The first generation of Americans to watch their savings erased by inflation wore the uniform of the Continental Army. Washington’s soldiers were paid in paper Continentals printed by the wagonload, and by 1780 the currency had collapsed so thoroughly that “not worth a Continental” entered the national lexicon. The Founders never forgot the lesson, which is why debates over hard money recur throughout their letters and state papers.
Two hundred forty-six years later, conservative politics is wrestling with a generation making the same discovery. When a college student told a Turning Point USA spokesman that a basic burrito shouldn’t cost $20, prominent voices in the movement responded with lectures about eating ramen and finding roommates. That reaction missed the mark.
The student wasn’t complaining out of entitlement — he was making an accurate observation about his daily expenses. I don’t like paying $20 for a burrito either. For years, the Left has told young Americans that market greed is why they can’t afford lunch, housing, or entry into adult life. The reality is more direct: A $20 fast-food bill isn’t a free-market price. It is an itemized government receipt. Capitalism made the burrito. Government made it $20.
Tracing that price tag starts with monetary expansion. Between March 2020 and March 2021, Washington authorized roughly $5 trillion in pandemic spending across three relief packages, pouring liquidity into an economy already beginning to reopen. The Federal Reserve monetized a significant share of that debt. By February 2021, M2 money supply growth had peaked at 26.9% year over year, a pace the St. Louis Fed noted exceeded anything in the quantitative easing era or the inflationary 1970s.
The initial 2020 emergency relief was bipartisan — the massive 2021 tranche was not. McDonald’s reported that its average U.S. menu prices rose approximately 40% between 2019 and 2024. That wasn’t franchise-level greed. It was currency dilution.
Targeted labor mandates added another line to the bill. California’s $20 fast-food minimum wage provided economists with a natural experiment, and the National Bureau of Economic Research found that fast-food prices in California’s major metros rose 3.3% to 3.6% relative to 17 control cities immediately following the law. Research from UC Santa Cruz documented the secondary effects: reduced shift hours, capped overtime, and faster automation, including cuts at one Central Valley operator that amounted to roughly 62 full-time positions. The same policy framed as a wage boost raised young workers’ living costs and eliminated the entry-level shifts needed to pay them.
Housing and commercial rent follow the same pattern. The National Association of Home Builders estimates that regulations now account for $131,734 of the price of an average new single-family home — roughly 26.4% of the sale price, up more than 40% in five years and far outpacing income growth. The same web of zoning restrictions and permitting delays inflates the commercial rents that restaurant operators pass on to consumers.
Finally, student debt. The federal government effectively took over student lending, flooding higher education with subsidized capital. Universities raised tuition to absorb the available funds — a dynamic economists have recognized since Education Secretary William Bennett outlined it in 1987 — while Congress restricted bankruptcy discharge. Every step was structured by federal policy, not market competition.
When young workers say the math is stacked against them, they are reading their expenses accurately. The good news: Market forces are already demonstrating the alternative. Major homebuilders are cutting prices — Lennar’s average selling price has moved down toward $377,000 — as supply adjusts to buyer capacity. And as Mike Rowe recently recounted after visiting a Texas data center, electricians under 30 are earning $240,000 to $280,000 a year, debt-free, because the physical economy needs skilled labor. The market isn’t failing these workers — it is offering them a way out of subsidized credentialism.
Expanding government intervention to fix the consequences of previous intervention only compounds the distortion. Proposals for state-run grocery outlets or permanent price caps echo history’s attempts to manage prices by decree, and the pattern is consistent: Price controls don’t reduce true costs; they produce shortages, reduced production, and empty shelves, as Venezuelans discovered when the question stopped being what a burrito costs and became whether there was a burrito at all.
CALIFORNIA IS DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM’S FUTURE — AND IT’S DEAD LAST
Rather than dismissing the frustrations of younger voters, Republicans should say the quiet part out loud and adopt a line worth repeating from now until November: Capitalism made the burrito. Government made it $20. Socialism would make it $40.
It is empathy, economics, and a warning in three short sentences, and every clause is documented. Washington’s early leaders stabilized the currency because they saw what unbacked paper did to ordinary citizens. Winning back a generation begins with the same honesty about cause and effect.
Dory Wiley is President and CEO of Commerce Street Holdings, LLC, a Dallas-based investment bank, and a historian who writes on American history and public policy.