• The False Binary
• The inflation illusion
• Power without accountability: the new feudalism
• What is to be done: the Bitcoin standard and the free machine
• **Eudaimonia vs. the Digital Serf. **

New technologies often arrive riding a wave of “hopium,” where its gains are exaggerated and its risks are glossed over. Reflecting on the internet’s emergence in the mid-1990s, many visionaries predicted a digital utopia of free information, dominant e-commerce and a borderless world. However, they failed to foresee the return of censorship, the actual pace of global adoption, or the deep psychological impact it would have on society.

We are currently witnessing a similar cycle with artificial intelligence, as its advantages are grossly exaggerated while its potential hazards remain largely ignored. Elon Musk recently ignited a firestorm of debate across the internet when he proposed a controversial solution to the anticipated economic upheaval caused by artificial intelligence. He tweeted:

“Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.  AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation.”

In short, Elon is asking you to trust the state’s judgement as the chief allocator of productivity gains from AI adoption. This is the same government that he unsuccessfully tried to repair with DOGE before throwing in the towel and declaring it to be “basically unfixable”. That’s the same group of people that he believes will do a stellar job of issuing UHI responsibly and wants you to put your trust in their hands? How’s that for a contradiction! He further asserts, with characteristic bravado, that there will be “no inflation.” Framing it as liberation since the machines will do all the work; while the citizen receives the dividend. Who could object?

I object. I do so not merely on the grounds of economics (we all know there is no free lunch) but simply because this is a blueprint for serfdom. It is the most elegant form of subjugation yet devised; servitude dressed in the language of abundance. 

§The False Binary

Musk presents a false binary: either the machine replaces you and you receive a government cheque, or the machine replaces you and you starve. This framing conceals the actual question, which is not whether machines will augment human productive capacity, but who will own the machines, who will benefit from their output, and in what monetary system the gains will be denominated?

Furthermore this idea is based on a chain of heroic assumptions that the AI industry will rake in tens of trillions in revenue; that a functional state will tax those revenues honestly and that the state will simply distribute the cheques to citizens, equally, without using its distribution as leverage in any way. That’s also assuming the AI agents themselves don’t “rebel” against the “useless eaters” that are benefitting from all their hard work. 

Given how companies like Palantir are already using AI and have been integrated into the defence infrastructure of the US, as well as other key parts of the economy; over time as their power grows what’s to stop them from becoming the new unelected government? Perhaps this is the real plan, that is being sold to us under the guise of “everyone will have a penthouse”* *utopian propaganda. That’s before we even consider the fact that the state would probably use a CBDC for such a program. A government that can give you everything can take everything away. A citizenry that depends on the state for its subsistence is not free; it is domesticated. 

We saw this during the plandemic when vaccine passports became the gateway to participating in normal life, and the same government that Elon wants you to trust created a two-tiered society where you had less rights as an unvaccinated person. With this in mind, what’s to stop a government that now has that kind of power from abusing it by targeting dissidents or settling political scores? What of people living under repressive governments, what happens to them when this kind of power is handed over to the state? 

§The inflation illusion

Musk’s most audacious claim is that a Federal program issuing “high income” cheques to tens of millions of displaced workers will produce no inflation. That is definitely untrue. 

During the 2025 fiscal year, the U.S. government recorded expenditures of $7 trillion against $5.23 trillion in revenue. This shortfall was financed through borrowing, contributing to a massive national debt that has now climbed to $39 trillion. AI is incapable of resolving the problem of a state that habitually outspends its income. This lack of fiscal discipline, rather than a shortfall in productivity, is what ultimately fuels inflation. Inflation is not primarily a function of supply chains or price indices but it is the inevitable consequence of increasing the money supply faster than the production of real goods and services. Call it what you will: “printing,” “deficit spending,” “quantitative easing,” or “Universal High Income.”

Musk’s retort, presumably, is that AI will so dramatically increase productivity that output will keep pace with the new money. Perhaps, but this argument contains a fatal contradiction. If AI produces such abundance that inflation is impossible, then the displaced worker needs no government cheque as the abundance itself will drive prices toward zero. Should the abundance be insufficient to prevent inflation, then the program destroys the very purchasing power it claims to provide. You cannot have it both ways. 

Furthermore, the other problematic assumption with this is that governments will be fiscally responsible and will only print money at a constant rate; thus implying that they will curb their spending. Anyone that has been merely observing government spending, even for a short period of time, knows that the general tendency of government is always to spend more not less. Do you honestly foresee a scenario where the Pentagon will cut its budget in half every year simply because they have more efficient AI systems? I highly doubt it.

The argument isn’t against the use of AI per se but with a failure to closely examine actions and their consequences in an economy. The biggest threat to the abundance narrative will be the fiat system and the fact that it’s inflationary by design. If the fiat financial system requires continuous credit expansion to grow, how can such a system be sustainable in a world where there is *no inflation? *

Sovereign debt, which underpins the entire system of reserve currency issuance, is viable only in an environment where the future units in which it will be repaid are worth less than the units borrowed today. Governments and central banks are, in a deep sense, inflation merchants. They must sell the currency to fund the state, and the currency is only worth holding if it depreciates slowly enough to retain confidence, yet fast enough to service the debt loads states have accumulated across decades of deficit spending.The bigger threat is to the solvency of the fiat system itself. 

The debt loads that major governments have accumulated are viable only under specific assumptions; that growth will continue, that inflation will persist, and that debt servicing costs remain manageable relative to tax revenues. AI disrupts all three simultaneously. It threatens to deliver such profound deflationary pressure that central banks lose control of the inflation signal entirely. In a world where governments must inflate or default, the failure to inflate is fatal for the fiat system.The deflationary world that Musk envisions as being the outcome of AI driven productivity is a mathematical impossibility under a fiat regime because deflation is an existential threat to the entire fiat ponzi scheme.

§Power without accountability: the new feudalism

The Roman annona, the grain ration that fed the urban poor of the Empire, began as emergency relief and became the instrument by which emperors secured quiescence. Panem et circenses: bread and spectacle. The population that might have organized, that might have demanded political accountability, was pacified by the dole. The Emperors understood, as Musk surely understands, that a population fed by the state is a population controlled by the state.

The enslaved worker of the antebellum South received food, shelter, clothing; subsistence, guaranteed, in exchange for the surrender of agency. The master’s power was not exercised primarily through violence, though violence was always available. It was exercised through the structure of dependency itself: the knowledge that outside the plantation there was no food, no shelter, no position. The “cheque” in this system was not cash but corn. 

Now scale this dynamic to the present. Artificial intelligence, as currently developing, is not a distributed technology. It is extraordinarily capital-intensive, concentrated in the hands of a very small number of corporations among them, the enterprises of Elon Musk and his peers. In this AI dominated world, these men who control the machines that replace your labour, while simultaneously lobbying for the government program that sustains you in your idleness, have achieved something the feudal lord could only dream of; total economic enslavement without a sword drawn. To have 8 billion people dependent on the benevolence of the tech bros who will have all the capital and the power, while the citizen owns nothing but his own idleness, is a destiny that no free man should find tolerable.

In this chain of causation, the technology oligarch who proposes UHI is not a philanthropist. He is the architect of a closed loop, his machines displace your labour, his lobbying and a portion of the company’s revenues secure your government cheque, your government cheque makes you politically docile, your political docility secures the regulatory environment his machines require. He has privatized the gains and socialized the dependency.

Once the state is established as the universal income distributor, the question of how much to distribute becomes permanently political. Every election becomes a bidding war over UHI levels, every fiscal crisis becomes a justification for expanding the conditions attached to payment and every social problem becomes a candidate for behavioral modification through the threat of payment suspension. 

The AI infrastructure that makes UHI administratively feasible also makes it the most powerful behavioral surveillance and control system ever built. Citizens will not be required to do anything overtly but they will simply find that certain behaviors, associations, speech acts, and consumption choices are quietly incompatible with continued receipt of their government cheque. The state does not need malicious intent to arrive at total economic control through UHI. It needs only the ordinary operational logic of a bureaucratic institution with unlimited financial leverage over the population it administers.

§What is to be done: the Bitcoin standard and the free machine

We have spent considerable time discussing what we oppose. It is time to speak plainly about what we would like to see and to do so without the wan equivocation that passes for policy analysis in this diminished age. The status quo of the fiat rot that makes Musk’s proposal seem plausible by comparison must be immediately abolished. This is why I am advocating for something genuinely radical, genuinely liberating, and grounded in the same tradition of distributed sovereignty. A hard money standard, anchored in Bitcoin, in which artificial intelligence and robotics serve as tools wielded by free individuals rather than instruments of control operated by concentrated power.

Consider the carpenter, who for a century, the power saw has made the carpenter more productive than his predecessor who worked only by hand. The power saw did not make the carpenter obsolete. It liberated him from the most tedious portion of his labour and freed his attention for joinery, for design, for the judgment that distinguishes craft from mere cutting.

The carpenter did not receive a government cheque in compensation for the power saw’s existence. He purchased the saw, and his increased productivity generated the income to accumulate capital for the next tool. The machine served the man. The machine is not the enemy of meaningful work. Cheap money is the enemy of meaningful work. The machine is merely the latest tool; the monetary system is the operating environment in which that tool is either liberating or enslaving.

The question, then, is not the machine. The question is the money and this is where the Bitcoin standard becomes not merely relevant but essential. In a Bitcoin-denominated economy, when AI reduces the cost of producing legal services, medical care, software, or education, the price of those services falls in bitcoin terms, and the purchasing power of every bitcoin holder rises proportionally. There is no monetary authority to counteract this signal, no need to “stimulate demand” and no debt overhang to service through currency debasement. Bitcoin is the only monetary system in which the deflationary gains of AI can be fully and fairly harvested by the population rather than captured by the financial system.

The Bitcoin network also possesses a property uniquely suited to an AI economy: it is natively digital and natively programmable. As AI agents become economic actors in their own right, capable of entering contracts, rendering services, receiving payment, and managing resources; they require a monetary system they can interact with directly, without banking relationships, without identity verification tied to human legal personhood, without the friction and censorship potential of fiat correspondent banking. Bitcoin’s open protocol, accessible to any computation that can speak its language, provides exactly this. It is the first monetary system that a machine can use as easily as a human.

If history is a guide, whenever a new wave of automation arrives; the market does not simply destroy jobs but it dissolves old categories of work and, through the restless operation of the price system, surfaces new ones that no central planner could have designed or foreseen. The hand-loom weavers displaced by the power loom did not need government handouts, but they needed the freedom to enter new industries at market wages. The same dynamic, operating at AI scale and speed, will produce new forms of productive human activity, provided the price system is allowed to function. Universal High Income would corrode that process at the root, replacing the hunger that drives adaptation with the sedation of a government stipend

§**Eudaimonia vs. the Digital Serf. **

The distinction that Musk’s proposal erases, which the Bitcoin standard restores, is the distinction between toiling for sustenance and working for purpose. These are not the same thing, and the conflation of them is the deepest error in the technocratic imagination. Toiling for sustenance is what the serf did, labour extracted by necessity, directed by another’s will, producing no accumulation of capital, no development of personal mastery, no expression of individual judgment. The serf plowed because he had no alternative; he received subsistence in return; he built nothing of his own. The UHI recipient is the digital serf: his sustenance is guaranteed, his labour is unnecessary, and the development of personal mastery, the accumulation of capital, the exercise of economic agency, all of these are rendered irrelevant. 

Working for purpose is something categorically different. It is the craftsman who chooses her specialty because it aligns with her aptitude and her vision of a life well-lived. It is the farmer who knows his land intimately and directs the robotic harvester not as a passive recipient of technology but as a sovereign producer deploying a tool. It is the physician who uses the diagnostic AI as a second opinion rather than a replacement for clinical judgment. It is, in the deepest sense, the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia (flourishing) which is not a passive state of contentment but an active condition of excellence: the exercise of distinctively human capacities in pursuit of genuinely chosen ends. No algorithm can choose your ends for you. 

The Bitcoin standard creates the material preconditions for this kind of work by doing one thing that no government program can do, it lowers time preference. In a fiat system, high time preference is the default;  inflation punishes patience, debt rewards consumption, and the quarterly earnings report governs corporate behaviour with a tyranny that destroys long-term investment. In a hard money system, the future is properly weighted.

The craftsman can afford to spend three years mastering a skill before it pays off, because her savings will be worth more in three years, not less. The entrepreneur can build a business with a ten-year horizon, because patient capital is not being eroded from below. The worker displaced by automation can afford the two years of retraining that transforms his obsolete skill into a new one, because the money he saved last decade has not been quietly redistributed, via inflation, to the balance sheets of institutions too large and too connected to fail.

This, then, is the genuine counter-vision: not the passive receipt of government checks, which extinguishes the motivation to adapt and surrenders economic agency to the state; not the resentful rejection of technology, which is as futile as opposing the power saw; but the active deployment of powerful tools (AI, robotics, the entire apparatus of automated production) by individuals who own sound money, whose savings are protected across time, whose capital accumulates at the pace of their own discipline and not at the discretion of any central authority. In such a world, the arrival of a more powerful machine is not a threat to be compensated for. It is an inheritance to be claimed; another instrument added to the workshop of a free people who own their labour, own their money, and bow to no sovereign for the disposition of either.