STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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July 31, 2014
Recovery? Really? Now the trumpets are sounding for a US recovery, but as we've pointed out many times, what is going up mostly is the stock market as the Fed determinedly debases currency. And as we've predicted, Ms. Yellen has no intention of stopping. She is ...
July 31, 2014
Boy, this is a patronizing story from the New York Times. It basically says that people are stupid and they should be rioting in the streets over "income disparity." They just don't know it yet! We're well aware of this meme, and have written about it a lot. We ...
July 31, 2014
A manufactured conflict is flashing through libertarianism: self-described "humanitarians" versus insultingly-labeled "brutalists." In a much circulated article entitled "Against Libertarian Brutalism," the libertarian luminary Jeffrey Tucker defines the "human ...
July 30, 2014
So we learn that Abenomics is not working so well. Okay ... we never expected it to. Honestly, where has a Keynesian economic program ever really rebuilt an economy? FDR tried it in the US, but the US economy didn't recover until the end of World War II when vi ...
July 30, 2014
The New York Times is out with what is apparently intended to be a definitive history of why marijuana was criminalized. This is a very important issue because the sudden reversal in marijuana laws and regulations is bringing up a question about criminal justic ...
July 30, 2014
In the history of political thought natural rights theory is most closely associated with John Locke, although as Brian Tierney has shown, the idea had been formed much earlier and some, for example Fred D. Miller, Jr., even hold that Aristotle was already cons ...
July 29, 2014
Here is an article that probably has been written to remind people that it is possible to approach the stock market rationally using the tools provided by Great Minds. The subtext of the article is the efficacy of modern portfolio theory, which we shall see is ...
July 29, 2014
We've predicted this in a series of articles. Enforced scarcity is how the power elite initiates further globalism and exercises controls. Of course, the mainstream media is sure there's a water problem, one that is only going to be compounded by a capitalist t ...
July 29, 2014
We live in a time when virtually all political parties and candidates stand for the same fundamental ideological idea: state interventionism and compulsory redistribution. This also applies to the mainstream media. Even many who say they adhere to a "pro-market ...
July 29, 2014
The extraordinary propaganda being conducted against Russia by the US and UK governments and Ministries of Propaganda, a.k.a., the "Western media," have the purpose of driving the world to war that no one can win. European governments need to rouse themselves f ...
July 28, 2014
If the government or mainstream media say something definitive, assume the opposite. This article explains to us that the Fed has little power to create "irrational" bubbles. And that the current stock bubble – bigger than any bubble in history – is a ratio ...
July 28, 2014
We are very sad for the chief Ebola doctor, Umar Khan, who is only 39 years old and a valiant fighter against this terrible disease. Wikipedia describes it as follows: "Manifestation of Ebola begins abruptly with a sudden onset of an influenza-like stage charac ...
July 28, 2014
Remember back in April, 2007, when then-CIA director George Tenet appeared on 60 Minutes, angrily telling the program host, "we don't torture people"? Remember a few months later, in October, President George W. Bush saying, "this government does not torture pe ...
July 27, 2014
Mexican President Vicente Fox Quesada wrote the Foreword to my new book, The Cannabis Encyclopedia, that will be released in December of 2014. I was fortunate to meet President Fox in San Francisco last year, 2013, at a press conference in San Francisco, CA. I ...
July 26, 2014
Nation-states don't exist. Only cultures abide. But is has been the great triumph of globalists that they have created an entire history built around non-existent entities. "France goes to war with Germany." "Russia makes peace with Austria." "Tensions arise be ...
July 25, 2014
It began with a bizarre statement by Janet Yellen. "Monetary policy faces significant limitations as a tool to promote financial stability," Yellen told an audience at an event put on by the International Monetary Fund. We covered this announcement via a write- ...
July 25, 2014
This article supports the meme that the mainstream media in the West is engaged in a meaningful news exercise. It is not, but pretending it is sustains the larger media fiction. It is amazing how intricate journalism has gotten in the past century. Unfortunatel ...
July 25, 2014
Despite the conclusion by US intelligence that there is no evidence of Russian involvement in the destruction of the Malaysian airliner and all lives onboard, Washington is escalating the crisis and shepherding it toward war. Twenty-two US senators have introdu ...
July 24, 2014
The news regarding Colombia's intention to legalize marijuana – as yet little reported in the wider, Western world – is truly shocking, though regular readers of our publications will not be much surprised. More than almost any other publication we know of, ...
July 24, 2014
Our perception has changed. Once this article would have made a kind of sense to us (long ago). But it surely doesn't now. It's jam-packed with various sorts of financially illiterate assumptions. Sorry for picking on it; there are hundreds if not thousands of ...
July 24, 2014
The Italian Marxist and philosopher Paolo Virno was imprisoned in 1979 for his affiliation with the Red Brigades. The organization attempted to create a revolutionary state through acts of violent destabilization such as bank robbery. While in prison, Virno had ...
July 23, 2014
This UK Telegraph article, predictably by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, gives us some more insight into how China's impossible boom has been created, leveraged and elongated, possibly to the breaking point. It's not a pretty picture. Years ago, we began to write tha ...
July 23, 2014
We heartily encourage people not to vote. Your vote doesn't really matter within the larger scheme of things. Anyway, many voting districts are so gerrymandered that the incumbent would have to perform a ghastly crime in broad daylight to stand any chance of lo ...
July 23, 2014
The concept of "rights" was developed, in part, from the concept of "right" – correct, true – as used in the tradition of natural law ethics (concerning how we ought to act or not act because we are human beings). In time, a natural rights theory was produc ...
July 22, 2014
This pernicious elite meme amply illustrates what we call directed history. In this case endless articles are appearing to explain why the dollar is in terminal decline as the BRICS (including South Africa) are ascending. We last wrote about this issue here: Do ...
July 22, 2014
Will Rand Paul be the next US president? We believe it's perfectly possible, and thus we've been following this meme. Now it seems Rand Paul – and the news media – are coining a new phrase, "conservatarian." We weren't familiar with the term, but we found n ...
July 22, 2014
The Obama Administration has proposed its latest form of collectivist control over the American people. In a letter to Congress, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has called for punishment and prohibition of any company that tries to move its headquarters overse ...
July 21, 2014
This is an interesting article because it shows clearly that controlling the Fed's business practices is a kind of non-starter. Reining in Fed behavior won't make a real difference. The article revolves around a Republican proposal having to do, in part, with r ...
July 21, 2014
US fedgov is going to reduce sentences for drug offenders. With a push on to decriminalize and legalize drugs, why should people continue to stay in jail? We asked that question a while ago and now have our answer. People won't. A bigger question, of course, is ...
July 21, 2014
Just days after the tragic crash of a Malaysian Airlines flight over eastern Ukraine, Western politicians and media joined together to gain the maximum propaganda value from the disaster. It had to be Russia; it had to be Putin, they said. President Obama held ...
July 20, 2014
Was there any justifiable reason to incarcerate [drug users] in the first place? Stephan Kinsella: Well, finally, an easy one! Of course not. Drug laws are completely evil. I believe some day we will look back on this like we look back on the days of chattel sl ...
July 19, 2014
The UN has now called for the decriminalization not just of marijuana but of other drugs as well, including so-called injectables. Our analyses are often correct, but in this case, we're a little surprised at how fast confirmation has arrived. The Economist inf ...
July 18, 2014
Dominant social themes are almost always economically literate. But rarely do we discover linkages that allow the presentation of two at once. This article offers one untruth – that robots will put almost everyone out of work – and then compounds it with an ...
July 18, 2014
There are two ways to confront this wrongheaded Reuters editorial. One way is by pointing out that aggregators like Google (and others) are protected by various legislative and court rulings that allow them to post the most salacious and destructive information ...
July 18, 2014
Mark Tier's latest title, Trust Your Enemies: A Political Thriller, which I found to be an intensely compelling Libertarian ride, is his first foray into fiction, following upon his excellent nonfiction writing that I've enjoyed for years. Having known Mark for ...
July 18, 2014
The unilateral US sanctions announced by Obama on July 16 blocking Russian weapons and energy companies access to US bank loans demonstrate Washington's impotence. The rest of the world, including America's two largest business organizations, turned their backs ...
July 17, 2014
Nope. We are past believing in such fantasies as a trillion dollar company. These will not be companies but titanic mercantilist organizations. Of course, for smaller, nimbler companies, such vastness is a good thing. As stock markets climb and trillions slosh ...
July 17, 2014
We've noticed this meme is gaining popularity "on the left." The idea is that tax-exempt social welfare organizations should not engage in politics, and that when the IRS began to examine these organizations, Republicans moved in with trumped up charges because ...
July 17, 2014
Libertarians believe a better world is possible. Libertarian anarchists believe the best world is a stateless one; it consists of voluntary societies which would include institutions or customs to prevent and deal with occasional crime. The practical applicatio ...
July 16, 2014
This is one of the better articles we've read in the mainstream media recently because it efficiently covers two sides of the Western economic argument. Only at the end does it fail to come to logical conclusions. But what it does provide is both entertaining a ...
July 16, 2014
Japan is going to create a standing army; supposedly truculent Premiere Shinzo Abe is leading the way. But there seems to be another side to Abe. Apparently, he can be politically astute and considerate when he wishes to be. At least that's what we read in The ...
July 16, 2014
That freedom is the matrix required for the growth of moral values – indeed not merely one value among many but the source of all values – is almost self-evident. It is only where the individual has choice, and its inherent responsibility, that he has occas ...
July 15, 2014
This article from Slate makes several arguments regarding higher taxes: Taxes are necessary and higher taxes are even more important for social comity. Why the "left" (if we can characterize Slate a leftist rather than corporatist) always seems to want to justi ...
July 15, 2014
We cover dominant social themes and often you find these in the mainstream media. But sometimes a meme is revealed by its absence. One such case is this article posted at the World Socialist Website, which provides us with an elite theme that has not really bee ...
July 15, 2014
In the minds of many people around the world, including in the United States, the term "capitalism" carries the idea of unfairness, exploitation, undeserved privilege and power and immoral profit making. What is often difficult to get people to understand is th ...
July 14, 2014
Another article, among thousands every year, explaining how the Fed can be more effective if it would just do ... this. Or that … The rhetorical element always involves explaining what the Fed has done wrong, and continues to do wrong, and why the Fed can bec ...
July 14, 2014
Here comes The Atlantic magazine – that bastion of international socialism – with a scathing article about the US's rising lawlessness. Of course, we have no idea why this article appeared in The Atlantic, a publication dedicated to advancing an ever-closer ...
July 14, 2014
Over the past several weeks we have seen a significant increase in illegal immigration, as thousands of unaccompanied minors pour across what seems an invisible southern border into the United States. The mass immigration has, as to be expected, put an enormous ...
July 13, 2014
Escobar: I think the world will change its policies, first with marijuana and then with cocaine. The important thing then will be to invest in education for the children so they know that it's harmful, same as alcohol. The problem is that right now there is ver ...
July 12, 2014
BusinessInsider tells us that "America's Drug Companies Are Bankrolling the Crusade Against Legal Weed." This article is actually a summary of a larger article in The Nation, and BusinessInsider presents it this way: "Last week, The Nation published an interest ...
