STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Showing 8051 - 2 of 2
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 ...
April 08, 2010
This is a very interesting development in that it would tend to confirm the perception of the Daily Bell that the US has been engaged for quite some time in the projection of its influence beyond its borders not to support regulatory democracy or for general pu ...
April 07, 2010
This book review by Boris Johnson is actually disguised social criticism, and later on he brings another book into the fray against with which he contrasts Willetts' book. As we can see from the above excerpt, he is not willing to grant Willetts' argument that ...
April 07, 2010
It is nice to see that the mainstream media has woken up to one of the biggest stories of the 21st century, the foundering of the European Union – the grand socialist experiment that began as a modest trade union and has ended in an attempt to squash together ...
April 06, 2010
Unlike the 20th century, power elite promotions are increasingly foundering in the 21st as the Internet seems to expose them. The first area an investor ought to look into is whether or not the specific promotion he wishes to support is feasible long-term or is ...
April 06, 2010
We weren't surprised by this move. The American president does nothing by suggestion when he can demand it. Barack Obama is indeed the most amiable and soft spoken of authoritarians. First, he "bailed out" two of America's three car companies and in the process ...
April 06, 2010
As we head into the summer driving season and gasoline prices are again creeping up, the administration has announced plans to explore opening up more off-shore areas for exploration and drilling. On the one hand this can be lauded as a positive step. On the ot ...
April 06, 2010
It is disgusting to witness all the dishonesty surrounding the current administration's public policy efforts. Even the new language columnist of The New York Times Magazine is in denial and pretends to consider it some kind of smear - even conspiracy - for tho ...
April 05, 2010
Certainly, the powers-that-be shall try to manipulate the Internet for their own ends, but as it was with the Reformation, the results will not be predictable and likely not favorable, at least in part, for those intending to use the 'Net to further consolidate ...
April 05, 2010
This is an astonishing story that has appeared in the Times, given the lack of real reporting about what's going on in Afghanistan. Marja, which the Times spells without an "h" on the end, is not a city, not even town, it turns out. Just a rural, agrarian colle ...
April 04, 2010
The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with William Murphy. Bill Murphy grew up in Glen Ridge, New Jersey and graduated from the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University in 1968. His senior year he broke all single season Ivy Le ...
April 03, 2010
Again, the drums beat - and the fear and frustration in America thicken until they seem almost palpable. War is certainly a racket, as General Smedley Butler wrote, but it is one that America's power elite has deployed with grim efficiency over the past decade ...
April 03, 2010
Jeffersonian Conservatism offers us salvation. Its fundamentals of reason, universalized natural rights, and moral idealism are the vital antidotes to reverse the plague of authoritarian statism presently destroying the West. Without its restoration, an alien d ...
April 03, 2010
Although there could be variations in how one ought to resist (dodge, avoid, legally contest, etc.) taxation, the answer to whether those subject to the institution are ethically justified in making the effort to resist it is in the affirmative. Yet, as with al ...
April 02, 2010
It's not a done deal, of course. What may halt this relentless drive toward super-regionality is the growing tide of American (and Canadian) anger – given that both of these countries have a good tradition of self-rule and individualism and a high literacy ra ...
April 02, 2010
We'll put our biases right up front (don't we always?). We DON'T think the LHC has any value. We're old fashioned. Newton invented physics when an apple fell on his head. Copernicus figured out that the planets revolved around the sun with a pocket telescope. W ...
April 01, 2010
Countries have cultures, and the American culture – once you get outside of the big cities – is fairly small-r republican and entrepreneurial. Even In cities, there's an entrepreneurial streak in America, so it could be said, as it has been about America, t ...
April 01, 2010
By pushing through extremely unpopular health care legislation, the Obama administration has served notice that progressivism now takes pride of place over pragmatism. It is ironic that the previous Democratic presidency of Bill and Hillary Clinton was seen as ...
April 01, 2010
The New York Times reports that according to a ruling by a federal judge "a Mississippi school board was grossly discriminatory and mean-spirited when it told Constance McMillen that she could not attend her high school prom with her girlfriend." According to t ...
March 31, 2010
Not a day goes by that we don't read an article or see an Internet video that proclaims green-shoots have turned into what should be eventually a full-blown recovery. In America, we read, the recovery, though tentative, is doing well; the stock market has doubl ...
March 31, 2010
NASA will conduct a probe of Toyota. Yet this is an organization that couldn't figure out if an O-Ring was freezing until Richard P. Feynman, a member of the presidential commission investigating the 1986 Challenger space-shuttle crash, proved it on national TV ...
March 30, 2010
This latest apparent EU solution may merely stave off a day of reckoning, but likely it will not avoid it – not without many further efforts anyway. And we still believe the problems may prove intractable, as the problem is obviously not merely a Greek one. P ...
March 30, 2010
As a free-market publication, we would be more comforted by Sarah Palin's actions had she not just recently once again endorsed longtime former presidential running mate, Republican Senator John McCain. McCain is a certain kind of American politician and by sho ...
March 30, 2010
Those who understand Austrian economic theory know that this new model of healthcare will cause major problems down the road, as it has in every nation that ignores economic realities. The more government involves itself in medicine, the worse healthcare will g ...
March 30, 2010
Anyone who engages in the practice of psychotherapy knows that it is oftentimes as much a learning experience for the therapist as for the client. Nearly thirty years ago, I conducted a therapy group in which there was a man, a few years younger than I, with wh ...
