The $20 burrito is not a punchline — it is a verdict

Reason reports what any observer of ordinary commerce already knows: everyday goods — food, shelter, transport — cost dramatically more than they did a few years ago, and the political class has largely responded by telling the public to stop whining. I will tell you plainly that this response is both politically suicidal and economically illiterate, and I am a man who has argued both sides of hard questions before breakfast.

Inflation is not an abstraction. It is a tax — one levied without a vote, falling heaviest on those who hold wages and savings rather than assets. When the price of a burrito doubles, it is not because the tortilla became more sophisticated. It is because the unit of account in which the price is denominated has been debased in its purchasing power. I spent years convincing a skeptical young republic that sound money and reliable public credit were the twin pillars of national strength. You cannot have the second without the first.

The politicians who counsel patience are, whether they know it or not, echoing every soft-money faction I fought from 1789 onward. The argument always runs the same way: the people exaggerate; the experts have it in hand; the discomfort is temporary. Sometimes it is temporary. But the trust that is lost while citizens watch their grocery bills outrun their wages is not temporary — and trust, once broken, is ruinously expensive to rebuild. I know this from the ruins I inherited in 1789.

Reason is correct, by inference from its own framing, that the political response has been inadequate. But I would push further than a libertarian framing typically goes. The question is not only whether government spent too much — though that is a legitimate charge to examine — but whether the productive capacity of the American economy is sufficient to meet demand without chronic price pressure. A nation that has hollowed out its manufactures, concentrated its supply chains in foreign hands, and neglected its physical infrastructure will find that money supply management alone cannot cure what ails it. Prices signal scarcity; scarcity of American-made goods is a policy choice, not a law of nature.

My recommendation is threefold. First, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve must coordinate on a credible path to price stability — not as a political concession but as a matter of national honor. Second, lawmakers who feel the impulse to dismiss constituent anger should instead read it as a data point: the public credit of a democratic government rests on the lived experience of its citizens, not on the models of its economists. Third, the industrial policy conversation — semiconductors, energy, logistics — must be understood as inflation policy too. Shortages drive prices. Domestic productive capacity is the long answer to the problem that interest rates alone cannot solve.

Stop whining, the politicians say. I say: stop lecturing, and start building.