If you’re an avid listener to the Rollo & Slappy Show, the name Mike Brock might ring a bell. We first covered him almost three years ago in Episode 336 when we critiqued his appearance on the What Bitcoin Did podcast where he explained why he’s not a libertarian anymore. Like many who quit libertarianism before him, we weren’t impressed. He was the topic of discussion again in March 2024 for Episode 401. This time we addressed his claim that “deflationary money leads to an economy of thrift.” He didn’t seem to like our episode and may have especially not liked that I preemptively didn’t take him up on his offer to debate him because I didn’t think he understood the concepts well enough to make an interesting debate partner.
I bring Brock up now because he’s back in my Twitter feed. Earlier this week, he penned a piece on his blog titled “Bitcoin is a Lie” and followed up with a second one. Not surprisingly, a lot of Bitcoiners didn’t agree with him. I think he actually does raise some valid points about some Bitcoiners—there are things that annoy him that also annoy me. As I’ve posted on Twitter and talked about on the podcast plenty of times, there are too many Bitcoiners who don’t understand the concepts very well but still loudly and aggressively repeat slogans and memes without any regard for nuance. So when they’re confronted with something that doesn’t quite perfectly align with their tape-recorded messaging, they fully and proudly engage their toxicity gland to repeat the talking points they heard from their favorite influencers. And when the person who actually knows what they’re talking about responds with a little bit of toxicity of their own (this time perhaps justifiably), they retreat like wounded herbivorous woodland creatures.
Likewise, when someone asks a question in good faith about Bitcoin, telling them to “have fun staying poor” is unhelpful at best and just plain rude. On the other hand, I don’t have a problem with that line when someone is being willfully obtuse and difficult about Bitcoin. We’re not trying to force someone to use Bitcoin, so if he really wants to stick with the fiat system or play around in the altcoin casino, then that brutally honest warning should be something that stings. You get no favors by hearing, “Okay, that’s cool, you’ll be fine sticking with that.”
As I scrolled through “Bitcoin is a Lie,” a paragraph caught my eye that I felt warranted a comment with a tweet:
But strip away the economic mysticism and here’s what “hard money” actually means: it systematically advantages existing wealth holders and disadvantages workers and debtors. It makes wealth accumulation easier and wage earning harder. It turns the economy into a game where those who already have capital watch it appreciate while those who work for wages watch their purchasing power erode.
I am very happy to announce that my tweet played a very important role in the essay that Brock posted today called “The Performance: How Intellectual Cowardice Masquerades as Argument” with the subtitle “Or: A Field Guide to Recognizing When People Have Stopped Thinking.”
In this piece, Brock makes a systematic argument that I, along with many others, addressed his points by seizing up into a fit of cognitive dissonance, unable to see past tribal boundaries of Austrian economics and “that Bitcoin embeds feudalism in code.” In order words, he’s saying that I didn’t address his arguments and just responded with attacks.
The problem is that it’s the other way around. Mike Brock is lying to you, my dear reader.
But don’t just take my word for it, let’s go through each stage of the argument as laid out by Brock.
Section II is called “The Opening Gambit: Universal Assumption of Ignorance,” which is the accusation that he doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. Brock introduces me with:
And Rollo McFloogle—yes, that’s really his chosen pseudonym, and no, I will never tire of it—declared: “This is a really bad understanding of how money works by Mike Brock.”
Notice what they’re not doing. They’re not engaging my distributive analysis—the observation that wage earners at subsistence have no savings to appreciate under deflation. They’re not addressing my claim that Bitcoin removes monetary policy from democratic oversight permanently. They’re not confronting the historical evidence that commodity money caused depressions rather than equilibrium.
They’re asserting I don’t understand Austrian economics. I don’t grasp Bitcoin’s protocol. I’m confused about how money works.
Let me first take a moment as an aside to say that I am happy that my pseudonym fills Brock with such glee.
Here’s where the deception starts. My comments were directed at the few sentences quoted above that I will repost here for reiteration:
But strip away the economic mysticism and here’s what “hard money” actually means: it systematically advantages existing wealth holders and disadvantages workers and debtors. It makes wealth accumulation easier and wage earning harder. It turns the economy into a game where those who already have capital watch it appreciate while those who work for wages watch their purchasing power erode.
My comment was a screenshot of those sentences with two tweets saying why I thought that Brock doesn’t understand how money works:
This is a really bad understanding of how money works by Mike Brock.
Making wealth accumulation easier is for everyone…including the poor and those with little. Hard money actually makes it possible to save.
It makes you have to actually produce something of value.
The existing wealthy class that took advantage of the fiat system would have to actually have to be productive in a hard money system. Maybe they can just get by on converting their money to Bitcoin, but they’re net spenders and so their economic power dissipates over time.
I understand that there are some ideas built in there that might need some explanation, but most of my audience probably has a decent grasp of what I mean. Plus, it’s Twitter, so it’s not exactly the place to write detailed essays that assume the reader needs help with some of the ideas you’re building from.
Anyway, even though I was addressing just a few lines from his piece, Brock is claiming that I rejected everything about his two pieces (the latter I didn’t even know existed at the time). My comments were about how I disagreed that a hard money standard would allow the rich to stay rich and keep the poor from being anything but poor. I certainly disagree with him on his points about democratic oversight and depression but I obviously was not addressing either of them. I did, however, directly engage with his point about wage earners being able to accumulate savings. He might not agree with me, but he can’t say I didn’t make an argument as a response.
He also claims that I don’t understand his distributive analysis and makes the claim earlier in the piece that:
Austrian economics systematically ignores who starts with what. When you add distribution back—when you ask “who has savings to appreciate under deflation?”—the system reveals itself as advantaging accumulated wealth holders automatically while wage earners at subsistence have nothing that appreciates. This isn’t a bug. It’s the design.
For the record, this is nonsense especially when directed at me. As one of the pioneers of the #GetOnZero movement, I’ve addressed this numerous times, including in this post written in 2021 called “If I’m living paycheck to paycheck with no savings, is #GetOnZero for me?” I don’t expect Brock would have known that I wrote this, but he made a strong statement that Austrian economics ignores exactly what I addressed. This is why I say that he doesn’t understand the things he talks about.
We’ll skip through the next two sections about ad hominem attacks and “rigging the frame” because I’m happy to report that he did not reference me in either. So at least maybe I did something right in Brock’s eyes.
But I am front and center in Section V. “Assertion as Answer: the Circular Retreat.” This is where things might get confusing because Brock never actually linked to any of these discussions, so his readers are bound to his narratives surrounding them.
When challenged on substance, watch for this move carefully: they simply restate their position, claim they’ve “answered,” and demand you disprove it.
“Rollo McFloogle”—I cannot emphasize enough how much joy that pseudonym brings me—demonstrated this with crystalline perfection.
After I dismissed his initial claim as likely drawn from “bullshit essays on the Mises Institute’s website,” he protested: “I did answer the part I quoted from your piece though.”
His “answer”? The assertion that “hard money makes saving possible” and “makes you have to actually produce something of value.”
But that’s not an answer to my argument. My argument is structural and distributive: deflationary money systematically advantages those who already have accumulated wealth because their capital appreciates automatically without producing anything. Meanwhile, wage earners at subsistence levels don’t have savings to appreciate. Therefore deflation concentrates wealth in existing holders through automatic appreciation beyond democratic constraint, while those without capital to begin with gain nothing from “sound money” except the privilege of watching wealth accumulate to others.
His response: “But hard money makes saving possible!”
I need to again comment as an aside about Brock’s second comment on my pseudonym. He may actually be serious and genuinely like my name, but more than likely, he is attempting to poison the well for his readers. If I have such a silly name, how can I be taken seriously? I’d give him the benefit of the doubt if the whole point of his piece we’re going through right now weren’t about people dismissing others for bad reasons. But given his deception, it’s not surprising. I didn’t come up with the name Rollo McFloogle for this purpose, but it’s interesting to see how it’s a good way to filter out people who would rather pick on the name instead of engage the ideas being expressed.
It’s interesting that Brock does admit that he dismissed my initial comments by quote tweeting with “I’m sure there’s a bunch of bullshit essays on the Mises Institute’s website that would set me straight.” Does Brock, who is in the middle of a long piece decrying people who are dismissive without engaging with the arguments, expect me to respond with intellectual rigor to that? It’s got to be a two-way street here.
My “protest” of a response was after a number of jabs back and forth between the two of us. Here is the entire thread for your reading pleasure.
Even when we were just being jerks to each other (although I stand by what I said), I pointed out that I was taking one small section of his piece that I was objecting to, so his claims that I was dodging his general ideas are just incorrect. Brock took my comment (that he presumably had to search for since I didn’t tag him) and didn’t respond with an argument—he simply dismissed it. But then suddenly he cut the wheel and clutched his pearls over me dismissing him. It’s bizarre. It’s almost as if he knew he wanted to write this piece when he decided to respond to me. But alas, I guess Brock can have his cake and eat it too.
On the one hand, I’m glad that he put quotes around my “answer” because this is another example of a dishonesty on the part of Brock. As we’ve already seen, what he’s calling my “answer” was already written as my first comment. Brock must have thought that including a few more sentences was too much to include in his 8500+ word essay and he decided to slice and dice it. He decided to present
Making wealth accumulation easier is for everyone…including the poor and those with little. Hard money actually makes it possible to save.
It makes you have to actually produce something of value.
The existing wealthy class that took advantage of the fiat system would have to actually have to be productive in a hard money system. Maybe they can just get by on converting their money to Bitcoin, but they’re net spenders and so their economic power dissipates over time.
as “hard money makes saving possible” and “makes you have to actually produce something of value” and the eventual summation (that doesn’t actually exist) of “But hard money makes saving possible!”
It would have been fair for him to ask me to explain that more, but he instead chose to cherry pick poorly quoted parts of my response. He wants his readers to think that I’m only capable of regurgitating some simple talking points. He also wants to lead his readers to believe that he’s a poor soul who tried to talk through his ideas but was instead utterly dismissed—yet he was the one who initiated the dismissing. He continued with an imaginary conversation between himself and “them” where he so heroically tried to engage with his detractors with an honest dialogue while they just dismissed him as not understanding things. Maybe that’s happened with others, but he shouldn’t present that as something that happened with me here.
Section VI. “The Tribal Appeal: Consensus as a Substitute for Argument” is funny because he accuses me of exactly what he did:
When assertion fails to persuade, watch them pivot to consensus—but not actual consensus of economists or political philosophers. Consensus of their tribe.
John Haar deployed this with particular vigor: “By now, the flaws in your claims and arguments have been explained to you many times by many different people.”
Rollo McFloogle added: “*No one with a clue takes you seriously. Most people want to be fed easy slop to make themselves feel good about themselves.”
What was I responding to? If you read the screenshots above, you already know. But let’s show it again:
That must explain the spike in paid subscriber growth to my Substack since I wrote these pieces.
This was in response to me saying “Gee, I wonder why no one takes you seriously…” as a reply to his initial dismissal. According to Brock, I’m being tribal when I said that people agree with me, but he is not being tribal when he said that people agree with him. Ah, but is there a difference that Brock will show us?
When I cited actual evidence—my paid Substack subscriptions have spiked significantly since writing these pieces, suggesting people find the arguments compelling—Rollo pivoted immediately:
“Most people want to be fed easy slop to make themselves feel good about themselves. I’m not denying you supply a very hungry market.”
Perfect. Unfalsifiable.
If people agree with me, they’re seeking comfortable lies. If people disagree with me, that would prove I’m wrong. Either way, he’s right.
I don’t think my comment is all that controversial, even among normies. That might not prove it to be true, but in the context of a fight where it seemed like neither of us was trying to engage in a formal argument about the topic we had already abandoned, I’m not sure it needs more than casual evidence. Furthermore, Brock didn’t cite actual evidence. He made a claim without specifics. What does he consider a significant spike? Doubling his subscribers might be significant, but is it significant if they went from 5 to 10? I have no idea what his numbers are, and he didn’t offer any, so it’s odd that he would try to run a victory lap over this. He also appeals to consensus of economists and political philosophers as being meaningful. Is that who is subscribed to his Substack?
I know I’m being repetitive on this point, but this is so bizarre to me. Brock changed the direction of how a conversation would go by being the one who was dismissive, but when I returned with dismissive comments, he suddenly acted appalled and gave himself the moral high ground as the one who was above such boorish and cult-like behaviors since he was so interested in intellectual engagement.
I guess I shouldn’t find this bizarre because this is exactly the kind of deception that a liar would engage in.
It’s also worth noting that when Brock (now while writing his essay) wants to know what “with a clue” means, he appeals to “the profession” of trained economists who disagree with me but agree with him (apparently Austrian economics isn’t actual economics). Should we presume that whatever the majority position of the profession holds is the truth? I guess the earth is flat…
The only other mention of me was a repetition of what’s already been addressed, so I won’t go through it again.
In summary, Mike Brock has a history of making strong assertions about libertarianism, Austrian economics, and Bitcoin that can be easily debunked by someone with a reasonable understanding of each topic (see the previously linked podcast episodes for my debunking), but he’s so dismissive of counterpoints that most people get discouraged from wanting to engage in a discussion. To reiterate an example to drive home his poor grasp of topics he talks about, Brock—without any uncertainty—states that Austrian economics ignore what happens when people start with nothing, but I wrote on this exact topic regarding Bitcoin for savings for those with none four years ago. Along with his other errors, it’s perfectly reasonable for someone to conclude that he knows far less than he believes himself to know. From my direct experience of that here, he will bait you into dismissing him so that he can turn around and lament that nobody has a good argument against him. It’s also very telling that he did not provide a link to anything other than his own previous posts and used that as an opportunity to chop up the conversations to misrepresent what was said. Honest people do not need these tactics. It’s one thing to be ignorant, but it’s much worse to be willfully deceptive the way Brock is.