Home Page 101
Why They Hate Free Speech
Sometimes — why not now? — you just have to reflect on what an amazing man Thomas Jefferson was. I mean, he really got the whole idea of liberty, maybe better than anyone before him, and far better than most people today. What a man! What a dream he had! I’m reminded of his bravery …
In Defense of Homeless Hot Spots
BBH Labs is an advertising agency that specializes in new and creative ideas for marketing products. But few ideas have ever generated the heat of one used this past weekend at the Austin, Texas, technology conference South by Southwest. Wireless networks are famously overcrowded at these events, and everyone is scrambling for a good connection. …
Economics of the Timeline
Most of us hadn’t thought about Davy Jones of the Monkees in many years. Suddenly, he died at the age of 66 and we were all instantly living in his world. Tributes were everywhere. His YouTube videos were slammed with hits. Praise for his life and works appeared on blogs everywhere. People were honoring his …
See the World Through Bonner’s Eyes
in the spring of 2012, Bill Bonner, founder of Agora Inc., took a break from his daily column in The Daily Reckoning, and, like hundreds of thousands of others, I went through withdrawals. Fortunately, I had a copy of his wonderful book, Mobs, Messiahs and Markets, to devour as I awaited his return. This is …
The Fed Does the Figure-Four Three-Quarter Leglock
The money masters at the Federal Reserve have done a splendid job, haven’t they? Well, no, and all the more reason to End the Fed, in the legendary slogan of Ron Paul. Every few months since the great meltdown of 2008, there’s been some announcement that appears in the financial press about the latest fancy-pants …
Iran and the Prospect of Domestic Terrorism
I hate to be the one to bring up a very unpleasant subject, but let me begin with a question… Do you recall the reasons that the Sept. 11 terrorists gave for their rampage, the one that killed so many, did so much damage and led the U.S. government to unleash fury on the world …
Coercive Nannies
The term “nanny state” actually dates to the 1960s, and that’s not surprising. It was about this time that government ran out of ideas for improving society — it didn’t really improve us, but it claimed to — and turned its attention to hectoring us about all the things we do to ourselves that it …
Put Those Kids To Work!
I was reading a wonderful set of small biographies of Gilded Age entrepreneurs and took note of something we all know once we think about it. These men and women worked in productive labor from an early age. They universally credit these early work experiments for instilling an ethic to stick to the job, be …
The Free State Movement: Political Migration in Our Time
If you are willing to look past mainstream media coverage of American politics, you can actually find exciting and interesting activities taking place that rise above lobbying, voting, graft and corruption. Consider the Free State Project. It is an attempt, and a surprisingly successful one, to inspire a political migration by lovers to liberty to …
Peter Schiff on American Citizenship
You have probably seen Peter Schiff on television, not once, but many times. Among the legions of indistinguishable talking heads out there, he stands out. He makes sense. He draws attention to reality. He is disregarding of the opinions and conventions that prevail on the financial news networks and just comes right out and says …
Economic Lessons of Silly Putty
We loved it as kids — that amazing substance called Silly Putty. I recently found a version in a hotel room the other day, re-branded as Thinking Putty. It turns out that the names differ based on the targeted market segment. In any case, the whole phenomenon is curious. How it is that this seemingly …
Jetsons, Episode 5,437: The Kroger Vending Machine
You have heard of unmanned flight. Much more impressive to me is the unmanned grocery store that could be coming to a street corner by you. It’s being pushed by Kroger. It is a large-scale machine stocked with 200 items from the grocery store. Crackers, cheese, milk, bread, chips and dip, maybe even some fruit …
Is Taxation Voluntary?
Have you ever heard the claim that paying income tax is voluntary? The term “voluntary” is variously used in government documents, including the 1040 form itself, and some very naive people have actually taken this to mean that they don’t have to pay if they don’t want to. They think that “voluntary” actually means voluntary, …
The Banishment of the Marginal Worker
Do you know about Europe’s problem with the NEETs? This is the name being given to those mostly young workers who are not in school, not employed and not in training. The designation applies to one in five people aged 24 and younger. Unemployment among this generation is frighteningly high all over the eurozone. These …
Who Moved My Juice Bottle?
Most people think of the capitalist marketplace as the venue for the unleashing of the human ego. Selfishness reigns as those with financial means buy and build whatever they want, acquiring and amassing with no concern for the fate of anyone but themselves. Bah! I can’t even imagine a more inaccurate description of real life. …
To Love the Unknown
Why do we let the police power of the state take over and inevitably wreck so many aspects of our life? Why do we tolerate the invasions of our homes, businesses, and bank accounts? One theory: people find more comfort in the false security that the state provides over the uncertainty of a liberty-driven future. …
Why Facebook Works, and Democracy Does Not
We can learn from Facebook and all other social networks that the Internet has brought us. These are more than websites; they are models of social organization that transcend old forms. Make the rest of life more like a social network and we will begin to see real progress in the course of civilization. Persist in the old model of forced democratic community and we will continue to see decline.
The Great Monetary Debate
When National Public Radio airs a segment on the gold standard, you know that the debate over the quality of money has reached the point where it can no longer be ignored. Another sign came last month when Newt Gingrich, who has never shown the slightest interest in the cause of sound money, suddenly began …
How Change Happens
My brother is teaching a semester in London, and he casually video Skyped me last week to show me around his apartment, which is small but charming. I reciprocated by hauling up the cover of the e-book I am reading, and shared my desktop to show a YouTube performance of Renaissance music I thought he …
Ninety-Nine Years of Evil
January 3 of this year was the 99th anniversary of the signing of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution. It enshrined into law an idea that stands in total contradiction to the driving force being the American Revolution and the whole idea of freedom itself. The great “old right” commentator Frank Chodorov once described the …
A Public Service Announcement for Internationals Visiting the U.S.
Reprinted from the Daily Reckoning First up, a quick public service announcement for our International Reckoners: For Australians, that means no “cracking onto” members of the opposite sex…no getting “off one’s face”…no “tearing it up”…no “little rippers” and, we would think, no “barrakking” for anyone. Our Irish friends will likewise wish to steer clear of …
The Speakeasy Economy
Reflecting on the sheer vastness of this sector of life, one realizes the fiction, for example, embodied in official government statistics that record only the on-the-books sector of economic life. These agencies are pumping out half-truths and whole myths every day. One further realizes the immense damage that would be done to humanity in general should there come a time when government actually managed to enforce all its edicts. It would be catastrophic. We owe much of our prosperity to people’s willingness to enter the rebel class.
The Transformation of Banking
There is a scene in the Parable of the Talents in which the returned master berates the shabbiest of his three servants. Discovering that he had buried his seed capital in the ground, the master says: “You should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have …
The Death of File Sharing
Last week’s violent government attack on the hugely popular site Megaupload — the U.S. government arresting Belgian citizens in New Zealand, of all places, and stealing at gunpoint servers bank accounts and property — has sent shock waves through the entire digital world. The first shock was the realization that the gigantic protest against legislative …