Your Punishment for Believing Lies
By James Quillian, Political Analyst, Teacher of Natural Law
Folks don’t like to hear it, but I’ve said for years that every lie needs two guilty parties. There’s the fellow who tells it, and then there’s the one who decides the truth just isn’t quite good enough. Without that partnership, most lies would die on the vine.
The trouble is, lies don’t send you a bill right away. The punishment for believing them is suffering, but the suffering doesn’t fall evenly. A man can go his whole life believing a wagon‑load of nonsense and never feel more than a bump. But when the lie is collective—when a whole nation signs on—the pain often shows up in the next generation. They inherit the bill for something they never bought.
There’s always a cost to believing lies. The due date is unpredictable. Some folks get hit once or twice in a lifetime. Others get blindsided all at once. And right now, citizens around the world are being served a tab that’s been running for decades.
The lie of economic stimulus is a good example. It first showed up in the 1930s when John Maynard Keynes rolled out his general theory. Keynes wasn’t trying to hurt anybody. He meant well. But the flaws in his idea showed up almost immediately. Keynes saw them himself, but he died before he could fix the mess.
Monetary stimulus took a different road, but it didn’t work much better. Long before the modern era, it had already been shown to be unreliable at best and harmful at worst. Then came the Reagan years, when stimulus was reborn—not as sound economics, but as a political tool. It became a handy way to pass self‑serving legislation and move wealth around without calling it what it was.
The sales pitch never changed. Stimulus was supposed to “help the economy.” After the Full Employment Act of 1978, it became a yearly ritual. And year after year, Americans of every class nodded along, convinced it was good and necessary. But there has never been a moment—not one—when government stimulus had any real chance of benefiting an economy.
The damage comes in two main ways. First, stimulus keeps markets from clearing. Second, it replaces price—the natural rationing mechanism—with political power. Once politics starts deciding who gets what, the economy stops renewing itself. Old industries linger. New ones struggle to be born. Resources drift into the wrong places and stay there.
You can’t see a misallocation of resources with the naked eye, but it’s as real as a broken fence post. And after forty years of intervention, forty years of rationing by politics instead of price, forty years of blocking the natural cycle of out‑with‑the‑old and in‑with‑the‑new, the consequences are baked in. An economic crisis isn’t a possibility—it’s a certainty.
For four decades, Americans believed the lie that stimulus was helping them. Now the bill has come due.