EDITORIAL
Showing 3001 - 2 of 2
June 09, 2015
The media has been full of stories recently about the new sensitivity on college and university campuses concerning the avoidance in courses or assignments of the use of "trigger words" or phrases that may have a "hurtful" effect on students when thoughtlessly ...
June 08, 2015
Iraqi Prime Minister Abadi may be the most honest politician on the planet, at least judging by this one statement. His troops most certainly did "lose a lot of weapons." Let's add this up. Iraqi forces abandoned and/or lost some 2,300 armored Humvees, 40 M1A1 ...
June 08, 2015
Soros is very close to the Ukrainian president, who was put in power after a US-backed coup deposed the elected leader of Ukraine last year. In the email correspondence, Soros tells the Ukrainian leadership that the US should provide Ukraine "with same level of ...
June 06, 2015
If you want to analyze a large economic system, the best way to start is by tracking its surplus. Who gathers the surplus? Where does it go? Who decides? And that applies to our modern systems just as well as it does historical systems. THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF P ...
June 05, 2015
Government action is necessary, we are told, to solve thorny social problems and keep everyone safe. The Rohingya refugees prove the point wrong. One government drove them into desperation and exile, several other governments refused to help and humble citizens ...
June 05, 2015
Sen. Rand Paul accomplished something worthwhile when, almost single-handedly, he saw to it that Section 215 of the Patriot Act expired. For that he deserves our heartfelt thanks. But where does the expiration now leave us opponents of indiscriminate government ...
June 04, 2015
Almost everything the president says about the USA Freedom Act is false. He does not at all "welcome" the law's passage. If Obama had his way, Congress would have never even considered this law because the National Security Agency's illegal activities would sti ...
June 04, 2015
“A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy.”—Writers Against Mass Surveillance. THE GOOD NEWS: Americans have a right to freely express themselves on the Internet, including making threatening—e ...
June 03, 2015
There was a time in America when fear of government observation would get one accused of tinfoil-hat paranoia. Those days are gone. Thanks to Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers, we know Big Brother is watching. The only question is how close. The newest de ...
June 03, 2015
If you're interested in knowing which scepters of power the Warfare State is most unwilling to relinquish, try wrenching a few from its grasp. The volume of the cacophony will let you know just how grievously the beast in DC has been wounded. And it's never roa ...
June 03, 2015
Students in the state's official propaganda institutions learn about the wonders of the democratic process, so called, throughout their years of formal study. But the truth is on full display during a presidential election season. These are not wise statesm ...
June 02, 2015
Former House Speaker Denny Hastert's indictment is remarkable for several reasons, not least being the way it exposes the U.S. government's inherent corruption. Why is it that former senators and representatives so often become wealthy? It is because they can d ...
June 02, 2015
Keynesians never seem to learn. Every time an economy slows down or reverses gears and "goes negative," in terms of growth and employment, their only answer is a call for "aggregate demand" stimulus and more government spending manipulation. An example of this ...
June 01, 2015
Misty-eyed Americans who sing of "the rockets' red glare" miss the irony the rest of the world sees. All the evidence suggests we love nothing more than lobbing missiles at countries that resist our will. Daniel Larison, the writer quoted above, references this ...
June 01, 2015
This month Congress will consider whether to renew the charter of the Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im Bank). Ex-Im Bank is a New Deal-era federal program that uses taxpayer funds to subsidize the exports of American businesses. Foreign businesses, including state-own ...
June 01, 2015
The standard narrative floating about the mainstream press is that the developing world is held back by a quagmire of free market fundamentalism. Sure, there are a few exceptions to this narrative, such as Peter Bauer and William Easterly. But pretty much all w ...
May 30, 2015
Rome deviates from the cultural pattern we have been examining in that their creativity was not home grown and they did not simply overrun nearby creative peoples. Instead, they gathered to themselves the good ideas of distant peoples and made use of them, with ...
May 29, 2015
Efforts to end prohibition of marijuana use by adults in the US continue to move forward at the state level. Legal sales are already underway in Colorado and Washington State with Oregon, Alaska and Washington DC not far behind. Some limited form of medical mar ...
May 29, 2015
My distrust has deepened of Seymour Hersh’s retelling of the Obama regime’s extra-judicial murder of Osama bin Laden by operating illegally inside a sovereign country. That Hersh’s story, which is of very little inherent interest, received such a large a ...
May 28, 2015
If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, the National Football League must be something even lower. Those feel-good moments in the pregame are simply nothing more than your tax dollars at work. On the other hand, we all know the NFL is in business to mak ...
May 28, 2015
Regarding the feverish effort either to reauthorize, "reform," or abolish the National Security Agency's collection of our phone and email data, two things need to be said: First, thank you, Edward Snowden. Second, isn't it great to see the ruling elite panicki ...
May 27, 2015
As taxes go, state-run lotteries seem like a good idea. No one forces you to pay, they don't infringe on your privacy, and the games raise money very efficiently. The Washington Post writer points out that lotteries prey disproportionately on the poor. People w ...
May 27, 2015
We now have a fourth branch of government. As I document in my new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above a ...
May 27, 2015
Argentina will hold elections this year, and a number of provinces will be electing governors. Buenos Aires, the capital city, is holding elections for mayor, and Mauricio Macri, who is stepping down as mayor, is a favorite to become the next president. Toward ...
May 26, 2015
We are not at all surprised that the Bank of England or any other central bank would lie about its activities. Having their own documents prove they are lying is unusual, however. This might have been a major embarrassment for the BOE, but the financial media e ...
May 26, 2015
Financial markets in the United States and around the world are all waiting with "bated breath" for when the Federal Reserve modifies its "easy money" policy and starts to raise interest rates. No one, however, asks a simple question: Why is the American centra ...
May 25, 2015
Tech industry giants say they are alarmed the federal government would demand back-door access to the encryption built into their products. Are they crying crocodile tears? Maybe, but the point is still a good one. Imagine if, instead of memory chips, we were t ...
May 25, 2015
This week I found myself in rare agreement with Janet Yellen when she admitted that her economic predictions are likely to be wrong. Sadly, Yellen did not follow up her admission by handing in her resignation and joining efforts to end the Fed. An honest examin ...
May 24, 2015
I would say specifically as it relates to my research on the fiscal expenditures for bailouts that right now there is a great deal of strong rhetoric and toughness demonstrated regarding not bailing out institutions that approach failure at some unspecified poi ...
May 23, 2015
The cynical dictum, one sows, another reaps, is sometimes true in real life, but it has been burned into our history books. In some primary instances, usurpers have, famously, been given credit for what they did not create, but rather destroyed. Continued from ...
May 23, 2015
The middle of next month will mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. My knowledge of the "great charter" is modest, to be sure, but lately I have been reading about it and legacy. (See the "Liberty Matters" discussion, in which I have a small editorial role ...
May 22, 2015
Stories like this one aren't new to Daily Bell readers. We think often of the state's outrageous overreach in the War on Drugs. Yet this one strikes a different chord. The victim wasn't slumped in a black SUV cruising through the hood. He was on a passenger tra ...
May 22, 2015
The idea that government employees can or should have the right to unionize appears absurd on the face of it. Unlike the private sector, we are forced to pay for the "product" offered by government. We can't take our business elsewhere in the same way we do in ...
May 21, 2015
Most limited-government conservatives usually prefer as much local autonomy as possible. When government action is necessary, it should occur at the lowest possible level. They resist centrally imposed, one-size-fits-all laws and policies. That's what they say. ...
May 20, 2015
U.S. currency in circulation is now about $11,000 per U.S. household. It was only $7,000 per household in 2008. Years of QE seem to have enlarged the inventory of both electronic blips and paper currency. "Where is all this currency?" asks Barron's. "The Fed ca ...
May 20, 2015
American prosperity demand fiscal and monetary stimulus to jump-start the sick economy back to life. And so we got fiscal stimulus, as well as a program of monetary expansion without precedent in US history. David Stockman recently noted that we have in effect ...
May 20, 2015
It’s a Cultural Disease, Acclimating the Citizenry to Life in a Police State. Talk about poor timing. Then again, perhaps it’s brilliant timing. Only now—after the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security (DHS) and Defense have passed off billions of dol ...
May 19, 2015
Globalization and international trade are in the headlines as Congress considers whether to give President Obama "Fast Track" negotiating authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Opponents say TPP is less about free trade than giving privileges to special i ...
May 19, 2015
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported in early May that for the month of April 2015 the Federal government ran a budget surplus, taking in more in taxes than it laid out in expenditures. Don't be fooled by one month, especially when it was a month when ...
May 18, 2015
More than 50 years of U.S. economic sanctions did not bring Cuba to its knees. Now, with normal relations in sight, we are learning that Cuba not only survived but may have surpassed the U.S. in some respects. If Cimavax truly works as well as the Cubans say, t ...
May 18, 2015
New Military Spending Bill Expands Empire But Forbids Debate on War - On Friday the House passed a massive National Defense Authorization for 2016 that will guarantee US involvement in more wars and overseas interventions for years to come. The Republican major ...
May 17, 2015
Obviously, drug cases have had a huge impact on me because they are victimless crimes and they oftentimes carry mandatory minimum sentences along with them. Sometimes they're ridiculously long, outrageously immoral mandatory minimum sentences. I think it is an ...
May 16, 2015
There have been lots of complaints about governments sticking their fingers into school curricula... and the people complaining have been right; setting knowledge free from the state was the key to its growth. We'll cover the story this week. … Chapter Three: ...
May 15, 2015
The pursuit of freedom means more than escaping the government. True freedom requires independence – the state of "not depending" on outside help. In an advanced economy, very few people can claim to be fully independent. We all depend on each other to meet v ...
May 15, 2015
GDP purports to measure economic activity while largely divorcing itself from the quality, profitability, depth, breadth, improvement, advancement, and rationalization of goods and services provided. For example, even if a ship – built at great expense – ...
May 14, 2015
If anyone needs another reason to hate the federal income tax and the agency that enforces it, this is a good one. The IRS bans marijuana sellers from deducting most business expenses, even though they are operating in full compliance with all state and local l ...
May 14, 2015
One of the most amazing aspects of Ron Paul's twin presidential campaigns was the way they brought together people who, on the surface, attached themselves to many different political labels. I met wonderful people who identified as conservative, liberal, liber ...
May 14, 2015
Four years ago the late great journalist Alexander Cockburn wrote, "Alas, the actual story of 'our history' is an unrelenting ability to lie about everything, while simultaneously claiming America's superior moral worth." It so happens he wrote that sentence in ...
May 13, 2015
Evolutionary biologists tells us that humanity itself came from Africa. Now that continent may be leading the world back toward honest money. The EcoCash concept doesn't seem to offer a full escape from fractional reserve banking. The fact that accounts earn in ...
May 13, 2015
How many Americans have actually bothered to read the Constitution, let alone the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights (a quick read at 462 words)? Take a few minutes and read those words for yourself—rather than having some court or p ...