STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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April 29, 2010
We agree with Eric Sprott about gold, or at least as his comments are reported in the above excerpted article. And of course we take into account that his optimism is colored by his launch of a gold hedge fund with a perceived superiority because investors can ...
April 29, 2010
Enthusiasts for increasing government regulations of people in business, including those in the financial markets, never bother to answer the one basic question that any rational person would need to have answered before joining them as champions of their propo ...
April 28, 2010
US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner doesn't want to be seen as being affiliated with Wall Street, and we can't blame him. But what's odd from our perspective is that he does want to be known for being associated with "public service." We think this is very r ...
April 28, 2010
Immigration is one of the most politicized issues of the modern nation-state. We would have preferred if Napolitano had offered up a libertarian position rather than a political one, as this sort of analysis only further reinforces people's perception that the ...
April 27, 2010
We think President Barack Obama's statement that the upcoming US financial regulation bill could end boom-and-bust cycles is an unfortunate one. It illustrates a fundamental rhetorical dishonesty, because even the socialist economist John Maynard Keynes did not ...
April 27, 2010
We, too, believe that the Afghanistan war is winding down. Maybe the US military would like to continue it a while longer, but the home populations of the Dutch, the Canadians, the Germans, and even the British, are evermore opposed to it. From our point of vie ...
April 27, 2010
Lately many have characterized this administration as socialist, or having strong socialist leanings. I differ with this characterization. This is not to say Mr. Obama believes in free-markets by any means. On the contrary, he has done and said much that demons ...
April 27, 2010
Here we have a blatantly misleading assessment of a free society as well as men and women in such a society. Yes, Honderich is right that no one has an enforceable claim on other people providing food for them. There is in such a country no legal right to be su ...
April 26, 2010
So small banks want to retain the Federal Reserve as their regulator. We wonder why. It could be that the alternative the Dodd bill is offering is worse, but the article, excerpted above, taken on face value is somewhat bizarre to say the least. What did the Fe ...
April 26, 2010
The controversy around 9/11 is nearly a decade old now but it will not subside. People like David Ray Griffin continue to be in demand from a speaking standpoint and the amount of people who don't believe in the official 9/11 story may amount to as much as one- ...
April 25, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Douglas French. Mr. French is president of the Mises Institute and author of Early Speculative Bubbles & Increases in the Money Supply. He received his Masters degree in economics from the Univers ...
April 24, 2010
The news in this article, excerpted above, has hit the US blogosphere hard. Throughout Friday, there were more and more comments, like an inflowing tide – as could be seen if one did a little bit of research on Google. What was it in the article that caused s ...
April 24, 2010
As America sinks deeper into the tyranny of bureaucratic corporatism via today's incestuous relationship between Washington and Wall Street, it is understandable why many among the citizenry have become disgusted, and it is gratifying that thousands of Tea Part ...
April 24, 2010
Indeed, it seems to be common sense to worry about investing government with all the power being advocate for it now by Mr. Obama and Co., since, to put the matter simply, there is no reason to think that those who are the government possess any superior virtue ...
April 23, 2010
How did the world's biggest republic come to this pass? Twenty-five years ago, it seemed that America was indeed a shining light on a hill, or at least moreso than it had been for some time. The nation's rhetoric was shaped by its most libertarian president in ...
April 23, 2010
There are many reasons why James Murdoch, the son of perhaps the most powerful media mogul in the world, might have wanted to confront his father's detractors. It could simply have been personal pique or perhaps he could have had some sort of professional or co ...
April 22, 2010
In the best of all worlds, money itself would be privatized through the adoption, perhaps, of free-banking and the resultant evolution of a private gold and silver standard. People would rely on competition and private (common law) to sort out grievances having ...
April 22, 2010
This is a dangerous game in the era of the Internet. Generally, thanks to the 'Net, a minority of citizens in the West are quite aware of the kinds of elite manipulations that have taken place in the past and are opposed to a repeat. While sanctions may continu ...
April 21, 2010
We find the emerging explanations for the mess in Europe to be both compelling and predictable. Perhaps the Eurocrats (and the British) were wise to ban all flights for a period of time. But we assumed in our innocence that EU officials had done significant tes ...
April 21, 2010
This interview with Professor Nick Mills of Boston University is interesting because he apparently knows Hamid Karzai first-hand and has written a book about him. Thus the interview contained in this interview has not been sanitized so far as we can tell by the ...
April 21, 2010
No one in his right mind denies that people in commerce can become criminals. That's because people in any walk of life can--it is a basic human capacity not only to do something wrong but to hurt others with it. No other known animal is like us in this respect ...
April 20, 2010
The dominant social theme as regards the European Union seems simple enough: "Things are getting better" or, perhaps, "the market is calm and optimistic about Greece." But why is the elite orchestrating these sorts of sentiments – followed by wild gyrations i ...
April 20, 2010
We have often wondered about the issues that Dr. Thomas Sowell is tackling. His point seems to be – and we confess we are responding to a book review ABOUT his book (called "Intellectuals and Society") – that the thrust of the Western intelligentsia in the ...
April 20, 2010
Congress made a grave error by forcing all Americans to purchase health insurance. The mandate violates fundamental principles of individual liberty, and will lead to further government involvement in health care. It is time for legislation that fights back for ...
April 19, 2010
The beat goes on. We identify dominant social themes for a living here at the Daily Bell, and one of the themes we have been anticipating is, "Financial firms made the mess." This is a predictable promotion of the power elite and one that was last trotted out m ...
April 19, 2010
We are not surprised, either, to find Al Gore right in the middle of this upcoming promotion. As we have pointed out, these promotions are supposed to be inter-related. They stem from a perspective that human beings are blight, a ravenous horde of bipedal locus ...
April 19, 2010
When President Obama recently admonished members of the Tea Party, urging that they show him gratitude, that they thank him, he demonstrated quite unambiguously his adherence to the doctrine of statism, one that includes monarchism, czarism, Caesarism, and all ...
April 18, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with George Selgin. George is a professor of economics in the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington DC, and an associate editor of ...
April 17, 2010
We have no great affection for Goldman Sachs. The firm is a mercantilist excrescence that makes obscene profits by exploiting government laws and Western-style, modern central banking. More than almost any other "private" entity, Goldman Sachs has benefited fro ...
April 17, 2010
It all starts with 9/11. If one accepts – and we do – that there are a massive amount of unanswered questions about 9/11, then much of what flows from 9/11 – the creation over the past decade of embryonic police-states in Europe and America and the endles ...
April 17, 2010
Indeed, over the past few weeks, an amazing sequence of laws, treaties and acts have been put in place to facilitate more deficit spending and more big brother powers. None of these laws enhance your liberties. None of them are aimed at protecting fundamental r ...
April 16, 2010
We think this is how the EU may end, not with a bang but with a whimper. Right now the European elite is fighting hard to prevent a break up and set new sociopolitical power precedents about what Brussels can do to supersede national rule. But we have a hard ti ...
April 16, 2010
Wherever government is intrusive, society polarizes in this manner. America, with an entrepreneurial culture and vast middle class has proven to be resistant to this sort of polarization. But the economy itself, with its dependence on central banking and its re ...
April 15, 2010
Fiat money can stimulate stocks but it cannot rebuild badly distorted economies. Such events do not occur very often, perhaps every 50-75 years within any given fiat money cycle. But since the advent of the world's most powerful central bank, the Federal Reserv ...
April 15, 2010
The Afghanistan war continues to stumble from bad to worse from the West's point of view. It's hard to tell exactly what's going on because while success has many fathers, failure has only conflicting justifications. What's clear is that increasingly Europe is ...
April 15, 2010
In matters of human conduct it is vital to distinguish between actions that coerce others to do something they must be in charge of choosing either to do or not do, versus resisting their attempts to coerce someone. If I try to make you eat your vegetables and ...
April 14, 2010
We are not surprised that financial clout as regards Iceland's major banks was concentrated in only a few hands. We were fairly sure this would be the case, just as we were sure that Iceland's central bank itself would be found wanting. The Telegraph reports th ...
April 14, 2010
So it has come to this. The chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, one of the most powerful men in Washington DC – and therefore the world – has declared that the "world is at turning point" and that the US must make plans ...
April 13, 2010
We marvel at the announcement of the latest "deal" supporting Greece, the latest in a long line of such pronouncements, though the market itself rallied on the news. Now, apparently, the IMF and the EU stand side-by-side, ready to hand over massive sums of mone ...
April 13, 2010
Long ago at an international confab, the mainstream press was supposedly thanked by a powerful personage for keeping quiet about various maneuvers leading to world government. But today the mainstream media, led by "conservative" media titan Rupert Murdoch, is ...
April 13, 2010
Last week the federal government's Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission held hearings as part of their continuing investigation into the causes of the acute economic meltdown which occurred in late summer 2008. This bipartisan commission, partly inspired by the ...
April 12, 2010
We are not sure that comparing American tax rates to Europe's is a salutary way of figuring out an optimal tax rate. We think, in fact, that the governments in many countries in Europe are somewhat profligate. Can citizens of Western countries say with certaint ...
April 12, 2010
An American global warming bill is more important than ever. But why? With even a broad panorama of mainstream media reporting on the lack of evidence that a bill to reduce greenhouse gases will make any difference, and with the scandal about fraudulent evidenc ...
April 11, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with George Gilder. Mr. Gilder is Chairman of George Gilder Fund Management, LLC and host of the Gilder Telecosm Forum. He is also a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute where he directs Discovery's pr ...
April 10, 2010
Unfortunately, the further the US moves away from a market-based society, the more problems it has and the more contentious such issues as immigration tend to get. The nation has moved so far, in fact, that most people don't even consider a private-market solut ...
April 10, 2010
Ben Bernanke is back and talking tough! According to the Bloomberg article excerpted above, the mild-mannered Princeton economics professor has a "strong man" inside of him dying to get out. Bernanke wants to portray himself as decisive, a Federal Reserve chair ...
April 10, 2010
When liberty is attacked by its critics and enemies, often defenders pull out the skeptical ploy: "No one can know right from wrong, so no one may force others to comply with any standards of right versus wrong. Who can tell how we ought to act? And if no one c ...
April 09, 2010
We start with Greenspan and his recent denial of any role in provoking the current financial crisis by keeping interest rates very low for an extended period of time. We are a bit baffled by his denials. This is a man who was a preeminent acolyte of Ayn Rand, a ...
April 09, 2010
The Internet ... finished? In fact we don't think there is much chance of that. As we mentioned in a previous article on Chinese Internet censorship, there are numerous ways to get around the current kinds of censorship being applied. In any event, history show ...
April 08, 2010
Are American consumers really a bit "giddy?" We have mentioned already the amazing amount of attention in the mainstream press to the nation's recovery, even though we have a hard time discerning one. For us, a recovery begins with jobs, and it hard to see how ...
