Money Is Speech. The Dollar Is Shrinking. Nobody Notices Both at Once.

Oct 14, 2026 · @Brian Connelly

The Supreme Court tied your right to be heard to the number of dollars you hold. Nobody asked what the dollars were made of.

The Court made money speech and forgot to check the money

In January 2010 the Supreme Court decided, in Citizens United v. FEC, that spending money on political speech is itself speech, and that the government may not cap how much a corporation or a union spends on it. People fought about whether that was good for democracy, and they're still fighting about it, which is fine. What almost nobody did was turn the decision over and look at the other side.

If how much you can say depends on how many dollars you can spend saying it, then whoever decides how many dollars exist, and who receives them first, is also deciding whose voice gets amplified and whose gets turned down. The Court didn't invent that arrangement. It just gave it a constitutional seal and a pleasant name, and then handed the volume knob to an institution that has never once been elected.

That institution has a new chairman as of May, and he's an unusually interesting one for this argument, because he has spent years saying out loud the thing the argument depends on. We'll get to him. First the dollars.

The discount you were owed and never received

Jeff Booth built software companies for twenty years before he wrote about money, and his book The Price of Tomorrow starts from something every engineer knows and most economists would rather not pursue. Technology makes things cheaper. That is its entire job. Every year the same hour of human effort buys more computation, more light, more distance, more information, more medicine than it did the year before, and the curve isn't slowing down, it's steepening.

In a system that simply reflected that, prices would fall. Not collapse, just fall, gently and steadily, the way the price of a gigabyte or a solar panel or a long-distance call has fallen for as long as any of us can remember. Your paycheck would quietly stretch further every year without anyone handing you a raise, and that, Booth argues, is what a productive economy is supposed to feel like. He puts the natural rate of that decline at roughly five percent a year, given the pace of recent progress.

It doesn't feel like that, and the reason is arithmetic. To hold measured inflation at a positive two percent, the Federal Reserve has to manufacture enough new credit to overpower all of that natural price decline, and then add a little more on top. So the cost to you isn't the two percent you see on the evening news. It's the two percent plus every point of cheaper living that technology earned on your behalf and the monetary system absorbed before it reached you. Booth calls that theft of the productive power of human beings, and he means the phrase literally, not rhetorically.

The word is going to bother some readers, so it's worth being precise about what it does and doesn't claim. It doesn't claim intent. Nobody at the Fed wakes up planning to rob anyone. It claims that the system is built so the loss is invisible to the people absorbing it, which is a different and in some ways worse charge, because a thief with intent can be caught and a system without intent just keeps running.

Where the new money goes first

New money has to enter the economy somewhere, and it doesn't enter evenly. It comes in through banks, through bond purchases, through government contracts and the balance sheets of companies large enough to issue debt, which means it reaches people who already own appreciating assets long before it reaches people who get paid every other Friday. By the time it arrives in your paycheck, the prices have already moved. An Irish banker named Richard Cantillon noticed this in the 1730s and nobody has managed to disprove it since.

You don't have to take that from a Bitcoin writer. Kevin Warsh, now chairman of the Federal Reserve, spent the years before his nomination arguing exactly this about the Fed's own tools. Interest rates, he has said, reach into the cracks of the economy, while the balance sheet, the trillions in bonds the Fed bought after 2008 and again after 2020, "disproportionately helps those with financial assets." He has blamed that balance sheet, in so many words, for feeding inequality and for making cheap money available mainly to firms big enough to tap the bond market.

That isn't a conspiracy. It's plumbing. The spigot is pointed at the investor class, and the earners stand at the far end of the pipe, and the man who now holds the spigot has described the pipe more accurately than most of his critics.

The man who agrees with the diagnosis and runs the machine anyway

Warsh was sworn in on May 22, 2026, after a confirmation fight that featured a Justice Department subpoena of the Fed, a presidential threat to fire his predecessor, and a sitting senator calling him a sock puppet. He arrived with two convictions that happen to line up with Booth's. First, that artificial intelligence and the technology around it are a powerful disinflationary force, which is why he thinks rates can come down. Second, that the Fed's balance sheet, now around $6.7 trillion against roughly $1 trillion before 2008, is the main villain in American monetary policy and should be cut down to size.

So far the machine has won. An oil shock tied to the Iran war pushed the Fed's preferred inflation gauge to 3.7 percent by July, and in September the committee raised rates for the first time since 2023, by a unanimous vote, with Warsh's name at the top of the ballot. The balance-sheet reduction he has wanted since 2011 has not started, because his colleagues would rather wait for a task force to finish its review. He refused to submit his own rate projection at his first meeting, saying the exercise wasn't helpful to him, which is honest and also tells you how much one chairman's convictions move an institution with a committee, a mandate, and a Treasury that needs to sell a great deal of debt.

None of that makes Warsh a hypocrite. It makes him a case study. The person at the top of the Fed believes technology is pushing prices down and believes the Fed's main tool favors people who already own things, and the system he now runs still has one setting: positive inflation, indefinitely, financed by people who can't see what it's costing them. If the diagnosis doesn't change the machine when the diagnostician is in charge of it, the problem is the machine.

You don't need a villain

Put the three pieces side by side. The Court tied your right to be heard to the number of dollars you can spend being heard. The central bank decides how many dollars exist and, through the plumbing its own chairman has described, who receives them first. And the dollars themselves are designed to lose value against everything technology is making cheaper, so that the discount you earned is spent before you ever see it, and spent mostly by people closer to the spigot than you are.

No one planned this. Citizens United wasn't written with the Fed in mind, and the Fed's inflation target wasn't set with campaign finance in mind, and that's the point. You don't need a villain to end up with a system where speech is measured in a currency that quietly favors the people who already own the most of it. You just need two institutions that never checked each other's work.

What you'd need to get out of it is a different kind of money, one with a supply that nobody can expand to drown out the discount, one where the plumbing has no privileged entrance. I've been writing about that money since 2014, and I'm not going to argue for it here, because the argument makes itself once you've looked at the dollar from both sides. I'd only invite you to look.

Sources

This piece has an AI watermark. If that is your focus you missed my point. This is how I write with AI.