die, heirs spend, capital depreciates. And when you look closely at the rise in the capital-to-income ratio, a large share of it comes from housing. In other words, from rising real estate prices, fueled by low interest rates and supply choked by regulation. The inequality Piketty denounces is largely manufactured by the monetary and zoning policies he never questions. He treats the fever by adding more virus. And he doesn't hide his conclusion: in Capital and Ideology, he calls for a progressive wealth tax up to 90% on the largest fortunes, "temporary ownership," and "participatory socialism." He calls it moving beyond capitalism. Zucman. Same confusion, tax edition. The Zucman tax: 2% a year on wealth above €100 million, the French version of the billionaire tax he's been pushing with Saez in the US for years. Except a large fortune isn't a pile of cash sitting somewhere. It's not money being held. It's shares in companies, valued at the last trade price. A stock of claims on future flows. A founder whose startup is worth a billion on paper, but pays no dividends, would have to come up with $20 million in cash every year. From where? By selling shares. Which means gradually losing control of his company, to foreign funds that don't pay the tax. And if every large fortune sells at once, prices drop, and the wealth the tax claimed to measure evaporates. Taxing a stock as if it were a flow is exactly Piketty's mistake. That's not a coincidence. It's the same school of thought. Now take each primitive and look at where it leads. Demand is insufficient? The state must spend. Saving is dangerous? Tax it, or erode it with inflation. GDP is slowing? Stimulus. Prices fluctuate? A committee must set the price of money. Inequality is rising? Tax capital. Every single concept, without exception, leads to the same conclusion: more power for the state and for those who run it. Not one primitive of macroeconomics ever concludes "leave people alone." A science discovers results it didn't expect. Macro always lands in the same place. That's the mark of a doctrine, not of knowledge. It's not a tool for understanding the economy. It's a tool for running it. And running the economy from a central office, with centralized money and centralized credit, is exactly what the Communist Manifesto proposed in 1848. Plank five: centralization of credit in the hands of the state, through a national bank with an exclusive monopoly. Communism didn't die in 1991. It changed its vocabulary. It no longer talks about class struggle. It talks about aggregate demand, multipliers and taxing capital. It no longer wears a cap. It wears a PhD. And it no longer seizes the factories. It seizes the unit of measurement of everything the factories produce.

The world consumes roughly 28 million tonnes of copper every year—a mass equivalent to five Great Pyramids of Giza. Yet that refined metal is just the tip of the iceberg of a far more monstrous physical reality. Beneath those 28 million tonnes of copper sits a massive geological footprint: billions of tonnes of blasted rock, colossal volumes of chemical tailings, vast energy expenditures and trillions of litres of water. This is all fresh, relentless demand. Crucially, up to 75% of that copper never enters individual turbines, solar panels or electric vehicles. It goes into the invisible grid infrastructure required to link everything together and make it function. When you trace 28 million tonnes of copper backward into the Earth, the true scale and cost is staggering. The drive to overhaul the global energy structure rests on a profound misunderstanding of physics: it treats energy supply as a 'software' problem while ignoring the devastating raw material gridlock caused by manufacturing billions of solar panels and over a million wind turbines, with hundreds of thousands more in the pipeline. When an energy system shifts from reliable, high-density fuels—hydrocarbons and uranium—to low-density, intermittent sources like wind and solar, the physical apparatus needed to capture, convert, stabilise and transmit that diffuse flux just explodes. It becomes an absurd trade-off: expending colossal amounts of finite, high-grade fossil fuels upfront simply to dig up materials for low-density generators—generators that can never run a steel mill, power an ocean cargo vessel or sustain international air travel. Mining is already a vast consumer of continuous energy. As global copper ore grades decline—frequently dropping to 0.5% or lower—the mass of rock that must be dug, hauled, and crushed grows exponentially per unit of recovered metal. Crushing rock alone accounts for roughly 3% to 4% of total global electricity consumption. Demanding billions of additional tonnes of processed metal creates a self-defeating loop: huge volumes of reliable, baseline power are consumed just to extract the raw materials needed to construct weather-dependent hardware. Yet the primary metals drain does not come from the turbines or arrays themselves. It stems from the enormous physical web needed to transport that energy across vast distances. Diffuse generators located hundreds of kilometres from cities require unprecedented volumes of step-up transformers, substations, high-voltage transmission lines and regional grid overhauls. The heavy overhead wiring looping across the landscape regularly dwarfs the metal required to build the turbine in the first place. Because two centuries of industrial civilisation have already extracted the highest-grade deposits, meeting future demand forces miners to dig deeper, crush harder and manage billions of tonnes of toxic slurry. This is a twin crisis: the escalating physical cost of ore recovery on the front end, and an unprecedented tsunami of industrial e-waste bound for landfills on the back end. The physical limits of this model are not dictated by how much metal remains in the crust, but by the soaring energy penalty required to dig them up and refine them. Heavy industrial processes—blast furnaces, chemical synthesis, cement production and deep-shaft mining—all need continuous, high-temperature thermal energy and uninterrupted high-voltage power. Intermittent turbines and panels cannot reliably deliver that dense power to sustain heavy industry, let alone an entire national economy. The ultimate irony is that the staggering industrial muscle needed to build, maintain, and periodically replace these diffuse energy systems relies entirely on the coal, oil and gas they were meant to replace. The dream of a fully weather-dependent industrial grid ignores physical reality. It overlooks a looming nightmare of endless ore extraction, refining bottlenecks, and perpetual grid expansion.