STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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November 01, 2012
Lawrence Summers is offering up his usual recipe for a successful national economy. He seeks government involvement in all ways. Nonetheless, from a perspective of dominant and sub-dominant social themes it is instructive to deconstruct Summers's arguments. The ...
November 01, 2012
There are plenty of sub-dominant themes growing out of this main one of food scarcity. In fact, it is such a deep meme that one could compare it to a bush with many branches. A lot of these sub-dominant social themes could be classified as dominant themes thems ...
November 01, 2012
Concepts such as that of "government," like those of "democracy," "law," "justice," "freedom" and "love," to cite just a few, is what W. B. Gallie called "essentially contestable" (see his "Essentially Contested Concepts," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Societ ...
October 31, 2012
Sometimes dominant social themes and sub-dominant social themes are unstated instead of stated. One out of every four Spanish workers is now without a job. This is a full-fledged depression by any standard. This statistic is topped by another one, that 50 perce ...
October 30, 2012
What a surprise ... not! We're long on the record as explaining the essential phony nature of this pseudo youth movement. Funded by George Soros among others and putatively generated out of the socialist-anarchist publication Adbusters, Occupy Wall Street is su ...
October 30, 2012
This Vancouver Sun article is typical of some of the coverage of Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York City and environs yesterday. It is written by William Marsden, author of Fools Rule: Inside the Failed Politics of Climate Change (Knopf). We looked up the book ...
October 30, 2012
French businessman and economist Jean-Baptiste Say is credited with identifying the fundamental economic principle that aggregate demand for goods in an economy will equal the aggregate supply of goods when markets are permitted to operate. Or in Say's words, " ...
October 30, 2012
This talk was delivered at the 30th Anniversary Supporters Summit of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Callaway Gardens, Georgia, on October 26, 2012. What a thrill to speak to you on this happy occasion of the Mises Institute's thirtieth anniversary. I am deligh ...
October 29, 2012
So it turns out that many Greek politicians have Swiss bank accounts and are not paying taxes due. What does this tell us about "austerity"? ... Only that it is a meme, as we have previously discussed. What is going on in Greece and elsewhere is that a small cl ...
October 29, 2012
Tax crackdowns are an emerging meme but this news, above, is especially egregious. The powers-that-be use a divide-and-conquer approach when it comes to much business and regulation. And this approach is increasing. The idea basically is to turn businesses into ...
October 29, 2012
During the rather brief and confusing discussion about bailing out automakers President Obama announced with his characteristic misplaced righteousness that we "will not turn our backs on one of America's basic industries." Of course, Mr. Obama and his cheerlea ...
October 29, 2012
Since mid-2009 the US has been enjoying a virtual recovery courtesy of a rigged inflation measure that understates inflation. The financial Presstitutes spoon out the government's propaganda that prices are rising less than 2%. But anyone who purchases food, fu ...
October 28, 2012
The Daily Bell is pleased to present another exclusive interview with Ron Holland. Daily Bell: You felt the system of control itself was not working so well anymore last time we interviewed you. Can you elaborate? Ron Holland: Today, in the middle of the Intern ...
October 27, 2012
"Senator John Kerry released his plan today to eliminate the deficit. He said all we have to do is find a really rich country like Switzerland and marry it." ~ Jay Leno; the approach of courting the Swiss has since turned out to be a little less amicable... The ...
October 26, 2012
No. It's just not true. There is no real recovery in Britain or anywhere else in the world, for that matter. The banking elites that caused this rolling depression are in full cry about the struggles they are taking to cure it. In doing so, they reinforce the m ...
October 26, 2012
The deaths in Afghanistan, after more than a decade of war, keep climbing. Our paradigm proves itself out daily. The West is not in Afghanistan to help its women. The West is not in Afghanistan because of its mineral wealth. The West is not in Afghanistan to cr ...
October 25, 2012
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard partially redeems himself with this article. After going through a bad patch when he loosed his inner Keynesian and inflicted it on innocent readers, he provides us with a fairly crisp perspective on the reality of Britain's stance versu ...
October 25, 2012
We're not surprised about this only because we've lost our capacity to be shocked. These days we're surprised only if our worst expectations are NOT fulfilled. Everything – and we do mean everything – in Western culture and corporate enterprise is bent towa ...
October 25, 2012
Paul Ryan has some affinities with Ayn Rand's political philosophy and is now taking flack for this. Apparently eager to besmirch Ayn Rand and through her Mr. Ryan, claims now abound in the media that go like this: "Rand's libertarianism has an underlying philo ...
October 24, 2012
There are problems with Germany but the good news regarding China brings us back to emotional parity. This seems to be the gist, the dominant social theme of this Reuters article. We're supposed to be depressed about Germany but excited about China. The idea th ...
October 24, 2012
The idea of a debt jubilee is gaining more and more traction, as John Rubino observes (above) in a recent article posted at Dollar Collapse. Ron Holland has also just written a clear, bold article on a similar concept, debt repudiation, posted today at The Dail ...
October 24, 2012
While regional independence is superior to both the failing European Union and the façade of special interest controlled democracy, one further action should taken by any jurisdictions that choose secession: Newly restored sovereign nations should repudiate th ...
October 24, 2012
God help them if Obama and Romney ever had to participate in a real debate about a real issue at the Oxford Union. They would be massacred. The "debates" revealed that not only the candidates but also the entire country is completely tuned out to every real pro ...
October 23, 2012
This article at Slate illustrates the growing radicalization of the Fed conversation and also how words and premises make it increasingly difficult to discuss central banking logically. It is an analysis of whom Mitt Romney would pick for Fed Chairman if he bec ...
October 23, 2012
So here it comes. The powers-that-be have decided that they need to track user details on the Internet to prevent crime. We've reported for a while on private justice. Why is it that proponents of the state simply assume that crime is the state's business? Actu ...
October 23, 2012
Until the late 1990s, individuals interested in Austrian economics, US constitutional history and libertarian philosophy had few sources of information. They had to spend hours scouring used book stores or the back pages of obscure libertarian periodicals to fi ...
October 22, 2012
The Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has caught up to a working paper entitled "The Chicago Plan Revisited" issued by IMF staff members Jaromir Benes and Michael Kumhof. His summary: "Personally, I am a long way from reaching a conclusion in this extraordina ...
October 22, 2012
Can government "create" jobs? Free-market types believe it is impossible for government to generate employment, though politicians claim various kinds of job creation all the time. The New York Times thinks it can. Most of the time, analysis turns on government ...
October 22, 2012
It has always been my view that corporations are groups of people united for various purposes, often to benefit from a business venture guided by competent management. Initially, I worried little about either the legal details or even about the legal history. A ...
October 21, 2012
The Daily Bell is pleased to present this exclusive interview with Brian Doherty. Here's a brief snippet: Daily Bell: You received a Bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Florida. What do you think of Western mainstream journalists and media? B ...
October 20, 2012
The Daily Mail received a lot of attention this week for an article entitled, "3,000 doctors putting patients on 'death lists' that single them out to be allowed to die." Now, some of the feedbacks that the Mail received claimed that the End of Life Care Strate ...
October 19, 2012
Jim O'Neill, the Goldman Sachs creator of the term "BRICs," wants to convince us that the BRICs are not only magnificent engines of growth and prosperity but also the future of finance and investment. To this end, he attended the Telegraph's Festival of Busines ...
October 19, 2012
The West's fascination with numeracy continues. It surely is kind of power elite dominant social theme. We've written about this before, in fact. The elites search out a certain kind of intelligence and even select for it. In our view, this is the reason for th ...
October 19, 2012
"There is essentially no difference between one administration and another, no matter what the platform." ~ Ron Paul, on CNBC Futures Now; he also stated that "They haven't the vaguest idea what Austrian free-market hard-money economics is"... I am writing this ...
October 19, 2012
In the guest section [at Paulcraigroberts.org] there is a new contribution by Dr. Robert S. Dotson. He points out that Obamneycare is two versions of the same thing. A person has to be gullible and uninformed to believe the claims of Obama and Romney that their ...
October 18, 2012
What we consider to be the "phony" war on terror is the gift that keeps on giving to those who run our governments. The phony war on drugs only adds to the rationales for telling people what they can and cannot do with their resources. What is going on is a pat ...
October 18, 2012
The BBC is nothing that the market itself would ever create. At once vindictive and sanctimonious, BBC culture is that of entitlement: Every Briton is forced to pay an annual stipend for the privilege of viewing the BBC. It is held up as a beacon of good taste ...
October 18, 2012
Karl Marx, in his posthumously published work Grundrisse identified his view of humanity very clearly. Humanity is an organic whole (or body). People aren't individuals but the cells of this organic entity whose development and maturation Marx tried to chronicl ...
October 18, 2012
In recent decades politicians have increasingly followed the Keynesian prescription of economic growth through continued government borrowing and the creation of undreamt of amounts of fiat money by central banks. To facilitate this process, the larger commerci ...
October 17, 2012
So builders are busy again in the US. The Fed has been flooding the market with cheap money so we are not surprised. But there are ramifications. It certainly is a dominant social theme, however. The idea is that the economy went through a rough patch but that ...
October 17, 2012
It seems like Hillary Clinton's very own terrorist strike force is about to become a reality. We first wrote about this back in May. You can see the article here: "As Commandos Raid Tampa US State Department Demands Power to Declare War." Ms. Clinton was attend ...
October 17, 2012
Journalists, politicians and economists all seem to agree that the biggest economic issue currently worrying voters is unemployment. It follows then that most believe that the deciding factor in the presidential race will be the ability of each candidate to con ...
October 17, 2012
Years ago, somebody asked Nathaniel Branden how you know when you love somebody. His answer was something to the effect that, "When they enter a room, for you, the room gets a little brighter, like the lights had been turned up a notch." What is it that makes l ...
October 16, 2012
We've written about copyright and its criminalization numerous times and this article on Geekosystems and the one it is based on at The American Assembly are no surprise: Illegal downloaders are apt to be large record purchasers. This simply makes sense. Those ...
October 16, 2012
People in the West would be shocked to know that their taxes had funded the wholesale poisoning of parts of the Middle East and Afghanistan but increasingly, that's how it seems. We've written about it before numerous times. The culprit is depleted uranium and ...
October 16, 2012
Last week, supporters of the current administration rejoiced over job numbers released by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS). For the first time since the administration came to power, the official unemployment number fell below 8%. Keynesian cheerleaders ...
October 16, 2012
What exactly went wrong in Germany? Thomas Jefferson had been dead for 150 years when Adolf Hitler came to power. But he would have recognized the broad outlines of the problem. Jefferson: "My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results fro ...
October 16, 2012
Back during the George W. Bush neocon regime, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in his UN speech summed up George W. Bush for the world. I am quoting Chavez from memory, not verbatim. "Yesterday standing at this same podium was Satan himself, speaking as if he ...
October 15, 2012
Reuters has posted an editorial from Frederick Kempe maintaining the importance of the upcoming US presidential elections. We've noticed more and more discussion of the importance of this presidential election. It is seemingly being positioned in the mainstream ...
October 15, 2012
Gaia Health is reporting on a 2010 study published in the Cochrane Collaboration Library that concluded the so-called influenza vaccine is ineffective and that studies regarding flu vaccines generally are flawed. The study cited harm from such vaccines that wen ...
