Government mismanagement and central planning are again showing their ugly faces in Turkey’s inflation disaster. When the state controls the money supply and manipulates interest rates, be it under Erdogan or any central bank bureaucrats, you simply get theft via inflation—Hayek warned us that central banks are the ultimate price fixers, destroying the spontaneous order of voluntary markets. The government’s endless tinkering—raising and dropping rates for political expediency rather than in response to real supply and demand—only amplifies this chaos. It’s tragicomic, watching officials mouth platitudes about “temporary spikes” caused by their own tax hikes and state-induced energy crises. This isn’t a market failure; it’s full-on state failure.

Let’s be honest—these “official” inflation numbers are laughable. Whenever the state is allowed to create its own metrics, you end up with Potemkin statistics and deliberate understatements, as independent economists have shown. The actual cost of living for ordinary Turks is being eroded by policies instituted by the very same government that claims to protect them. Nozick would roll his eyes at this coercive meddling, where anointed planners impose suffering by force while pretending to serve the common good. In truth, freedom to choose one’s medium of exchange, interest rate, and private monetary arrangements is crushed beneath mountains of regulation, taxation, and legal tender laws.

Ayn Rand would see this as pure looting—a predatory state inflating, taxing, and manipulating to extract wealth from productive citizens and subsidize a dependent class for political gain. The only just system is laissez-faire: abolish the central bank, restore genuine currency competition, and end the government’s power to print money. Let the free market, not bureaucrats or politicians, set interest rates and decide what money is.

Until Turkey casts off the chains of statism, its people will continue to suffer. Inflation isn’t bad luck; it’s the inevitable result of a system built on force and collective delusion, not voluntary cooperation and liberty. The path out is radical—abolish legal tender, denationalize money, end the central bank’s monopoly, and shrink the state until it’s powerless to manipulate the people’s wallets ever again.