JD Hall, Insight to Incite, July, 2025
In the Middle Ages, alchemy functioned as a kind of counterfeit religion. Not in the sense of worshipping gods or idols directly, but in its structure of secret knowledge, symbols, hierarchies, and promises of mystical power. Its high priests did not wear clerical collars but cloaks. They scrawled arcane symbols on parchment, whispered Latin incantations, and convinced gullible kings that they could transmute lead into gold. What they offered was not just metal—it was salvation from scarcity. The fantasy was intoxicating: something for nothing, wealth without labor, and value conjured from the void. It was prosperity without repentance.
Despite the fact that no one ever succeeded in turning base metals into gold, the lie lived on. Alchemy persisted because it served those in power. Kings wanted the gold. Courts craved the glory. And as long as the alchemists kept promising they were on the verge of discovery, the fraud could be funded a little longer. There was always one more step, one more secret ingredient, one more turn of the wheel before success. Just a little more time and a little more treasure, and the spell would work. It never did.
What most people miss is that the alchemists never actually disappeared. They simply rebranded. Today they wear tailored suits instead of robes, they carry laptops instead of scrolls, and they use acronyms instead of symbols. They no longer promise to turn lead into gold. Instead, they promise to turn debt into prosperity, digital keystrokes into national wealth, and government IOUs into economic stability. We no longer call them alchemists. We call them central bankers. Economists. Policy experts. The Federal Reserve Board.
But the essence of their operation remains unchanged. It is still a magic trick. They create something from nothing, declare it to have value, and demand that everyone pretend it is real.
THE FEDERAL RESERVE: AMERICA’S GOLDEN LIE
Most Americans do not really understand what the Federal Reserve is or what it actually does. That confusion is not an accident. It is engineered. The more complex and opaque the system sounds, the less likely the average citizen is to question it. But here is the simple truth, stripped of the jargon and mystique.
The Federal Reserve creates money. Not in the way a mint prints dollar bills, but digitally and artificially. It adds numbers to accounts with no physical basis. It creates dollars on a screen and uses those dollars to buy government debt. In doing so, it “injects liquidity” into the economy, or so the explanation goes. The more the government borrows, the more the Fed creates money to lend. The cycle feeds itself.
This is not stability. It is not prudence. It is illusion on top of illusion. We are told this is normal, that it is how modern economies function, that without this system everything would collapse. But the results are plain to see. Inflation erodes purchasing power. Economic bubbles form and burst. The middle class shrinks while the debt ceiling rises like a sacrament of national denial. In 1913, when the Fed was created, a dollar could buy what now requires over thirty dollars. The dollar has not merely lost value. It has been bled out slowly through a system that demands perpetual debt in order to stay upright.
A monetary system that requires endless borrowing in order to survive is not sustainable. It is not virtuous. It is not wise. It is predatory. It is parasitic. It is occultic in its structure, in its secrecy, and in its contempt for honest scales. It is, in every meaningful way, economic alchemy.
FIAT CURRENCY IS SORCERY BY CONSENT
The word fiat is not random. It comes from Latin and simply means “let it be done.” In the book of Genesis, God speaks creation into existence with divine fiat. He says, “Let there be light,” and light exists. God’s word has power because He is truth itself, and what He speaks conforms to the reality He made.
Fiat currency imitates this authority but without the truth to back it. It declares value into being without any real substance behind it. It has no gold. No silver. No labor. It is not tied to a resource, a harvest, a mine, or a product. It is simply paper or digital notation that we are told has value. It works only because people believe it does. Its power comes from confidence, not from content.
This is why fiat money is not just a poor economic tool. It is an act of counterfeit creation. It is verbal sorcery disguised as fiscal policy. It is value spoken into existence by bureaucrats who are not God. Just as ancient magicians claimed they could control nature with incantations, today’s central bankers use phrases like “quantitative easing,” “interest rate adjustment,” and “stimulus package” as spells to control perception. These are not explanations. They are rituals.
The difference between God and the Fed is not merely theological. It is ontological. When God says, “Let there be,” there is. When the Fed says, “Let there be,” there is only debt.
So having a bunch of IOU’s is evidence of prosperity?