EDITORIAL
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November 11, 2014
Why is it that government grows in size and scope, and is so difficult to stop or reverse? Political economist Gordon Tullock, who passed away on November 3, 2014 at the age of 92, was a path-breaker in explaining how and why big government keeps getting bigger ...
November 11, 2014
Just as the German media has destroyed its credibility with lies, the US government is consistently destroying Washington's credibility both with its own citizens and the rest of the world. Russia and China, the other two significant nuclear powers, no longer b ...
November 10, 2014
The great destroyer of freedom in the US is the "politics of compromise." And this is the meme now in play since the Republican mid-term victory. The mainstream media and its allied interests have cast the victory as one for "moderates" that repudiated Tea Part ...
November 10, 2014
Now comes The Economist magazine to predict what we mentioned numerous times months ago ... that eventually the cannabis industry will consolidate. What is interesting about this in retrospect is that it's a meme. Corporations, as we've pointed out numerous tim ...
November 10, 2014
Did the election last week really mean that much? I took to my Twitter account on Tuesday to point out that the change in control of the Senate from Democrat to Republican actually means very little, despite efforts by politicians and the mainstream media to co ...
November 10, 2014
The term "anarcho-capitalism" has, we might say, rather an arresting quality. But while the term itself may jolt the newcomer, the ideas it embodies are compelling and attractive, and represent the culmination of a long development of thought. If I had to boil ...
November 09, 2014
I got into healthcare by accident. It's a sleepy field. The best economists are not in healthcare; they're in monetary policy or growth economics. It was a field that desperately needed radical revision, and most of what I've done in health economics has been a ...
November 08, 2014
Reuters has posted an interesting review of a new book by Geoffrey Hosking called Trust: A History. The thesis? Apparently that trust "provides a substitute for prescience. The unchecked pursuit of self-interest can undermine trust." This is surely one more glo ...
November 08, 2014
"Politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth." – Paul Krugman What leads me to conclude Paul Krugman's latest column is dead wrong? First of all, I agree with him on one thing. Krugman offers a summary of supposed conservative, free-market so ...
November 07, 2014
Jeremy Warner, assistant editor of the UK Telegraph, has written a strong condemnation of austerity politics. Good for him. In fact, as we can see, the article's lead actually claims the City's sentiments are anti-ECB. That's an enormous statement to make. We'l ...
November 07, 2014
Somehow Michael Bloomberg has taken yet another repudiation of the US sociopolitical system and turned it into an endorsement. Reports indicate that the turnout for midterm elections in the US was fairly abysmal and follows a pattern of continual voter disengag ...
November 06, 2014
Republicans have gained control in the US House and Senate. From our perspective, only one thing will change: The level of frustration will continue to climb. This is important to understand because it has numerous implications for US sociopolitical and economi ...
November 06, 2014
Is the Fed worried about losing its independence? Probably not, certainly not in the near term, even though this Bloomberg article makes the case that Fed officials are concerned nonetheless. But the article buries the lead. It gives away the Fed's REAL concern ...
November 06, 2014
I owe an unpaid intellectual debt to Robert LeFevre (1911-1986) with whom I associated in my twenties. LeFevre deeply impacted libertarians who met him personally but current and future generations may not understand why. They will meet only his books, which ar ...
November 05, 2014
This is an interesting article to analyze from the standpoint of elite memes because it produces so many of them. In fact, nothing brings out spurious justifications of the monetary system like attacks on the Fed, potential or realistic. The mainstream media ca ...
November 05, 2014
Free-Market Analysis: We've been predicting this for a while. Once cannabis decriminalization and legalization became a trend, the entire underpinnings of this questionable enterprise would begin to unravel. It should be evident to anyone who seriously studies ...
November 04, 2014
We agree with parts of this Telegraph article, but not all of it. And yet ... to some degree we are quibbling. This is a startling and compelling analysis, considering it is appearing in the mainstream media. It is both startling and compelling because it focus ...
November 04, 2014
The Economist has just published a review of an interesting-sounding book entitled The Cambridge History of Capitalism, edited by Larry Neal and Jeffrey Williamson (Cambridge University Press, 1,400 pages, £150.) The magazine's review provides us a cogent summ ...
November 04, 2014
October 25th marked the 247th birthday of one of the greatest voices of liberty, the French political philosopher of freedom, Benjamin Constant. He may not be a household name to friends of freedom today, but he should be. He wrote one of the most principled an ...
November 04, 2014
Another election day is upon us, always a great boost to the establishment media giants that own cable and print news as well as TV and radio stations. Total political advertising spending for the 2014 election should reach $2.5 billion dollars in this cycle an ...
November 04, 2014
Writing for Americans is not always an enjoyable experience. Many readers want to have their prejudices confirmed, not challenged. Emotions rule their reason, and they are capable of a determined resistance to facts and are not inhibited from displays of rudene ...
November 03, 2014
This article makes the point that the Federal Reserve has kept rates so low for so long that at some point rates will have to rise very fast and very hard. This is congruent with our position that what we call the Wall Street Party may continue until the last d ...
November 03, 2014
The Washington Post assigned numerous journalists to this story, which doesn't seem to have turned up much, but perhaps that's just the point. We don't recall seeing regular stories about FBI malfeasance in the major media. Sure, a squib here and there but not ...
November 03, 2014
Last week's tragic shootings in Canada and Washington state are certain to lead to new calls for gun control. The media-generated fear over "lone wolf terrorists" will enable the gun control lobby to smear Second Amendment supporters as "pro-terrorist." Marketi ...
November 02, 2014
First off, to be successful in resource speculation, you need to see everything through the eyes of a contrarian: Yes, junior resource stocks are out of flavor... so they're very cheap. It's not easy to buy low and sell high, but we are currently in a period wh ...
November 01, 2014
Two more recent news articles reemphasize how the drug dialogue is changing – and, yes, we've been "on top if it" from the very beginning. In fact, we focused on worldwide drug legalization in a series of groundbreaking articles. You can see one here: World L ...
October 31, 2014
Mainstream economists have finally discovered what we here at The Daily Bell have been predicting for about four years anyway, that Chinese growth is surely unsustainable. Now our favorite new mainstream media columnist, Bloomberg's Noah Smith, has written an a ...
October 31, 2014
We cover gold closely week to week and are ever more astonished at mainstream media reasons given for the travel of the dollar against gold. For one thing, gold is priced in dollars and while it may seem to be the most natural thing in the world to write "the p ...
October 31, 2014
Commerce and Its Dubious Reputation: Given its reputation in many of the popular renditions of world religions and philosophies, commerce wouldn't be expected to inspire. Most of those who comment on such matters do not consider engaging in commerce to contain ...
October 30, 2014
The Federal Reserve, as expected, is distancing itself from the program known as "quantitative easing." This program involved purchasing various US securities with freshly printed money, presumably to add liquidity and confidence to the market. The program last ...
October 30, 2014
We have a provocative question regarding Mexico: Is there a larger sociopolitical plan to destabilize this great country? We've suggested this before, but the footsteps seem louder now. Perhaps the stage is being set for a collapse into chaos. And what will be ...
October 30, 2014
The Ebola hysteria raises questions about how a free society would handle contagious diseases. Critics of freedom argue: libertarian principles, like the right against involuntary confinement, means that half the people on the planet could literally die from a ...
October 29, 2014
We've been waiting for the Facebook implosion ever since the company went public. We were not alone in reporting on the disaster-in-the-making that was the overpriced IPO, but we were certainly correct. Our skepticism regarding the Facebook IPO was generated by ...
October 29, 2014
This article in Mother Jones shows us how even organizations that might be expected to protect civil rights in the US are co-opted by the trend toward police militarization. The NRA has long stood as a bulwark against US fedgov overreach when it comes to firear ...
October 29, 2014
These changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes, Nothing remains quite the same. Through all of the islands and all of the highlands, If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane. ~ Jimmy Buffett (1977) There have been a lot of articles in the press over the la ...
October 28, 2014
Call technocracy, the idea of a select group of private individuals running public affairs privately, the meme that will never die. Now again, almost randomly, comes a call for action. This one is uttered by someone called Clive Crook who has attended all the r ...
October 28, 2014
We've been following the "organic promotion" meme and this article from the New York Times posted at the end of September further buttresses the transition of natural food from a private initiative to a public one. We haven't labeled this the "organic meme" bec ...
October 28, 2014
On October 13th, the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics was announced in Stockholm, Sweden, with French economist, Jean Tirole, the recipient for his work on developing models to better assist governments in regulating private enterprise. A couple of weeks earlier, ...
October 27, 2014
So it is Monday and some results are in, as the article excerpted above explains. While the Ukraine parliamentary election results will be announced on October 20th from what we can tell, stress test results have turned out as expected with 25 banks out of 130 ...
October 27, 2014
Long ago we analyzed the cannabis trend as one that was going to create vibrant ventures that, taken together, would generate a business no less powerful than that of the alcohol/beverage industry. And even with the inevitable setbacks, this projection holds, i ...
October 27, 2014
In 1968 the government of Canada decided to openly admit Americans seeking to avoid being drafted into the US war on Vietnam. Before, would-be immigrants were technically required to prove that they had been discharged from US military service. This move made i ...
October 26, 2014
As someone who grew up under a communist regime, with no free press, no public debate of foreign affairs, with schools that were indoctrination camps and a nearly tyrannical bunch of rulers who seemed to believe that their destiny was to guide the workers of th ...
October 25, 2014
The movement to legalize cannabis is in place. It will continue. And it leads to some interesting conclusions. One can argue, for instance, that the tragic shooting in Canada's capital city earlier this week may ultimately benefit cannabis decriminalization eff ...
October 24, 2014
We´ve always been a little skeptical of bitcoin and have received plenty of slings and arrows for our apparently non-libertarian stance when it comes to this private, electronic technology. But we remain interested and this Bloomberg article caught our eye. Th ...
October 24, 2014
We've been writing a series of analyses of natural and organic farming and food; the above article in the Wall Street Journal fits right into this evolving meme. Corporations like McDonald´s are adopting "organic" as a kind of brand these days. But "organic" h ...
October 24, 2014
Last week a lengthy report on an apparently fraudulent and dangerous medical cannabis-related product was brought to my attention. It is not a pleasure to read – always the case when we come across bad news but this news is particularly distasteful, as it com ...
October 24, 2014
I recently was in Vietnam and spent some time in prosperous, capitalist Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, and toured the American War Museum. I believe there are a number of parallels between the Vietnam and Iraq War and that history could repeat itself now ...
October 23, 2014
It seems these days that every time we identify a new meme, we see a "fast-track" evolution. The "Internet of Money" is no exception. We wrote about the Internet of Money on October 20, and now in this article in The Local, we see an apparent furtherance of thi ...
October 23, 2014
To call "organic food" a meme is questionable. From our point of view, the word "organic" by itself does not yet constitute a promotion. However, there is a debate taking place in the feedback section of The Daily Bell and it revolves around what actually const ...
October 23, 2014
I know the secret of life. You get up each morning and put both feet on the floor. You stand up and walk through the day in as straight a line as possible. Work diligently. Treat everyone with the civility they deserve. Treat those for whom you care with patien ...
