EDITORIAL
Showing 3551 - 2 of 2
October 11, 2014
The Daily Bell has covered the growing lawlessness of governments in ways that directly affect many of our readers, particularly in Western nations. These include ever-increasing surveillance, draconian Homeland Security powers and militarization of out-of-cont ...
October 10, 2014
We wish we could be more sympathetic to US tech giants, but we can't. The largest US firms have apparently – and obviously – turned themselves into a kind of Trojan horse for the US intelligence community and for law enforcement besides. Now Congress is hol ...
October 10, 2014
For a while, asset forfeiture in the US was a much-discussed topic, but then it faded away. We missed this Forbes article in September that puts the controversy into perspective and offers some reasonable solutions. Of course, the larger issue is a kind of offi ...
October 10, 2014
We have known since . . . well, when haven't we known that our public officials are incompetent. Their incompetence is always expensive, but now it risks a worldwide ebola pandemic. With so little known about a deadly disease, one would think that with ebola on ...
October 09, 2014
Just recently the Crash of 1929 loomed over Western stock markets, especially the Dow. But on Wednesday the Roaring Teens resumed. Like the Roaring '20s, this stock market is destined to climb as high as the Federal Reserve will allow it to go. Of course, marke ...
October 09, 2014
We recently wrote that a certain amount of skepticism might be warranted when surveying reports about Ebola and the grimness of its potential spread. But skepticism aside, there are other larger questions as well regarding how the Ebola epidemic is going to be ...
October 09, 2014
A Liberty magazine article (March 1987) on religion was entitled "Freedom is for Everyone (Including the despised 'Rightists')." In it, Murray Rothbard observed, "The libertarian movement, and the Libertarian Party, will get nowhere in America – or throughout ...
October 08, 2014
So having severed what was left of the link between gold and the Swiss franc around 2000 AD, the Swiss are now having second thoughts. Good luck to them. We've tried to figure out if there's more to this than meets the eye. We're not sure. Usually when somethin ...
October 08, 2014
This is an interesting article by leftist columnist Paul Waldman because it explains the overarching destruction of war, not just for those on the receiving end but for those who prosecute it, even victoriously. The article is also noteworthy because it does no ...
October 08, 2014
The point of having a written constitution to which the administration of a country's legal system is firmly committed is to provide a framework of viable, just social life to all members of society who renounce violations of its principles. The American framer ...
October 07, 2014
Gold has continued its downward trend, and confusingly so. As we can see from the above, expectations that the US Federal Reserve would start hiking rates sent the yellow metal tumbling. But is that how it's supposed to work? As we recall, rising rates have the ...
October 07, 2014
In the past half-century or so, cannabis has been identified by the mainstream media as a "drug" that is used mostly for recreational purposes. But that's not so, as we can see from the above article excerpt. What's being rediscovered about cannabis is just how ...
October 07, 2014
Forty years ago, on October 9, 1974, the Nobel Prize committee announced that the co-recipient of that year's award for economics was the Austrian economist, Friedrich A. Hayek. Never was there a more deserving recognition for one of the truly great free-market ...
October 06, 2014
We made it up. There is no record that we know awarded for the "most single foolish financial sentence" of the year. But if there were, Business Insider would be in the running. We'll get to the sentence in a minute. First, let's examine the larger argument tha ...
October 06, 2014
African skepticism regarding Ebola has been reported on for the past few months and this article posted at Yahoo shows us that the skepticism persists – warranted or not. These reports were especially numerous in mid- to late- summer when Ebola cases were sca ...
October 06, 2014
After 13 years of war in Afghanistan – the longest in US history – the US government has achieved no victory. Afghanistan is in chaos and would collapse completely without regular infusions of US money. The war has been a failure, but Washington will not ad ...
October 05, 2014
Consider this: Since most of the news that the worldwide news organizations pass is the negative news, most of us hardly hear about the positive news out there. Thus, I posit that there is more positive news out there than negative news and the reason there is ...
October 04, 2014
Just as we've predicted, the cannabis industry is expanding rapidly worldwide – and for people following this trend, there's exciting news almost every day. It's also raised a question I want to address in this editorial. More about that further down. The big ...
October 03, 2014
This kind of article is a fairy tale organized around selected numerical evidence. It reminds us of the famous phrase, "lies, damned lies and statistics," often attributed to Mark Twain. The article is posted at the Washington Post and is actually penned by blo ...
October 03, 2014
We're trying to lay off Mr. Noah Smith's fatuous articles, but he has perfected a bad combination: He is intelligent enough to discern media memes but he is defiantly uneducated, a lethal combination when it comes to commenting on the themes he intends to analy ...
October 02, 2014
In a wide-ranging speech and fresh off a "no secession" vote in Scotland, UK Prime Minister David Cameron sounded like a convert to free-market thinking. This has sent conservative journos into a kind of subdued adulatory shock – and editorialist Janet Daley ...
October 02, 2014
Megan McArdle is one of Bloomberg's more libertarian editorialists, and in this column she actually comes right out and states the truth about regulation ... And what is the hidden truth? Regulation is seldom adversarial and not particularly effective because t ...
October 02, 2014
The Spanish historian and Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) is one of my favorite libertarian figures. He devoted most of his life to fighting the violent colonization of South America and the savage slavery it involved. Unique among European ...
October 01, 2014
There is nothing in this world today that provides much comfort for a rational investor – in the long term. In the short term, as we have argued, this expanding Wall Street Party may provide a last chance for significant, individual investment gains. More on ...
October 01, 2014
Alan Greenspan, Gold Bug, has scuttled back into view with a typical statement – one posted at Foreign Affairs – that implies a good deal more than it explains. Greenspan has spent years, decades, dealing with the continued fallout of a famous article he wr ...
October 01, 2014
Hong Kong: Whatever is occurring in Hong Kong, it bears no relation to what is being reported about it in the Western print and TV media. These reports spin the protests as a conflict between the demand for democracy and a tyrannical Chinese government. Ming Ch ...
September 30, 2014
It's fairly predictable now. A Wall Street transgression is noted and trumpeted and the call goes out for prosecutions. Often the rhetoric is accompanied by demands for additional regulatory rigor and perhaps a whole new strata of regulatory oversight. It's rea ...
September 30, 2014
This is another article that shows how quickly cannabis is changing from an illegal substance to a marketable commodity. We recently noted this trend in an article that focused on the tax revenue that would inevitably be gained by states that decriminalized or ...
September 30, 2014
One of the greatest huddles to a successful achievement of liberty in society is all due to the little word, "but." People will often say, "Oh, I believe in freedom in principle, but . . ." That "but" is followed by an assumed exception requiring some form of g ...
September 29, 2014
Mohamed A. El-Erian was basically number two at the bond giant PIMCO until he decided he wasn't going to wait for Bill Gross to retire. Too bad for him ... as Gross quit the other day. El-Erian, meanwhile, is writing over at Bloomberg, among other gigs, and thi ...
September 29, 2014
Something happened on the way to the "Occupy" movement's apparent demise. It's gone international. Now according to Reuters, it's responsible for the Hong Kong unrest taking place to protest the Chinese government's stance on more forceful Hong Kong rule. When ...
September 29, 2014
Even though it ultimately failed at the ballot box, the recent campaign for Scottish independence should cheer supporters of the numerous secession movements springing up around the globe. In the weeks leading up to the referendum, it appeared that the people o ...
September 28, 2014
The Daily Bell was the first media outlet to break the story, and it took courage to do so. The GGC debacle needed to be exposed. Potential investors and purchasers needed to be warned so that they did not walk into the same angst as my husband and me. When we ...
September 27, 2014
Well, the spinmeisters are out in force. It's predictable. A young woman has taped conversations between Goldman Sachs and the New York Fed apparently showing clear collusion –and the articles are already spewing forth on how the system is terribly corrupt an ...
September 26, 2014
Suddenly, in one brief, political exchange of opinions, the pretense has been stripped away, revealing the underlying distortions of the French economy. France is suffering from the problems that Southern European countries know only too well: high unemployment ...
September 26, 2014
In our efforts to cover elite memes and their successes and failures, we occasionally notice significant signposts – reports that indicate the strengthening or weakening of a given thematic element. Chief among the instruments in the global toolkit are war an ...
September 25, 2014
This is an interesting article by a Bloomberg editorialist – Noah Smith – whose editorials sometimes border on the ridiculous. He's a firm Keynesian – a believer that money-from-nothing can cure most economic ills – and we've written about some of his e ...
September 25, 2014
Ever since tiny Uruguay's announcement regarding the legalization of cannabis, we've been more convinced than ever this movement is going worldwide. There are many reasons for this but two we'll focus on in this article: (1) the money that governments can make ...
September 25, 2014
It is voting season and a fever of straw hats is falling. Hundreds of 'libertarians' have jumped out of the crazy closet in their candidate costumes that are emblazoned with "this time for sure!" Hundreds of thousands more will tick a box, as the media and poli ...
September 25, 2014
One fairly common concern about the legalization of marijuana use for adults is that it will lead to an increase in rates of abuse of hard drugs, like cocaine, heroin or methamphetamine. This generally stems from the belief that marijuana is a "gateway drug," m ...
September 24, 2014
There are two parts to this analysis. In the first part, we'll take a look at what's going on in Germany. In the second part, we'll discuss the announcements by Rockefeller Brothers Fund officials that they were divesting the fund of fossil fuels. Our discussio ...
September 24, 2014
This is not actually just an SEC issue. Regulatory agencies increasingly pay out cash rewards to those who provide the government names of potential wrongdoers. Homeland Security encourages citizens to inform on their neighbors if they see anything that might l ...
September 24, 2014
A fundamental fallacy of our time is that democracy is the open-sesame to peace, freedom and prosperity. The political events surrounding what was called the ill-fated "Arab Spring" a couple of years ago was a based on the idea that "democracy" would solve all ...
September 23, 2014
Yes, it's crazy time. For some reason the mainstream media is in full cry about taxes again. It's good to raise taxes, you see, higher and higher until "deficits" come down and the world's fiscal house is "in order." That's what this Bloomberg article is mostly ...
September 23, 2014
Users of cannabis are just like you and me. In fact, over time we've predicted that cannabis will assume the industrial profile of wine or cigars. There will be cannabis to suit most every taste and mood, from very expensive brands to inexpensive ones. In the m ...
September 23, 2014
The Federal Reserve and its bullion bank agents (JP Morgan, Scotia and HSBC) have been using naked short-selling to drive down the price of gold since September 2011. The latest containment effort began in mid-July of this year, after gold had moved higher in p ...
September 22, 2014
Every time we believe the heights of economic ridiculousness have been reached, we find there is yet a further peak proffered. In this case, as you can see from the excerpt above, we are being solemnly assured that the world's "most powerful finance ministers" ...
September 22, 2014
The New York Times is scrambling to keep up with 21st century realities. It's very doubtful that the Times would have run similar stories to this one, excerpted above, in the 20th century. But that was then and this is now. The Times's readership is doubtless d ...
September 22, 2014
Last week, the House and Senate voted to rubber stamp President Obama's war plans for the Middle East. Both bodies, on a bipartisan basis, authorized the US to begin openly training and arming the rebels who have been fighting for three years to overthrow the A ...
September 21, 2014
Andy Hoffman: Janet Yellen is so dangerous because she is a career Keynesian puppet, with not a shred of success on her resume or even the slightest inclination to try anything other than enhanced money printing. Of course, it's not her fault that she inherited ...
