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July 24, 2010
How would you like to begin a peaceful, legitimate political action which could roll back the last 100 years of government growth and national debt along with the hated federal income tax and the Fed? What if you could force Washington to return to a strong dol ...
Hungary's Malaise
July 24, 2010
Prime Minister Ference Gyurcsany, identified by some as "the golden boy" of Hungary's Socialist Party, got himself into serious trouble with many Hungarians for having admitted, in a leaked closed-door party conference speech, that during his two years term as ...
Obama's Professor Yoo
July 21, 2010
Don't believe it for a moment. The American Left, as a whole, does not support civil liberties. All that protestation of about Bush and Cheney's allegedly unconstitutional expansion of presidential powers was just a bunch of empty hand-waiving. The New York Tim ...
When There Is No Rule of Law
July 20, 2010
Last week ended with some promising news on finally stopping the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Unfortunately, the administration still seems to believe that shutting down working oil wells is a higher priority than effectively dealing with the broken one. Th ...
Recycling a Beauty
July 17, 2010
Of course our era has its problems but these folks are really bonkers with their pessimism. What's more, they aren't upset with some of the real horrors of our time, such as the tyrannies and wars and oppression that go on in parts of the globe but with the goo ...
Shutting It All Down for the State!
July 15, 2010
We in America now we have a head of state who actually appears to accept this reactionary philosophy, judging by his eager embrace of the judicial philosophy of his former colleague from the University of Chicago Law School, now Harvard law professor Cass Sunst ...
Funding Corruption and Waste in Afghanistan
July 13, 2010
Last week, GOP chairman Michael Steele came under fire for daring to say what a lot of Americans already know - that our involvement in Afghanistan is an ill-advised quagmire with no end in sight. After nearly 10 years and approaching $1 trillion spent, the con ...
Competitive Currencies Instead of the Euro Monopoly
July 10, 2010
A new study prepared by the Dutch financial institution, ING, called "Quantifying the Unthinkable," has warned that a collapse of the Euro as the European single currency would lead to a global economy cataclysm. The worldwide banking system would face a new an ...
More Power for the Fed
July 08, 2010
The Federal Reserve Transparency Act would eliminate restrictions on GAO audits of the Federal Reserve and open Fed operations to Congressional oversight. Additionally, audits could include discount window operations, open market operations, and agreements with ...
Two Insidious Trends in America
July 08, 2010
Two powerful intellectual developments are ruining America. One is egalitarianism, the other pragmatism. The former is an effort at the highest levels of American education, at institutions such as Harvard University and the University of Chicago, for example, ...
The Hubris of Central Bankers and the Ghosts of Deflation Past
July 06, 2010
In 2003, while the United States was at the end of another boom and bust cycle following the bursting of the "dot.com" bubble and the Y2K scare, there were many monetary central planners at the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank who were expressing f ...
Floating Exchange Rates: Scheme to Embezzle the Dollar Balances of Surplus Countries
July 06, 2010
In putting pressure on China to follow Japan's example to revalue the yuan, the American money doctors fail to point out that they are in effect asking China to take a loss, similar to those of Japan amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars, on her holdings ...
America's Leadership Under Contention – Has Monetary, Fiscal and Political Excess Run Its Course?
July 05, 2010
I just finished reading Richard Russell´s 'Latest Remarks´. He sums things up with the following comment: "The bear keeps torturing the majority. If only the authorities could straighten out the oil problem, the housing problem and the unemployment proble ...
July 4th Reflections and Revelations
July 04, 2010
Too many countries and governments in the world today expect that people are supposed to conform to manmade "laws" rather than the other way around. But when laws do not respect human nature, then nothing but trouble can result. The founders of America understo ...
A Declaration of Independence Against Big Government
July 04, 2010
What is usually not recalled is the long list of enumerated grievances that make up most of the text of the Declaration of Independence. The Founding Fathers explained how intolerable an absolutist and highly centralized government in faraway London had become. ...
On I earned it, it's mine!
July 03, 2010
In my political circles quite a few people, both now and in the past, defend the right to private property, to individual ownership, based on the idea that whatever one earns – or creates, or makes, or produces – surely is one's own property and others have ...
The Military Can Waste Money Too
June 30, 2010
This past week various news events once again made it abundantly clear that our foreign policy is an abject failure. Unfortunately, in spite of this the administration is determined to stay on this destructive course, despite any past promises to change it. For ...
Risks and Liberty
June 30, 2010
The New York Times editorialized in panic, predictably, in the wake of the U. S. Supreme Court ruling striking down Chicago's ban on handgun ownership. Lamenting the Court's highly abstract debate about the constitutional clause that needed to be considered, Th ...
Krugman's Opium War on China
June 29, 2010
Paul Krugman's article The Renminbi Runaround in the June 24th edition of The New York Times is not only diplomatically insensitive: it also lacks economic justification. The United States, with its unprecedented debt, is hardly in a position to lecture China a ...
Why Military Hubris?
June 29, 2010
General McChristal spoke out of line, though perhaps truth to power. Yet hasn't the American military been mislead into thinking that it is the answer to most of our problems? In which case his conduct may well be quite understandable, even a prelude to things ...
My Perennial Puzzles
June 28, 2010
I no longer recall whether I chose philosophy as the discipline I wanted to explore because of some puzzles I encountered or whether I found the puzzles in the field once a got to do work in it. I think it is the former since I recall some odd questions I rais ...
Architecture for a New World Financial System
June 24, 2010
The present Great Financial Crisis is far from over. In fact, it is getting worse. It can be described as a debt crisis or, at its roots, a belated gold crisis. The landmark year was 1971, when the United States defaulted on its international gold obligations. ...
Friends & Politics
June 24, 2010
Yes, most of my friends have similar political convictions to mine. Actually, not just political but also more general philosophical ones, bearing on the theory of being, knowledge, the human good and even the nature of art. But not all. I do have some genuin ...
Too Much Government in the Gulf
June 23, 2010
Sadly, the disaster in the Gulf continues this week as BP's efforts at containment keep hitting snags and residents along the coast scramble to clean up and defend their shores and wildlife. Many have criticized the federal government in the past weeks for not ...
The Skeptical Train to Tyranny
June 22, 2010
Skeptics have, throughout history, concluded that we can never be sure about what it is that exists, and even that reality itself does not exist except in the mind. With their gospel of "eternal doubt," advocates of skepticism have thus played the role of ideol ...
There's No Level Playing Field or Equal Opportunity
June 22, 2010
Yet another excuse for some people to gain power over others is this idea of the level playing field. It's a metaphor, of course, but used often to mean starting in a race with no advantages for any of the participants. Another term by which to indicate this i ...
No Excuse for Coercion
June 21, 2010
I am always baffled and now and then really angered when people defend using coercion against other people. (Some will say I must be biased since I come from several early years of tyranny and since one of my parents was an out and out brute. How could I be o ...
Justice and BP
June 19, 2010
Many moons ago President Richard Nixon lashed out at Charles Manson after he learned of the carnage but before the law could get at the mass murderer. The president told reporters that Manson was "guilty, directly or indirectly of eight murders." Manson's defe ...
Revisiting Free Will
June 18, 2010
Here you have yet another instance of never allowing a good disaster to go unexploited for political purposes, a policy endorsed a while ago by White House Chief Eric Rahmer. But I will leave that aside for now and focus once again on the curious phenomenon of ...
Sandel Says Rumor is False
June 17, 2010
I mentioned this in a column, saying "Michael Sandel reportedly refused to let his own child play sports because that would teach them the idea that some people are better athletes than others and that this matters somewhat in one's life." Then I went on to cri ...
Authoritarianism Is Bad for Your Health
June 15, 2010
The administration's terrible healthcare reform bill is now law, but the debate over how - and whether - the federal government should be involved in providing healthcare services is not over. It is not too late for America to correct its course and stop the ma ...
Like Changing the Course of Aircraft Carriers
June 15, 2010
In the effort to move the world toward human liberty - to induce countries around the globe to implement the regime of individual rights to life, liberty, etc. - the image of turn around an aircraft carrier, redirecting which way it will move in the middle of t ...
Self-Delusions of Statists
June 14, 2010
There is a provocative recent comment attributed to Harvard University and Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen in The Philosopher's Magazine (3rd Quarter 2010, p. 12 and taken from what he reported wrote in the New Statesman magazine). It is that "The nature o ...
Free Markets Need a Spiritual Dimension
June 13, 2010
Thanks to the Internet, one could argue, we are witnessing the beginning of the next great Renaissance/Reformation, free-market era. It is one that may prove even more powerful than the one unleashed by the Gutenberg press and agents such as Luther. Nonetheless ...
What You Always Wanted to Know About Gold
June 12, 2010
To say that the gold standard is not practicable is the same to say that honesty is not practicable, and Constitutions are made to be blithely ignored when convenient. The American Constitution, for example, mandates a metallic monetary standard for the United ...
Democracy vs. Liberty
June 12, 2010
Professor Benjamin Barber, author of the book Strong Democracy (1984), was recently a guest on John Stossel's FOX Business News Network program honoring the memory and ideas of Milton Friedman who wrote the world famous book Free to Choose (1980) and has been f ...
Nasty Effects of Egalitarianism
June 11, 2010
Ideas do have consequences. You come to believe that you are invincible, you will take risks more readily. You believe government will bail you out, cover your debts up to a certain amount, you will borrow more (indeed, your financial advisor will tell you you ...
A Mother's Politics
June 09, 2010
In his heartfelt eulogy for his mother, Jean Biden, Vice President Joe Biden quoted some words from her, very approvingly. These included the idea that "Everyone is your equal, and everyone is equal to you." Furthermore, in his autobiography the vice president ...
Why Governments Hate Gold
June 08, 2010
This past week several emerging and ongoing crises took attention away from the ongoing sovereign debt problems in Greece. The bailouts are merely kicking the can down the road and making things worse for taxpaying citizens, here and abroad. Greece is unfortuna ...
The Foundations of a Free Society
June 08, 2010
Some years ago, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Empire, I was an invited speaker at a conference of company CEOs and presidents in Acapulco, Mexico. Another of the speakers was Gennady Gerasimov, who you may remember was Gorbachev's spokesperson to th ...
Equality vs. Diversity
June 07, 2010
For the last couple or so decades the universities and colleges where I have taught - and by all accounts, most of them in the USA - have had two mutually exclusive social objectives. (Yes, Virginia, higher education is now mostly embarked upon pursuing social ...
Prof. Krugman Is Wrong Again
June 05, 2010
While Prof. Krugman and most other fiscalists believe this to be self-evident, it is not. Indeed, this fiscalist dogma fails to withstand the indignity of empirical verification. Prof. Paul Krugman's formulation fails to mention the state of confidence. This is ...
What Do We Cherish as Americans?
June 05, 2010
In a recent talk, responding to the Arizona law that's said to be aimed at containing illegal immigration, President Barrack Obama stated that this piece of legislation "threatens to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans...." I am not ...
Ignorance vs. Intervention
June 04, 2010
Some of the most prominent and influential defenders of the regime of individual liberty, such as F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Richard Epstein, Don Boudreaux and others, have argued that the main reason adult men and women must be left free from others' interf ...
Put Patients and Doctors Back in Control of Healthcare
June 02, 2010
Most everyone agrees that health care in the United States has major problems, the biggest problems relating to skyrocketing costs. No one doubts the system is in need of reform. However, too many in Washington see tighter government controls as the solution. I ...
Tea Party Versus ACORN, etc.
June 01, 2010
It is one thing to be against the ideas of some organization, quite another to be against organizing itself. Why would organizing be proper and commendable for Leftist causes but not for those of the Right? The Tea Party isn't some criminal gang burning down bu ...
Rights May Never Be In Conflict
May 31, 2010
If rights were no more that fancy ways of expressing preferences – in short, if morality and politics could only produce emotional expressions-there would be no doubt about the possibility of conflict between rights. Those who embrace the emotivism of the lik ...
Are Kids Altruists?
May 28, 2010
I will not address whether babies have a sense of right versus wrong, only the way this matter was reportedly tested by the researchers who investigated it. Paul Bloom and his wife, Karen Wynn, of the Infant Cognitive Center at Yale University, conducted studie ...
Who Is Free to Discriminate?
May 26, 2010
Everyone who is awake discriminates – it is what people do with their minds, it's the way they know the world, more or less well. The kind of discrimination that's objectionable is when people use irrelevant attributes of others to classify them – like thei ...
More Blank Checks to the Military Industrial Complex
May 25, 2010
Congress, with its insatiable appetite for spending, is set to pass yet another "supplemental" appropriations bill in the next two weeks. So-called supplemental bills allow Congress to spend beyond even the 13 annual appropriations bills that fund the federal g ...
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