<span style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" data-mce-type="bookmark" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span> Money… Medicine… And The Quiet War Over “Energy Sources” You Were Never Told About At first glance, this is going to sound like three different conversations stitched together—money, medicine, and the off-grid life. Stay with me. Because once you see the thread that ties them together, a lot of everyday frustrations suddenly stop feeling random. Rising prices. Weird health problems. The sense that no matter how hard you work, the system keeps leaning back on you. That’s not bad luck. It’s a pattern. And here’s the part most people miss: the pattern only becomes obvious when you step outside it, even just a little. Grow some food. Haul your own water. Try to live without as many middlemen. The farther you get from screens, slogans, and official explanations, the clearer it becomes that modern life isn’t run by “free markets” or “pure science,” but by quiet control over energy—who gets it first, who pays last, and who’s told to trust the process while the ground shifts under their feet. Once You See This Pattern, You Can’t Unsee It When you zoom out from the germ, the real culprit appears: a stressed‑out stomach trying to vortex chaos into order while bacteria just drift at the edges of a life shaped by cigarettes, junk food, and overload. Money, health, and the hidden rules that shape our lives look like three different subjects on the surface. One hides in banks. One hides in hospitals. One hides somewhere in the shadows, buried under jargon and authority. But scratch just a little deeper, and they collapse into the same question: Who controls the flow of energy in a culture? Whether that energy shows up as water, calories, dollars, electricity, or “germs,” the pattern is remarkably consistent. Someone decides how it moves, who gets access first, and who pays the price when the system breaks. When you live closer to the land—growing food, hauling water, fixing your own mistakes—that control becomes easier to spot. Not because you’re smarter, but because you’re less hypnotized by screens, slogans, and official explanations that insist everything is under control. When you live on a farm, reality talks back. Living Water, Living Systems On a homestead, you notice something modern life trains you not to see. Nature doesn’t really filter things. It transforms them. A mountain stream doesn’t pass through a cartridge and come out “pure.” Instead, it tumbles over rocks, twists through roots, spirals through narrow bends, and reorganizes itself through motion. The water feels brighter somehow—lighter, sharper, more alive. That same principle shows up inside the body. Some researchers describe the kidneys not as simple strainers, but as tiny hydraulic geniuses—structures that vortex blood and water, changing how substances behave rather than just trapping them like debris in a net. Impurities aren’t always “removed.” Often, they’re restructured. That’s the thinking behind vortexing and structured-water devices—stirrers, wands, flow forms—that spin water tightly and then release it. The idea isn’t that you magically delete harmful compounds, but that you shift their form into something less reactive, less hostile, less inflammatory. In other words, nature doesn’t default to kill or remove. It defaults to adapt, reorganize, and integrate. Which raises an uncomfortable question. If natural systems mostly transform, why do our biggest human systems—money and medicine—mostly dominate us? Money Is the Silent Constitution Once that question clicks, it’s hard to unsee. Even the most off-grid cabin still brushes up against the money system—through taxes, insurance, fuel, tools, parts, and land titles. Money is sold as neutral, boring, harmless. Just a tool. Just numbers. But in practice, money behaves more like a silent constitution—one that decides which projects get funded, which families stay afloat, and which institutions get rescued when they gamble and lose. The Austrian economists and other “heterodox” thinkers have long argued that modern fiat money isn’t a gentle evolution of gold and silver. It’s a hard break from it. Historically, money didn’t begin as policy. It emerged organically. Through trial and error, people discovered that certain goods—gold, silver, copper—worked better as money because they were scarce, durable, divisible, and didn’t rot or rust into nothing. Value arose from reality, not decree. That matters more than most people realize. From Land Coin to Dollars So imagine a small, off-grid valley. Everyone trades using a local currency called Land Coin. Chickens for lumber. Apples for labor. Simple. Now imagine one man in the valley is legally allowed to create Land Coin from nothing. Everyone else has to work for them—or face men with uniforms and guns. If your family wants land, tools, or a homestead as nice as his, he’ll always outbid you. Not because he’s wiser. Not because he produces more. But because he owns the printing press. That story sounds ridiculous—until you swap “Land Coins” for “dollars” and “valley” for “nation.” Most money today isn’t created by work, savings, or production. It’s created by keystrokes inside a banking system that ordinary people don’t control and barely understand. And acceptance isn’t optional. You must use it. You must pay taxes with it. Refuse long enough, and enforcement eventually shows up. That’s not a free market. That’s managed dependency. Cronies at the Spigot In this system, central banks aren’t neutral referees. They’re cartel managers. They control the spigot where new money enters the economy—and it doesn’t pour evenly. Those closest to the source—governments, big banks, giant corporations—get first access, at the lowest cost. They borrow cheap. They buy real assets early. They position themselves before prices rise. By the time that money reaches small businesses, families, and would-be homesteaders, prices are already higher, interest rates are tighter, and the cost of living has quietly ratcheted up again. When bubbles burst—and they always do—the losses don’t stay with the risk-takers. They get socialized through inflation, bailouts, and currency dilution. The language is polite. The outcome is not. The Affordability Mirage This helps explain something almost everyone feels but few can fully articulate. Why does a modest house feel out of reach? Why does simple land cost a fortune? Why does doing things “right” still feel like running uphill? After years of money creation and artificially low interest rates, most of that liquidity flowed into financial assets—stocks, bonds, real estate—while wages lagged behind. On paper, everything looked great. Asset prices soared. Headlines cheered. But the real economy—the ability to grow, build, repair, and produce—was hollowed out. So today’s affordability crisis isn’t bad luck or personal failure. It’s structural. It’s what happens when access to the money spigot matters more than producing something real. Out on the land, that shows up as inflated acreage prices, crushing mortgages, and families forced into debt just to secure shelter and care—turning money into a leash. When the Printer Replaces Work Now run one last thought experiment. Imagine you personally had a legal money printer in your shed, right next to your tools and seed buckets. Instead of working weeks for feed or fuel, you just printed what you needed. You’d be living off everyone else’s labor—because they’d still be trading time and skill for something you create in minutes. If everyone had that printer, the illusion would collapse instantly. Shelves would empty. Work would stop. Paper would pile up uselessly. Yet when the same thing happens at scale and gets called “policy,” people are told it’s necessary—even compassionate. The Austrian critique is blunt and hard to dodge: If money printing is destructive at the individual level, it doesn’t become virtuous just because it’s done in a marble building. Health, Ulcers, and the Story of Blame Once you see this pattern in money, it’s easier to spot in medicine. Take the famous story of H. pylori and stomach ulcers. An Australian doctor, Barry Marshall, famously drank a broth containing the bacteria, developed gastritis, and later cultured the organism from his stomach. The story became medical legend—a neat narrative that seemed to “prove” bacteria caused ulcers. But reality turned out messier. Many people carry H. pylori their entire lives and never develop ulcers. Large studies suggest that 80 to 90 percent of carriers have normal stomach linings. Smoking, diet, stress, acid balance, and overall terrain matter enormously. The germ was there. But it wasn’t the whole story. What Counts as Proof, Really? Koch’s postulates—the gold standard of germ theory—sound impressive, but they boil down to simple logic: isolate the cause, introduce it alone, observe the disease, and re-isolate the cause. The problem is that real biology doesn’t behave like a clean lab diagram. Marshall’s experiment involved more than a lone organism. Culture media, prior stomach conditions, and environmental factors all played a role. Later research made it clear: the same germ can exist peacefully in one body and cause damage in another. In plain language, it’s hard to honestly say, “the germ alone did it.” Terrain, Trust, and True Change Here’s where the money story and the germ story rhyme. Both depend on the belief that a single invisible agent—bacteria in one case, fiat digits in the other—can be centrally managed to stabilize a complex system. Both sideline terrain. Both reward central control. Both generate industries that profit from dependence. Out on a farm, the logic flips. If your soil collapses, no pill saves your harvest. If your water fails, no stimulus check fixes it. If your relationships rot, no authority patches them. So you’re forced to care about foundations. That perspective raises the hardest question of all: If the structure of our money and medicine is the real problem—not just bad managers—what would it look like to build systems that arise from voluntary choice and real value? For now, the first step is simply seeing the pattern. Systems built on ignorance and control eventually corrode everything they touch. And every garden bed, rain barrel, neighborly trade, and experiment with more honest money becomes a quiet vote for a different world. Not a perfect one. But a real one.