STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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January 20, 2015
Is this sudden interest in mapping farmland a back-door justification for the advancement of Big Agriculture? Will it justify as well a sudden drop in food production and rising farmland prices across the board? The idea of this article is that farmland must no ...
January 20, 2015
The recent brutal events in France have reminded us how small the world is that we all share. Violence and conflicts that have their origin in one part of the globe shows itself in another part of our planet. And mass media immediately shares those events with ...
January 19, 2015
So now it begins. Last week the EU Court of Justice advocate general ruled that the central bank could purchase sovereign debt. One by one, the hurdles are toppling and the reality of ECB market purchases grows closer. Of course, last year the German constituti ...
January 19, 2015
This article features a mainstream newspaper reporting clearly what we already know but have rarely seen admitted in the mainstream: Big business and big finance equally have lost the "trust" battle. The paradigm is no longer believable. Having made the admissi ...
January 19, 2015
Since the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the dollar has lost over 97 percent of its purchasing power, the US economy has been subjected to a series of painful Federal Reserve-created recessions and depressions, and government has grown to dangerous le ...
January 18, 2015
We have this issue now with patent law where we have a number of entities out there that aren't making any products, don't want to make a product but what they want to do is acquire dated patents, older patents, and then come up with a legal claim that some oth ...
January 17, 2015
Common Dreams has posted an article entitled, "In Just 60 Years, Neoliberal Capitalism Has Nearly Broken Planet Earth ..." The idea according to researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre is that "four of nine planetary boundaries have now been crossed as a ...
January 16, 2015
The meme is strong in this one, apologies to Star Wars. Every time we turn around, we're seeing more mainstream reports about the dangers of deflation. Now, having rejected their gold referendum, the Swiss have de-pegged their currency from the floundering euro ...
January 16, 2015
Over and over magazines churn out reports on the best places for retirement. The suspects are usually much the same names from year to year. But we are never to know all the variables, or why the countries place where they do in these rankings. In the case of C ...
January 15, 2015
Bitcoin is not worth what it used to be mostly in our view because of various "raids" by authorities that have tied the crypto-currency to bad actors and "drug dealers." But we want to make another point. This Economist article shows us once more how one can wr ...
January 15, 2015
Why is inflation good? Why is disinflation or deflation bad? We know what Murray Rothbard believed because he told us: In a free-market economy, there would be gentle deflation because technology constantly made goods and services less expensive. He had no prob ...
January 15, 2015
A legion of the politically correct who make a living from the alleged oppression of women were gleeful and almost goofy with proofiness this week. The incident is a window into how statistical myths are created. Charles Seife, a journalist and a professor at N ...
January 14, 2015
The deflation meme remains in full cry in Western media. Europe is in a deflationary morass and only Mario Draghi and a Brussels QE can save Europe from appreciating currency. Japan is printing as hard as it can and China is revving up the presses once again. B ...
January 14, 2015
Actually, we are not surprised by this sort of article. It is a bubble article and bubbles are blowing up everywhere – East and West. Central banks are printing and rates are lowering despite the doom and gloom regarding inflation. The asset bubbles are right ...
January 13, 2015
In our view, there is a kind of cold war going on between the US and Russia. The US worked to destabilize Ukraine from what we can tell and now along with Saudi Arabia has caused the price of oil to plummet. Low prices for oil put pressure on Russia's economy a ...
January 13, 2015
Years of protesting Monsanto's business practices may be having an effect. Monsanto is well known for various questionable business practices that result in lawsuits and often put significant burdens on small farmers who cannot afford continued litigation. But ...
January 13, 2015
Friends of freedom often become despondent when it seems that every day brings another growth and intrusion of government over people's lives. But there is no reason to be disheartened, because there are lessons for winning liberty – from the opponents of fre ...
January 13, 2015
After the tragic shooting at a provocative magazine in Paris last week, I pointed out that given the foreign policy positions of France we must consider blowback as a factor. Those who do not understand blowback made the ridiculous claim that I was excusing the ...
January 12, 2015
The Internet Reformation continues. The point of this article is that the Crash of 2008-2009 has given rise to an academic confrontation between professors and students regarding how economics is taught. But for us, the Internet as well must play a role in this ...
January 12, 2015
We are always on the verge of a recovery and then rates will have to move up. That seems to be a fairly consistent mainstream meme. But in the meantime, of course, rates are NOT going up. And this fits into our larger perspective that in a monopoly-fiat central ...
January 12, 2015
The hypocrisy of American police is beginning to bother even law and order conservatives. The New York Police Department is rivaling the black community in Ferguson in keeping alive the murders of their community members. We are constantly reminded of how dange ...
January 11, 2015
Gold coins are the most marketable instruments known to man. Its holder can trade on the best terms possible. Gold bills are the second most marketable instruments. Demand for them is virtually unlimited. Banks overflowing with gold coins scramble to expel them ...
January 10, 2015
As we predicted long ago, cannabis is gradually emerging as an industry. Those of us who saw the opportunity knew the large money would be made as the market gradually developed venture-capital and IPO participation. That's what is occurring now. Ultimately, th ...
January 09, 2015
This is a continuation of the Wall Street Party meme. We don't believe the Fed has any intention of disinflating, let alone deflating (not seriously anyway) but just in case something happens … here comes Bloomberg to inform us that it doesn't matter. Not to ...
January 09, 2015
The big problem with modern Western medicine is that everything has to be turned into a chemical before it can be marketed. No chemical, no profit, as no one can patent a plant. But if you can mimic the effects of that plant, without using the plant, or use the ...
January 09, 2015
If Americans were honest with themselves they would acknowledge that the Republic is no more. We now live in a police state. If we do not recognize and resist this development, freedom and prosperity for all Americans will continue to deteriorate. All liberties ...
January 08, 2015
This article is a good example of an EU "leadership" meme. This is actually two themes in one. The first, oft promoted meme is that the EU has devolved into Germany's back yard. It is Germany's union to run as it wishes. The second meme is that leaders like Ms. ...
January 08, 2015
Nowhere is the foundering of the American Dream more evident than in many US suburbs. Suburbs used to lie at the confident beating heart of the American Experience. Now they are prostrate baggage of an ill-conceived social experiment. Suburbs, initially called ...
January 08, 2015
Microaggression. The word may soon be knocking on your door to demand supplication or another form of payment. Microaggression is the new politically correct campaign being launched by "disadvantaged" elites who are running out of even vaguely real transgressio ...
January 07, 2015
The technocracy meme constantly reemerges. In this case we know why. UKIP, the quasi-libertarian, anti-EU party, is emerging as a potential political winner and many in British leadership are aghast. Solution? Combine forces. This is an idea constantly being pr ...
January 07, 2015
We've written quite a bit about the questionable legal theory behind insider trading and US courts are now starting to agree with us. One point we made on several occasions was that there was no specific statute against insider trading. This was because – or ...
January 06, 2015
It's been pointed out elsewhere on the Internet that the resumption of TPP talks last month was not exactly top news in the Western media. You would think the Western media would be covering this world-changing negotiation, as it affects the flow of information ...
January 06, 2015
We've pointed this out before, but this is another meme that is fast advancing. The idea of disinflation – especially – throughout the West and especially in Europe is being propagated regularly now. We've pointed out regularly that it is difficult to have ...
January 06, 2015
With the beginning of 2015, what might be a "New Year's resolution" for a friend of freedom? I would suggest that one answer is for each of us to do our best to become "lights of liberty" that will attract others to the cause of freedom and the free society. Fo ...
January 05, 2015
The best way to make sure capitalism becomes more popular is to give people the opportunity to take a bigger stake in it. That's the argument of the head of the London Stock Exchange, Xavier Rolet. He's not only convinced of capitalism's benefits; he also belie ...
January 05, 2015
This is not so much an analysis of gold as one of Bloomberg's regular negative assessments of the yellow metal's future. Bloomberg, as a media product, supports the agenda of major Western investment banks and central banks. There is not a lot of affection amon ...
January 05, 2015
Since New Year's is traditionally a time for resolutions, and since the new Congress convenes this week, I thought I would suggest some New Year's resolutions for Congress: 1) Bring the troops home — Congress should take the first, and most important, step to ...
January 04, 2015
Like everything else in the process of social change, it doesn't happen overnight. Consider, for example, the environmental movement. When we were kids, just getting people to stop throwing garbage out of the car window was considered a great environmental vict ...
January 03, 2015
In a staff report this week, we made some predictions regarding next year. The staff article was entitled, "Some Modest New Year Predictions Based on Dominant Social Themes." Our conclusion is what I want to discuss more thoroughly. We wrote: "Examine where ass ...
January 02, 2015
Noah Smith has written another article about whether economics is a science or not, a subject that obsesses him for good reason. If economics is not predictive, what good is it in this day and age? In fact, the field is really only a few hundred years old, if w ...
January 02, 2015
This is a good analysis, in our view, of what might happen regarding Greece and its potential pushback to Brussels-imposed "austerity." No one knows the full story regarding the austerity that has been imposed on Greece, and other Southern European countries as ...
January 02, 2015
Pernicious drugs dominate our lives today like restrictive manacles control a southern chain gang. We are prisoners. And it's not evils like cocaine and heroin that are the real enslavers; they control but a pittance of people. The real chains around us are fas ...
January 01, 2015
Ganesha has inspired us to make predictions for 2015. Our predictions focus on the trends we've covered this year. We begin with central banking, which is the engine driving most of the themes we observe. Central bankers will surely print money at an accelerate ...
January 01, 2015
The idea of this Atlantic article is that US governance generally is abdicating its responsibility to counteract lawlessness and this is fundamentally unbalancing US democracy. This is a perceptive point, though to ignore the legal and regulatory barrage genera ...
January 01, 2015
America is making emigration more difficult and expensive. Last year, for example, the cost of renouncing U.S. citizenship rose by over 400% from $450 to $2,350. Those who take the far more common step of simply and quietly leaving still remain vulnerable to a ...
December 31, 2014
This article presents the idea that people are going to get so fed up with do-nothing politicians – hamstrung by gridlock – that they will rise up and demand a dictatorship. The logic fails to convince us, though the article is penned by an award-winning pr ...
December 31, 2014
This Bloomberg editorial purports to be puzzled by the "two faces" of Frau Merkel. But the solution to the puzzle is to recognize that Merkel is not powerful at all. Sound shocking? We'll expand below … Politicians in this day and age generally are not powerf ...
December 30, 2014
We've covered Piketty and his book in several articles but this article from Bloomberg shows how memes can be perpetuated even when the evidence for the meme is lacking. The article actually provides us with a cogent analysis of the wrongness of Piketty's argum ...
December 30, 2014
We've written about "organic" food because it's a "hot" trend. But we've also wondered whether the corporate farming model can adapt to organic approaches. We wrote about some of those issues here: When Choice Matters: Organic Food vs. Organic Investing. Consum ...
December 30, 2014
As a new year begins, it is easy to consider that the prospects for freedom in America and in many other parts of the world seem dim. After all, government continues to grow bigger and more intrusive, along with tax burdens that siphon off vast amounts of priva ...
