One of the most successful lies in recent years involves the ousting of the Truss administration in the United Kingdom (UK).

What actually happened, the response of the institutions and the media, and eventually, how her own party treated her has had to compete for time with far inferior news – which is a tragedy. The United Kingdom is broke today, but it was also broke the day Liz Truss was appointed by her party to replace the hopeless jester before her, Boris Johnson.

Knowing that UK monetary policy was controlled by an overwhelmingly left-wing statist orthodoxy, Truss compiled a radical mini-budget with supply reforms that were to accompany it. Sadly, she did not send the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) a copy of the reforms, so this George Osborne-created oversight body – itself having mutated into a massive unwise and unneeded bureaucracy – panicked, then doubled up with another massive bureaucracy, the Bank of England (BoE), to tell the media that this was the worst thing ever – at which point the markets reacted. Very badly.

As a result of this ridiculous, unnecessary error and the hubris that accompanied it, Truss was hauled into her party HQ, accused of the grave crime of unfunded tax cuts and ultimately given her marching orders.

But even then, something was wrong: the institutions involved, namely the BoE and the OBR rarely get anything right, but this particular response was icily precise, almost as if they knew what Truss sought to do – and were unwilling to live with those implications.

Doom loop

What was she planning to do?

Escape the doom loop, essentially, that saw the country become addicted to debt, chiefly by public spending and out of control welfare, and amputate the festering limbs that uphold expired fiscal policies.

In the event that she’d ordered the events correctly – if the reforms had gotten to the BoE and OBR before she’d announced the mini-budget – the feeling is that the strategy would have humiliated the former for not doing their jobs, leading to the sacking of their executives, and the loss of prestige.

As it happens that institution (BoE) and its mandates are unaccountable – the country has Tony Blair to thank for that one. But of all the consequences of this period to emerge, perhaps the most egregious and scandalously false is that our circumstances now are a direct result of Liz Truss.

This is peddled in parliament, in The Guardian and other media establishment titles, and by MPs to their constituents, ordinarily in response to questions about why the cost of living is prohibitive, why the jobs market has cratered, and why home ownership is all but impossible for twenty-somethings.

Labour MP after Labour MP gets trotted to the cameras – the cameras beam into households watching the news, and the lie that one woman’s thoughtful, if administratively scattered approach to solving the crisis handicapping the country’s potential is accepted as fact.

But because it's so obvious that it's rubbish – by mere glance at the current borrowing costs – there does appear to be a major problem: the UK has lost the ability to read economics, and will now accept a theory on the subject from someone who was previously a community organizer, or a social worker.

Fatal

The situation is as fatal for the citizens of the UK as youth in South Africa believing tenderpreneurship a worthy career pursuit. There is almost nothing to separate the NPCs in the UK Treasury and those who calculate or hallucinate the price of buckets or mops for Tembisa Hospital. Both of these groups are motivated not by sound maths and practical strategy that underwrites it, but, like Mzwandile Masina in Ekurhuleni, an almost-criminal urge to test boundaries; just as the racket adds 500% to the cost of a pair of latex gloves, so do Britain’s Treasury NPCs daydream about creating a Scandinavian economy in the UK with near identical tax and welfare features.

It’s voodoo, it’s all make believe, and most tragically, it’s addictive. Into this death spiral we add one more bizarre, possibly final movement – the profile of the fully vaccinated boomer emerging to lament the chaos of disorderly monetary systems, followed by predictable submission to them - “it’s awful, I know, but it’s all we have – so let’s try to make it work”.

Now, you would expect, at this point in the UK, some resistance in the form of the young and educated who’ve spent time in the company of Austrian economists’ work. Similarly, you would expect a much more assertive response from South African youth watching the myriad tragedies of broad-based black economic empowerment unfold. There is none.

Financial education

Contrary to what you may hear, the problem is neither racial nor ideological solidarity in the respective countries. It is one of financial education, or rather, lack of. In the UK’s universities, students are encouraged to be patient with Marx, but jeer at the Laffer Curve or other features of free market theory.

No student in the land apparently knows what “APR” means – much less how to calculate it. One of the most depressing indictments of modern economic academia lies in how a student can spend weeks studying the disaster of someone like Julius Nyerere, channelled by some professor with the tone of disappointment (“if he just had a few more years to execute his agenda”), yet not know about practical, real-life instrumentation.

The costs of learning nonsense are already clear: a generation in the UK sees the civil service as a prudent career move (as opposed to duty) and South African youth are drawn to the fringes of economic study as a matter of obsessive consumerism only.

Gold (and other precious metals) are studied in science classes at universities, but its history should not be the preserve of academic talent, and its meaning should extend way beyond the imposed limits.

Whilst encouraging numbers of youth are exploring Bitcoin, it's just as important to explore why it exists, as this is arguably the key to unshackling oneself from the diabolical narratives crafted to sustain the status quo.