Peter St Onge is an economist and former MBA professor holding positions at the Heritage Foundation, the Mises Institute, and the Montreal Economic Institute. In this conversation, we discuss what the Strait of Hormuz blockade means for different countries, the parallels between today and the 1930s, why AI will raise wages rather than destroy jobs, how central banks function as a permanent bailout mechanism for reckless banking, how to protect yourself during this chaos, and why free speech determines whether the West survives what is coming.
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Takeaways:
The most dangerous economic moment is a shock that lands on an economy already weakened by its own government. The 1970s stagflation was not caused by oil prices. The Nixon shock and the runaway spending on Vietnam and the welfare state came first. Oil was the match that lit a fire in a house already soaked in gasoline. According to Peter, today the US economy is much stronger than this period and he doesn’t see the war as a devastating damage.
A leader can have genuinely good instincts and still get talked into things that betray those instincts. Peter’s read on Trump: solid on the economy, real on free speech, not a fan of the Iran war. The question is never just about who is in office. The apparatus beneath any president carries its own agenda, and the question is always whether one person can redirect something that large.
The doomsday case for AI destroying jobs has been made before. For automation, for the industrial revolution, for computers and the internet. Every single time, jobs multiplied and wages rose. Peter’s escalator analogy cuts through all the noise: yes, people step down when automation replaces their specific role, but the escalator beneath everyone is moving upward. The net direction has always been up, and there is no credible reason to believe this time is different.
When the loudest voices predicting that AI will eliminate jobs are the same organizations pushing Universal Basic Income, the correct response is to ask what they are selling. The answer Peter gave was the one I could not stop thinking about: get 51% of the population on government transfers, and you have a permanent electoral majority for whoever controls the transfers. The AI panic is not a forecast. It is a political strategy.
The Cyprus bail-in did not reveal a quirk of Cypriot banking. It revealed the default condition of a world without central bank coverage. What the US, UK, and eurozone did in 2008 was the same thing, just denominated in printed money instead of depositor equity. The central bank is the mechanism that allows banks to take reckless bets while knowing the losses will be socialized. Peter’s term for this -- a counterfeiting cartel -- is precise and uncomfortable for a reason.
Stablecoins deserve credit from Peter for two things: they reduce the appeal of a CBDC, and they threaten fractional reserve banking by offering fully backed accounts that pay real yield. But they do nothing to fix the inflation-recession cycle of fiat. They are a faster, cheaper way to hold a currency that is still being debased, and they can also be confiscated or censored.
I thought I cared most about economics. Then Covid happened and I realized that without free speech, every economic argument becomes irrelevant. You cannot protect purchasing power in a world where saying purchasing power is eroding is classified as misinformation. Peter said it plainly: without free speech, we are dead. That is a structural observation about what makes any other freedom worth defending.
The censorship infrastructure built during Covid has not been dismantled. The bureaucrats who flagged vaccine discussions, who marked commentary on unemployment as disinformation, who built the architecture of coordinated suppression, they’re still in place. Changing who sits in the White House does not change the architecture. And the next time power rotates, those tools get handed to whoever comes next, fully operational.
Technology is simultaneously the threat and the only viable response to the threat. The same infrastructure that enables government surveillance enables Nostr. The same AI that powers state control powers decentralized publishing. The only real question is whether the builders of open protocols can stay ahead of the builders of closed ones.
Peter started making videos with an iPhone and two colors of shirts. The lesson is that quality is the byproduct of showing up imperfectly, repeatedly, until something clicks. Perfectionism is just procrastination dressed in professional language.
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