By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

A website specializing in data visuals offered a helpful graphic on global inflation, 2020-2025, with no other comment about how or why this happened. The results are eye-popping and amazing, and a reminder that hardly anyone has fully come to terms with what transpired over five years.

Most currencies in the world took a 25-35 percent haircut, Far East excepted.



That's a technical description that obscures what actually happened. The measures by which most people in the world hold the liquid part of their worldly possessions - the money they earned through hard work and saving - was robbed by a quarter and more.

Where did it go? After all, the wealth didn't sink in the ocean. It was transferred from one group to another. It went from the poor and middle class to the elites in well-connected industries and government. It was simply sucked away from one sector to another, achieving in a matter of a few years what would have been impossible in normal times.

The forced transfer of wealth went from small business to large, from physical enterprise to digital, from store fronts to online, from citizens to government-connected contractors, from workers to leveraged capital, from families to corporations, from savers to a deeply indebted government, and so on.

You are perfectly free to believe that this was all a mistake. Just bad policy. The world panicked because of a pathogen, and central banks ran the printing presses. Out of compassion for our suffering, legislators rained fresh paper on the population which we used to buy hardware and digital gadgetry, while fostering addiction to online entertainment.

Regrettably and mistakenly, governments criminalized small businesses and subsidized large ones. Inadvertently our communities and extended families were divided and then shattered and replaced with the only technology around, Zooming and TikToking while awaiting artificial intelligence to replace the intelligence lost during school and college closures.

Sadly, the shots that everyone thought would save us made us sicker than ever - surely an earnest attempt gone wrong - while a depressed population got hooked on weed and liquor from shops that remained open, and availed themselves to psych drugs newly available through liberalized access via telehealth. The population in the developed world lost three years of lifespan expectation.

You can believe all of this befell people all over the world at the same time via a series of pathetic misjudgments.

Or you could be more realistic and see that this was not a mistake at all. It was entirely intentional, the unfolding of a dark scheme hatched by an indescribably sadistic ruling class. Indeed, if this had all been an accident, we surely would have heard someone apologize by now.

There is also the planning involved. There was Event 201, the lesser-known Crimson Contagion, and many others. They are usually described in the mainstream press as rehearsals for unplanned contingencies, like resiliency training. Absurd. This was plotted far in advance. We have all the receipts. To realize this and connect the dots does not make you a conspiracy theorist. It makes you a person with the capacity to think.

To deny nefarious motives and schemes makes you impossibly naive to the point of sedation. At best, it makes you ill-read in history.

After five years, what can we say was the plan and purpose of this calamity? We all have our views. Certainly within Brownstone ranks, there are many opinions. We argue among ourselves all the time. Coming up with a clean and clear explanation is not easy because there are so many moving parts and so many industrial opportunists who took advantage of the crisis to cash out.

So we all have our own judgments. Mine is as follows. There were three primary motivations and purposes for destroying the world as we knew it: Political, Industrial, and Pharmaceutical.

Political

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