U.S. and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions and emails, according to top-secret documents revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden. The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart …

Following an extensive investigation, The Martian can reveal that it is neither Lawrence Summers nor Janet Yellen who will be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve System. Instead, President Obama is scheduled to announce that Davita Vance-Cooks will replace Ben Bernanke on Jan. 1. Like John Galt, Davita Vance-Cooks is not a household name. …

Writers sometimes worry if a day will come when they have nothing more to say. As long as Paul Krugman is around, I will never have that worry. Boston University professor, Lawrence Kotlikoff has suggested that Krugman return his Nobel Prize. I hope he doesn’t. As long as someone with Krugman’s professional status gets his …

Oh, how the media love a good strike. Look at these fast-food workers and peasants standing up to the owners of capital! They aren’t going to take the oppression anymore. The suits in the boardrooms had better shape up and stop hoarding all that money. They need to give it up to the men and …

Whether you agree or not that the U.S. ought to strike Syria, there is one reason it will: Because it has to. (Indeed, the bombing may already have started by the time you read this.) Perpetual war is one of the pillars of the US economy. According to the Mercatus Center, the U.S. spends more …

Like all great historical ideas, the project of licensing journalists so that they may benefit from the First Amendment was born in a very modest place. In fact, it began in the most modest of all places: the brain of Dianne Feinstein, U.S. senator from California. The new law, which was just adopted by Congress …

The position that there need be a state is too often taken for granted. The main body of Sartwell’s book Against the State is dedicated to destroying the arguments for a state from the likes of Hobbes, Rousseau and Hegel. In fact, one thing that becomes crystal clear in reading Sartwell’s book is how bad …

Crispin Sartwell is someone you should know. He is doing important work in recovering forgotten greats in America’s anti-authoritarian tradition. Among other works, he’s put forward a lean and powerful book titled Against the State. In what follows, you’ll see why he’s my favorite living philosopher. Sartwell will take you on an intellectual tour de …

In the last several days, I’ve had three phone conversations with friends — completely normal people who have their wits about them — during which they have declined to say something for fear of government surveillance. They will be talking normally and suddenly catch themselves and divert the conversation. The topics we were discussing were …

From the moment Barack Obama, the president of the United States, arrived at this plush resort community for a family vacation after another year of hard labor for the American people, it was obvious that security was not a detail. Seventy hotel rooms had been booked for the president’s secret police (not counting those for …

Today, like most days, I fired up my computer. I read freely available information on the latest developments in technology that would, in the not too distant past, have required a drive to a library to flip through journals too numerous for me to afford. I read the latest national and global news without having …

Remember when President Obama promised back in 2009 that his health care reform plan would cut insurance premiums for the average family by $2,500? Four years later, those promised cuts have morphed into admissions of price hikes. Indeed, America’s health cost crisis shows no signs of stopping. And Obamacare will only make it worse by …

Many people do not seem to mind the government peeping into their “metadata” or even into their emails, Internet habits, or phone calls. Mark Reid, the city manager of Bluffdale, Utah, where a large NSA data center is being built, doesn’t worry: “If someone reads my emails,”he says, “they’ll be pretty bored.” He should think …

A cornered rat has a deadly bite, or so says the lore from the 19th century, when rat baiting was common sport. The same is true of a cornered empire today. Every hour that goes by presents the evidence. It’s getting absolutely dangerous out there for anyone who dares to stand up against the empire …

Just when you think government couldn’t be more outrageous, you read a story like the one in The New York Times last weekend about Edward Young, who was put away for 15 years. His crime was possessing seven shotgun shells. Not a gun, mind you, just the ammo. When William Killian, the United States attorney, …

Today, we take time out from our regularly scheduled programming to thank the people who rule us. To the TSA agents at airports… to the IRS agents who audit our tax returns… to the NSA agents who are reading our mail… and to zombies everywhere… To all of you, we’d like to say a heartfelt, …

Detroit’s fate is best summed up by the phrase “Demographics is destiny.” Take a look at the following chart on Detroit’s population growth since 1840. The golden age of the U.S. car manufacturing industry (1930-1980) maintained Detroit’s population consistently above 1.5 million. Fifty years is more than enough time for at least two generations to …

Actors. Actresses. NFL football players. Baseball players. Librarians. Mayors. City councilmen. Members of AARP. The Obama administration is looking far and wide, leaving no stone unturned in a relentless search for… well… for help. Help with what? Help with getting people to enroll in health insurance plans this fall. And why is that? Because the …

On a Sunday afternoon swim, a 6-year-old boy was bugging me in a sweet sort of way. He rode up and down the handrail on the stairs in the shallow end of the pool where I was trying to sit in peace. He was laughing and talking, but I couldn’t understand a word through the …

The Federal Reserve has grown the monetary base from $827 billion to $3.1 trillion in five years. At the same time banks have stuck $2 trillion more than required in reserves at the Fed. This money lays around fallow, earning just 25 basis points from the central bank. A blossoming to its full potential would …

Jim Rickards lit up the Agora Financial Investment Symposium in Vancouver telling the crowd the price of gold will soar north of $7,000 per ounce in an inevitable global currency reset, the fourth reset since the founding of the Federal Reserve. The first was in 1914, the second in 1939, and the third in 1971. …

A frightening story this week in The New Yorker tells of a Texas couple that headed toward the Texas-Louisiana border to buy a used car. They were carrying all their savings in cash. They were stopped by the police. The police found cash and a tiny pipe, and arrested them both. Then the police made …

From antiquity to the Middle Ages, public health meant two things: sanitation (mainly clean water supply and sewage disposal) and protection against epidemics. On sanitation, think about the elaborate aqueduct systems built by Roman engineers. Epidemics meant transmissions of communicable diseases. Attacking lifestyles deemed threatening was a preferred activity of public authorities, but public health …

New York seems to have more than its fair share of knuckleheads. Paul Krugman and Tom Friedman are both stalwart columnists in The New York Times. And there’s staff writer James Surowiecki at The New Yorker. More about that in a minute… First, investors are taking it easy… distracted by barbeques, family reunions, and the …