Coco Cay, Bahamas – Utopia of the Seas is the newest, but certainly not the last, super cruise ship built by cruise line Royal Caribbean. Whether you love or hate cruises or cruising, the size of the ship is impressive.

When you walk in, you feel like you’re not on a ship, it’s that huge. When you walk in, you feel like you’re walking into a mall because you have all kinds of interiors to choose from, including jewelry stores, pizza places, bars, sports bars, clothing stores, laser tag theaters, dry slides, and much more. And that’s just a brief description of the ship’s interior.

Outside, there are more bars, restaurants, pools, parks, water parks, mini golf, boogie board parks, basketball courts, zip lines, and so on. Utopia of the Seas is apparently the result of an architect teaming up with adults and children with unlimited imaginations who tell the architect everything they want to do during three or four days at sea.

And that is what it is about. Or at least this opinion piece. Utopia’s size and breadth in a everything Sinn reveals the smallness and realistic insignificance of the Federal Reserve. As is often said here, in the future people of all ideological stripes will look back on the era of Fed obsession and wonder why so many smart people were completely fooled by something so obviously insignificant. The Utopia of the Seas shows why.

To understand why this is so, or to fathom it, you have to consider what it is: it is a triumph of the increasing global acquisitiveness (the ship’s passengers come from all over the world) that results from the rapidly increasing global productivity. In other words, more and more people from all over the world have the means (more on this in a moment) to vacation on the Utopia of the Seas, precisely because they are increasingly demonstrating a growing capacity for production.

This truth, of course, is a rejection of the economic narrative created by economists. What’s remarkable about economists is that the Fed employs more of them than any other institution on Earth. It shows. And the Utopia of the Seas is an expression of the impressive stupidity of an economics profession that worships consumption. A monument to consumption like the Utopia shows why the almost monolithic worship of consumption among economists is so utterly backward.

What limits the ability of Royal Caribbean passengers to consume in excess? The obvious answer is that the limiting factor is lack of production. Looking at this in time, a ship like Utopia of the Seas would have been impossible forty years ago. Not only was the global economy not sufficiently interconnected to create something so large in economic terms, the larger truth is that American or global wealth was not nearly enough forty years ago to sustain something so gigantic.

So what happened? Did the Fed’s manipulation of interest rates create the wealth that makes something like utopia possible? It is an insult to reason to ask such a stupid question. Not only does it imply that possible central planning of a crucial price (credit) has positive effects, but it also presupposes that the Fed produces credit. No and no.

What economists overlook is not only that consumption is a Effect of economic growth, which always and everywhere follows production, is that credit itself always and everywhere produced. From us. When we as individuals, corporations and (unfortunately) governments borrow “money,” we borrow what we can exchange for money. AlwaysThat is, credit only exists to the extent that there is production, and production increases as people and machines around the world divide up labor in ever more sophisticated ways.

What should go without saying is that Utopia of the Seas is far from the pinnacle of Royal Caribbean’s ability to cater to an increasingly spend-happy global workforce. Star of the Seas is scheduled to enter service in 2025 and, if possible, will expand Utopia’s scale even further.

And that’s the key point. There are no limits to production and the expansion of credit that is a brilliant consequence of production. This means that if people continue to produce freely, the Utopia and the Star will soon prove to be as primitive as the once-giant ships they replaced. And the Fed will play no role in this development.