STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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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 ...
May 12, 2015
Faux transparency is a favorite tool of entrenched bureaucratic institutions. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's 1980s "Glasnost" is one example. The idea is to divert resistance into a box where it can vent its frustrations without forcing any real change. Ofte ...
May 12, 2015
Old fallacies never seem to die, they just fade away to reemerge once again later on. One such fallacy is that if there is significant unemployment and slow economic growth it must be due to not enough consumers' spending in the economy, what Keynesian economis ...
May 11, 2015
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to free speech. The Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear arms. Two centuries later, these rights are colliding. What will we see when the smoke clears? The Framers wisely placed ...
May 11, 2015
This week the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the NSA's metadata collection program was not authorized in US law. The PATRIOT Act, under which the program began, was too vague, the court found. But the truth is the Act was intended to be vague so that ...
May 09, 2015
Any freedom advocate has to be amazed by the fact that millions of people seem emotionally bound to their abusers. Today, we'll explain how that began and uncover its roots. Continued from last week… THE GREAT TRADE. During the years between 5400 and 3000 B. ...
May 08, 2015
These two court cases in the same week illustrate the maddening distinctions and hurdles that stand between citizens and any semblance of privacy. The first case involved a criminal conviction made with the help of phone location data given to law enforcement b ...
May 07, 2015
Once again, NYT misses the point. Yes, Federal Reserve leaks are bad. Authorities should identify the leakers and deal with them. But here is the bigger question: Why is Federal Reserve information so valuable? Fed officials from Janet Yellen on down maintain t ...
May 07, 2015
Much of the commentary on the rioting and torching of Baltimore resides within the predictable Red-versus-Blue dichotomy: Republicans blame the Welfare State, fatherless teenagers, a lack of self-responsibility. They dismiss the rioters as thugs and imply that ...
May 06, 2015
In theory, profit-seeking colleges ought to deliver better service at a lower price than state-run institutions. Some probably do, but a tangled web of political influence and regulatory interference makes it hard to know. The Corinthian College's bankruptcy fi ...
May 06, 2015
“In a democratic society,” observed Oakland police chief Sean Whent, “people have a say in how they are policed.” Unfortunately, if you can be kicked, punched, tasered, shot, intimidated, harassed, stripped, searched, brutalized, terrorized, wrongfully ...
May 06, 2015
Washington continues to drive Europe toward one or the other of the two most likely outcomes of the orchestrated conflict with Russia. Either Europe or some European Union member government will break from Washington over the issue of Russian sanctions, thereby ...
May 05, 2015
If you've been dying to know whether the Chinese yuan was at fair value, you can finally rest easy. The IMF says it's almost there. This leaves another question, though. By what authority does the International Monetary Fund decide a currency's value is "fair" ...
May 05, 2015
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spoke before a joint session of the U.S. Congress on April 29, 2015 and offered his "eternal condolences to the souls of all American people that were lost during World War II," but never directly said that he was sorry for Im ...
May 04, 2015
Ask a traditional small-government conservative to define government's appropriate role, and most will list police as a necessary function. We need them to maintain order and stop evildoers. Yet history shows that societies around the globe managed to maintain ...
May 04, 2015
Apologists for the National Security Agency (NSA) point to the arrest of David Coleman Headley as an example of how warrantless mass surveillance is necessary to catch terrorists. Headley played a major role in the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack that killed 166 p ...
May 02, 2015
Surveillance is nothing new. In fact, it goes back some seven thousand years. Then, as now, it quietly destroyed productive modes of life. Furthermore, it was fundamental in setting one class of people (rulers) above all other people (the ruled). This two-class ...
May 02, 2015
The story of Robert Bates has covered the news wire for the past two weeks. A sting gone bad, with a "pay for play" volunteer reserve officer fatally shooting the subdued suspect. These facts have been known for some time, along with the details of the sting: a ...
May 01, 2015
Politicians like Al Gore have made millions whipping crowds into a frenzy over "Climate Change," the newer term for what they once called "Global Warming." Whether or not one believes the world is in peril, fossil fuels are certainly not pleasant. No one enjoys ...
May 01, 2015
GMO opponents have claimed for years that ubiquitous GMO produce such as corn and soy may have detrimental effects on our health. And in 2013, a group of researchers set out to prove it. The peer-reviewed study, which was published in the Journal of Organic Sys ...
