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May 17, 2012 10:16 AM
SSI sends Supreme Court Justices zip drive with thousands of petitions signers urging the Court to strike down ObamaCare as unconstitutional. Read Dr. Lawrence Hunter's letter to Supreme Court Justices.
May 15, 2012 08:18 AM
 Our labor force is shrinking, the number of dependent U.S. adults is growing, our social programs are failing, and our best educated and most productive generation is retiring. To borrow from Merle Haggard, "Are the good times really over for good?"
May 14, 2012 08:00 AM
 Risk is the very thing that makes human progress possible. To refuse to act – or to limit action – until and unless all risk is removed is to negate the possibility of acting. It is to embrace stasis – and even that amount to a false sense of security, since failing to act out of fear of risk can itself be lethally paralyzing. There isn’t a problem with being risk adverse or risk taking, the problem is the imposition of both the nannying and the charity by the state. This country if it is to survive and thrive needs to get back to people being responsible for their own risk and reward without artifical outside forces.
May 10, 2012 12:43 PM
 Can a retired couple live on $1,000-$1,200 per month in Latin America? Sure. In fact a complete budget is available including actual recipes of North American meals to show just how simple this is. Send an e-mail to Budgets@ecidevelopment.com to receive a copy of the budget if you’d like to see the reality of living a better life for less. If you have $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 or more per month for retirement, the quality of life you can enjoy in Latin America is tremendously enhanced. The Gringo Life stories written about our family’s eight years in Latin America hold a rich treasure of lifestyle observations and anecdotes for people considering a move overseas. You can find them at www.MikesGringoLife.com
May 10, 2012 10:09 AM
  The United States is no longer a free country. When almost everything people do is either illegal or "regulated," there is an overabundance of so-called "crimes" being committed at every moment of the day. The police are no longer in the business of protecting people from rare and costly events, and thus have nothing whatsoever in common with firemen. They are in the business of cracking skulls and enforcing the political class’s dictates on the people. Firemen, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly volunteers who simply wait to respond to accidents. Firemen are a form of voluntary social insurance against accidents, while the police are merely thuggish tools of the political class.
May 09, 2012 06:04 PM
The one world government types continue their plans for even more control over European finances with all-powerful central bank.
May 08, 2012 11:44 AM
 For over five thousand years, gold has represented a reliable store of value. Which is why many wise men own gold. If I asked you to leave something for your great grandkids in a package to be opened one hundred years from now, would you leave them a wad of hundred dollar bills or one hundred gold coins? If you had any brains you would pick the gold coins.
May 07, 2012 01:08 PM
 A leaked U.S. Army document prepared for the Department of Defense contains shocking plans for “political activists” to be pacified by “PSYOP officers” into developing an “appreciation of U.S. policies” while detained in prison camps inside the United States.
May 01, 2012 10:19 AM
 ObamaCare raids Medicare to reduce the unfunded liability of the seniors' medical program by $50 trillion. How? ObamaCare uses cuts in Medicare to pay for more than half the cost of expanding health insurance for young people. So even if the Medicare cuts take place, they won’t reduce the government’s overall obligations. They just cut medical care for seniors to increase middleclass welfare for young people. In addition, the health reform bill contains no serious plan for making Medicare more efficient.
May 01, 2012 09:13 AM
 The increasing number of US expats remains concentrated among Baby Boomers but a good bet is Generation Xers also may soon be looking south for their offshore havens as well. Life in the US is becoming forbiddingly expensive for many retirees – and they feel compelled to start looking for a better quality of life at a far lower cost of living in Latin America. This sense appears to be growing among the kids of the Baby Boomers as well, and they can be expected to cast their eyes south of the border well before retirement is nigh – while property is still at bargain prices – rather than waiting until the out-migration trickle turns into a torrent, and prices skyrocket as demand soars.
Apr 30, 2012 12:03 PM
 Paul Ryan's budget, which has passed the House and soon could be voted on in the Senate, creates an unprecedented new fast-track procedure -- a so-called "expedited parliamentary process" -- to ram through Social Security benefit cuts, including cutting cost of living allowances (COLAs) by adopting the Chained CPI, reducing benefits by at least $108 billion over 10 years.
Apr 30, 2012 09:52 AM
 In a system of real justice, there would not be "prosecutors" as such, at all. There would be attorneys available to represent the litigants for a fee, and in the Roe v. Doe case, the one representing Roe would have the burden of proving Doe's actions; but he would be paid initially by his client (or his client's insurer) rather than by an uninvolved third party such as government. Justice would right the wrong with restitution, compensaton and reimbursement. That's what justice is for. That's honest, and is the kind of justice system that will exist in the coming free society. You are honest; so can it be right to spend your working days employed by and supporting the dishonest "criminal-justice" system?
Apr 29, 2012 10:18 AM
 Interview with Lew Rockwell on the state of affairs in America today: "The American government has become an horrendous tyranny, a prison-military-industrial complex. The people who work in the government love putting people in jail, love starting wars, love killing, they like torturing people, they are not good people, and we don't want them running our lives."
Apr 29, 2012 09:39 AM
 The City of Man [government] is the secular order. It is the earthly city ruled by humans for their own gain using their own rules. Above all, says Saint Augustine, it "is itself ruled by the lust of rule." The "lust of rule" is a translation of the Latin libido dominandi. As Richard John Neuhaus puts it, libido dominandi is "the lust for power, advantage, and glory." It shouts, "My way or no way!"
Apr 28, 2012 09:14 PM
 I ask you, I plead with you, I beg you all, walk out of here with me, never to come back. It’s the moral and ethical thing to do. Nothing good goes on in this place. Let’s lock the doors and leave the building to the spiders, moths and four-legged rats.
Apr 25, 2012 08:28 AM
 Until early in the 20th century, gold played a central role in the world of money. Gold had an incredible run – almost three thousand years. And why not? After all, Professor Roy Jastram convincingly documents in The Golden Constant just how gold maintains its purchasing power over long periods of time. But, since President Richard Nixon closed the gold window in August 1971, gold has not played a formal role in the international monetary regime. Today, the “regime” is a chaotic non-system. It is time to reconnect the world's money to gold.
Apr 24, 2012 08:07 AM
 Despite stonewalling by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and his cronies in the moneyed institutions of privilege, the recent partial Fed audit and dribbled-out documents sought by news organizations under the Freedom of Information Act are revealing an astounding level of corruption in the institution.
Apr 23, 2012 11:18 AM
 The American left is dead, killed off by their support of a candidate who personified their turn to identity politics. The left’s undying allegiance to the President and his policies has sealed their rejection of the old-fashioned liberal anti-imperialist pro-civil libertarian stance, exemplified by The Nation when it was edited by Oswald Garrison Villard and which briefly resurfaced during the Vietnam era. Instead of going forward, American liberalism has retreated back to the era of FDR, when being on the “left” meant supporting not only the Welfare State but also calling for bigger and better ways to buttress the Warfare State.
Apr 23, 2012 07:48 AM
 New Class Pseudo Intellectuals believe man incapable of making a rational or informed judgment about what risks he accepts, and they tend to be afraid of risk or change. As a result, even the normal risks of living are blown out of all proportion. They believe they know what is best for the "masses," which produces a busybody mentality, which is only natural, since social workers, politicians, and pundits are really only professional busybodies; their job descriptions are to set standards for others and then make sure those others conform to their standards. And, after all, if "society" is going to pay the costs of an individual's sickness or injury, it follows that society's New Class, pseudo-intellectual guardians should ensure that the individual behaves appropriately, regardless of whether or not those who have to obey the rules, and pay taxes for the privilege, like it.
Apr 20, 2012 12:17 PM
 Listen to the latest interview with trends forcaster Gerald Celente of the Trends Research Institute warning of a multi-pronged attack on our liberty. Celente says we are well along to living in a country not dissimilar to that of Hitler’s Third Reich. While the pervasive signs are as clear as day to those paying attention, a large portion of our population, like that of Germany in the 1930′s, simply doesn’t understand what’s happening, or they bury their heads in the sand so as to avoid ruffling the feathers of the all powerful and entrenched American Police State.
Apr 20, 2012 07:16 AM
 It seems as if society at large has been captured by Madoff clones. I want to probe a little deeper into the realm of abnormal psychology and see how it relates to economics and where the world is heading. What really distinguishes political elites from normal people is not just a predilection for stupidity but a real capacity for evil. Evil might best be defined as the intentional and usually gratuitous commission of acts that are cruel or unjust. A person who commits many evil acts is a sociopath. The sociopaths who are naturally drawn to government eventually come to dominate it. They're very dangerous people. They reset the social mores of the country they control. After a certain point, a critical mass is reached, and it's GAME OVER. I suspect we're approaching that point.
Apr 19, 2012 09:16 AM
 George Will fingers Virginia Federal Judge for stabbing Virginia's constitutional giants in the back. Will writes that Judge Harvie J. Wilkinson III, whom he describes as possessing "a courtly Virginian manner as soft as a Shenandoah breeze," violates fundamental constitutional rights by elevating majority rule to status of the "first principle of our constitutional order." Virginia's true Aristocracy of Intellect, which gave us freedom in the 18th century, has degenerated into a modernday lawyers' cartel of posers with Roman numerals after their names and soothing voices like Donald Sutherland playing President Coriolanus Snow in Hunger Games. Yes Virginia, you have fallen through a worm hole right into Bizzaro World.
Apr 17, 2012 12:12 PM
 As an expatriate PT (Permanent Tourist or Prior Taxpayer) I legally do not have to pay income taxes. Nearly a decade ago when I complained about the socialist government and the taxes many brainwashed government lovers would tell me, "if you don't like it, leave." I happily did, and it's been easily one of the best things I've ever done. Nothing feels so great as not having to track all your income and expenses and spending hours, days or weeks "filing" your taxes.
Apr 13, 2012 08:07 AM
 The problems of democracy are inherent. It’s like having dinner with a million people and deciding up front the bill will be split evenly. Everyone has a strong incentive to order more than he would individually, resulting in a huge bill that everyone deplores but no individual could do anything about. Democracy therefore has a very limited self-cleansing capability. Our politicians have a natural short-term outlook since they are only temporarily in office. They will overspend, overtax and overborrow knowing their successors will have to deal with the negative consequences. Besides that, they spend other people’s money anyhow.
Apr 12, 2012 09:51 AM
 Contrary to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, a gold standard that is not abused by the central bank generates stability. Boom-bust cycles are the outcome of central-bank policies that are aimed at stabilizing the economy. The alleged instability of economies during so-called gold standards in the past took place because the authorities were issuing paper money unbacked by gold, thereby undermining the gold standard.
Apr 12, 2012 07:54 AM
 Book Review: Mary's Mosaic -- Herein lies the cancerous tumor upon the soul of America. The CIA’s inception and entrance into the American landscape fundamentally altered not only the functioning of our government, but the entire character of American life. The CIA’s reign during the Cold War era has contaminated the pursuit of historical truth. While the dismantling of America’s republic didn’t begin in Dallas in 1963, that day surely marked an unprecedented acceleration of the erosion of constitutional democracy. America has never recovered. Today in 2012, the ongoing disintegration of our country is ultimately about the corruption of our government, a government that has consistently and intentionally misrepresented and lied about what really took place in Dallas in 1963, as it did about the escalation of the Vietnam War that followed, and which it presently continues to do about so many things.
Apr 11, 2012 10:59 AM
 The source of excessive inequality is not inequality of after-tax income resulting from an inequitable tax system, but the inequality of pre-tax income generated by the corporatist system of crony capitalism in which big business and big government conspire to extract rents from individuals. Income inequality results, not — as in the standard liberal narrative — from a highly competitive market, but from lack of market competition. Powerful players have built self-serving and inequality-generating institutions that are often codified in law and come to be mischaracterized — through an ingenious sleight of hand — as "laissez-faire capitalism" when, in fact, it is just the opposite. There would be less income inequality, if the economy were more competitive.
Apr 11, 2012 08:42 AM
 No wonder the top 10 percent of income earners in America already pay more than 70 percent of the taxes! The brackets punish them, the phase-outs penalize them, and the refundable tax credits add insult to the injury of “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.” There is nothing American about the U.S. tax code. It is straight out of the Communist Manifesto.
Apr 10, 2012 09:48 AM
 Americans, now 236 years removed from the Declaration of Independence, have acquiesced to far more tax tyranny - and I do not use that word lightly - than the British tax tyranny that ignited our revolt.
Apr 10, 2012 09:19 AM
 The modern juggernaut of the Welfare State trundles onward, crushing beneath its bureaucratic powers the ancient freedoms of one group after another—to serve the Welfare of All, of course. And yet there has been no great outcry, no widespread screams of outrage or anguish from our people. The reason for that is that they are firmly in the grip of the myth of the welfare state, the myth that their individual welfare depends upon and is served by the ineluctable ratchet-up in state powers. The politicians are paying them off with their own tax-monies and erstwhile liberties: the politicians use police powers to take from them their wealth and their individual liberties to determine how they will live, and then return part of this to them under government constraints—but only on the proviso that they support the politicians who use police powers to take away their wealth and their liberties.
Apr 09, 2012 01:22 PM
 Sebastian Haffner, a young German law student wrote a manuscript in the 1930s as the Nazis were taking control of the country (later published as Defying Hitler), in which he ponders the question, "What became of the Germans." How did "it" [the Nazi takeover] happen? Haffner writes that nobody saw what was to come with any clarity in the early days of the fascist transformation of the land in 1933, but that he "had a sense of what was in the air. I felt distinctly that what had happened so far was merely disgusting and no more. But what was in the offing had something apocalyptic about it."
Apr 06, 2012 11:04 AM
 Senator John McCain seeks to wrap himself and his neo-conservative cronies in Ronald Reagan's mantle to justify their war mongering. However, based on Reagan's actions, as opposed to the bogus, super-hawk image Neo-cons have fabricated of him, Reagan was an "isolationist" by the Neo-Cons' own definition. He ended the Cold War against America's greatest, most fearsome foe, without firing a shot and disingaged from meddling in a foreign civil war when it unnecessarily put our troops in harm's way.
Apr 06, 2012 10:02 AM
 In order to accommodate the modern administrative state, every single principle, consequence, and inference that comes from the Constitution's "one thing"--the enumerated powers doctrine--has systematically been purged from modern law with respect both to the scope of federal power and to the institutional form for its exercise.
Apr 04, 2012 09:16 PM
 U.S. Senate passes bill that would allow the federal government to prevent any Americans who owe back taxes from traveling outside the U.S. The bill includes a provision that would allow for the “revocation or denial” of a passport for anyone with “certain unpaid taxes” or “tax delinquencies”. The gates are swinging shut on prison America.
Apr 04, 2012 11:52 AM
 You either believe in the primacy of liberty, or you do not. The belief in personal freedom from state control is not negotiable. You cannot apply Keynes' economic dictum that "When the facts change, I change my mind" to this, though in this case there is no known evidence that the warrant-free examination of online, email and social network activity would pre-empt crimes.
Apr 04, 2012 11:04 AM
 The elites are neither imaginative nor facile. They tend to select repetitious stratagems from a sparse and brutal tool kit. They are not disappointing now. Brutality is increasingly the order of the day. Wars, depression, torture and general intimidation via Draconian laws and regulation are the order of the day. But "hope is the only thing stronger than fear," so they decrminilize at the edges of the drug war and free up the police state to assert greater control over the average chump.
Apr 03, 2012 11:08 AM
 Gingrich, Santorum, and Romney all have supported the individual mandate and universal health care coverage before Obama got it enacted into law while Obama oppposed the mandate until Congress rammed it down his throat. This is the extent of the national debate on healthcare: Two parties fighting over a corporatized health care system with subsidies and individual mandates, each one taking the position that it opposed a few years ago.
Apr 03, 2012 10:34 AM
 Increasingly federal efforts at tyranny are the proving grounds for follow-on state government efforts. Take the Internet; efforts to take it over begin at the federal level. That's the first and simplest option. But now they are likely starting to work their way down to state and even municipal levels if necessary. This is how the dialectic is pursued.
Apr 02, 2012 08:00 AM
 Governments touched off a recession due to their tariff wars, which they turned into the Great Depression with follow-on folly. They made the problem worse with “austerity” and “stimulus” (deficit spending and tax hikes). In the U.S., Congress increased the top income tax rate from 25% to 63%, and legislated an explosion of excise taxes. Then, they made the problem even worse with currency chaos and devaluation.
Mar 31, 2012 10:17 AM
 The early 21st century is addicted to war porn, a prime spectator sport consumed by global couch and digital potatoes. War porn took the limelight on the evening of September 11, 2001, when the George W Bush administration launched the "war on terror." Over a decade after the beginning of the war on terror, this is what the world is coming to; a lazy, virtually worldwide audience, jaded, dazed and distracted from distraction by distraction, helplessly hooked on the shabby atrocity exhibition of war porn.
Mar 30, 2012 05:23 PM
 America is a dangerous place to live in now, but the reason isn’t because of Islamic terrorists – it’s because of government bureaucrats, central planners run amok. The problem is that bureaucrats who MUST have war and expanded powers, including suppression of civil liberties, will change the laws to suit their narcissistic needs for more power. And America is dangerous because too many amongst the general population are no longer raised with a sense of moral values and personal responsibility. Americans seem to get easily swept up into a national fervor for war, for killing and death. Just look at these past ten years of destruction that our government has caused overseas, and the American people’s passive acceptance of it based on the government’s emotion-driven propaganda.
Mar 28, 2012 12:18 PM
 Book Review -- In his recent wonderful book, Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School, Ralph Raico gives Eugen Richter (1830-1906), the neglected hero of authentic German liberalism, his due. As I read the chapter, I kept feeling as if I was reading about Ron Paul. Free e-book and pdf download of Richter's prescient work of dystopian fiction, Pictures of a Socialist Future available at Mises.org
Mar 27, 2012 10:31 PM
 BOOK REVIEW -- “Hope. It is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective; a lot of hope is dangerous. A spark is fine as long as it’s contained. So, contain it.”
______ President Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland) explains to Head Gamemaker Seneca Crane (Wes Bentley) the Machavellian purpose behind the Hunger Games.
Mar 27, 2012 10:17 PM
 A belief in the alleged "virtues" of democracy disguises a hidden contribution to violence in our world. "Majority rule" is not only a mindset that helps to define "democracy," but necessarily promotes social conflict because of its inherent tendency to set groups against one another (e.g., 51% overwhelming the 49%). The idea that group action could take place based upon a consensus [i.e.,100% agreement] of its members is so foreign to our institutionalized conditioning that we dismiss it as utopian. But there are societies and communities in which groups will act only if all who are affected by the action agree. So-called "democratic" political systems based on majority rule cannot act consensually, as their modus operandi depends upon creating – and then managing – conflicts among people.
Mar 26, 2012 04:51 PM
 The United States is rotten with corruption but it occurs at the level of policy and contracts, between corporations, special interests, and Congress and by a chief executive who ignores the other two branches as well as the Constitution. It is done gracefully and usually legally, and people are none the wiser because they live perpetually with their heads in the sand. Mexicans know what kind of government they have. Americans do not.
Mar 24, 2012 11:23 AM
 Obama’s Plan C In the Global War On Terror is permanent, opened-ended war of targeted assassination and drone attacks without regard to congressional approval, without regard to national sovereignty, without regard to citizenship, without regard to cost and without regard to long-run effect on America and her people. Woe betide America if there is no alternative to endless war.
Mar 24, 2012 09:45 AM
 The more things change, the more they remain the same. On Wednesday, November 7, the day after the next president is elected, the government as we have come to know it—corrupt, bloated and controlled by big-money corporations, lobbyists and special interest groups—will be largely unchanged. And “we the people”—overtaxed, overpoliced, overburdened by big government, underrepresented by those who should speak for us and blissfully ignorant of the prison walls closing in on us—will continue to trudge along a path of misery.
Mar 22, 2012 07:42 AM
 Writing to Thomas Jefferson in 1815, Adams asked, "What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760–1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington." Yet, today one can go through an entire American life – through public or even private schools and universities, attending to the news and the political contests of our age – without ever hearing the case for freedom explicitly made.
Mar 22, 2012 07:12 AM
 Government is being overrun by the wrong kind of person – a trend that's been in motion for many years but has now reached a point of no return. A type of moral rot has become so prevalent that it's institutional in nature so there is not going to be any serious change in the direction in which the US is headed until a genuine crisis topples the existing order. Until then, the trend will accelerate. The reason is that a certain class of people – sociopaths – are now fully in control of major American institutions. Their beliefs and attitudes are insinuated throughout the economic, political, intellectual and psychological/spiritual fabric of the US.
Mar 20, 2012 10:38 AM
 “It’s a sickness,” says a politician recently elected to his city council: “It sets in after you’re elected the first time, or maybe even when you’re running for office. That sickness is 'thinking you’re smarter than everyone else.'”
Mar 17, 2012 11:20 AM
 Fear, ignorance and greed empower all governments, which are, as they must be, oligarchies backed up by force and violence wielded by a Praetorian Guard of police and military that enforces government exploitation of the people and steals their stuff. Democratic rituals disguise the tyranny and delude people into believing they are in control. Government cannot refrain from crime because it is inherently a criminal enterprise.
Mar 17, 2012 10:05 AM
 Video Version of Government for Dummies.
An Alien channels Socrates to explore the meaning and purpose of government.
Mar 17, 2012 09:01 AM
 Soon Brtitons can be watched everywhere they go in the UK. All their emails, texts and phone calls will be monitored and they can even be seen where cameras can't. Under a new anti-terrorism spy plan security companies will have real time access to all personal happenings at the click of a button.
Mar 16, 2012 09:41 AM
 ANOTHER AARP STAB IN THE BACK TO SENIORS -- The invite list for the secret meeting suggests that AARP is still very much open to cutting Social Security and Medicare, as a majority of this year's expected "thought leaders" have thoughts that involve slashing Social Security.
Mar 16, 2012 08:50 AM
 Through history, frightened establishments have dealt severely even with peaceful challenges to their power, which is why Socrates was forced to drink poison, Christ was crucified, Sir Thomas More was beheaded and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was sent to the Gulag.
Mar 15, 2012 08:02 AM
 Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says a little bit of inflation is OK. The reason a little inflation is not all right, and the reason inflation comes suddenly, is expectations.
Mar 14, 2012 07:29 AM
 People who act as instruments of government do not pay a personal price for usurping parental authority. The reason is Americans, unlike Americans of yesteryear, have become timid and, as such, come to accept all manner of intrusive governmental acts. Can you imagine what a rugged American, such as one portrayed by John Wayne, would have done to a government tyrant who confiscated his daughter's lunch or facilitated her abortion without his permission?
Mar 10, 2012 09:04 AM
 Prices are rising while Washington politicians hatch back-room deals to mask inflation and cut Social Security. SIGN the SOCIAL SECURITY INSTITUTE PETITION to protect Social Security against another Congressional Raid on benefits.
Mar 09, 2012 08:48 AM
 "Sterilization" is an attempt by Fed leaders to reassure people that the big central banks can remove money they printed up from the system as well as add it in. But after a while, one who follows this stuff simply gets the feeling they are "making it up" with increasing desperation.
Mar 09, 2012 08:14 AM
 Very few legislators have ever had to eat their own cooking, to run a business governed by the cumulative weight of the laws and regulations they supported. The most famous example is George McGovern who, after years as a liberal U.S. Senator from South Dakota and an unsuccessful presidential campaign, retired to run an inn in Connecticut. He wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal decrying all the useless regulations that burdened his business. This, of course, delighted his conservative critics but did nothing to lighten the regulatory burden.
Mar 07, 2012 03:25 PM
 Professional police forces, when first created in the mid-19th century in Britain and the United States, were simply understood as ordinary citizens paid to exercise full-time the same rights of posse comitatus — still preserved in the doctrine of “citizen’s arrest” — inherent in citizenship. They were not regarded as holding some special status under the law.
Mar 05, 2012 01:34 PM
 Over the last several decades of American political life the idea of liberty has taken a back seat to that of democracy.
Mar 05, 2012 10:14 AM
 The ubiquitous fantasy of “homeland security,” pushed hard by the federal government in the wake of 9/11, has been widely embraced by the public. It has also excited intense weapons- and techno-envy among police departments and municipalities vying for the latest in armor and spy equipment. Stephen Salisbury spells out just what citizens opposing government policy will be up against -- think unmanned drones, tanks, and super-sophisticated surveillance systems from New York City to Scottsbluff, Nebraska -- in the months ahead.
Mar 03, 2012 07:57 AM
 Means testing Social Security would strip many seniors of their benefits, for which they've paid 50 years of taxes, just because they worked hard, saved and succeeded financially. That would set off a fury storm among even middle-aged people who already had been paying into Social Security for 30 or 40 years. Eliminating checks for people with incomes that make them “rich” transforms Social Security from an “everyone pays, everyone collects” earned-benefit program into welfare. The Irony is that the greatest supporters of means testing are Republicans who profess to destest the welfare state.
Mar 02, 2012 08:05 AM
 Do you think that you are free? Most Americans would still probably answer "yes" to that question, but is that really the case? In the film Edge of Darkness, Mel Gibson stated that "everything is illegal in Massachusetts". Well, the same could pretty much be said for the United States as a whole.
Mar 01, 2012 01:08 PM
 As the Roman denarius was debased, Rome became an economic basket case. Desperate times called for desperate legislation as the fabric of society was slowly torn apart by inflation.
Mar 01, 2012 11:51 AM
 The Fed's 2% inflation target fails to take into account that whatever measure is used to determine price inflation, be it CPI, core CPI, PCE, etc., will always be chosen with an eye towards underreporting the true rate of inflation and price rises. One need only look at what is taking place in Argentina today, where the government publishes an official CPI figure that is often less than half that reported by private sources. A similar situation exists in this country, where economists calculating CPI according to the original basket of goods have determined that price inflation has increased 9.5% per year since 2006, rather than the 2.25% reported by the government.
Feb 28, 2012 12:10 PM
 The government should let citizens experiment, as the great economist F.A. Hayek advocated, with developing their own monies, whether it be gold, silver, a commodity basket or whatever without imposing a tax on transactions involving these monies. Americans now do have the legal right to make contracts in gold, as long as both buyer and seller agree but onerous taxation of them make them impracticable as a means of creating alternative monies.
Feb 25, 2012 02:22 PM
 BOOK REVIEW - AMERICA AND THE IMPERIALISM OF IGNORANCE: US FOREIGN POLICY SINCE 1945 -- Andrew Alexander argues that communism never posed an existential threat to the security of the West. Stalin’s primary aim was the preservation of his regime, and his only objective in Eastern Europe was to create a defensive buffer against any German advance. Not only did he lack the resources, the plans or the will to conquer Western Europe: he actively opposed communist revolutions around the world.
Feb 25, 2012 10:32 AM
 Federal and state spending on social welfare is approaching $1 trillion a year, $17 trillion since the Great Society was launched, not to mention private charity. But we have witnessed a headlong descent into social decomposition. Half of all children born to women under 30 in America now are illegitimate. Three in 10 white children are born out of wedlock, as are 53 percent of Hispanic babies and 73 percent of black babies. Rising right along with the illegitimacy rate is the drug-use rate, the dropout rate, the crime rate and the incarceration rate.
Feb 15, 2012 08:59 AM
Judge Napolitano reminds us of Thomas Jefferson's admonition to America: "When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny." The government toadies at Fox News responded by taking him off the air. Cowards!
Feb 15, 2012 08:38 AM
 Government monopolies are always focused on pivotal control points that render populations helpless and dependent upon the state for survival. The intent of these bureaucracies is to control very specific aspects of our lives, which is why the government insists that they are the only ones able to provide these services. This is a strategic maneuver which is targeted at specific trade sectors that are absolutely vital to the lives of individuals in order to enslave people by keeping them so sheltered that they forget how to take care of themselves, or even forget that they have the ability to take care of themselves.
Feb 10, 2012 08:34 AM
 There are a lot of different options as to how to set up and operate a gold standard but they all have the same goal: Maintain the value of the currency at a certain gold-price parity.
Feb 08, 2012 11:24 AM
 President Obama has adopted the Bush/Cheney Police-State, Empire America agenda, in fact greatly expanding what they did in many areas. From the Bush assault on civil liberties under the notion that the President could do whatever he wants, in secret and with no checks, to anyone he accuses without trial of being a Terrorist – even including eavesdropping on their communications or detaining them without due process. President Obama not only has done the same thing; he has gone much farther than mere eavesdropping or detention: he has asserted the power even to kill citizens without due process.
Feb 07, 2012 07:53 AM
 During my year in Afghanistan, visiting and talking with U.S. troops and their Afghan partners, my duties with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force took me into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level. How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding and behind an array of more than seven years of optimistic statements by U.S. senior leaders in Afghanistan? No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan. But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.
Feb 06, 2012 04:47 PM
 America is coming apart at the seams. Once the deterioration was under way, a self-reinforcing loop took hold as traditionally powerful social norms broke down. Because the process has become self-reinforcing, repealing the reforms of the 1960s (something that's not going to happen) would change the trends slowly at best.
Feb 01, 2012 10:29 AM
 Francis Grund observed as early as 1837 that the U.S Constitution was a simple document, yet it proved sufficient because of the unique qualities of those early Americans: "[The Constitution] can only suffice a people habitually correct in their actions," Grund wrote. "Change the domestic habits of the Americans," he added, and you would wind up with a different country in spite of our Constitution. By the 1970s Tom Wolfe could describe an emerging ‘me' generation whose pursuit of self-fulfillment one could see reflected in everything from declining worker productivity to rising numbers of divorces and children born to unmarried parents. Now comes Charles Murray arguing convincingly that the nightmare has spread far beyond the lowest economic rungs of America. Whither goest America?
Jan 31, 2012 02:43 PM
 The Federal Reserve announced last week, just months after promising a near zero percent rate of interest until 2013, that weak economic aggregates ensure a zero rate until 2014. The two aren't unrelated. If we ignore the utter arrogance of any governmental body presuming to know the infinite decisions of lenders and borrowers such that it could divine the proper cost of credit, the simple truth is that the Fed's continued attempts to make credit artificially cheap are related to the ongoing economic weakness that causes those at our central bank to promise low rates as far as the eye can see.
Jan 31, 2012 11:18 AM
Economic sanctions and the EU's oil embargo against Iran may backfire and decrease the value of or even destroy the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency. Efforts by India and China to circumvent the EU's oil embrago against Iran by trading oil in U.S. dollars appear to be spreading.
Jan 29, 2012 08:19 AM
Why does the throng (us) need the permission of the Dot (a tiny little gang of control freaks) to do anything?
Jan 28, 2012 07:16 AM
 This week saw the launch of a popular uprising in Sicily, by a group known as the ‘Movimento dei Forconi’ or ‘Pitchfork Movement’. This is not an uprising of self absorbed youth who want more government handouts; but of producers who are being pushed into poverty by government taxes and regulation. The organizers are middle aged and older; this is significant, as most power and wealth is held by this generation and they have now drawn a line in the sand.
Jan 28, 2012 06:45 AM
 If America wishes to lead the world, let us do it by example, as we once did, not by hectoring every nation on earth to adopt the American way, which as of now, does not seem to be working all that well for Americans.
Jan 24, 2012 03:31 PM
 The sometimes euphoric commentary about SOPA, and concerning the allegedly significant "victory" of the legislation being set aside for now is wildly out of touch with the realities of State power -- and with the nature of the State itself. The essence of the State is domination, oppression, brutalization and exploitation. We appear to possess some small remaining slivers of liberty only because the State has not chosen to utilize and consistently apply the powers it already has -- at least, not yet.
Jan 24, 2012 06:28 AM
 Staunch advocates of private property might be expected to support “intellectual property rights”—patents and copyrights—but these days that expectation is more than likely to be wrong. IP has come in for a thrashing from libertarians, among others, in the last few years, and it may be all over but the funeral.
Jan 23, 2012 07:17 AM
 Bush and Cheney’s cronies in big business helped walk us right into the blast furnace of financial meltdown. Then they rushed to save the banks with taxpayer money. Now, it’s startling the number of high-ranking Obama officials who also have spun through the revolving door between the White House and the sacred halls of investment banking. President Obama may call them "fat cats" and stir the rabble against them with populist rhetoric when it serves his purpose, but after the fiscal fiasco, he allowed the culprits to escape virtually scot-free. And when he’s here in New York, he dines with them frequently and eagerly accepts their big contributions.
Jan 22, 2012 10:08 AM
 New Hampshire looking to ban state employees who work with the public from wearing perfume. Of course, body odor is fairly offensive to the senses as well. Don’t we deserve protection from that? Clearly the proper balance here is for the federal government to require regular showers and the application of deodorant, but ban all but the unscented varieties. All of this would be proper under the authority of the Commerce Clause, of course.
Jan 20, 2012 10:51 AM
 "Economists everywhere agree" gold standard is bad idea. Fiat currency can be inflated at whim - such as the greenback during the “Civil War” or the Federal Reserve note when losing its silver/gold backing in the late 60’s. Meanwhile, the value of gold is incredibly stable relative to other commodities. Which one is the bad idea again?
Jan 19, 2012 08:59 AM
 Prior to the American Revolution, eminent British jurist William Blackstone described Parliament as possessing “sovereign and uncontrollable authority in making, confirming, enlarging, restraining, abrogating, repealing, reviving, and expounding of laws.” The American revolutionaries rejected the idea that a legislature, or any other branch of government, could possess ultimate power. In June 1776, the Virginia Declaration of Rights averred, “all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the People; that magistrates are their trustees and servants, and at all times amenable to them.”
Jan 17, 2012 06:42 AM
 As the Praetorian Class (military, police, prosecutors, judges and other various "security" and "justice" personnel) ascends, the clear, albeit unstated, message that emerges is that actions and events of regular citizens only occur with its tacit consent. Whether driving on roads, traveling in the air, visiting public land, walking down the street or even living in your own home, every action you take is predicated on permission of the Praetorians. By preconditioning the populace to enforcement of its edicts, most of which are completely arbitrary, the Praetorian Class sets itself up for a high degree of autonomy in its actions--a state within a state. This is confirmed by the fact that consequences for malfeasance within the Praetorian Class are almost never observed, and when it happens, it typically becomes a grotesque spectacle in which one of their own is sacrificed as an example, so as to keep appearances of effective internal controls.
Jan 16, 2012 09:27 AM
 One of the few virtues of the federal government has been its inefficiency. With functions spread out across different agencies and duplicated powers and responsibilities, it has often proved unable to harm the economy as much as it could owing to power games and competition among agencies. Now the president wants to change all that. He wants a ruthlessly efficient government to intrude in all aspects of our lives without internal checks and balances.
Jan 13, 2012 08:51 AM
 VIDEO: Faking It -- How the media serves the war machine and manipulates the world into war.
Jan 13, 2012 08:17 AM
 BOOK REVIEW: Richard Betts’s new book, "American Force: Dangers, Delusions and Dilemmas in National Security," is an indictment of many of his fellow members of the national-security policy-making elite—for their failure to adapt to a changing world, their inadequate analysis of costs and benefits, and their generally sloppy thinking about several security-related concepts on which Betts gives us instruction. He pins blame for misdirections in U.S. security policy over the past two decades squarely on this elite rather than on larger streams of public opinion.
Jan 13, 2012 07:54 AM
 Three reasons U.S. Establishment wants to go to war with Iran: 1) US government is committed to using its superior military and economic position to achieve world hegemony. 2) Israel’s desire to eliminate all support for the Palestinians and for Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. 3) To deter or slow China’s rise as a military and economic power by controlling China’s access to energy.
Jan 10, 2012 12:49 PM
 The American criminal "justice" system has been implemented with malice aforethought. When one-third of the US population has a criminal record, the system is not merely broken, it has approached the stage of terminal authoritarianism, even totalitarianism. It survives only because of ignorance, fear ... and money. The legal profession in the United States is a professional cartel where legislating lawyers and regulators produce thousands of new enforceable laws and regulations every year; judges, prosecutors, and private sector counsel lock arms to ensure that legal invoices, (which total almost 10 per cent of GDP – almost $1.4 trillion annually), are paid as a priority surpassed only by the claims of government. Prosecutors in the US justice system receive extraordinary protection and are rarely if ever exposed to the consequences of their unethical and illegal actions that ruin lives of the "guilty" and their families alike.
Jan 10, 2012 12:06 PM
 Is there a link between cancer and the polio vaccine? There is a good chance that there is, according to a Baylor University study released on February 18, 1999 and published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. At the time, the announcement sent shockwaves throughout the medical establishment and caused a great deal of public alarm. After all, who hasn't had at least one polio shot?
Jan 09, 2012 06:37 AM
 Ahead of the Republican primary Tuesday, there’s no sign that the populist conservative movement is poised to shape the presidential results in the “Live Free or Die” state — or anywhere else, for that matter.
Jan 07, 2012 11:41 AM
 If we are going to keep committed, experienced physicians from retiring early or taking another job where they stop practicing medicine, we must free doctors from oppressive price controls and expensive regulations that are choking their practices.
Jan 04, 2012 08:03 AM
 As Leon Trotsky believed in advancing world communist revolution, neocons and democratists similarly believe we have some inherent right to intervene in nations that fail to share our views and values. But where did we acquire this right? Would we want foreigners funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into our election of 2012?
Jan 03, 2012 09:59 AM
 America’s election season degrades mainstream political discourse even beyond its usual lowly state. The worst attributes of our political culture — obsession with trivialities, the dominance of horserace “reporting,” and mindless partisan loyalties — become more pronounced than ever. Meanwhile, the actually consequential acts of the U.S. Government and the permanent power factions that control it — covert endless wars, consolidation of unchecked power, the rapid growth of the Surveillance State and the secrecy regime, massive inequalities in the legal system, continuous transfers of wealth from the disappearing middle class to large corporate conglomerates — drone on with even less attention paid than usual.
Dec 31, 2011 08:14 AM
 Inflation is indistinguishable in its effects from counterfeiting, therefore the central-bank bureaucrats are simply counterfeiters with grandiose titles; their sacred monetary policy is nothing more than “legalized counterfeiting.” Inflation is “new money issued by the banking system, under the aegis of government.”
Dec 31, 2011 07:35 AM
 We seem unable to appreciate that much of the Middle East detests our culture, abhors our presence, loathes Israel and is as committed to Quranic absolutes as devout evangelical Christians are to biblical truths. Our one-man, one-vote democratists who would remake the world in our image and whose ideology has guided foreign policy for the Bush-Obama decade failed to understand what our Founding Fathers taught about majoritarian democracy.
Dec 30, 2011 08:50 AM
 The Fed has no authority for a bailout of Europe. Chairman Bernanke promised Congress more openness and "better communication." It is time for the Fed chairman to provide an honest accounting to Congress of what is going on.
Dec 29, 2011 08:58 AM
 Imagine having a surgery with no knives involved. At TEDMED, Yoav Medan shares a technique that uses MRI to find such issues as brain lesions, uterine fibroids and several kinds of cancerous growths.
Dec 28, 2011 07:16 AM
 For children reared on a diet of CGI blockbusters and 3D cartoon characters, the titles may be unfamiliar. But these are the 20 classic films that experts believe schoolchildren should watch in order to understand the power of cinema.
Dec 28, 2011 07:06 AM
 Government is a natural phenomenon, an expression of power relationships, in which some people seek to dominate others by force. These dominators gather ‘insiders’ together so that they can take money, power and status away from other people, the ‘outsiders.’
Dec 27, 2011 02:47 PM
 In December 1991, the mighty, feared Soviet Union collapsed under its own rotten weight. Its disintegration could easily have ignited World War III with the US and NATO. That it did not was due to two remarkable men: Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and chief ally, Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze.I consider Gorbachev one of the 20th century’s greatest men, perhaps the greatest for his achievements and moral courage.
Dec 26, 2011 10:00 AM
 C.S. Lewis warned us about people like NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman, saying: "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
Dec 23, 2011 10:51 AM
 In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial written by editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz, the newspaper comes close to accusing Ron Paul of outright treason. In a prime editorial slot at one of the world's most prestigious newspapers, a member of the board (Rabinowitz) calls a top US presidential candidate one of the "best-known propagandists for our enemies," which sounds uncomfortably close to the language of the recently passed language describing actions for which the president may instruct the military to detain American citizens on U.S. soil indefinitely without charge or trial.
Dec 21, 2011 03:05 PM
 The notion that what Wall Street firms did was merely unethical and not illegal is not just mistaken but preposterous: most everyone who works in the financial services industry understands that fraud right now is not just pervasive but epidemic, with many of the biggest banks committing entire departments to the routine commission of fraud and perjury – every single one of the major banks, for instance, devotes significant manpower to robosigning affidavits for foreclosures and credit card judgments, acts which are openly and inarguably criminal.
Dec 20, 2011 11:07 AM
 There is an enormous tax extraction cost for the government to obtain each additional dollar of revenue. Estimates of extraction costs typically run from $1.40 to well over $2.50 of lost output for each revenue dollar the government obtains. In addition, there is vast literature showing how specific government spending programs have little or even negative benefit and, as a result, are actually wealth and job destroyers. Thus, the real deadweight loss of additional government taxing and spending is estimated to be in the $3 to $4 range.
Dec 20, 2011 10:59 AM
 Even the liberal Yale economic professor and chairman of Lyndon Johnson's Council of Economic Advisers, Arthur Okun, understood government's limited ability to redistribute income without so damaging the economy that the effort became counterproductive -- a phenomenon Okun labeled "the big tradeoff". Even if one accepts the premise that it is right and just to take from some to give to others in the name of the "greater good," transferring wealth from one social stratum to another is like trying to carry water from one place to another in a leaky bucket. Much of the water leaks away before the bucket reaches is destination, and everyone is left high and dry. President Obama doesn't seem to understand this phenomenon.
Dec 19, 2011 07:19 AM
 Who is the real enemy Bradley Manning is accused of "aiding and abetting?" The real “enemy” here isn’t the Taliban, it isn’t al-Qaeda (or what’s left of it), nor is it any foreign government or entity: it’s the American people. That’s who the US government lives in deathly fear of – the fear that if only Americans knew and understood what was being done all over the world in their name, they’d put a stop to it once and for all.
Dec 16, 2011 08:17 PM
 It is established fact that we were lied into war — deceived into believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction ready to use and was the man behind 9/11. But, equally astonishing is that while Bush & Co. planned this war from Sept. 11, 2001, if not before, no one seems to have thought it through before launching it. Yet the disaster that may still befall us in Iraq has not in the least inhibited the war hawks who, even now, are advancing identical arguments for a new war, on Iran, a country three times the size of Iraq.
Dec 15, 2011 08:11 AM
 Obama has dropped his threat to veto the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which provides for indefinitie military detention of American citizens on U.S. soil, and the bill is now expected to be signed into law. It was the Obama White House that demanded the bill apply to U.S. citizens in the first place. NDAA, which would codify into law the indefinite detention without trial of American citizens is about to be passed and sent to Obama’s desk to be signed into law, even as some news outlets still erroneously report that the legislation does not apply to U.S. citizens.
Dec 14, 2011 08:09 AM
 Pat Buchanan asks: "Given the hostile attitude of Greeks, Italians and many others to years of austerity to pay back debts, given the growing reluctance of the European Central Bank, Germany and Northern Europe to bailing out deadbeats, given the lack of resources available, are not defaults in the eurozone almost inevitable?"
Dec 13, 2011 06:52 AM
 President Obama tells CBS 60-Minutes: "The math is the math. You can’t lower rates and raise revenue, unless you’re getting revenue from someplace else." Obama's math isn't Jack Kennedy's math, and he's no Jack Kennedy.
Dec 12, 2011 12:34 PM
 Evalulating the economic policies of the Roosevelt Admininstration during the Great Depression, FDR's Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., said: "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . .We have never made good on our promises. . .I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . and an enormous debt to boot.”
Dec 12, 2011 08:26 AM
 To demonstrate to the American people that we in Congress have skin in the game when it comes to reducing deficit spending and that we intend to lead by example on this matter, we must put an end to pensions for members of Congress.
Dec 12, 2011 07:23 AM
 Taxation by traffic citation is the most profitable way for government to collect from us. Increased fees and penalties are the sneaky way to raise taxes without raising taxes. I just wonder how much running a red light is going to cost next year. Or the year after that?. $800.00? Maybe a $1,000.00. Where and when does it end?
Dec 10, 2011 08:46 AM
 Last Tuesday, US President Barack Obama delivered a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, echoing Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 sermon in the same town. Roosevelt’s speech, which Robert S. La Forte called “a milestone along the road to the modern all-powerful state,” arraigned the “overdivision of governmental powers” and called for a “New Nationalism.” The president’s symbolism in choosing Osawatomie as venue offers clues about his particular brand of political philosophy.
Dec 09, 2011 09:25 AM
 What if the people's representatives subverted the Constitution? What if the ultimate target in the government's war on terror is all who believe in personal freedom? What if that includes YOU? What do we do about it?
Dec 08, 2011 08:17 AM
 The government is not ready – will never be ready – to cut spending prior to a crisis that forces them to cut spending. Only a financial crisis will stop the government from spending. So, in the meantime, it is best to take whatever tax cuts we can get. This increases the deficit. But, there are two ways to have a deficit: (1) with higher taxes, or (2) with lower taxes. Congress is going to spend. Which way is better for liberty? The lower tax/high deficit way.
Dec 07, 2011 05:58 PM
 Today, 70 years after Pearl Harbor, a remarkable secret history, written from 1943 to 1963, has come to light. It is Herbert Hoover’s explanation of what happened before, during and after the world war that may prove yet the death knell of the West. Edited by historian George Nash, Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath is a searing indictment of FDR and the men around him as politicians who lied prodigiously about their desire to keep America out of war, even as they took one deliberate step after another to take us into war.
Dec 06, 2011 08:55 AM
 Deliberately create problems, and then offer only those solutions that result in the expansion of government. Create conditions so frightful at home and abroad that the abadnonment of personal liberties and national sovereignty will appear as a reasonable price for a return to domestic tranquility and world peace.
Dec 06, 2011 07:24 AM
 Government reports consistently misinterpret tax and income data to perpetuate the myth that free markets enrich a handful and impoverish the masses. In fact, if Congress raises top tax rates on capital gains and dividends, the highest income earners would report less income from capital gains and dividends and hold more tax-exempt bonds. Such tax policies would reduce the share of reported income of the top earners almost as effectively as the recession the policies would likely provoke. The top 1% would then pay a much smaller portion of federal income taxes, just as they did in 1979. And the other 99% would pay more. As the CBO found, "the federal income tax was notably more progressive in 2007 [with lower tax rates] than in 1979 [with higher tax rates]."
Dec 06, 2011 07:02 AM
 This is the beginning of the end. Both the EU and US are politically paralyzed, seeming only to be able to make compromises that involve more spending, more debt, and more central planning. The results are all too predictable to free-market thinkers: bailouts leading to moral hazard, low interest rates leading to ballooning debt, and eventually a cascade of systemic failures - leading to more bailouts. This was confirmed yet again on Wednesday when central bankers on both sides of the Atlantic announced a coordinated tidal wave of new money to bailout the Western banking system yet again. Now, we're left with a world where the only thing you can trust is the gold and silver in your pocket.
Dec 05, 2011 06:38 AM
 The government's joint policy of keeping interest rates near zero and then taxing nominal (unadjusted for inflation) returns on saving and investment clearly aims to expropriate private wealth on a massive scale. The only plausible alternative interpretation of these policies requires us to believe that the government officials who set these policies are complete idiots about basic economics.
Dec 04, 2011 09:10 AM
 The amount of gold and silver in existence is irrelevant to the ability to use gold or silver as money. The fallacy of quantity is the number one way apologists for fiat currency (money not redeemable in silver or gold) attempt to invalidate the Gold Standard. It's the number one way they attempt to brainwash you into using paper currency, i.e., fiat currency. The reason is simple. These people (elite bankers and corrupt congressmen) want us all using paper money becasue they can endlessly print paper money − but they can't print up gold or silver.
Dec 03, 2011 08:48 PM
 On July 21, 2008, as the economy was melting down, then secretary of the treasury and former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson met with around a dozen hedge-fund managers and Wall Street executives to discuss the possibility of the government's putting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into conservatorship. One hedge fund manager revealed he was shocked that Secretary Paulson blabbed specifics, and the hedge fund managers therefore believed the Treasury Department would implement the plan. Seven weeks later, it did. This kind of meeting happens all the time.
Nov 28, 2011 08:46 AM
 No newly elected president in memory, neither John F. Kennedy nor Ronald Reagan, had the extraordinary response to his election as Barack Obama. Obama had convinced the electorate that he would end the wars, stop the violation of law by the US government, end the regime of illegal torture, close the torture prison of Guantanamo, and attend to the real needs of the American people rather than stuff the pockets of the military/security complex with taxpayers’ money. Once in office, Obama renewed and extended the Bush/Cheney/neoconservative wars. He validated the Bush regime’s assaults on the US Constitution. He left Wall Street in charge of US economic policy, he absolved the Bush regime of its crimes, and he assigned to the American people the financial cost necessary to preserve the economic welfare of the mega-rich.
Nov 28, 2011 08:11 AM
 In twenty-first-century America, “rights” are increasingly meant for those who behave themselves and don’t exercise them. And if you happen to be part of a government in which no criminal act of state -- torture, kidnapping, the assassination of U.S. citizens abroad, the launching of wars of aggression -- will ever bring a miscreant to court, only two crimes evidently exist: blowing a whistle or expressing your opinion.
Nov 28, 2011 07:41 AM
 The pace of US intervention across the globe is picking up speed, even as the world-wide economic crisis threatens to bring down the Empire – and the response to this accelerated imperialism drives a growing global backlash. All this will come back to haunt us – indeed, it already has, and I’m not just talking about how terrorism is the unacknowledged offspring of US intervention. The economic blowback alone will be severe enough to destroy us: we are well down the road to bankruptcy, and a few more downgradings of US debt will have us in the same condition as Greece.
Nov 26, 2011 12:19 PM
 “The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will give this president—and every future president — the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world. The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself,” writes Chris Anders of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.
Nov 25, 2011 08:48 AM
 America forgot what made it so prosperous; it forgot the warnings of its early founders about, "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations - entangling alliances with none." With the Patriot Act and literally thousands of other acts, rules, regulations and laws, Americans can make a case for being the most enslaved in human history. Many in the US are awakening to the fact that they are becoming trapped.
Nov 25, 2011 08:05 AM
 Ron Paul invented the Tea Party Movement and used it as a springboard to highlight libertarian and constitutional issues during his 2008 presidential campaign. Soon after, it was co-opted by key right-wing political and media influencers, associating itself less with a libertarian manifesto and more with emerging figures within the Republican Establishment. Now it is has morphed into nothing more than a block of voters whom the Republican party can rely to strike a deal with during an election cycle. Has the Occupy Movement gone the same route on the left?
Nov 24, 2011 09:05 AM
 The original Plymouth Colony was organized as a model socialist society -- "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." According to the colony's governor, William Bradford, "All profits & benefits that are got by trade, working, fishing, or any other means" were to be placed in the common stock of the colony, and that, "all such persons as are of this colony, are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock." A person was to put into the common stock all he could, and take out only what he needed. Bradford reported that the colonists went hungry for years because they refused to work in the fields. "Young men that are most able and fit for labor and service" complained about being forced to "spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children." They preferred instead to steal food. The colony was riddled with "corruption," and with "confusion and discontent." The crops were small because "much was stolen both by night and day, before it became scarce eatable."
Nov 23, 2011 06:35 PM
 As soon as the Tea Party appeared, groups like Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks—staffed by experienced Republican operatives and funded by the usual corporate coffers—swept in to offer training and organizational support. The Tea Party has a hard and fast expiration date: the first day of the next Republican presidency.
Nov 22, 2011 07:57 AM
 [Our] conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State. . . The State . . . is a spiritual and ethical entity for securing the political, juridical, and economic organization of the nation, an organization which in its origin and growth is a manifestation of the spirit. _____ Benito Mussolini
Nov 22, 2011 07:24 AM
 The major world governments are in the process of destroying the value of the money their citizens hold. The world monetary system is in deep trouble. The United States has more than 8,000 tons of gold, with a current market value of almost a half-trillion dollars, which would be enough to move to some form of a gold standard. A gold standard for money is not a panacea, but it is far better than an undisciplined fiat standard.
Nov 22, 2011 07:06 AM
 Big finance has achieved its present size on the back of numerous policy decisions - some going back centuries. Many of these policies had the intention of protecting the general public, but often had the unintended consequence of enriching bankers beyond the product of their labor. Rather than adopting destructively envious tax increases, adopting new policies that require financial industry participants to shoulder more of the risks they create will reduce the burden Wall Street imposes on the general public, will shrink the industry, and will release human talent for higher and better purposes.
Nov 18, 2011 11:37 AM
 DC Beltway Elites think a sequester would be catastrophic, leading to “savage” and “draconian” budget cuts. This is nonsense. A sequester simply means spending climbs by $2 trillion between now and 2021 rather than climbing by $2.1 trillion. If that’s “savage” and “draconian,” then I suppose we should hospitalize 300-pounders for anorexia when they trim their toenails.
Nov 17, 2011 09:51 AM
 Survivors of concentration camps report that the secret to staying alive was often simple: those who were near the kitchen made it; those who were not didn’t. In our modern, degenerate form of capitalism the secret is the same: you want to be near the kitchen…the place where the food is handed out. You want to be near the government. That’s why there are so many lobbyists in Washington. And why the only city in America where property prices are going up is Washington, DC.
Nov 16, 2011 12:33 PM
 People in the White House and Congress lie to you; the difference is that on the Hill it’s not the same lie told by the same seven people. Or at least that was true until the super committee was created. Now, instead of politicians lying to their constituents and reporters, they are lying to themselves. Not rationalizing, or trimming the truth, or speaking in euphemisms. Lying. Bald. Faced. Lying.
Nov 16, 2011 09:16 AM
 Would a farmer who put out a trough of slop be surprised if it attracted a bunch of pigs? Then why are activists who promote enlarging the size and scope of government shocked when one program after another is hijacked by corporations that find it easier to seek favors in Washington than customers in the marketplace? And, knowing that such corruption is inevitable, why do mainstream media dismiss those who advocate curtailing government powers as corporate stooges?
Nov 16, 2011 08:49 AM
 The thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted is starting to disappear. Beating up old people for no reason seems to be catching on all over the country.
Nov 14, 2011 01:32 PM
 “I know that you’re afraid … you’re afraid of us. You’re afraid of change. … I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin. … I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible.” Anonymous: "Expect us."
Nov 12, 2011 02:57 PM
 The mainstream U.S. news media is again ratcheting up tensions with Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons program by hailing a new report on the topic. But the press is once more falling down on its duty to examine the allegations carefully, writes Robert Parry. So, rather than undertake a careful examination of the report’s claims, America’s preeminent newspapers are once more putting on display their deep-seated biases regarding the Middle East.
Nov 11, 2011 07:35 AM
 Flynt Leverett, former Senior Director for Middle East Affairs at the National Security Council, discusses how the most crucial part of the IAEA report on Iran – that declared nuclear material isn’t being diverted to weapons manufacturing – has been buried under a heap of unsubstantiated rumors and accusations; the evidence that new IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano is much more cozy with the US than his predecessor Mohamed ElBaradei; why those who defend Iran’s rights under the NPT aren’t necessarily minions of the Ayatollah; the end-times theology of all the major Abrahamic religions; and why Israel’s real “existential threat” is from losing the support of Jews worldwide, not from an incredibly improbable Iran attack.
Nov 11, 2011 06:49 AM
 Neoconservatives have merged Teddy Roosevelt's bombast and Woodrow Wilson’s hubris to create a monstrous hybrid that combines all the worst impulses in American intellectual life: in foreign affairs, this amounts to a messianic militarism that openly proclaims "global hegemony" as the proper goal of American foreign policy. This reflects the origins of neoconservatism on the far left and its evolution into a kind of Trotskyism turned inside out, with George W. Bush’s wars fought in the name of a "global democratic revolution" displacing, in their hearts, the old Leninist dream of an international communist revolution. But, the push for war with Iran isn’t coming exclusively from the same old neoconservative gang of intellectual hoodlums and dubious "scholars" who are trying to pull this one off. As the war cries get louder, the "liberal" hawks will take wing once again, flying in perfect formation with their neoconservative cousins, the whole flock cawing and shrieking like vultures over a battlefield.
Nov 09, 2011 07:43 AM
 There is nothing concrete in the IAEA report on Iran to support a nefarious plot to obtain a nuke: only hearsay descriptions of blueprints and computer models, including various publicly available scientific studies authored by Iranian scientists. According to A.Q. Khan, what was transferred to the Iranians was know-how: theoretical knowledge and contacts with suppliers. Yet throughout the IAEA report, although there are plenty of instances where Iran is alleged to have sought this or that dual use component, we are never told if they actually succeeded in procuring the item. While the report attributes its information to “Member States,” why would it not be surprising to learn that this “intelligence” comes from the same folks who brought us the Niger uranium forgeries?
Nov 09, 2011 07:29 AM
 CNN is the Bill Clinton of liberal media; it continuously lies to every watcher it reaches, yet it continues onward without apparent difficulty, without even a brush with bankruptcy. Now CNN has decided one of the main reasons for the Euro-crisis is rampant tax evasion in Southern Europe rather than governments that print tens and hundreds of trillions of paper money while instructing their controlled media to run stories about average people who are struggling desperately to keep their houses and provide their families with food. The problem isn't taxes or a lack therefore. The problem is a conspiracy to create world government – and a power elite that will lie and cheat and steal to do it.
Nov 08, 2011 08:44 AM
 When it comes to the idea of the rule of law, the American public is in a state of deep denial. Despite being surrounded by evidence that the law is inherently political in nature, most people are nevertheless able to convince themselves that it is an embodiment of objective rules of justice which they have a moral obligation to obey. For with the acceptance of the myth of the rule of law comes a blindness to the fact that laws are merely the commands of those with political power, and an increased willingness to submit oneself to the yoke of the state. Once one is truly convinced that the law is an impersonal, objective code of justice rather than an expression of the will of the powerful, one is likely to be willing not only to relinquish a large measure of one's own freedom, but to enthusiastically support the state in the suppression of others' freedom as well.
Nov 07, 2011 08:34 AM
 Governments do not create wealth; they drain it. Governments do not provide peace; they ruin it. Governments do not guarantee the perpetuation of civil society; they abrogate it. These are the unfortunate facts. Government cannot be fixed by better government. Government cannot be fixed by the right leadership. The only way to make government better is to make it smaller.
Nov 06, 2011 06:26 AM
 Most so-called stock analysts on Wall Street are little more than cheerleaders—afraid of rocking the boat at their firms, afraid of alienating the companies they cover and drawing the wrath of their superiors. The proportion of sell ratings on Wall Street remains under 5%, even today, despite the fact that any first-year MBA student can tell you that 95% of the stocks cannot be winners.
Nov 04, 2011 04:42 PM
 American politicians have become little more than money launderers in the trafficking of power and policy—fewer than six degrees of separation from the spirit and tactics of Tony Soprano. Americans have learned the hard way that when rich organizations and wealthy individuals shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they get what they want.
Nov 03, 2011 08:46 AM
 In geometry, a hyperplane of an n-dimensional space is a flat subset of the space with dimension (n−1), e.g., the surface of a three-dimensional sphere is a two-dimensional hyperplane. By its nature, a hyperplane separates the space into two half spaces: the surface and everything else. We live on a hyperplane of human reality; interacting daily with our fellow humans who occupy the same hyperspace but seeing only the surface reflections (the shadows in Plato’s Cave) of the deeper reality of higher dimensions. Like the image of a cube drawn by an artist on a flat piece of paper, the full-dimensional social, political and economic reality of human existence can be revealed to our limited senses from time to time by someone with the perception and writing capabilities to unveil the deeper reality. Such a man was Murray Rothbard, who wasn’t always right in his interpretations and logical inferences (although he was right the vast majority of the time) but always enriched our perception of social, political and economic reality by the portraits he painted.
Nov 02, 2011 08:49 AM
 One thing is becoming clear as our lame crisis persists. The monetary system has got to be reformed. Given the paucity of ideas circulating today about how really to get out of the Great Recession, we owe it to ourselves to absorb, and implement, the wisdom inherent in Lew Lehrman's book The True Gold Standard.
Nov 01, 2011 08:35 AM
 Whacking old people with a big cut in Social Security benefits draws bipartisan support inside Super Committee. Both the Republicans and Democrats on the committee support a plan to reduce average Social Security benefits by 3 percent -- not in ten years, not in five years, not in two years, right now!
Oct 27, 2011 07:52 AM
 It cannot be stated plainly enough or often enough that the founding documents of America were written to protect citizens from their government. Again, it was James Madison who said, “All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.”
Oct 27, 2011 07:15 AM
 Capitalism succeeds because of an internal discipline that allows for loss and even bankruptcy. It’s the possibility of failure that creates the opportunity for triumph. Yet many of America’s major banks are too big to fail, so they can privatize profits while socializing risk. Some financiers have chosen to live in a government-backed featherbed. Their platform seems to be socialism for tycoons and capitalism for the rest of us. They’re not evil at all. But when the system allows you more than your fair share, it’s human to grab. That’s what explains featherbedding by both unions and tycoons, and both are impediments to a well-functioning market economy.
Oct 26, 2011 07:28 PM
 The terrible fact of life in America that the Tea Parties refuse to face up to: Republicans have, for many decades now, approached politics like mules – stupidly and stodgily repeating the same course that they have trekked for decades. The history of the GOP is Einstein's definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over, yet expecting different results.
Oct 26, 2011 07:12 AM
 The U.S. Government now claims to own the moon and will arrest anyone who claims to own or tries to sell even a grain of moon rock. NASA sets up sting operation to arrest 74 year old grandmother after it agreed to pay her for a sliver of moon rock her deceased husband told her was given to him by Neil Armstrong. Individuals may not own moon dirt, NASA says; it belongs to the U.S. Government who stole it from the moon on taxpayers' dime fair and square. Geronimo must be smiling down from the Happy Hunting Grounds today. View video. . .
Oct 25, 2011 03:02 PM
 In order to love one’s country, said Edmund Burke, one’s country ought to be lovely. Is it still? Reid Buckley, brother of conservative icon William F. Buckley, replies, “I am obliged to make a public declaration that I cannot love my country. … We are Vile.” And so what is the conservative’s role in an America many believe has not only lost its way but seems to be losing its mind?
Oct 25, 2011 10:37 AM
 D.C.'s prosperity reflects a parasite economy that fattens on wealth created by others. The nation's capital lives in a vast, metastasizing tick of a metropolitan area, swollen on the lifeblood it drains from the body politic. This is one race the home team deserved to lose. Exhibit A: While the total of U.S. state government debt could surpass $4 trillion, the governments of DC's bedroom states, Virginia and Maryland, luxurate in budget surpluses of $545 million and $344 million respectively.
Oct 25, 2011 08:21 AM
 Book Release Announcement -- America’s two-tiered justice system vests political and financial elites with virtually absolute immunity from the rule of law even when they are caught committing egregious crimes, while ordinary Americans are subjected to the world’s largest and one of its harshest and most merciless penal states even for trivial offenses. Law has been completely perverted from what it was intended to be – the guarantor of an equal playing field which would legitimize outcome inequalities – into its precise antithesis: a weapon used by the most powerful to protect their ill-gotten gains, strengthen their unearned prerogatives, and ensure ever-expanding opportunity inequality.
Oct 24, 2011 11:45 AM
 According to the National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project, the police commit more violent crimes of assaults, sexual assaults, murder, and fatal excessive force, per capita than the rest of society. The state is always and forever the enemy of the people. It has nothing, it creates nothing, it produces nothing, and it lives and survives by looting, stealing, beating, and murdering. It is time to remove the power the state holds over us, and to try liberty instead of slavery.
Oct 24, 2011 09:31 AM
 In the few opening years of the 21st century, Washington has destroyed the US Constitution, the separation of powers, international law, the accountability of government, and has sacrificed every moral principle to achieving hegemony over the world. This ambitious agenda is being attempted while simultaneously Washington removed all regulation over Wall Street, the home of massive greed, permitting Wall Street’s short-term horizon to wreck the US economy, thus destroying the economic basis for Washington’s assault on the world.
Oct 23, 2011 09:06 AM
 Right now, there is a lot of talk about the evils of "capitalism". But it is not really accurate to say that we live in a capitalist system. Rather, what we have in the United States today, and what most of the world is living under, is much more accurately described as "corporatism". Under corporatism, most wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of giant corporations and big government is used as a tool by these corporations to consolidate wealth and power even further.
Oct 21, 2011 04:49 PM
 There is no human liberty, natural or constitutional, expressly guaranteed in the Constitution or traditionally viewed as belonging to all persons, that has not been nullified by government in America. We are deluding ourselves if we really think that the government thinks that the so-called guarantees of freedoms are truly guarantees. They are not. They have been tolerated by American governments unless and until the governments have felt threatened by them.
Oct 21, 2011 02:14 PM
 Watch the interview with Lew Lehrman on why the monetary gods of the 20th century have failed us, and why a return to the gold standard is the only way to bring monetary policy back into the free market’s hands.
Oct 21, 2011 10:22 AM
 American liberty is rapidly disappearing and the Religious Right has played an important role in empowering the worst among us. This was not supposed to be the case, but whenever people seek to impose the Kingdom of God through politically-sponsored violence, the sad results are inevitable. The United States of America is not the Kingdom of God, nor is it the "Shining City on a Hill." It is simply a country whose political leaders decided long ago that individual liberty should be replaced by collectivism, and the Christian conservatives were there to answer the call.
Oct 20, 2011 02:25 PM
 Money is not a government phenomenon, and it need not and should not be managed by government. When central banks like the Fed manage money they are engaging in price fixing, which leads not to prosperity but to disaster. The Federal Reserve has caused every single boom and bust that has occurred in this country since the bank's creation in 1913. If the Fed would stop intervening and distorting the market, our economy could recover.
Oct 18, 2011 10:40 AM
 In the communist tradition of naming the stages of history, we can call the current situation in America "late fascism." It is fascist, despite widespread denial of the fact. But the fascist system in the end cannot work because, despite the claims, the State does not have the means to achieve what it promises. It does not possess the capability to outrun private markets in technology, of serving the population in the way markets can, of making things more plentiful or cheaper, or even of providing basic services in a manner that is economically efficient.
Oct 13, 2011 02:17 PM
 How many times in the past four years have you read the sentence, “This time, it’s different”? Well, in the case of the U.S. economy, this time it really is different. In fact, it’s not just different, it’s FUBAR. However, it doesn’t need to be. The first—and essential—step in getting the U.S. economy back to normal will be for the Fed to stop paying interest on bank reserves.
Oct 13, 2011 11:45 AM
 Americans think of themselves as a peace-loving people, and we certainly don't regard our country as a "warrior nation" or "garrison state." Yet, we seem to be caught in a vortex of never-ending, constantly expanding wars. Here are the five main reasons why.
Oct 12, 2011 01:36 PM
 Until a large enough voter or protest base has been victimized by the law and demands change, politicians are rewarded for continuing to be "hard" on crime, which is not merely a vote winner but also gives the state apparatus much greater social control. You and your children are likely to continue living under the constant threat of arrest by an arbitrary power against whom you either have no defense or a defense that could be ruinous. You will continue to live in a police state.
Oct 12, 2011 01:15 PM
 Ben Franklin said, "There is no such thing as a bad peace or a good war." After ten years of war in Afghanistan, costing at least $450 billion, over 1,600 dead and 15,000 seriously wounded soldiers, the US has achieved none of its strategic or political goals while Afghanistan has suffered untold civilian casualties, villages shattered by US bombing, night raids by death squads, over two million refugees and a 30-year civil war.
Oct 12, 2011 08:19 AM
 This is another one of US law enforcement’s manufactured “anti-terrorist” triumphs, where the feds set somebody up, fabricate a “crime” out of thin air, and then proceed to “solve” a case that never really existed to begin with. This has been the general pattern of our “anti-terrorist” operations in the US since the beginning
Oct 11, 2011 01:56 PM
 I often hear a variant of the following from conservatives (and some liberals) when confronted with the foreign policy views of libertarians: “Sure, I’m all for a more peaceful foreign policy, but you guys take it too far – isolationism won’t work in our increasingly interconnected world. Besides, we have real enemies we have to deal with.”
Oct 11, 2011 01:36 PM
 A constant theme during this most difficult of periods has been politicians' fear of private sector failures. Across the spectrum, from the biggest banking, insurance and auto companies to the smallest homeowners behind on mortgage payments, the government has intervened to preempt failure.
Oct 11, 2011 01:28 PM
 Occupy Wall Street: Thousands March in New York as Unions Join Protest ... Thousands of people gathered and marched alongside Occupy Wall Street Protest as union labor gave their support to the long-running protest Wednesday. Protestors with union slogans left work early to march from Occupy Wall Street to Foley Square in Lower Manhattan making it the largest demonstration since the movement was launched on Sept. 17. Dominant Social Theme: The people have had enough. Get rid of the corporations and the bankers just the way they did in the 1930s.
Oct 11, 2011 01:21 PM
Politicians who are principled enough to point out the fraud of Social Security, referring to it as a lie and Ponzi scheme, are under siege. Acknowledgment of Social Security's problems is not the same as calling for the abandonment of its recipients. Instead, it's a call to take actions now, while there's time to avert a disaster. Let's look at it.
Oct 11, 2011 11:23 AM
The FBI has received substantial criticism over the past decade — much of it valid — but nobody can deny its record of excellence in thwarting its own Terrorist plots. Time and again, the FBI concocts a Terrorist attack, infiltrates Muslim communities in order to find recruits, persuades them to perpetrate the attack, supplies them with the money, weapons and know-how they need to carry it out — only to heroically jump in at the last moment, arrest the would-be perpetrators whom the FBI converted, and save a grateful nation from the plot manufactured by the FBI.
Oct 11, 2011 11:15 AM
 Long before 9/11, US law had ceased to be a shield of the people and had been turned into a weapon in the hands of the government. The event known as 9/11 was used to raise the executive branch above the law. As long as the President sanctions an illegal act, executive branch employees are no longer accountable to the law that prohibits the illegal act. On the president’s authority, the executive branch can violate US laws against spying on Americans without warrants, indefinite detention, and torture and suffer no consequences.
Oct 11, 2011 11:01 AM
 After decades of new laws to toughen sentencing for criminals, prosecutors have gained greater leverage to extract guilty pleas from defendants and reduce the number of cases that go to trial, often by using the threat of more serious charges with mandatory sentences or other harsher penalties. Some experts say the process has become coercive in many state and federal jurisdictions, forcing defendants to weigh their options based on the relative risks of facing a judge and jury rather than simple matters of guilt or innocence.
Oct 11, 2011 10:51 AM
*Some Strong Language
I see that I may have to take over drug policy for the United States. Maybe not, though. I’ll hold off if I get a call from Michelle Leonhart, who runs the Drug Enforcement Administration, asking me how she ought to do her job, and what she ought to think about Mexico, and what is wrong with Washington’s whole approach to mind candy. (I’m expecting her call any day now.) I will answer as follows:
Oct 11, 2011 08:55 AM
 During the past 15 years or so, the basic function of the financial markets has been corrupted into a self-serving carnival of speculation, where many participants are interested in nothing except getting the next rally going at public expense, regardless of how badly market signals are distorted, how recklessly capital is misallocated, or even whether what they do has any positive effect on the economy or the country. The Fed and U.S. Government were co-conspirators to the crimes.
Oct 11, 2011 08:36 AM
 In both the United States and Europe, household long-term savings (which includes pensions) is more than sufficient to meet the long-term borrowing needs of both the corporate and the household sector. In the case of the United States which issues its own currency, the need for maturity transformation can simply be eliminated by adjusting the government debt maturity profile accordingly, which is why it is crucial that firms (banks or otherwise) that engage in maturity transformation are allowed to fail when they run into trouble.
Oct 10, 2011 07:48 AM
 Obama has been extraordinarily solicitous of Wall Street and big business -- making Timothy Geithner Treasury Secretary and de facto ambassador from the Street; seeing to it that Bush's Fed appointee, Ben Bernanke, got another term; and appointing GE Chair Jeffrey Immelt to head his jobs council. Most tellingly, it was President Obama's unwillingness to place conditions on the bailout of Wall Street that contributed to the new populist insurrection.
Oct 06, 2011 08:23 AM
 Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the police State as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive State the unlimited master of society. This describes mainstream politics supported by both political parties in America today, which is totalitarian because it acknowledges no restraint upon its powers.
Oct 05, 2011 11:43 AM
 There is widespread belief among politicians, public officials, and pundits that if government doesn’t give us the seeds, nothing will grow. In other words, without government spending, there will be a serious lack of critical investment. So serious, in fact, that America would cease to be a “great power” and force for good around the globe. Not so.
Oct 05, 2011 08:21 AM
 It is no fun to be neutral when history is being made. Today's political economy resembles some form of fascism more than the free-enterprise system, and of the businesses with a hand in colluding with the state in advancement of corporatism, those being targeted by the protesters for special animus are probably among the guiltiest. Yet, the general statist philosophical thrust of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement is disturbing, and its list of demands comprise a terrible recipe for moving far down the road toward socialism.
Oct 03, 2011 10:56 AM
 The tendency toward the arbitrary use of force has been latent in American government for at least 100 years but now, with the assassination of Anwar al-Auluqi, an American citizen, we’ve turned a corner and made it openly our policy. Or rather the policy of the individuals who control the machinery of organized force. That is, of the Dons who control what has become the cosa nostra in Washington.
Oct 03, 2011 10:42 AM
 According to First Financial's calculations, those workers who retire under the Texas counties' Alternate Social Security Plan do much better than those on Social Security but the plan is available only to Texas local-government bureaucrats.
Oct 03, 2011 10:31 AM
 It is not just the First Amendment rights to freedom of expression, assembly and religion and Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures that are endangered by the emerging surveillance state. When algorithms detect "pre-crime" in a world in which we are all potential suspects, we have sacrificed such core values as the presumption of innocence and the right to privacy.
Oct 02, 2011 07:48 AM
 Author Interview - Every divorce has a first kiss. James Bradley ( Imperial Cruise) went looking for America's first kiss with Japan and found it in the summer of 1905 when President Theodore Roosevelt forged a treaty where America and Japan would walk hand in hand onto the Asian continent to take it over. And Japan needed Korea as a springboard for that plan. Roosevelt in a secret treaty agreed to give Korea to Japan and in doing so lighted the fuse on World War II.
Sep 30, 2011 07:54 AM
 What if you worked for the government and the government didn't work for you? What if freedom were a myth? What if we don't live in a free country? What do we do about it?
Sep 29, 2011 04:56 PM
 Where public employees are concerned, there is nothing less than a conspiracy among politicians, bureaucrats, and labor unions to create and sustain a fourth branch of government specifically designed to increase the cost, size, and power of government. Madison and Jefferson must weep.
Sep 27, 2011 06:57 PM
 Helicopter Ben [Bernanke] talks a good line about being ready to unleash quantitative easing, but this talk only imparts an aura of justification for the Fed’s incredibly expanded role in allocating the country’s scarce supply of savings. If anything, his policies were closer to a quantitative tightening. A better moniker would therefore be "Bailout Ben."
Sep 27, 2011 06:46 PM
 The rise and entrenchment of the American police state are rarely questioned. Public opinion is mostly happy with the whole thing. There can never be too much prosecutorial power, never too many police, never too many prisons, never sentences that are too long. No one says: "We should not be so tough." The entire ethos is the opposite.
Sep 27, 2011 05:30 PM
 Among the great untold stories of our time is this one: the last half of the twentieth century saw America's criminal justice system unravel. Signs of the unraveling are everywhere. The nation's record- shattering prison population has grown out of control.
Sep 27, 2011 05:17 PM
 Representative democracy cannot subsist if a great part of the voters are on the government payroll. If the members of parliament no longer consider themselves mandatories of the taxpayers but deputies of those receiving salaries, wages, subsidies, doles, and other benefits from the treasury, democracy is done for.
Sep 27, 2011 10:14 AM
  Book Reviews - Anyone who reads these books with a knowledge of the relevant information that is left out of them—namely, the history of U.S. involvement in Indonesia and Kenya—will find it difficult to take them seriously. But a reader who connects the dots between that history and the stories these books tell should find it not only unsurprising but also predictable that a brown-skinned man “with a funny name” has taken up the long American project of killing people with names and complexions like his in order to save them.
Sep 27, 2011 09:42 AM
 Many on the political left are quick to recognize that tax rates affect behavior when applied to behaviors they do not like, such as smoking. They want to have high taxes on certain foods, such as candy, drinks containing sugar, and transfats, to discourage their use. But when it comes to labor and capital, those on the left often argue that those taxes have little effect on the willingness of people to work or invest in productive enterprises, despite both the empirical evidence and good economic theory.
Sep 26, 2011 08:00 AM
 Cindy Vong is a tiny woman with a problem as big as the government that is causing it. She wants to provide a service that will enable customers “to brighten up their days.” Having fish nibble your feet may not be your idea of fun, but lots of people around the world enjoy it, and so did some Arizonans until their bossy government butted in, in the service of a cartel. Herewith a story that illustrates how governments that will not mind their own business impede the flourishing of businesses.
Sep 25, 2011 06:07 PM
 The failure to defeat the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, the specter of a nuclear Pakistan turning into a failed state, rising concerns about the decline of Iraq into a civil war after the U.S. withdrawal, the growing power of Iran and its regional satellites, the threat that the Arab Spring is posing to regimes that were willing at least to accept the U.S.-backed status-quo, and the deadlocked Israel-Palestinian peace process − all these are clear indications that the era of Pax Americana in the Middle East is over.
Sep 23, 2011 09:55 AM
 Elites will try to utilize the unwinding international depression to their advantage. In fact, it may be to their advantage to continually aggravate it. One thing for sure, whatever solutions are proposed at the top will benefit the powers-that-be and their agendas first of all. Despite the rhetoric, the billions of people struggling with this economic crisis are merely an afterthought by the elites, or even worse – thier perceived enemy.
Sep 22, 2011 10:08 AM
 Throughout history, the ever popular idea of "political moderation" has been the means by which to expand government coercion, while the commitment to liberty, privacy and individual sovereignty has been continually attacked as "extremism."
Sep 22, 2011 08:21 AM
 In the aftermath of the Spanish-American War (1898), William Graham Sumner of Yale described how the war transformed America from a constitutional republic into an imperialist power, just like the old Spanish Empire it defeated in the war. Sumner also forecast what America has become: Policeman of the world, with a military presence in over 100 countries, with endless meddling in the affairs of just about everyone on the planet. He wrote: "We were told that we needed Hawaii in order to secure California. What shall we now take in order to secure the Philippines? . . . . We shall need to take China, Japan, and the East Indies . . . . in order to ‘secure’ what we have. Of course this means that . . . we must take the whole earth in order to be safe on any part of it, and the fallacy stands exposed."
Sep 21, 2011 09:18 AM
 Make no mistake: When the taxman aims at “the rich,” he ends up hitting everyone else instead. And the tragedy of it all is that the promised tax revenue never shows up. Over the last 70 years, the top tax rate has fluctuated wildly from a high of 90 percent to a low of 28 percent, yet revenues always averaged out to about 18 percent of the national income.
Sep 20, 2011 08:11 AM
 Did World War Two really end the Great Depression? A growing body of evidence from economists and historians suggests the opposite. Far from turning around the numbers in a burst of government-financed economic activity, the massive mobilization for war may actually have prolonged the Depression, and even deepened aspects of it. And far from setting the stage for the boom of the fifties and afterward, as the textbooks suggest, the economic policies of the war had to be reversed to make way for the postwar boom.
Sep 20, 2011 07:52 AM
 The more people are forced to pay for things they disapprove of—and for things like foreign wars, abortion or mixed-sex schools that they might find ethically repugnant the more exploited they feel and the less attachment they feel to the regime levying the taxes. We should, therefore, be very sure of our ground before we heap such moral distress on people in order to provide benefits to others.
Sep 19, 2011 07:53 PM
 The stealth wealth tax may be the single-largest tax ever imposed on the American people - ranging from 360 percent for lower-income people to 390 percent for higher-income people - yet virtually no one knows about it. What is particularly unconscionable about this tax is the disproportionate way it is imposed on the most responsible citizens and the elderly.
Sep 19, 2011 07:36 PM
 On any given day, America’s elite troops are working in about 70 countries and by year’s end that number will rise to 120. With Americans balking at defending what George W. Bush labeled "arc-of-instability nations" (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen), with clear indications that military interventions don’t promote stability and with a budget crisis of epic proportions at home, it remains to be seen what pretexts the Obama administration will rely on to continue a failed policy — one that seems certain to make the world more volatile and put American citizens at greater risk.
Sep 19, 2011 04:45 PM
 What needs to be discussed about Social Security is not the Ponzi scheme element but that it is forcibly imposed on all working people in the country, nevermind whether they want it or not. It would be quite enlightening if this aspect of Social Security were debated. That would bring up a central feature of most governments, namely, their coercive nature.
Sep 19, 2011 11:43 AM
 The money supply increases naturally by exactly the amount of increases in productivity in a healthy economy. It doesn't require belaboring that the economy isn’t healthy, nor that the money supply expands every time the printing presses run to bail out a failing business and bring on a new iteration of quantitative easing. The solution is a simple (albeit not necessarily easy) one, says Porter Stansberry: Return to the gold standard. That will happen, he says, when the people say, “Enough!”
Sep 14, 2011 11:06 AM
 Barack Obama, who was elected to bring the troops home, close the gulags, and restore the Bill of Rights, has in fact become the chief curator of the Bush legacy: a born-again convert to special ops, killer drones, immense intelligence budgets, Orwellian surveillance technology, secret jails, and the superhero cult of former general and now CIA Director David Petraeus. Our “antiwar” president, in fact, may be taking U.S. power deeper into the darkness than any of us dare to imagine.
Sep 14, 2011 10:17 AM
 If “veterans benefits, future costs for treating the war-wounded, and interest payments on war-related borrowing” are added, Hellman writes, the cost is much higher: $11 trillion, by the estimate of Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies. Hellman says by his reckoning, the full cost of “security” is $1.2 trillion a year.
Sep 12, 2011 07:53 AM
 Part of the problem with Social Security, according to the Wall Street Journal is that "current seniors get more than they put in thanks to the formula for increasing benefits over time." Hey Wall Street, how about we pass a law requiring investment firms to give the government 15 percent of their investment capital for 35 years interest free over and above the income taxes they pay?
Sep 11, 2011 07:22 PM
 Those who wield true political authority as part of an empire are vested with immense power over other people, but those who exercise that authority as part of wars are more powerful still. That kind of power not only attracts warped authoritarians and sociopaths like moths to light, but it also converts -- degrades -- otherwise normal people who come to possess it.
Sep 11, 2011 11:20 AM
 Much aided and abetted by the internet giants' readily expressed contempt for privacy in the rush to monetise their customers and their customers' data, the long-term legacy of 9/11 is that new generations are being schooled to no longer see or understand why control of personal information may really matter, and why in history it does and did matter.
Sep 10, 2011 06:04 PM
 Cavuto treated him like America's dirty uncle, and Imus played along perfectly. "This is nonsense! It's a television show!" he ranted of the Capitol Hill proceedings. And when asked if he thought the credit-downgrade was imminent, he made a false prediction that seemed perfectly sensible: "I don't think they're going to do it to us. It's not in the spirit of doing business."
Sep 10, 2011 05:28 PM
 It's easy to find lists of the best places to retire in the United States. The AARP has one, so does Forbes, U.S. News and a host of retiree-oriented websites. The same cities and states tend to appear on each list – Tucson, Ariz.! Austin, Texas! — in part because the things that matter most as people pick a place to retire – proximity to good medical care, tax advantages for seniors, nice climate and safe streets – never really go out of style.
Sep 10, 2011 05:09 PM
 Those economic forecasters who keep telling us the dollar will fall to zero forget the obvious: big banks are creditors. Bankers lose when a currency falls to zero. Never forget this. If you believe, as I do, that the Federal Reserve is the enforcement arm of the largest commercial banks, then stop worrying about hyperinflation. But don't stop worrying about Congress.
Sep 09, 2011 01:42 PM
 Republicans are not serious about passing a balanced budget amendment. If they were, they would not have written an entirely new one that is radically and conceptually different from those debated in the past, with new language that constitutional scholars have not even begun to analyze. And, they would have held weeks of hearings and planned many more weeks of floor debate. GOP think tanks would have been urged to hold conferences and publish studies of the proposed amendment.
Sep 08, 2011 10:50 AM
 Herman Cain jumped into the GOP Debate at the Reagan Library with the keenest solution: Use the model deployed successfully in Chile. “I believe in the Chilean mode,” Cain said, "where you give a personal retirement account option so we can move this society from an entitlement society to an empowerment society.”
Sep 08, 2011 08:28 AM
 The U.S. imperial project of the past 10 years has killed as many as 1 million people while displacing millions of others, has nearly bankrupted the United States with major costs still to come, has rendered the world even more unstable than it was in 2001, and has made Washington hated by nearly everyone nearly everywhere. Fed a steady diet of “military necessity” over the past 10 years, most Americans support constant armed intervention in other nations. We have identified the problem and it is us. Beam me up, Scotty. It’s pretty bad down here.
Sep 08, 2011 08:11 AM
 President Obama will propose a so-called "public infrastructure bank" to create jobs in his speech to the nation tonight. We already have one; it's called the capital market. The idea that our $14 trillion economy depends on a $10 billion federal start-up infusion is astounding. Obama's time would be better spent cataloging the ways government interferes with private infrastructure, and how to quit doing that.
Sep 06, 2011 09:09 AM
 American fascism is one of a kind. Its economic system is neither free enterprise nor pure egalitarian socialism, but more akin to a buffed-up, modernized, globally dominant Mussolinian corporate state. Its militarism rivals and in many senses exceeds any of history’s fascist regimes, in power, uninterrupted belligerence, and sheer size. Its presidency is the most revered and powerful Fuhrer in world history, despite and actually due to its democratic nature.
Sep 05, 2011 09:48 AM
 The rage that follows when the welfare-warfare state no longer can support its recipients in the style to which they have become entitled.
Sep 05, 2011 09:37 AM
 The Holy Triumvirate — the United States, NATO and the European Union — recognizes no higher power and believes, literally, that it can do whatever it wants in the world, to whomever it wants, for as long as it wants, and call it whatever it wants, like “humanitarian.”
Sep 02, 2011 01:54 PM
 Government Syllogism: If old people substituted cat food for hamburger, it wouldn't cost them anymore to eat today than it did a few years ago therefore we are going to change the way we measure inflation to assume people make these substitutions. Ergo they won't be needing a Cost Of Living Adjustment (COLA) to their Social Security benefits because there won't be any inflation. It's called the Chained Consumer Price Index (CPI). Look for it soon as a Super Committee "reform" to chisel Social Security benefits.
Sep 02, 2011 01:13 PM
 Crime statistics indicate that police actually commit more acts of violence against the public than do criminals, which raises an interesting question: Are police a greater threat to the public than are criminals? On Yahoo I just searched "police brutality" and up came 4,840,000 results. Meanwhile, the real master criminals, such as Dick Cheney, who, if tried for his actions at Nuremberg, would most definitely have been executed as a war criminal, run free.
Sep 01, 2011 09:06 AM
 Social Security is facing more than $20 trillion in unfunded future liabilities. Raising taxes and cutting benefits enough to keep the program limping along will obviously mean an ever-worsening deal for younger workers. They will be forced to pay more and get less.
Aug 31, 2011 08:16 AM
 After the financial crisis struck in 2007, the Fed secretly propped up elite bankers all the way from Wall Street to Brussels to the Central Bank of Libya. The bailouts were supposed to revive the economy but all they have done is institutionalize too-big-to-fail policies that put American taxpayers on the hook for reckless and irresponsible actors in the global financial system.
Aug 30, 2011 08:33 AM
 An agenda both populist and radical: Decentralize government to settle controversies on social issues, while focusing on questions that libertarians and conservatives can rally behind—including slashing taxes, cutting welfare, abolishing racial and other group privileges, dismantling the Federal Reserve, bringing the troops home, and defending family values against the politically correct state. Washington, D.C. is the enemy whichever party is in power.
Aug 28, 2011 01:56 PM
 If liberal approaches work so well, why are so many people choosing to pack their bags and desert some of the most progressive, pro-labor, big-government states in the union? And if uncompromising conservatism is a cruel, fraudulent disaster, why do small-government, pro-business, low-tax, gun-toting, and churchgoing states draw such a disproportionate number of America’s internal immigrants?
Aug 27, 2011 03:41 PM
 In June, Glen Campbell announced that he had Alzheimer's. As he releases his final album, he talks about memory loss, drug addiction and telling Elvis he was too fat.
Aug 27, 2011 02:19 PM
Ame  ricans are very close to breaking with the old and taking their chances with the new – because anything is better than the status quo. When they get there, a committed minority with the passion and the political savvy to make a difference could very well win an election. The war issue is quite conceivably the spark that will set the prairie aflame: we’ve been through economic downturns before, without a political and social revolution overturning the established order. This time, however, we’re a world empire — the Lone Superpower — still sending out expeditionary forces to subdue new territories as we teeter on the brink of bankruptcy.
Aug 27, 2011 01:42 PM
 "Capitalism" is to "free markets" as "awful" is to "wonderful." The current system of "capitalism" is nothing but an aggressive form of mercantilism that uses the power of the state to prop up the privileges of a few. Everything about this system is established by government monopoly power, from the corporation itself (a judicial entity) to the paper money monopoly itself (implemented by government force). There is almost nothing about the system at a fundamental level that partakes of the free market.
Aug 24, 2011 08:46 AM
Russia's p  resident Dimitri Medvedev believes that Georgia launched its 2008 attack on South Ossetia (which had succeeded from Georgia), killing and wounding scores of Russian peacekeepers, after a visit to Georgia by Condoleezza Rice, during which Georgian president Saakashvili may have been flashed a green light. Russia withdrew from Georgia but remains in South Ossetia to deter another Georgian attack on the country. The US Senate recently passed a resolution declaring South Ossetia a provence of Georgia and ordering Russia to leave. If there is another invasion of Georgia and a new war, the U.S. Senate will not be without major moral responsibility. Is there to be no end to this country’s meddling in other nations’ quarrels and wars?
Aug 23, 2011 12:29 PM
 DC's Budgetary Sleight of Hand: "Watch the entitlement birdie 50 years out so you don't pay attention to all the other spending we are binging on right now." While entitlements must be controlled in the long run, Washington's current spending problem lies in the here and now. Today's deficit crisis is not one of entitlements. It was created by out-of-control spending on everything other than entitlements. The recent debt-ceiling agreement is supposed to put the brakes on that kind of spending, but leaders have so far been vague on how they'll do it.
Aug 23, 2011 08:59 AM
 By the Administration's line of reasoning, all the government really needs to do to get the economy going is pile on the mandates and hand food stamps and unemployment checks out to everyone. Then again, given that this pretty much sums up Obama's economic policy to date, shouldn't the economy be at risk of overheating?
Aug 22, 2011 01:06 PM
 For the last ten weeks politicians have been harping about the out-of-control social costs of Social Security and Medicare and our immediate need to raise taxes and reduce benefits. These political ideologues are liars. . .According to the Social Security Administration, the average recipient collects $500,000 in retirement benefits but pays in only $278,000. Wrong! What they conveniently don't mention is that if the average beneficiary pays in $278,000 and the employer matches that with an equal amount, SS collects $556,000 per recipient.
Aug 22, 2011 09:03 AM
 Are you ready for Big Brother 2.0? If you think that the hundreds of ways that the government watches, monitors, tracks and controls us now are bad, just wait until you see what is coming.
Aug 22, 2011 08:20 AM
 The U.S. government poses the greatest threat to life, liberty, property, and peace – not the leaders or the military or the people of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, or Yemen. James Madison said: "If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." As John Quincy Adams said: "America . . . goes not abroad seeking monsters to destroy." Christians should stop regarding the state’s acts of aggression as benevolent. Christians should stop presuming divine support for U.S. military interventions. And because just war theory merely allows Christians to make peace with war, they should reject it just as they would any theory of just piracy or just terrorism or just murder. It is Christians that should be leading the way toward peace and a foreign policy of nonintervention.
Aug 21, 2011 05:46 PM
 When the tidal waves wrecked Japan, how many mobs of looters attacked the unguarded shopping centers? For the mathematically advanced reader, I will offer a hint: It is a non-negative integer less than one. Years back, I wandered the side streets of Tokyo after midnight, without fear, and saw dating couples doing the same thing. The Japanese do not refrain from violent criminality because the police watch them, but because they agree that they do not want a violently criminal society.
Aug 21, 2011 10:46 AM
 Pressure is on to overhaul Social Security and Medicare. These two programs place the fiscal health of the country at risk as Baby Boomers retire. Yet current and short-term federal deficits, driven by George W. Bush's spending spree and Barack Obama's blowout budgets, have little to do with Social Security and Medicare. If the "super committee" wants to cut the fat, it won't find much in these social-insurance programs, which have paid for themselves for decades.
Aug 18, 2011 11:56 AM
 In Iowa's Ames Straw Poll this weekend, Michele Bachmann bested 2nd place Ron Paul by less than 200 votes. And yet, in the immediate spin cycle at least, pundits talked about Rick Perry, Mitt Romney and Bachmann. Paul seemed to be, as his supporters always point out, invisible. Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart became the latest to weigh in on the habit of ignoring Paul.
Aug 18, 2011 11:23 AM
 America is committing suicide. That’s the only explanation I have for the course followed by US policymakers in the past decade, a period in which the US budget deficit has skyrocketed beyond all reason. While we have run up deficits before, some of them considerable by the standards of the day, in 2001 – the year we launched our endless “war on terrorism” – the deficit began to enter new territory.
Aug 18, 2011 10:43 AM
 Can an amendment to the U.S. Constitution fix the deficit problem? Polls show most Americans think we need a balanced-budget amendment. Yet serious scholars of the issue understand that the deficit is merely a symptom of the problem; people want more benefits from government than they wish to pay for.
Aug 18, 2011 07:42 AM
 Police can use deadly force at will. They can confiscate cameras and keep their own official videos away from public view. They can intimidate and harass writers. They can count on their departments to cover up for them. They know the "outside" investigators, mostly their colleagues and allies in the law enforcement community, will do the same for them. They can count on the media and the public to excuse them. Yet some people blush at the term Police State.
Aug 13, 2011 01:24 PM
 Ultra-low interest rates are the root cause of the misallocation of resources that define the modern American economy, among the biggest impediments currently preventing genuine economic growth. As a direct result, Americans borrow, consume, and speculate too much, while we save, produce, and invest too little. By committing to keep rates near zero for the next two years, the Fed has actually lengthened the time Americans will now have to wait before a real recovery begins.
Aug 13, 2011 10:40 AM
 Western culture has seen a great evolution of advancements since the Enlightenment and the American Revolution, but because of the intrusions of the State and compulsory State apparatus (taxation, regulatory trespasses, central banks, wars of aggression, etc.), and because of decades of immediate-gratification selfishness, materialism and indebtedness, the West has been on a steady decline – a devolution. The statism sickness is de-civilizing our society, our culture, our world. And it is statism that will have been the main cause of the possible impending economic collapse.
Aug 12, 2011 01:58 PM
 Another clueless Texas Governor surrounded by the same Praetorian Guard of conniving neocons who led us down the road to imperial overstretch and fiscal ruin last time around – isn’t that just what the GOP needs right now? They’ll yank your grandmother off her life support system, and cut your Social Security – which you’ve been "paying into" all these years – just as you reach retirement age, long before they’ll touch a penny of the trillions being funneled overseas to our far-flung outposts of empire. In trying to sell this warmed-over Bush-ism, the Perry camp is setting itself on a collision course with the tea partiers.
Aug 12, 2011 01:14 PM
 Warning: Strong Language -- Former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson, who served as Co-Chair of President Obama's debt commission, called senior citizens "the Greediest Generation" as he compared Social Security to a Milk Cow with 310 million teats." Here is a letter of response from an unknown Montanan.
Aug 12, 2011 10:28 AM
 The Super Congress created by the recent debt ceiling increase deal is a typical example of something nefarious attached to a bigger bill that is rushed through Congress without giving Members ample opportunity to consider the full ramifications. This commission may turn into an early Christmas present for the well-heeled lobbyists of K Street.
Aug 11, 2011 10:46 PM
It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people. The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker.
Aug 11, 2011 09:35 PM
 Is it possible for a free market economy to support a democratic socialist society? collapsing before our eyes is the lodestone of the Christian Socialist doctrine that has underpinned the EU’s political philosophy: the idea that a capitalist economy can support an ever-expanding socialist welfare state. To pay for the kind of entitlements that populations have been led to expect by their politicians, the wealth-creating sector has to be taxed to a degree that makes it almost impossible for it to create the wealth that is needed to pay for the entitlements that populations have been led to expect.
Aug 11, 2011 08:43 PM
 Conservatives – Republicans – are the most depressing. Because they claim to love liberty – the abstract conception of it, at least. But down in the mud, they’re as or even more statist than the left-liberal Democrats they claim to oppose. Most people, no matter where they fall on the political continuum, are quite happily habituated to the omnipresence of government – to omnipresent control in exchange (supposedly) for “safety.”
Aug 11, 2011 08:26 PM
With upcoming cuts in federal spending, as required by the Budget Control Act of 2011, yet to be identified, it is clear that both Medicare and Social Security are being targeted by some persons in order to avoid making other cuts.
Aug 10, 2011 02:54 PM
With upcoming cuts in federal spending, as required by the Budget Control Act of 2011, yet to be identified, it is clear that both Medicare and Social Security are being targeted by some persons in order to avoid making other cuts.
Aug 10, 2011 02:42 PM
The Tea Party lost the debt debate because they took on not only Establishment politicians but also the entire industry for which they shill -- A meta-industry from a supra-economy. Neither of which can survive any real reforms. The goal of a grass roots citizens’ movement has to be to not only enter the system, but to change it from the inside. And that means an ugly showdown with the professional class that lives off the system. Not just with them, but their allies in the business world, in local communities and allied media outlets.
Aug 10, 2011 02:37 PM
Unless addressed, collapsing confidence in the dollar could result in political and social chaos. The government will find itself unable to fund its commitments and leverage the issue of social unrest to apply draconian measures under the cover of maintaining law and order. Ron Paul warns that the ultimate trap will be set for a system where government, claiming to protect a free society, will actually enforce new power and authority that creates a “lethal threat” to civil liberties. Ironically, it’s likely to be US citizens themselves that clamor for new enforcement measures to be used before recognizing – too late – the nature of the trap.
Aug 10, 2011 02:29 PM
Essentially, the structure announced today allows both political parties to talk about reform without actually changing anything. To underscore that point, the deal involves less than $25 billion in immediate cuts! This is less than a rounding error in a $3.8 trillion dollar budget. This is politics as usual.
Aug 10, 2011 02:13 PM
Today, on the democracy front, Greece, the historic birthplace of democracy around 508 BC and America – the witch's caldron which spawned the failed debt-financed regulatory democracy experiment – are now competing to see whether it'll be Athens' or Washington's politicians who will be more despised. I believe the US will win the race to the bottom only because Greek politicians have only subjected Greece and several wealthy EU countries like Germany to their wealth thievery, while the failed American example of democracy financed by sovereign debt is bankrupting the US and all of EU Europe.
Aug 10, 2011 01:54 PM
If the small government establishment truly believed its voluminous columns about how small government and free markets are the path to prosperity, then it would have recommended that the GOP sit on its hands and maintain a legal barrier to increased spending which is itself the debt limit. It would have because as anyone with a pulse knows, we won’t nor do we need to default. The truth is, the commentariat that sides with the small government wing in Washington owes its living to the perpetuation of a federal government that will never shrink.
Aug 10, 2011 01:38 PM
Congress, a collection of whores, con-men, and penny-ante sharpers from East Jesus, Nebraska, ponders the Great Question: Default now, and admit manfully to being the economic lepers everyone else already knows we are? Or raise the debt ceiling, keep spending like a spoiled Swarthmore sophomore with daddy's credit card, and collapse a bit later?
Aug 10, 2011 11:55 AM
As we look back on the horrors of the dictatorships and autocracies of the past, one particular question consistently arises; how was it possible for the common men of these eras to NOT notice what was happening around them? How could they have stood as statues unaware or uncaring as their cultures were overrun by fascism, communism, collectivism, and elitism? Here is how. . .
Aug 10, 2011 11:46 AM
U.S. Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) spoke on the Senate floor Thursday about Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s recent move to issue a prioritization plan in case the debt limit is not raised by Aug. 2.
Aug 10, 2011 11:20 AM
Contrary to propaganda, the ratings agencies have not threatened to downgrade U.S. Treasury debt if the debt ceiling is not raised. The big three rating agencies will not downgrade U.S. Treasury debt over a political event or non-event. They would get sued if they did.
Aug 10, 2011 11:17 AM
Since Lehman Bros. failed in 2008, there's been a crippling fear of "contagion," thus making all governments "too big to fail" because banks have so much exposure to government debt. The problem with this contagion theory is that the collapse of Lehman Brothers could never on its own have caused the market carnage in 2008 that still paralyzes and defines the actions of world leaders. In truth, the financial agony relating to Lehman was the result of moral hazzard created by the earlier bailout of Bear Stearns's creditors and the follow-on market uncertainty about government policy concerning bailouts after Lehman was allowed to fail. Absent the subsidized buyout of Bear, there would have been no presumption of a government role as savior of any financial institutions, thus a more realistically priced market for banks in trouble.
Aug 10, 2011 11:06 AM
Gold provides monetary discipline. If individuals suspect that money is being issued in excess of levels warranted by legitimate economic needs and growth prospects, they can exchange their currency holdings for gold at a pre-established, fixed rate. Gold convertibility ensures that the money supply expands or contracts based on the collective assessment of market participants—as opposed to the less-than-omniscient hunches of central bankers. Gold provides a self-correcting mechanism for irrational exuberance; as credit begins to flow too freely, as equity values or commodity prices appear frothy, the astute observer at the margin cashes out in gold. Monetary central planning gives way to the aggregate wisdom of the free market.
Aug 10, 2011 10:45 AM
 With upcoming cuts in federal spending, as required by the Budget Control Act of 2011, yet to be identified, it is clear that both Medicare and Social Security are being targeted by some persons in order to avoid making other cuts.
Aug 10, 2011 10:05 AM
The elaboration of a national para-military police state is the most dangerous development in recent times. The likelihood of a crash of the Federal Reserve System in hyperinflation is critical, too. But if that event occurs (as it probably will), the response of the power-structure will not be to correct the situation, but instead to impose the worst kind of third-world "austerity" on this country, in order to salvage the financial system at the expense of Mr. and Mrs. America. As most average Americans will not accept savage cuts in their standard of living gracefully, "austerity" will have to be rammed down their throats with police batons. Which, as far as I can tell, is the main, if not the only reason for the Department of Homeland Security.
Aug 10, 2011 09:50 AM
Obama must fulfill his constitutional duty to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, which means he does not have discretion to refuse to pay interest and principle on the national debt, including the Social Security trust fund bonds, as long as he has the money to do so, which he would even without an increase in the debt limit, or new taxes. Therefore, failing to pay Social Security benefits as required by law, would be an impeachable offense.
Aug 10, 2011 09:45 AM
DMV probably didn’t mention that your new digitized driver's license photo was to be downloaded into a new database that uses facial recognition software to “scan” for (are you surprised?) Terrorists – among other things. Only it’s ordinary Americans who are being terrorized.
Aug 10, 2011 09:40 AM
When the president says that thanks to the debt ceiling "there may simply not be the money in the coffers" to send out the $20 billion in August Social Security checks, he either does not understand the way the system works, or the administration intends to spend the money on something else.
Aug 10, 2011 09:28 AM
 If you've lived your whole life in the US and never really visited any foreign countries you are practically the equivalent of someone who lives in North Korea. Most of the information you have received is from the controlled media feeding you propaganda and if you do go to a country like Argentina, Mexico or countless others, you will be shocked at what you are allowed to do.
Aug 10, 2011 08:46 AM
 The Chief Actuary of Social Security confirmed last week that current Social Security tax receipts are more than enough to cover current outlays in the event the debt ceiling is not raised August 2. The only reason those checks would not go out would be if the administration decided to spend those designated funds elsewhere. It is very telling that the administration would rather frighten seniors dependent on social security checks than alarm their big banking friends, who have already received $5.3 trillion in bailouts, stimulus and quantitative easing. This instance of trying to blackmail Congress into tax increases by threatening social security demonstrates how scary it is to be completely dependent on government promises and why many young people today would jump at the chance to opt out of Social Security altogether.
Jun 21, 2011 07:44 AM
 However beautiful the veneer of the left's lofty rhetoric, its moral crusade against the nature of mankind is in the end enslavement. The only way to deliver mankind from the demon Mammon will be by removing the greatest gift of the gods - freedom. In this Faustian exchange we are guaranteed the Marxist security of bread, authoritarian certainty of order and utopian unity of world government. But, beyond the rhetoric, the experiment in social engineering always ends as other such utopian pursuits have concluded in history - hopeless.
Jun 22, 2011 08:01 AM
To protect beneficiaries' access to Medicare services the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) must be eliminated. Under the new law IPAB has been made responsible for suggesting and implementing cuts to Medicare. It is critical that Congress continue to be able to fulfill its duty to the American people and maintain direct oversight of Medicare on behalf of their constituents. Changes to Medicare's payments should be based on careful consideration of the Medicare program itself -- and not arbitrary budget targets.
Jun 22, 2011 08:12 AM
 The Fed's $600 billion program of “quantitative easing” has been great for Wall Street. The flood of cheap money has helped the big banks rake in profits hand over fist, commodity speculators have grown rich and the stock market has boomed but main Street largely missed out.
Jun 23, 2011 11:02 AM
 Blogosphere Reprise from 2008 -- What possesses us to dignify economists with arguments rather than laugh them off the stage the way we would a doctor who recommends leeches to drain phlegmatic humours? What will it take to pull back the curtain and reveal that there is no wizard, that we’re going to have to muddle along for ourselves using our own resources to solve our own problems? I don’t know. Maybe someone should buy Obama a dog named Toto.
Jun 24, 2011 10:11 AM
 The Welfare State is an illusion that depends on a vigorous engine of wealth-creation--but it punishes wealth-creation and the virtues of the wealth-creators, while encouraging and rewarding the exact opposite. Supporting oneself through one's own productive effort is considered both morally and practically optional, while living off the largesse extracted from those who do produce is considered both a moral and a legal right. So you get less of the first kind of action, and more of the second.
Jun 26, 2011 12:07 PM
 Poppy Bush's War -- The false lesson from the official bogus history of the United States experience in Afghanistan is that we should remain in that godforsaken country indefinitely because to depart prematurely would invite greater danger in the future. It may be understandable why neoconservatives would push such malarkey – and why Defense Secretary Gates and other government hardliners would be tempted to use the made-up chronology to convince gullible journalists about the need to stay the course – but their “history” is a fabrication as Gates well knows. The simple truth is that the last end game in Afghanistan was messed up during George H.W. Bush's presidency not because the United States left too soon but because it stayed too long.
Jun 26, 2011 03:24 PM
 Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner opined to Congress that hiking taxes on small businesses is the only "alternative" that will allow "a balanced approach to reduce our fiscal deficits" despite the fact that small business is the engine of job growth in America. "If you don't touch revenues," Geithner said, "you have to shrink the overall size of government programs. . .to levels that we could not accept as a country."
Jul 01, 2011 09:31 AM
 It amuses me today when people invent this, that or another reason why a gold standard system is "impossible." What they usually mean by that is: they don’t know how to do it. You can’t be in a worse position than Germany on Nov. 15, 1923 when it returned to the gold standard and eliminated hyper-inflation overnight. If it was possible then, it is possible at any time.
Jul 02, 2011 07:32 AM
 Western financial journos in aggregate still don't seem to understand the gravity of the world's unraveling financial system. They are so used to regarding government as the fulcrum of the economy that they cannot see it any other way.
Jul 02, 2011 08:12 AM
 In a free country, a person who hasn’t done anything – who is just “out and about” – has the right to decline to speak with a cop; to decline a search absent specific suspicion of wrongdoing based on some objective probable cause; to decline to “show his papers” to a cop unless the person has actually done something to warrant being ID’d. To be able to go about his business without interference. To be able to tell a cop no – and for the law to support the person saying no, not the cop.
Jul 02, 2011 08:24 AM
 There is the ever-growing intrusion of the federal government into the daily lives of men and women, revealing a gross disregard for constitutional guarantees. We also need to pay attention to what happens locally. Overregulation of society comes from local government as well as state and federal. As one area resident said, it’s “the tyranny of tiny rules and regulations.”
Jul 05, 2011 09:13 AM
 To produce rapid growth, most capital must be allocated by markets. The effect of $4.5 trillion of borrowing since 2009 is that foreigners and Americans are buying Treasury bills instead of investing in the next Google, Oracle, Wal-Mart or biomedical company. Today, foreigners are financing food stamps and the next bridge to nowhere while Americans are building state-of-the-art production systems abroad. This is the real pernicious "crowding out effect" of the federal government's borrowing.
Jul 05, 2011 06:11 PM
 The incredible Dominique Strauss-Kahn circus puts the US justice system on trial before the eyes of the world. The Wild West frontier arrest and treatment of DSK, the lynch-mob mood, the media orgy, and his public humiliation make the US look like a nasty third world state where prosecutors and media collude. The US prosecutors who allowed this circus to occur should be fired and sent to North Dakota. America’s justice system is embarrassing and desperately needs to be elevated to civilized standards. Arresting and humiliating DSK on trumped up evidence, and as if he was a notorious mass murderer, is outrageous and dim-witted. If cleared of charges, he should launch the mother of all law suits against New York’s publicity-seeking legal vigilantes.
Jul 08, 2011 06:53 AM
 Liberty is possible. I do not think it is likely in the near future. It will take three laws: (1) the abolition of central banking; (2) the temporal connection between tax day and voting day; (3) the abolition of withholding taxes. If and when we get all three, the government will shrink back below the definition of tyranny provided in the Bible governments that tax at 10% or higher (I Samuel 8:14, 17)
Jul 08, 2011 07:08 AM
 President Obama is bettering the instruction of the Roman Empire. It initially fought to defend itself. Then it fought to defend allies. Then it invented allies to defend. Then it fought for the adolescent excitement of swagger. Finally, the Empire fell into bankruptcy and ruination from overreach and arrogance.
Jul 09, 2011 08:37 AM
 As attention focuses intently on the negotiations to raise the debt ceiling, House Republicans have made a great show of drawing a line in the fiscal sand. They claim that they will not vote for any deal that includes tax increases to narrow the budget deficit. But we all know how the game works in Washington. With the 2012 elections looming the Republican bluster is merely a bargaining chip that they will quickly toss into the pot when they sense a political victory. In fact there are signs that such a compromise is already underway.
Jul 09, 2011 08:56 AM
 Back in the ’60s, the Beach Boys celebrated a country that was young, growing, optimistic…and a winner. Now, what we see is the whole kit-and-kaboodle of life in the US giving way to desperation, delusion and an irresistible impulse to commit imperial suicide. The economy turns sour. The military becomes malignant. Households are corrupt, bankrupt and dependent. Even the churches sing their hallelujahs to Caesar now.
Jul 11, 2011 11:34 AM
Book Review: Stealing You Blind: How "Public Servants" Sponge Off the Private Sector
Jul 11, 2011 12:05 PM
 There comes a point when elected leaders reach the end of their ability to tax, borrow, and inflate for funding the welfare state. The United States is verging on that inevitable threshold when the taxes that feed the welfare state start choking off the economy.
Jul 12, 2011 09:16 AM
 For the past 150 years, Republicans have been cast as seeking a "small and efficient" government (while being pro-military and apt to interfere in people's personal lives out of moral or religious conviction). Democrats have been positioned as seeking a large government that is tax- and welfare-intensive. This paradigm has been deliberately created by the powers-that-be to exclude those who believe in neither the military-industrial complex nor in a massive, high-tax, welfare state.
Jul 12, 2011 12:02 PM
 Obama is the key person in the debt ceiling debate. If he were serious about any of his proposals, he’d be working closely with key Congressmen in private behind closed doors. He would not be trying to box in Republicans or embarrass them in public or score political points. One does not place multi-trillion dollar proposals on the table and expect them to be taken seriously, debated and acted upon within 2 or 3 weeks. Obama’s credibility on serious budget control is nil. The debate, such as it is, can’t be taken seriously.
Jul 13, 2011 09:37 AM
 Conservatives are considering means tests on Social Security and Medicare benefits, which seemingly offer billions in savings while targeting only high income retirees who need benefits the least. But a means test is equivalent to a tax on work and saving, precisely the things Americans should do to reduce their dependence on government benefits. The Heritage Foundation proposes raising tax rates on affected retirees to 70%. No one will willingly pay such high taxes. Budget "savings" will be illusionary.
Jul 13, 2011 10:28 AM
 Walter Wriston, the old lion of Citibank, used to say that if you didn’t make money as a banker, you’re pathetic. He noticed that the Fed gave banks scads of free money whenever it felt the urge (usually to fulfill some Keynesian mandate); money, which, banks could then deploy to make profits. The Fed’s vaunted “recapitalization” of the banks has shoveled trillions into the system. And why should the stuff migrate out into the cruel world? After all, banks make money, 0.25% interest, on the dollars they get from the Fed. Hmm, $1.5 trillion times 0.25% equals $4 billion per year…all just for being you. Maybe Wriston was onto something about unsuccessful bankers being sad sacks.
Jul 15, 2011 08:14 AM
 Were the debt limit not raised by Aug. 2, other governmental functions would be disrupted but there would be neither a default on bonds nor an interruption of the retirement benefit programs unless the President and Secretary of the Treasury chose to spend money on other programs first. Obama is attempting to create a panic in order to stampede Congress into passing an increase in the debt limit on his terms before August 2.
Jul 15, 2011 12:22 PM
 President Barack Obama, Congressional Democrats, and the Washington Establishment have now tried everything to revive America’s moribund economy…except Reaganomics. We have seen over a trillion in Keynesian stimulus spending, record shattering deficits, easy money, bank bailouts, mortgage bailouts, low interest rates, even fake, Keynesian, “tax cuts” (based on tax credits rather than reduced rates). Yet, at no point in the last 70 years, going back to the Great Depression, has the American economy suffered unemployment this high for this long, or such extended stagnation without a rebound or recovery.
Jul 16, 2011 08:44 AM
 Barack Obama, Class Warrior extraordinaire. Taxes for President Obama are not about the revenue; they are about so-called "fairness," and spreading the wealth around, a.k.a. wealth and income redistribution.
Jul 16, 2011 09:57 AM
 My employer said those funds are taken by the federal government and put aside so that when I get old I would have a nice little bundle instead of spending it now and being left with nothing for old age. I recall asking why it wasn't up to me. My employer had no answer to this. But he did try to assure me that I should relax because at least there will be this stash awaiting me when I get old and won't be making much money anymore. Now, I hear noises from the President of the United States of America that unless the debt ceiling is increased now, it may lead the feds to stop paying social security to those legally entitled to it.
Jul 17, 2011 12:11 PM
 As the twin pillars of international monetary system threaten to come tumbling down in unison, gold has reclaimed its ancient status as the anchor of stability. The spot price surged to an all-time high of $1,594 an ounce in London, lifting silver to $39 in its train.
Jul 17, 2011 04:20 PM
 Book Review: Politicians get away with lies in part because Americans are taught that anyone who disbelieves the government must be crazy—the same view the KGB took of Soviet dissidents in the 1970s. This prejudice was canonized in the work of former communist and Ivy League professor Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Top-ranking government officials exploited that notion to help deceive Americans into submission.
Jul 17, 2011 04:41 PM
 Book Review: After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it became fashionable on the right, and among some hawkish liberals, to defend and even promote the idea of an American Empire to keep us safe from terrorists, hold rogue nations in check, and secure global commerce. Two recent histories of previous great empires argue instead that the imperial project is inherently unstable. Both books succeed in showing the small, concentrated benefits that empires bestow on a ruling class and the extraordinary burdens they impose on everyone else. The security and prosperity allegedly offered by empire is an illusion, and those societies that pursue it—even with the best of intentions—will ultimately receive neither.
Jul 17, 2011 05:02 PM
 My leftie friends might protest that these bonds also finance Social Security payments, and I would answer that they need to grow a spine: President Obama’s threat that Social Security checks may not go out after the August deadline is, like everything out that comes out of his mouth, a lie. The government has the money to pay on those checks: this is just his way of playing havoc with the lives of American citizens, a less violent but nonetheless just as evil version of the havoc he plays with the lives of Afghans, Pakistanis, and Libyans every day.
Jul 18, 2011 09:58 AM
 Book Review: Clarence Darrow on the injustice of the American system of "justice:" The negative points about "criminal justice" that you have noticed are not just periodic accidents. They aren’t mistakes. They aren’t exceptions. Darrow explains that the injustice of the system is intrinsic to the system itself. Far from being the proper agency to adjudicate and administer justice, the state is actually the worst agency for this purpose.
Jul 18, 2011 09:52 PM
 Question # 17: Do you support abolition of the income tax?
Question # 34: When a person's moral beliefs are in conflict with a legislative edict, what should he do?
Question # 35: Do you favor compelling citizens to violate their conscience?
# 36: How does compelling someone to violate his conscience differ when we do it, from when the Communists, Nazis or Fascists did it?
Jul 19, 2011 07:40 AM
 WSJ Editorial: A balanced budget amendment is the wrong debt solution. We do not believe this [balanced budget amendment] mechanism can achieve its desired result. The BBA's supporters are right that the U.S. is riding a runaway entitlement train. That train, however, is the product of politics, and politics is the way it will have to be stopped. The main political impact of the BBA, however, will be to give "moderate" Senate Democrats up for re-election next year a chance to enhance their prospects by voting "for" spending control they don't believe in.
Jul 19, 2011 01:12 PM
 Democrats' insistence that the "rich" pay more in taxes is rivaled only by Republicans' apparent inability or unwillingness to engage them on this specific issue. In the following excerpt from testimony submitted to the Senate Finance Committee, economist Thomas Sowell attempts to fill that void.
Jul 19, 2011 02:05 PM
 A net tax increase of more than $1 trillion (I expect that number to be much higher when further details are divulged). Over the next few days, we’ll find out what’s really in this package, but my advice is to keep a tight hold on your wallet.
Jul 20, 2011 08:44 AM
 Bob Dole's Progeny: Seven Republican Senators, Two Republican Members of the House of Representatives (including House Majority Leader) Praise Gang-of-Six proposal the House Budget Committee says will raise taxes by $2.8 trillion.
May 09, 2011 08:38 AM
New national polls show overwhelming opposition to the cuts in Medicare that the House Budget Bill contains for fiscal year 2012.
May 09, 2011 11:47 AM
Last month the U.S. Supreme Court in Connick v. Thompson dismissed a $14 million judgment against the former district attorney of New Orleans although prosecutors had withheld exculpatory evidence in the wrongful murder and robbery conviction of John Thompson. Thompson spent 14 years in prison, mostly on death row, before being acquitted in a second trial...
May 09, 2011 11:53 AM
Rep. Paul Ryan has gotten some very important things right. First, $1 billion may be real money, but it's nothing compared to our federal deficit. We need to talk in terms of thousands of billions, i.e. trillions. Second, we have to stop the hemorrhage from entitlements, or we will bleed to death. Ryan suggests a switch to a defined contribution plan...
May 11, 2011 11:46 AM
The death of Osama bin Laden last week is prompting the Obama Administration, members of Congress and the American public to re-think the war in Afghanistan, and to wonder how the demise of the world's most famous terrorist might hasten its end.
May 12, 2011 12:43 PM
The acting solicitor general for the United States today claimed in a federal appeals court hearing that Congress has the absolute power to order citizens to purchase consumer goods if lawmakers believe there is a national problem the purchases would address.
May 13, 2011 09:47 AM
Fiat money is a digression from what has been the American system. Its advocates seek to give the impression that fiat money is the default position, standard operating procedure for America. On the contrary, fiat money is a bizarre experiment, like the Soviet communism, that deserves to be abandoned.
May 13, 2011 09:53 AM
Following in the footsteps of a rather ignominious list of nations like Argentina and Hungary, the government of lreland is set to take its ‘fair share’ of private retirement funds. I’m convinced that politicians have their eyes firmly fixed on the trillions of dollars in private, individual retirement accounts (IRAs) in the United States to fund new spending. Here’s how it will go down. . .
May 13, 2011 10:04 AM
A growing set of secret forces cocooned inside the U.S. military, along with the missile-armed pilotless drones fighting the CIA’s semi-secret war in Pakistan add up to the newly dominant form of American conflict: presidential war fought on the sly and beyond any serious kind of accountability to the American people.
May 16, 2011 01:13 PM
There is a dirty secret about health care that President Obama hopes will escape the headlines. In his newly released plan to "reform" Medicare as part of overall deficit reduction, Obama has punted actual cost-cutting and instead proposed a panel - the Independent Payment Advisory Board - to recommend savings for the financially doomed program. Translation: Welcome to the world of rationing.
May 16, 2011 01:18 PM
Meddling with Medicare, whatever the nation’s fiscal circumstances, just isn’t popular. Fifty-three percent of voters recently surveyed by The Hill said they would not accept any reduction in Medicare benefits even if doing so would help get the national debt and federal deficits under control.
May 16, 2011 01:26 PM
Treasury Secretary Geithner used the release of the Social Security and Medicare Trustee reports Friday to warn Congress "to move as quickly as possible, so that all Americans will remain confident that the United States will meet all of its obligations," including "our commitments to our seniors."
May 17, 2011 11:48 AM
If, as the Obama Administration claims, "catastrophe" is the certain result of a U.S. debt default, it's fair to say that Treasury will not default. Rather than default, Treasury will be sure to pay interest due on U.S. debt, after which a spendthrift Congress will be forced to make do with funds left over. At that point a Congress that has never been required to make "tough choices" will have to do just that. Programs will shrink, or be abolished altogether, and we'll all be better off as a result.
May 17, 2011 03:14 PM
Through the IMF, U.S. taxpayers are bailing out European nations to save European banks, just as U.S. taxpayers, through the Federal Reserve, secretly bailed out European banks throughout 2009 and 2010. Time to shut down the IMF and get back what’s left of our gold.
May 18, 2011 07:18 AM
Eventually almost all intelligent people who are not the major beneficiaries of the vast powers and wealth of the Party government begin to wake up. By then, of course, it is too late and the "wise" person keeps his mouth shut, allowing the totalitarian police state to grow behind the Mass Media fronts of "freedom." Most Americans still say in public "Americans are the richest and most free people in the world!" That boast is absurdly false but who will dare speak out in the Mass Media to tell the ignorant or cowed people what has happened to them?
May 18, 2011 07:32 AM
You’d think the state would have enough of an unfair advantage to keep its head above water. All it has to do is spend less than it steals. Any common crook ought to be able to manage that. Ahh…but the government is no common crook. It is a crook of the commons, feasting on the toils of the productive economy only to pour the accumulated wealth and value into the bottomless vortex of its own engorged belly.
May 19, 2011 11:18 AM
The condition of state finances threatens the economic recovery. States employ over 19 million Americans, or 15% of the U.S. work force, and state spending accounts for 12% of U.S. gross domestic product. The process of reining in state finances will be painful for us all.
May 19, 2011 11:44 AM
If it was immoral and illegal for the government to confiscate the gold at $20 an ounce in 1933, why is it a bad idea for the government to sell back the gold to the public at a market price today? It is not, unless that is one adopts Franklin Roosevelt's idea of a gold standard: a system in which the government has the right to steal property at one price, hike the price later, and sit on the wealth.
May 19, 2011 01:54 PM
Paul Ryan's Medicare plan contained in the 2012 House Budget Resolution differs from the plan he and Alice Rivlin designed in two ways: One, the Ryan Budget plan does not preserve the traditional Medicare option; newly eligible beneficiaries beginning in 2021 would have only the exchange option. Two, the Ryan plan has a lower growth rate for the subsidy (only the CPI rate of inflation).
May 20, 2011 12:26 PM
In the 1980s, the pre-Blair leftist Labor Party issued its campaign manifesto to oppose Thatcher’s Conservatives in the coming national election. Its loony, leftist proposals were so extreme that the Tory media promptly dubbed it “the longest suicide note in history.” The Republican proposal to shift Medicare from the current system to a voucher-based program of private insurance – in TEN years – falls into the same category.
May 22, 2011 11:40 AM
How could a brilliant guy like Ryan get something so important so completely wrong? The fundamental flaw in the Ryan plan was that it was based upon “static analysis,” which is deeply engrained in Washington. Static analysis is what makes otherwise sensible people say things like, “There are only two ways to reduce the deficit: cut spending or raise taxes.”
May 24, 2011 10:24 AM
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the architect of his party’s radical plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program, gave a lesson Sunday in stating the obvious: “I don’t consult polls to tell me what my principles are or what our policies should be.” I’d suggest that Republicans with less disdain for public opinion might want to check out the height of the cliff from which Ryan would have them leap. Americans oppose Medicare cuts by overwhelming margins.
May 24, 2011 12:07 PM
American society has changed. And with that change, the way the government views us, the way we view one another and the way we view and are viewed by law enforcement have undergone dramatic transformations. We have succeeded in forfeiting one of the principles that has been a hallmark of American democracy--the idea that every person is innocent until proven guilty.
May 25, 2011 05:13 PM
Tim Pawlenty is by all accounts a nice guy who would like very much to be president. But contrary to his 'truth-telling' tag, running for president in today's hyperpartisan primaries encourages would-be candidates to contort their executive records—for example, calling tax hikes "fees" to avoid the wrath of litmus test absolutists. It incentivizes backtracks and flip flops, like running from past support of cap-and-trade legislation (which Pawlenty embraced when aiming to be McCain's vice president in '08) or denying his flirtation with Romney-eqsue individual health-insurance mandates, once Obama backed a similar structure for his national plan.
May 26, 2011 10:26 AM
Those who voted for Obama in 2008, expecting a shift in defense policy, must face a sad fact: The United States would have likely spent less money and spilled less American and foreign blood in its wars had the President simply continued on the path charted by President Bush. Instead, we now have Bush Plus.
May 26, 2011 10:30 AM
Politicians can lead only as far and as fast as public opinion allows. House Republicans, emboldened by their success in the 2010 elections, made the same miscalculation that other politicians in both parties have made, which is to assume a mandate when one doesn’t exist.
May 27, 2011 08:45 AM
It is now within the realm of possibility that the GOP's firm support for RyanCare might hand the House back to Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party. Prior to the New York special election, Democrats had been using the slogan "Drive for 25!" to indicate the number of seats they needed to pick up to regain majority control. In light of Hochul's win, their new slogan is "24 More!"
May 27, 2011 12:21 PM
Does America fit common description of a police state? Clearly it does. The American government exerts extreme control over society down to dictating which foods you may eat. Its economic control borders on the absolute. It politicizes and presides over even the traditional bastion of privacy — the family. Camera and other surveillance of daily life has soared, with the Supreme Court recently expanding the "right" of police to perform warrantless searches. The US has more prisoners per capita than any other nation; the police have self-consciously militarized procedures and attitudes. Travel is a privilege granted by government agents at their whim. Several huge and tyrannical law-enforcement agencies monitor peaceful behavior rather than respond to crime.
May 31, 2011 02:37 PM
The idea that the rich have gotten rich by making the poor poor and that the rich are to blame for all manner of social and economic problems is among the oldest -- and most factually discredited -- explanations of such difference among all sorts of peoples in all sorts of places. Yet it is an explanation that has long been politically seductive, in countries around the world.
Jun 01, 2011 11:58 AM
Geithner and Goldman, Thick as Thieves. The Fed $30 million giveaway to Goldman Sachs was merely one small part of that reckless policy of throwing mad money at the banks while ignoring the plight of homeowners whom the banks had swindled, a plan pursued by both the Bush and the Obama administrations that set the stage for the current slide into a double-dip recession.
Jun 01, 2011 12:09 PM
People watch the History Channel and marvel at the apparently inexplicable rising of the nightmare that engulfed Russia in 1917 – and Germany in modified form 15 years later. They think it could never happen here. America is exceptional. Special. ”Our freedoms” are sacred, except they no longer exist in principle – and very soon, may not exist in fact.
Jun 02, 2011 09:36 AM
G8 calls for more government spending and greater intervention into western economies. No sector of an economy is to escape the interventionist search for “new growth drivers.” No mention in the latest G8 Communiqué — not a word — of market forces and government discipline, except for a call for “market-based” interventions to boost the green economy, a code word for even more government control.
Jun 02, 2011 09:43 AM
 The desire for an exchange rate fix is certainly correct, though it is wildly incorrect to suggest that inflation and deflation can be cured if the U.S. Treasury simply ties the dollar to the euro. Fixed exchange rates are only as good as their underlying definition, and with the euro and dollar lacking any anchor at present, the Mundell policy in favor of continued dollar weakness through a euro peg is anti-growth, and will ensure yet more years of subpar economic performance.
Jun 03, 2011 08:55 AM
The deficit is 10 percent of our gross domestic product, Congress considers cutting Medicare and Social Security for seniors who have chipped in to those programs all their working lives to secure their retirement years. Cities are cutting education. States are slashing pensions. The Pentagon is killing weapons systems. And Barack Obama is ladling out fresh foreign aid.
Jun 05, 2011 01:12 PM
Under ObamaCare, seniors will have extreme difficulty finding doctors who will see them and hospitals who will admit them. Once admitted, they will certainly enjoy fewer amenities (no private room, no gourmet meal choices, and no cable TV perhaps) as well as a lower quality of care. We will have a two-tiered health care system, with the elderly getting second class care.
Jun 06, 2011 11:40 AM
 A totalitarian vision within the United States is continually being enacted and made real. It is not that of Orwell or Huxley although some of their elements are present. At present it is a suffocating and deadening vision in which political correctness holds sway and in which government makes countless rules that control many aspects of life, while allowing outlets in certain directions that vent the pressures. The government’s vision is of oneness, sameness, monotony, regularity, perfect safety and security, regimentation, and boredom. It crushes the personal and the individual.
Jun 07, 2011 08:15 AM
 Hypothesis: America in 2011 is Rome in 200AD or Britain on the eve of the first world war: an empire at the zenith of its power but with cracks beginning to show. The experience of both Rome and Britain suggests that it is hard to stop the rot once it has set in, so here are the a few of the warning signs of trouble ahead. . .
Jun 07, 2011 02:09 PM
The return of the anti-interventionist right is welcome news. It may assure a real debate on foreign policy in the Republican primaries of 2012.
Jun 08, 2011 10:29 AM
 Next week, in Switzerland, Henry Kissinger and his brave band of corporate CEOs, high-wealth individuals and heavyweight thinktankers will lock arms with Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and David Rockefeller, and stand their ground against the economic contagion.
Jun 08, 2011 03:08 PM
Democracy imbues irritation and covetousness with legitimacy. The democratic process is a theater of the absurd and the tragic; for there isn't a fetish, a paranoia, an obsession, or a whim that can't be legislated. One need only to form a persuasive, vocal minority. We wrongfully believe democracy engenders rule of law. It doesn't. Democracy invariably regresses to government driven by decrees, which differ from laws in that laws are consecrated by long usage. Laws are part of a coherent, harmonious, and logical whole. A piece of legislation created ad hoc — and most are — is merely a decree.
Jun 09, 2011 07:09 AM
 The state - and the corporate order that depends upon the exercise of state power - is fighting for its survival. Rather than treating this as a "war against terrorism," it is more accurate to consider it as a "war to preserve the hierarchically-structured institutional order." There are too many trillions of dollars and too much arbitrary power at stake for those who benefit from controlling the state’s instruments of violence to await the outcome of ordinary people’s thinking. Destructive violence becomes an end-in-itself to an organization that is defined in terms of its monopoly on such means.
Jun 09, 2011 07:28 AM
Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society experiment is in full bloom and it is downright ugly. LBJ's attempt to coddle the lower classes with free money for going fatherless and even more money for mother's having more children, without husbands around, has perhaps reached the third generation of such fatherless, uncontrollable youth. The experiment has resulted in roaming bands of criminals.
Jun 09, 2011 08:12 AM
 Together, the public and private sectors in the US now spend $3.5 trillion just on interest. Since almost all the borrowed money was spent on consumption rather than capital investment, this expense is just one big drag on the economy. It produces no growth, no real jobs, and no real wealth. The total tax take is about $2.5 trillion - money almost 100% consumed…eaten up…used up, with nothing to show for it but people eager to consume even more next year. These two expenses combined tote to about 40% of GDP.No wonder the economy is not growing! Four out of every ten dollars is zombie spending.
Jun 15, 2011 09:06 AM
 A metaphor responsible for a great deal of confusion is that of wealth as a pie–a metaphor that shows up again and again in debates over income inequality. The pie metaphor misleads because wealth is not a zero-sum game. Wealth grows so individuals' well-being can grow even when their share of the pie falls if the pie is getting sufficiently larger.
Jun 15, 2011 10:50 AM
The lesson of Medicare's Prescription Drugs Program is hard for Washington policymakers to swallow. We cannot micromanage every aspect of the health care system if we expect to reduce Medicare spending in a way that can be sustained over the long term. Health plans freed from excessive regulation and perverse payment incentives are capable of finding better ways to provide the care patients need. And seniors, given the proper information, can navigate a system that offers them choices of competing plans.
Jun 16, 2011 07:16 AM
 Reductions in top tax rates under Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, and reductions in capital gains tax rates under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, not only "paid for themselves" but also provided enough extra revenue to finance negative income taxes for the bottom 40% and record-low income taxes at middle incomes.
Jun 19, 2011 08:37 AM
 As the old saw has it, power corrupts. Governments around the world - whether out of fear, prejudice or greed -- frequently succumb to the temptation to abuse their power and lives are ruined as a result. Our own government is no exception.
Jun 20, 2011 08:04 AM
 As the Fed's debasement of the currency reaches literally unprecedented levels, more and more regular Americans are waking up to the merits of commodity money. Yet this isn't some populist fad; there is a whole tradition of excellent academic scholarship touting the virtues of the gold standard. The Gold Standard: Myths and Lies
Apr 01, 2011 01:59 PM
If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government...
Apr 01, 2011 02:02 PM
Unstable money creates anxiety. By now, the dollar has been unstable enough, for long enough, that this anxiety is popping out everywhere. TV commercials are urging people to buy gold, sales of “survivalist” books are rising, and consumer confidence is plunging. And, on March 22, “money” featured more prominently than tax cuts at a “Supply Side” conference in New York City, at which luminaries such as Robert Mundell, Steve Forbes, Arthur Laffer and Larry Kudlow offered their views...
Apr 04, 2011 01:19 PM
The tax-exempt seniors group that pushed hard to get ObamaCare passed stands to reap a billion-dollar reward over the next decade as ObamaCare destroys the competition to the products it endorses. During what passed for a debate on ObamaCare, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)...
Apr 04, 2011 01:27 PM
Physical protection from criminal thugs is arguably the only moral service a cop can provide. But the truth is they don’t provide even this most elemental of services. Indeed, the Supremes have explicitly laid this out; i.e., cops have no duty to protect specific individuals from harm. Just 'society.' That means you are on your own where it matters most; the one area where most of us would agree having some back-up would be nice to have...
Apr 04, 2011 01:31 PM
Last fall's national elections showed that voters are increasingly wise to the basic truth that governments can only spend what's been taken from them first. From that there's developed a growing consensus inside the electorate that Washington must mend its profligate ways...
Apr 04, 2011 01:37 PM
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Apr 05, 2011 12:00 PM
With the rise of the Progressive Movement of more than a century ago, American intellectuals, businessmen and politicians joined to overthrow a social order that was responsible for transforming American society from a backwoods, agrarian country into an industrial powerhouse. While 'Progressives' were and are championed by the intellectual elite and media pundits as "reformers" who are trying to make society better, in reality they undermined human liberty in order to impose an order that could move in no direction but toward tyranny...
Apr 05, 2011 02:14 PM
"I take President Obama's word for it that troops will not be engaged on the ground," eructated MSNBC's Ed Schultz, rebuking investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill for fomenting doubts about the wisdom of the Dear Leader's war in Libya. When Scahill made a passing reference to "your President Obama," Schultz morphed into a portlier, more articulate version of Sean Hannity: "`My' President Obama? Is he your president, too? Jeremy, is he your president, too?"
Apr 06, 2011 04:04 PM
Is this “the end of progressive government?” asks E.J. Dionne in The Washington Post. Do Republicans intend to break “America’s promise to seniors and to the poor?” asks Jon Cohn in The New Republic. Will the Republicans leave “the old and the poor without health care,” as Ezra Klein suggests? There’s no question in Paul Krugman’s mind. The “savings will come entirely from…denying medical care to those who can’t afford to top up their premiums,” he says. It’s “radical,” “irresponsible,” and “extreme,” adds Dionne...
Apr 07, 2011 12:58 PM
You can hardly turn over an investing advice newsletter without finding a recommendation to buy TIPS, or Treasury inflation-protected securities, to preserve the purchasing power of your dollar-denominated savings. Economists and investment pros look out three years and can't believe we aren't due for a powerful flush of inflation...
Apr 08, 2011 12:10 PM
On March 20, Pastor Terry Jones, who heads a congregation of 30 at his Dove World Outreach Center church in Gainesville, Fla., conducted a mock trial of the Quran “for crimes against humanity.” Pronouncing Islam’s sacred book guilty, Jones soaked a Quran in kerosene and set it ablaze in a portable fire pit...
Apr 08, 2011 12:15 PM
The worst effect of the state is intellectual. It puts our brains in a prison, simply by defining the terms in which we are permitted to think and speak. The one non-negotiable point becomes the state itself. You are permitted to argue about what the state's priorities ought to be (bombs or butter), but not question the fundamental model of a state-dominated society...
Apr 11, 2011 10:45 AM
Anyone who has read Friedrick Hayek's The Road to Serfdom should be able to understand the new popularity of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate. When Hayek writes that the average person is attracted to the "can do" leader, it is not hard to believe that Trump fits within the broad definition of what Hayek had in mind...
Apr 11, 2011 10:47 AM
Rep. Paul Ryan calls the Federal budget plan that he unveiled on April 5 a "Path to Prosperity". Critics on the Left have called it a "Road to Ruin". However, it is probably best characterized as an "Interstate to Irrelevance". This is because it pays so little attention to what is by far the most important factor affecting federal finances, the rate of economic growth...
Apr 11, 2011 10:51 AM
When George W. Bush ran for President in 2000, he explicitly campaigned on empowering workers with the freedom to choose personal accounts for Social Security. His campaign employed all the positive, populist themes originally envisioned for the reform effort...
Apr 11, 2011 10:59 AM
The following chart says it all. The Fed’s aggressive Treasury monetization has been the causa proxima (90-percent correlation) to the peddle-to-the-metal Minsky Meltup in commodities. I suspected this would be the effect but confess I did not believe the Fed and government could be so irrational and stupid as to attempt it, especially with the blowback evident by year end...
Apr 15, 2011 12:36 PM
The Justice Department knows how to get those guys. You know the ones who hit home runs and abuse themselves with steroids in order to hit more. Not the way the game should be played, but the last time I checked Barry Bonds hadn't foreclosed on anyone's home, nor had his actions pressured the economy to his own benefit while millions were losing their jobs...
Apr 15, 2011 12:39 PM
Ever wonder why the US military can’t win wars? Why a few ragtag guerillas could send it running out of Somalia (Black Hawk Down)? Why one guy with a truck bomb could chase the Marines out of Lebanon? Why the attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran was such a disaster? Why the world’s most expensive military can’t win its unending wars against peasants with rifles? How is this possible?...
Apr 18, 2011 12:54 PM
When financially hard-pressed Americans and firms work diligently to cut spending so as to bolster their solvency, they know the word “cut” had better mean “decrease” — and certainly not its opposite (“increase”) – or they’ll fail to be fiscally prudent. But that’s not the way of it in Washington, where public officials and the breathless media shills claim incessantly that there’ll be a “cut” in spending, when in fact what they mean is: an increase, but at a slightly lesser rate than initially intended (under some previous “baseline” growth rate)...
Apr 18, 2011 12:58 PM
There is a lot more to taxes than simply paying the bill. Taxpayers must spend significantly more than $1 in order to provide $1 of income-tax revenue to the federal government. To start with, individuals and businesses must pay the government the $1 in revenue plus the costs of their own time spent filing and complying with the tax code...
Apr 21, 2011 11:40 AM
The College Republicans at the University of California-Merced ask fellow students, who support raising taxes on the rich, if they would be willing to redistribute their GPAs. They don’t think it’s a good idea because they earned their grades...
Apr 25, 2011 11:29 AM
Back around 2005 when housing was booming, far from a sign of economic vitality, the proverbial "rush to the real" signaled a growing economic downturn. Thanks to a dollar in freefall as evidenced by a spike in the price of gold, always limited capital was migrating toward the hard, unproductive assets least vulnerable to currency devaluation...
Apr 25, 2011 11:33 AM
Good week! We're getting closer to the goal! I went to GWU and denounced the Paul Ryan plan as a radical Republican plan. You should have heard the howls! The GOP should put me on the payroll—the tea partiers and their congressmen were rushing to support a proposal that remakes (one more time!) the Republican peace with the welfare state!
Apr 25, 2011 11:36 AM
California -- it's the best place to live and it's the worst place to live. The physical climate is almost ideal and the political climate, if you're a conservative, is surreal. Through their politicians and bureaucrats Californians seem hell bent on destroying the state's vast potential. It's a painful sight to witness...
Apr 25, 2011 12:17 PM
While casting himself as America's new constitutional savior, Donald Trump has shown reckless disregard for fundamental private property rights. Trump doesn't have to negotiate with a private owner when he wants to buy a piece of property to build a new Casino because a governmental agency -- the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority -- will get it for him at a fraction of the market value, even if the current owner refuses to sell...
Apr 25, 2011 12:20 PM
As we have been approaching the $14.3 trillion statutory limit to federal borrowing, I and many of my colleagues have insisted on real spending reforms now as part of any agreement to allow still more government borrowing. Unfortunately, the administration has insisted instead that we should simply raise the debt limit unconditionally...
Apr 26, 2011 01:28 PM
No serious politician in either party is talking about letting the country default on its debt, even if they don't reach an agreement on raising the debt and the federal government is precluded from borrowing more money. A combination of tax revenues on hand, savings from furloughing government workers and a few other measures would certainly allow the richest country in the world to meet its obligations...
Apr 26, 2011 01:30 PM
Something to remember next time you pull up to the pump and get ready to pay four one-dollar greenbacks for a gallon of gas, if you can even find gas at the $4 price Mr. Obama quoted in his weekly radio address. It’s not that the gasoline has been going up in value: It is not that the true price of gas has don up; the dollars you’re using to pay for the gas have collapsed in value...
Apr 28, 2011 12:17 PM
Contemplating the 2012 election that can already be seen looming on the distant horizon, the President's advisors were no doubt hoping that the "death panel" debate was… well… dead. But Obama himself inadvertently resurrected it when, in response to Republican budget proposals, he claimed that Medicare costs will be kept under control by the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB)...
Apr 28, 2011 12:20 PM
Baltimore, Maryland – We’ve always wondered why there is so much debate about the rate of inflation. It seems like such a simple thing to track. You go in the store. You buy a box of Wheaties. You write down the price. Next month, you do the same thing. What’s so hard about that?
Apr 28, 2011 12:23 PM
Since 1962, the U.S. has reached its debt ceiling 74 times, about once every eight months. Every time, the ceiling has been raised with little notice outside Washington and little, if any, change in the trajectory of government spending. But when opposing parties have held the White House and Congress, the process has always resembled a Kabuki dance. What should be a debate becomes an exercise in scoring political points...
Apr 28, 2011 12:54 PM
Chairman Bernanke hadn’t even finished his press conference when an investor of our acquaintance who was watching on television sent over an email describing the event as the “illusion of transparency.” We’re not sure the blame attaches solely to Mr. Bernanke, in that the person holding a press conference is never the only player. There are also those who ask, or fail to ask, the questions...
Apr 29, 2011 10:40 AM
Rep. Paul Ryan acknowledged he was handing Democrats a political weapon when he unveiled his fiscal 2012 budget proposal, including a controversial overhaul of Medicare. Congressional leaders in both parties now seem to agree with him...
Apr 30, 2011 02:27 PM
Now that Haley Barbour, one of the savviest politicos around, has dropped out of the presidential race, we may as just make Tim Pawlenty the Republicans’ Bob Dole for 2012 and be done with it—at least he won’t embarrass the party when he loses, says Matt Latimer...
May 02, 2011 10:21 AM
The Obama regime has endorsed the Bush regime’s violation of the US Constitution. It has made indefinite detention in concentration camps an enduring American institution. Habeas corpus, due process, and the right to an attorney are now dead-letter legal rights for anyone accused with or without evidence of being a "suspect..."
May 03, 2011 12:24 PM
The real question here is how any politician (Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Rick Scott) could resist promising 'universal' health care – the resulting dependency is embraced by the people it victimizes, and vastly increases politicians’ power...
May 03, 2011 12:31 PM
We are told that Osama bin Laden is dead. I hope they publish the death certificate. A little DNA checking would be good, too. We are told this was done. I hope all of his personal papers get published. I am waiting to find out who paid the bill for the Dubai hospital where he was treated in July 2001...
May 03, 2011 12:34 PM
Imagine a military historian visiting here from five hundred years into the future. What could he possibly think of an Army general who is endlessly feted and promoted while the war he has been most closely associated with, not to mention in command of, chokes and wheezes along like an asthmatic, by many accounts a foregone failure?
May 03, 2011 12:37 PM
Average wages in the federal civilian workforce -- $74,311 in 2010 -- far eclipse the $49,977 median wages in private industry,' states a recent House budget report. Add benefit packages and the average compensation per year of federal civilian workers jumps to $101,628...
May 03, 2011 02:09 PM
I commend former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Emil W. Henry Jr. on "The Debt Ceiling: Myths and Facts" (op-ed, April 28), in which he dispels the myths and demagoguery surrounding the debt limit debate. Specifically, he effectively explains that if Congress does not raise the debt limit, it need not, and will not, result in default on the national debt...
May 05, 2011 02:19 PM
I’ll make two predictions with utter confidence. The first is that one day Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke will be ridden out of town on a rail, joining Arthur Burns in that special circle of hell reserved for monetary debauchers. The second is that in the aftermath of our pending inflationary disaster we will see the gold standard return...
May 06, 2011 08:46 AM
In essence, Mr. Obama and the others who are advocating tax increases - either enthusiastically or reluctantly - are saying that they want or expect the federal government to be bigger as a share of the national economy than it has been in the past and this bigger government should be financed through higher taxes.
May 06, 2011 09:37 AM
A 2008 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that the highest-earning 10% of the U.S. population paid the largest share among 24 countries examined, even after adjusting for their relatively higher incomes. “Taxation is most progressively distributed in the United States,” the OECD study concluded.
May 06, 2011 10:02 AM
President Obama proposes budget savings of $480 billion to come from federal health care programs. He plans to achieve those savings through heavy-handed rationing. Americans will lose control of their health care as government officials dictate which treatments will be available--and which cost too much money.
Feb 21, 2011 09:43 AM
Traditionally, when the national debt approaches the debt ceiling, the minority party in Congress engages in a little no-cost demagoguery. They let the majority take responsibility for the necessary "yes" vote, and then publicly denounce them for fiscal irresponsibility. This routine is so familiar that Donald Marron, a former Congressional Budget Office official, describes the debt-ceiling increase vote as a "a tax on the majority." The Tea Party-minded Republicans, however, are making things play out very differently than in past years...
Feb 22, 2011 01:40 PM
This state – my state – has a thing for imposing grossly disproportionate-to-the-offense punishments. Oh, not on the cretins who murder, rape or even steal. It’s usually necessary to kill, rape or steal multiple times before my state begins to get cross-eyed...
Feb 22, 2011 04:00 PM
Every nation has its “founding myth,” as we are apt to hear from post-modern quarters. But is this ever true when it comes to our economic history. In curricula from K-12 to history graduate school, it is staple fare that as a new nation in the early nineteenth century, the United States nurtured its “infant industry” into adulthood by having a protective tariff that kept out cheap mass-made European goods. After a century of trade protectionism, the story goes, U.S. industry was so strong that it was the most productive in the world...
Feb 23, 2011 11:54 AM
Sixty-five billion dollars is a lot of money. But when special-inter- est groups are used to getting $70 billion, it’s not hard to imag- ine the reaction when, as Florida’s newest governor, I rolled out my “jobs budget,” which called for reducing state spending by more than $5 billion, when a reduction of just $3.6 billion would have “balanced” the state budget...
Feb 23, 2011 11:59 AM
Government workers have taken to the streets in Madison, Wis., to battle a series of reforms proposed by Gov. Scott Walker that include allowing workers to opt out of paying dues to unions. Everywhere that this "opt out" idea has been proposed, unions have battled it vigorously because the money they collect from dues is at the heart of their power...
Feb 23, 2011 12:02 PM
As a large and furious demonstration was under way outside and inside the Capitol in Madison last week, Barack Obama invited in a TV camera crew from Milwaukee and proceeded to fan the flames. Dropping the mask of The Great Compromiser, Obama reverted to his role as South Chicago community organizer, charging Gov. Scott Walker and the Wisconsin legislature with an "assault on unions..."
Feb 25, 2011 01:43 PM
American politics has been Middle-Easternized by which I mean political positions increasingly are defined not on their individual merits but rather by who takes what position on the particular issue in question. If Democrats are for it, Republicans are against it; if President Obama opposes it, Republican presidential contenders are for it. If you are not with us, you are against us. My enemy’s enemy is my friend and his friend my enemy. Most un-American and completely at odds with the kind of reasoned and informed debate required to make democracy work...
Mar 01, 2011 10:33 AM
Before answering this question it is necessary to put into better relief the distinctive feature of capitalism as against that of a status society. It is quite customary to liken the entrepreneurs and capitalists of the market economy to the aristocrats of a status society. The basis of the comparison is the relative riches of both groups as against the relatively straitened conditions of the rest of their fellow men. However, in resorting to this metaphor, one fails to realize the fundamental difference between aristocratic riches and "bourgeois" or capitalistic riches...
Mar 04, 2011 11:17 AM
While the U.S. government was expressing outrage over attacks on freedom of speech at the hands of U.S.-supported dictators in the Middle East, the U.S. Justice Department was securing a federal grand jury indictment against a man named Julian Heicklen. The charge? The feds are charging Heicklen for handing out jury-nullification pamphlets to people who are entering the federal courthouse in New York City, including prospective jurors. The feds say that that’s “jury tampering...”
Mar 04, 2011 11:23 AM
The U.S. government historically went into debt suddenly to fight wars and then gradually repaid the debt, entirely or in large part, in the postwar period. This pattern held until the Great Depression and World War II, when the government went massively into debt, but did not pay off much of that debt afterward. However, it did not add much to the debt between 1946 and the early 1980s, so for more than thirty years, the real debt hovered in the neighborhood of $2 trillion (dollars of 2010 purchasing power)...
Mar 04, 2011 11:27 AM
I think it would be useful to begin this article with a brief statement of the facts. Eunice and Owen Johns are an elderly couple from Derby, who fostered a number of children in the 1990s, and who recently offered their services again to Derby City Council. Their offer was rejected on the grounds that, as fundamentalist Christians, they might teach any children in their keeping that homosexual acts were sinful. They took legal action against the Council, arguing that their beliefs should not be held against them...
Mar 07, 2011 04:09 PM
Under ObamaCare, seniors are at risk of losing access to physicians and medical care. Medicare actuaries say that the cuts built into the law will force as many as 40% of providers to eventually stop seeing Medicare patients or go bankrupt...
Mar 09, 2011 01:13 PM
Welfare states face an inescapable paradox: The level of production needed to sustain a welfare state cannot be sustained by a welfare state. Special interest groups like AARP will funnel campaign funds and votes to pliable politicians who will spend the country into bankruptcy...
Mar 09, 2011 01:18 PM
It is virtually impossible to pick up a newspaper without seeing Mark Zandi — or, as he is invariably identified, “Mark Zandi, a former adviser to John McCain” — extolling the virtues of government spending. Zandi is worried that Republican plans to cut $61 billion in government spending this year...
Mar 11, 2011 12:52 PM
Michael Moore and his fellow-travelers in the American version of the Socialist/Marxist cabal have picked up the mantle of defending public unionism in their demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin and other state capitals. They are vocally calling for more confiscation of the wealth of the rich to pay for the bloated incomes of government workers and openly stating that all wealth belongs to the state while their true motives are deliberately obfuscated...
Mar 11, 2011 12:56 PM
Having deliberately ignored the issue of entitlement costs in its 2012 Budget, the Obama Administration is holding its breath to see if the Republicans will fall into the trap and propose unpopular changes to Social Security. The GOP should not take the bait...
Mar 14, 2011 04:03 PM
The United States has been called the oldest nation in the world, in the sense that it has operated the longest without a major upheaval in its basic institutional structure. From one perspective, this characterization is fair. The nation still rests on the Constitution of 1787, and no other government can trace its current charter back so far...
Mar 14, 2011 04:07 PM
I like to refer to a gold standard as a "currency board linked to gold." This accomplishes quite a few things. It helps people throw out their old misconceptions and look at things from a new perspective. It describes, in five words, how a gold standard actually operates. It also serves as a sort of litmus test...
Mar 15, 2011 10:25 AM
One of the first things that children are taught is that might does not make right. When a fight breaks out among children, their parents tell them that the person who threw the first punch was wrong. Not only was the aggressor wrong, but he was acting unintelligently. It is the one who has run out of ideas that resorts to the use of force. The bully is the dummy, while the child who seeks to resolve disputes through conversation and agreement is the intelligent one...
Mar 17, 2011 12:11 PM
No economic policy innovation since the New Deal of the 1930s has proven more consequential than the supply-side revolution – arguably the most important component of the larger Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Three decades removed from this epic event, you would expect to find it the subject of a mountain of books written by professional historians, the product of comprehensive research entailing all manner of sources, evidence, and interpretations. After all, three decades after 1933, a small library would have scarcely contained the books detailing the intellectual ancestry, policy history, and economic effects of the New Deal...
Mar 17, 2011 12:16 PM
Speaker of the House John Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and House Republican Whip Kevin McCarthy have consistently blocked efforts by Reps. Steve King and Michele Bachmann to defund the so-called "Obamacare slush fund" via the continuing resolution or House spending bills, despite being told by House Republican leadership staff that they could do so under current House rules...
Mar 17, 2011 12:20 PM
Republicans ran their 2010 mid-term campaigns on chiefly the promise that the Democratic health care law would eventually be repealed, but in the meantime, de-funding the entire health care legislation would have to be a way to at least slow down the implementation of the law. H.R. 1 promised to accomplish the de-funding of Obamacare, but according to discoveries made by former Republican Oklahoma Congressman now a distinguish fellow at the Heritage Foundation Ernest Istook, the health care bill has a mandatory appropriation that would fund the legislation almost a decade into the future...
Mar 18, 2011 12:20 PM
Middle-income professionals and workers and those on fixed incomes and pensions are impoverished by the very same inflationary process that subsidizes speculators and bankers. Those on fixed incomes will likely earn very little or even a negative return on their savings...
Mar 18, 2011 12:37 PM
Next year the baby boomers begin to retire on Medicare in earnest, and the year after that on Social Security. For decades now, the federal government’s own official reports have been showing that Social Security would not be able to pay all promised benefits to the baby boomers without dramatic, unsustainable tax increases...
Mar 18, 2011 02:41 PM
In a recent editorial, the Wall Street Journal declared “We are all neocons now.” The claim is exaggerated but not by much. Neoconservatism has been, for better or worse, the most influential political philosophy of the last generation. But what exactly is it? My new book Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea attempts to answer that question...
Mar 21, 2011 11:30 AM
There's a relatively new front in the war against elephantine government and the Obama administration's socialist dreams. It's called The Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011, and it's gotten less attention than it deserves, even in the conservative press...
Mar 22, 2011 01:45 PM
The civil war in Libya is now a new war: the Libyan War. This new war began when the West and/or the U.N. joined the war and escalated it. NATO may be coming aboard too. The U.N., that supposed instrument of international peace and security, has escalated a civil war into an international war...
Mar 22, 2011 01:49 PM
The United States is on a fiscal path towards insolvency and policymakers are at a "tipping point," a Federal Reserve official said on Tuesday. "If we continue down on the path on which the fiscal authorities put us, we will become insolvent, the question is when..."
Mar 22, 2011 02:03 PM
Maybe I missed something, but wasn't that The Constitution of the United States of America that we just laid to rest this weekend? It was buried in a private ceremony by Mr. Barack Obama of Chicago as he silently signed America on to the One World Government some of us have been worried about for decades...
Mar 23, 2011 12:25 PM
We don't live in a libertarian moment. Or even an anti-state moment. People are protesting to make the state work better, to work for them. But it is an interesting moment, and one that is generally positive for liberty...
Mar 23, 2011 12:29 PM
"The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation." -Senator Barack Obama, December, 2007...
Mar 23, 2011 12:32 PM
Back in the late ‘90s at Goldman Sachs, it was a running joke in the equities division that so inept were the firm's economists, that the best way to put one's clients into profitable trades was to bet against their projections. Though a buy-and-hold firm by nature, Goldman had clients eager to trade, and the GS economists served as the proverbial muse for clients seeking profitable action...
Mar 23, 2011 01:13 PM
In 1492 Columbus rediscovered America, and the settlers, destructively exploiting its vast resources, achieved a success which they attributed to their own near-miraculous virtues, some of which they actually had: courage, rude vigor, industry, and an independent spirit. Shortly after, they emerged from WWII unscathed due to the military genius embodied in two oceans while competitors—Europe, Russia, China, and Japan—lay prostrate.
Mar 25, 2011 02:51 PM
Coercion is the essence of government in the same way that profit is the essence of private businesses. The state can impose new prohibitions and restrictions, create new penalties, or impose taxes in order to finance benefits. It is misleading to conceive of politicians as offering both carrots and sticks: Government must first use a stick to commandeer the money to pay for the carrot...
Mar 25, 2011 02:57 PM
'What Should the Federal Reserve Do Next?' Less, we say. Withdraw from the business of macroeconomic management. Acknowledge the essential error of the doctrine of interest-rate manipulation. Confess to the obvious flaws in the paper-currency system. Renounce debasement under the pseudoscientific name of "'quantitative easing...'
Mar 25, 2011 03:02 PM
When news broke that Elizabeth Taylor had died at 79, we immediately reached out to founding Salon contributor and lifelong Taylor obsessive Camille Paglia for her thoughts. We found her in a Philadelphia research library researching her new visual arts book for Pantheon, but she diligently trekked outside in the rain to speak to Salon editor-in-chief Kerry Lauerman by telephone under a portico, as the wind howled around her...
Mar 25, 2011 03:12 PM
In America today, the biggest recipients of handouts are not poor people. They're corporations. General Electric CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt is super-close to President Obama. The president named Immelt chairman of his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Before that, Immelt was on Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board...
Mar 27, 2011 10:51 AM
ObamaCare’s draconian Medicare cuts apply to today’s retirees. It’s too late for today’s retirees to adjust. If the government is not going to pay, then today’s seniors are not going to get the health services, treatment and care they were promised. The U.S. Government Accountability Office acknowledges this fact in the federal government’s 2010 Financial Statement, saying, “Unless providers could reduce their cost per service correspondingly, through productivity improvements, or other steps, they would eventually become unwilling or unable to treat Medicare beneficiaries.”
Mar 27, 2011 11:50 AM
The earthquake, Tsunami, and nuclear plant crisis combined to persuade Japanese investors to sell their assets and get into cash, which means yen. This threatened to create losses for the speculators and their banks. The Bank of Japan, the Federal Reserve, and the G-7 bureaucrats decided in the business week of March 15 to keep the yen carry trade from unwinding. They see their task as thwarting the results of Japanese investors. The central bankers are unofficially pledged to save the big banks whenever required, no matter what the cost
Mar 28, 2011 01:56 PM
As the Tea Party continues to set its sights on astronomical and unsustainable government growth, Republicans have been eager to sing the movement's tune. Promising to cut spending and balance budgets, the GOP's newfound right-wing fiscal rhetoric has been characterized by mainstream pundits as a once "respectable" Republican Party kowtowing to conservative "extremists" for whom the debt crisis continues to represent the one and only crisis...
Mar 28, 2011 02:02 PM
They basically printed money out of thin air—about $1.25 trillion—and used it to purchase the so-called “toxic assets” from all the banks up and down Wall Street which were about to keel over dead. The reason they were about to keel over dead was because the “toxic assets”—mortgage backed securities and so on—were worth fractions of their nominal value. Very small fractions. All these banks were broke, because of their bad bets on these toxic assets. So in order to keep them from going broke—and thereby wrecking the world economy—the Fed payed 100 cents on the dollar for this crap...
Mar 28, 2011 02:05 PM
An average-income couple retiring in 2009, had they been allowed to pay into a personal retirement account what they and their employers instead were forced to pay into Social Security, would have reached retirement with accumulated account funds, after administrative costs, of $855,175, despite the fact that they retired just one year after the worst 10-year stock market performance in American history, from 1999 to 2008. Their account still would have been sufficient to pay them about 75% more than Social Security promises them, increased annually for inflation just like Social Security...
Mar 28, 2011 02:11 PM
Someone has to stop the Fed before it crushes what remains of America’s main street economy. Last Friday morning alone it launched two more financial sector pumping operations which will harm the real economy, even as these actions juice Wall Street’s speculative humors...
Mar 30, 2011 10:52 AM
As revolts demonstrating humankind's innate yearning to be free erupt around the world, it is deeply ironic that here in the formerly freest nation ever established, Americans are being conditioned to submit to unreasonable searches on top of the warrantless wiretaps and other rights violations that have escalated over the past 10 years...
Mar 30, 2011 10:56 AM
It sounds like a mythic tale of heroic salvation: A former Republican congressman with a fierce reputation as a cost-cutter comes out of retirement, runs for governor of one of the largest states in the country, and is swept into office by an anti-incumbent, anti-spending wave. Frustrated voters also give the new governor's party control of both houses in the state's legislature...
Mar 30, 2011 11:01 AM
In my previous column I warned of a coming slowdown in long-term U.S. economic growth. This gloomy prospect has nothing to do with the current mess we’re in: even if we returned to robust macroeconomic health tomorrow (don’t hold your breath), unfavorable demographics over the coming decades threaten to reduce growth rates well below the historical trend line. According to Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon, growth in GDP per capita will average 1.45 percent a year from 2008-2028 – down from 2.16 percent average annual growth between 1929 and 2007...
Jan 11, 2011 05:04 PM
Is the Federal Reserve Really Purchasing Over 60% of 2011’s Fiscal Deficit? In a Word, uh . . . Yeah...
Aug 23, 2010 05:39 PM
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) last month unveiled a slick, $700,000 television commercial featuring crusty old actor Andy Griffith announcing that "more good things" are coming to seniors - thanks to Obamacare. Just add the O Force campaign logo, and the advertisement will be ready for use in the 2012 presidential race.
Aug 31, 2010 03:51 PM
Washington has become little more than a sugar daddy to the states, handing out money for a whole range of needs -- health care, welfare, highways and other infrastructure needs, education, environmental concerns, and most recently bail out dollars. Ironically, the states' embrace of the handouts comes at a time when many of them are trying to reassert their rights and independence under the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. They want Washington to quite bossing them around, even as governors plead for more federal assistance. The two can't co-exist. Can States Break the Cycle of Dependency?
Sep 02, 2010 04:44 PM
Republicans must show the American people a credible, concrete plan to reduce government taxes and spending, resolve the entitlement crisis and cut the national debt, reinvigorate Main Street and entrepreneurial free enterprise, repeal and replace Obamacare, control our borders, and much else. If they don't, little will change in Washington except that Republicans will then share even more of the blame with Obama and the Democrats for the disaster in the nation's capital.
Sep 04, 2010 03:38 PM
Fed policy—call it “money-printing”, call it “liquidity injections,” call it “asset price stabilization”—has been overwhelmed by the credit contraction. At best, the Fed has been able to alleviate the worst effects of the deflation—it certainly has not turned the deflationary environment into anything resembling inflation. Therefore, talking about hyperinflation now would seem . . . well . . . crazy. Right? Wrong: The next step down in this world-historical Global Depression which we are experiencing will be hyperinflation.
Sep 04, 2010 05:12 PM
Congressional architects of ObamaCare carefully constructed it to fail and in the process of failing lead into a "solution" that is closer to their ultimate objective—socialized medicine. ObamaCare is a three-step jump—individual mandate, public option, socialized medicine—very risky scheme. Senator Ron Wyden (D-WA) prefers a two-step jump—just skip the whole individual mandate thing, get directly to a public option run by the states, which itself will collapse and require a federal rescue/bailout in the form of real socialized medicine.
Sep 07, 2010 06:03 PM
There’s a saying in Spanish: Por la boca muere el pez. “The fish dies by the mouth.” Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman has a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times which goes an awful long way to showing that he is a complete and utter imbecile—or the worst sort of cheap huckster imaginable.
Oct 04, 2010 09:32 AM
Governments have no business telling us how to live. They are tiresome enough in the exercise of authority. They are intolerable when they mount the pulpit. Nor should we be in any doubt that nationalizing the moral life of the people is the first step toward totalitarianism.
Oct 05, 2010 11:35 AM
Our imperial generals seem determined to blunder into a nation of 175 million hostile people without any clear strategy. Unable to subdue the Pashtun tribes of Afghanistan, they are now attacking the Pashtun tribes of Pakistan. America does not need more enemies.
Nov 04, 2010 11:20 PM
The question being asked all across the world of business news is: Will QE2 be successful? Because this policy is literally economic suicide, the question becomes: Will the Federal Reserve be successful in the assisted economic suicide of the U.S. government? I find this an utterly appalling question -- which highlights the intellectual bankruptcy of government policymakers and the bankers who goad them onward.
Nov 05, 2010 11:48 AM
When the American people find themselves at the polls again in 2012, how can we know that our voice was heard in 2010? Will we find our government smaller, our freedom greater, our taxes lower, our spending wiser? Or will we find ourselves disappointed yet again, trudging dutifully to cast ballots for the latest crop of Johnny-come-lately's promising true change?
Nov 05, 2010 04:11 PM
Joe Barton (R-TX) is in line to become Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, and in a recent telephone interview he told Congressional Quarterly he would push for replacement legislation to replace ObamaCare that would retain some of the law. That is, Barton does not want to eliminate ObamaCare entirely but to “retain some of its more popular provisions.” “Some of the stuff in the bill is not that bad,” Barton said.
Nov 05, 2010 08:46 PM
This election season, the tea partiers stormed the halls of Congress and took several key positions, but were outflanked by the Federal Reserve, which announced that very day that we’d be spending another trillion – and it was done without congressional approval. Given the course we have been on and are continuing on – in which the government printing presses are seen as the path to recovery – we are headed for hyper-inflation and economic catastrophe.
Nov 06, 2010 08:11 PM
The Keynesian welfare state is best described as the mild-mannered alter ego of the totalitarian welfare state. The official alchemists responsible for transmuting debt into political power eventually find it impossible to siphon wealth out of the productive class in amounts sufficient to meet the needs of the political class. When this happens, the ruling elite will inevitably turn to bloodshed as a source of economic "stimulus."
Jan 04, 2011 11:47 AM
The same day they elect Rep. John Boehner of Ohio as speaker, members of the 112th House of Representatives must approve the rules under which they will operate. The package submitted by the new Republican majority provides a glimmer of hope that perhaps they may yet "get it" about why their party did so well in the 2010 congressional election. The rules package -- H.Res. 5 -- reflects an understanding by Republican leaders that they will be held not only to a higher standard than their Democratic predecessors on major issues but also to the promises they made to change the way Congress works. If these new rules perform as planned, they will provide a vital procedural boost to House members who are seeking to restore fiscal responsibility, transparency and limited government...
Jan 04, 2011 01:21 PM
With each published interview, Ron Paul only seems to become more articulate, more persuasive and compelling, more to the pedagogical point in explaining the meaning and priority of liberty as the central political principle. Those of us who understand can only cheer. Those who hold contradictory opinions – favoring liberty in some areas and government expansion in others – find his views, in the words of National Review, "quixotic – unquestionably a little weird..."
Jan 12, 2011 03:21 PM
What follows is the introduction I wrote to Back on the Road to Serfdom, a just-released collection of esays on the resurgence of statism... It was not difficult to predict a major consequence of the Panic of 2008: disparaging the market economy and the free society is now more chic than it has been in half a century. In light of recent events, the argument runs, only a hopeless naïf would champion these things. What we need now is greater supervision by our public servants, and less adherence to the discredited dogmas of the past...
Jan 17, 2011 12:49 PM
VANCOUVER (Bullion Bulls Canada ) --Unlike most market commentators, I generally wait until about mid-January before "reporting" on the U.S. holiday shopping season. There are two good reasons for this. First, there is no point in trying to interject any rationality during the shopping season, since it will simply be drowned-out by the mind-numbing hype "predicting" a great holiday shopping season for the U.S....
Jan 17, 2011 12:58 PM
Democratic politics relies on deception. Without deception of the voters on a comprehensive scale, there could be no politics above the local level, where people know the deceivers personally and are therefore less easy to fool. Basic to deception are symbols. Symbols serve politicians in much the same way as a red cape serves a matador...
Jan 17, 2011 02:13 PM
What the Republican party—supported as it is today by so many former Democrats—must do is what the Democrats used to claim to be able to do. The Republicans must find a way to sustain the entitlements that Americans have come to depend on—most notably Social Security and Medicare—without crippling the economy with increased levels of taxation..
Jan 18, 2011 01:17 PM
"If the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives is serious about cutting the budget, here is where it would start: U.S. Military Bases Abroad..."
Jan 27, 2011 11:38 AM
Democracy Texas Style: For all of Texans' ranting about the sins and oppressions of the federal government, The Lone Star State holds itself above the law...
Jan 27, 2011 11:40 AM
Machiavelli urged The Prince (or the governing body) to abandon principles and act immorally in order to achieve a particular objective (or to maintain/expand power). This is unfortunately the sentiment that has not only become embodied by our "representative government" but also much of the population...
Feb 07, 2011 02:41 PM
Essentially, I believe that the fall of the US Empire has begun and that's what you are seeing in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen. It's going to be like watching dominos fall, in my opinion. So just from that standpoint alone, just from the perspective of a potential collapse of the US Empire, we are going to see the whole world's political matrix upset and there's possibly going to be a lot of wars from that.
Feb 09, 2011 10:55 AM
The true size of the federal workforce — civil servants, postal workers, military personnel, contractors, grantees, and bailed-out businesses — and add in state- and local-government employees — civil servants, teachers, firefighters, and police officers — we reach the astonishing figure of nearly 40 million Americans employed in some way by government. That means that about 17 percent of the American labor pool — one in every six workers — owes its living to the taxpayer.
Feb 15, 2011 12:55 PM
Ron Paul’s definition of foreign aid: 'Taking money from poor people of rich nations to give to rich people of poor nations.' View Congressman Ron Paul’s CPAC speech here. . .
Feb 15, 2011 03:26 PM
Why it is a big mistake to put bureaucrats in charge of health care. This BBC story is a sobering look at America’s future with a government-run healthcare system.
Feb 16, 2011 02:28 PM
WASHINGTON, D.C. – On Wednesday, Feb. 16, at 11:30 a.m., Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) will deliver a major policy speech at the Heritage Foundation on the recent debt limit debate. The senator will discuss his new legislation, the Full Faith and Credit Act, and debunk many of the myths that have surrounded this important debate...
Feb 17, 2011 07:18 AM
Contrary to rhetoric on Capitol Hill, the Patriot Act is first and foremost a weapon to bludgeon whistleblowers and political dissidents. Indeed, it has been singularly crafted for that purpose.
Feb 17, 2011 03:00 PM
According to a new report, the Internet police are coming... and they're not wearing badges. Instead, governments are devolving enforcement powers on the 'Net to ISPs.Here at Ars Technica, we regularly report on the uneasy relationship between Internet Service Providers and the national legal systems under which they operate...
Feb 17, 2011 04:10 PM
Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that..."
Feb 21, 2011 09:23 AM
Today marks the two year anniversary of the hallmark failure of the Obama Administration: the signing of the “stimulus” package into law. There is little for taxpayers to celebrate on the second anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as every promise made regarding the spending plan by the White House has been broken...
Jul 07, 2010 09:56 AM
The Annual Report of the Social Security Board of Trustees usually comes out between mid-April and mid-May. It's July, and there's no sign of this year's report. What is the Obama administration hiding? What the administration is trying to hide are sweeping draconian cuts to Medicare resulting from the ObamaCare legislation, which the annual report will document.
Jul 07, 2010 10:02 AM
USA Today reported in March that federal workers earn substantially higher wages than private sector employees who work the same types of jobs. Government employees may also receive more generous health and pension benefits than Americans working for private enterprise. So are federal employees overpaid? Data from the March Current Population Survey (CPS) suggest they are.
Jul 11, 2010 08:00 AM
The group Organizing For America (OFA) has virtually supplanted the Democratic party structure. When Democratic officials inside the headquarters say "we," they are more often than not talking about OFA rather than the party organization that existed before.
Jul 11, 2010 10:10 AM
It serves to remember that the "rich" also go by another name: "entrepreneurs." They build the economy by starting new businesses, and by some estimates are responsible for 75% of all new U.S. jobs.
Jul 11, 2010 10:51 AM
The “Road Map for America’s Future” authored by congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin is the most important proposal in domestic policy since Ronald Reagan embraced supply side economics in the 1980 presidential campaign. It’s not only the freshest, boldest, and most comprehensive Republican thinking, it’s also the most relevant. If Republicans adopt the Road Map as their basic ideological blueprint, it offers them the prospect of a landslide in the midterm election this year, followed by victory in the presidential election in 2012.
Jul 11, 2010 07:05 PM
Campaign finance "reforms" have become the disease they pretend to cure. The latest effort -- The Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections (DISCLOSE Act) -- is awful. Its nakedly partisan provisions, and the squalid process of trying to ram them into law, illuminate the corruption that inevitably infects what is supposed to be a crusade to purify politics: When constitutional rights are treated as negotiable, the negotiations corrupt the negotiators.
Jul 11, 2010 07:26 PM
The Supreme Court held that the First Amendment doesn't permit Congress to treat different corporations differently; that the protections afforded political speech arise from the Constitution, not Congress. Otherwise, it would be tantamount to a congressional power to license the speech of some while denying it to others. The NRA carve-out in the DISCLOSE Act is a clear example of a congressional speech license.
Jul 20, 2010 09:52 AM
The exodus of doctors from Medicare -- and likely from private practice altogether -- is accelerating.
Jul 20, 2010 10:20 AM
Deficit "stimulus" is not the road to economic recovery. It's the problem, not the solution, writes Nobel laureate economist Vernon L. Smith, who grew up in Depression-era Kansas.
Jul 20, 2010 10:36 AM
The federally funded Maryland high-risk pool intends to use federal funds for abortion coverage in their new Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP), just like Pennsylvania and New Mexico plan to do.
Jul 20, 2010 12:57 PM
Americans -- with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession and, above all, their addiction to government spending programs -- demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world. They don't simply want the government to keep the peace and create a level playing field. They want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is prevented, or that they are fully compensated in the event something goes wrong. And if the price of their house drops, they will hold the government responsible for that, too.
Jul 21, 2010 08:22 AM
We humans have generated so much conflict, destructiveness, wars, and other social dislocations because of our failure to respect the inviolability of one another’s property interests. The state thrives on such trespasses; could not operate without them. We have been thoughtless enough to let the state get away with its contrived conflicts that set us at war with one another. We buy into this self-perpetuating racket because, to do otherwise, would require us to burden our minds with thoughts we prefer not to consider. We prefer to be entertained – perhaps to wonder who will be the next "American Idol," or to follow the daily CNN drama on an oil spill.
Jul 25, 2010 11:49 AM
States with the biggest fiscal problems have the highest individual state income tax rates, such as New York and California, while some of the states with the least fiscal problems have no state income tax at all.
Jul 25, 2010 12:02 PM
Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett would have the Supreme Court adopt a "presumption of liberty" test when determining the constitutionality of a law, placing the burden on the government to show that a law has a clear basis in Congress's constitutional powers. "The easiest way to explain it is, it would basically apply to all liberty the same basic protection we now apply to speech," he says.
Jul 25, 2010 12:10 PM
It was said of the Bourbons that they forgot nothing and learned nothing. The same could easily be said of some of today’s latter-day Keynesians. They cannot and never will forget the policy errors made in the US in the 1930s. But they appear to have learned nothing from all that has happened in economic theory since the publication of their bible, John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, in 1936.
Jul 26, 2010 07:39 AM
The United States government has succeeded in entangling Americans in an endless succession of foreign wars. It has succeeded in retarding and even reversing standards of living. It has succeeded in raising medical care costs and reducing the quality of medical care. It has perpetuated a Ponzi scheme of social security that is doomed to fail. The United States government is responsible for reducing American freedoms, for spying on Americans, for searching them, and for turning travel into a nightmare. More and more Americans realize that promises of security do not create security. More and more Americans realize that the United States government creates insecurity and disorder. The United States government does not deserve the tax dollars it collects.
Jul 26, 2010 08:21 AM
Governments in America – at both the state and federal level – are in an escalating state of bankruptcy. Politicians, media hacks, and academicians propose the kinds of responses reminiscent of the classic definition of insanity: to keep repeating the same actions expecting a different result. Increase income taxes, cut spending, enact a federal sales tax, tax "junk food" and tanning salons, are just a few of the suggestions being made by those intent on recycling political solutions to politically-generated problems...
Jul 26, 2010 11:01 AM
In a recent appearance on C-Span2’s Book TV, where he was discussing his new book Lies the Government Told You, Napolitano argued that Bush and Cheney should be indicted for their unconstitutional actions taken during the Bush years. Here is a part of the exchange between Napolitano and Ralph Nader who was interviewing him...
Jul 27, 2010 12:56 PM
Peter Orszag, the president’s outgoing Director of the Office of Management and Budget, released the annual mid-year update to the administration’s budget projections at 3 pm last Friday afternoon in a conference call with reporters. That was a dead giveaway that the administration was hoping not to make much news with its latest budget projections, or at least not make news in a way that anyone would notice.
Jul 30, 2010 07:38 PM
People are asking, "Is the government doing us more harm than good? Should we change what it does and the way it does it?" Pruning the power of government begins with the imperial presidency.
Aug 02, 2010 11:27 AM
Tax reduction thus sets off a process that can bring gains for everyone, gains won by marshalling resources that would otherwise stand idle—workers without jobs and farm and factory capacity without markets. Yet many taxpayers seemed prepared to deny the nation the fruits of tax reduction because they question the financial soundness of reducing taxes when the federal budget is already in deficit. Let me make clear why, in today's economy, fiscal prudence and responsibility call for tax reduction even if it temporarily enlarged the federal deficit—why reducing taxes is the best way open to us to increase revenues.
Aug 05, 2010 07:24 AM
The political revolt against ObamaCare came to Missouri Tuesday, with voters casting ballots three to one against the plan in its first direct referendum. This is another resounding health-care rebuke to the White House and Democrats, not that overwhelming public opposition to this expansion of government power ever deterred them before.
Aug 05, 2010 10:56 PM
The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us.
Aug 06, 2010 11:14 AM
If we expect government to pay us a decent Social Security pension, cover our medical expenses in our old age (and sometimes before), combat crime and terrorism, build and repair highways and bridges, maintain national parks, and all the rest - well, invading and transforming distant nations might just become an unaffordable luxury.
Aug 07, 2010 09:17 AM
It would be very difficult to argue against the proposition that the US economy today is even more heavily controlled, regulated, and regimented by the state than Germany was at the time Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom. Americans have travelled many miles down the road to serfdom by deluding themselves that the god of democracy will somehow save them from statist slavery.
Aug 07, 2010 11:18 AM
In its August 1 edition the editors of the Gray Lady published a lengthy editorial that claimed our economy is in trouble because tax rates are too low. That's right, the "experts" at the Times say that what we need to bring our economy back into balance is a big increase in taxes.
Aug 07, 2010 11:42 AM
So far the Obama team has thrown the entire Keyensian playbook at the economy. We have paid people to buy cars, purchase homes, pay off their mortgages, weatherize their homes and put solar paneling on their roofs. And of course there was the original stimulus package of $862 billion, though some of that remains unspent. None of it has put America back to work.
Aug 08, 2010 11:22 AM
Four months after it was originally scheduled to be released, the Medicare trustees issued their annual report last week on the program's fiscal health. But the trustees' rosy conclusions were completely undermined by an unprecedented appendix from Medicare Chief Actuary Richard Foster, who called the projections by the trustees "unreasonable" and "implausible."
Aug 10, 2010 08:18 AM
Here's why the Social Security trust fund is funny money: The government has to borrow money to pay Social Security benefits to recipients regardless of how big the trust fund is. In other words, the trust fund is of no economic value.
Aug 10, 2010 10:03 PM
President Obama and his left-wing compatriots are engaged in calculated strategic failure on healthcare, in which they anticipate failure leading to the achievement of their original purpose -- totally government-run health care. ObamaCare is shot through with intentional poison pills that will undermine the system and bring it crashing down on itself. The premeditated squeeze on Medicare's reimbursement of doctors and hospitals is one example. When the crash comes, liberal politicians and legions of bureaucrats will rush in to save the day with One Big Medicare Program.
Aug 11, 2010 12:22 PM
The co-chairman of President Obama's Debt and Deficit Commission contends, "We can't grow our way out of this. We could have decades of double-digit growth and not grow our way out of this enormous debt problem." This statement is utter nonsense, prompted by our political and media elite's desire to have a bigger, more intrusive, and more expensive government and a Value Added Tax (VAT) to pay for it. Their strategy is to de-legitimize other alternatives-particularly faster economic growth-to the point where they cannot even be discussed.
Aug 11, 2010 01:02 PM
Republicans on President Obama's Deficit Commission, led by Sen. Judd Gregg, have surrendered on doing anything to inject freedom into the Social Security system. Instead of allowing people to direct a portion of their taxes into their own personal accounts, that they own, Republicans are being complicit in raising Social Security taxes to balance out the system. And if the payroll tax cap is lifted on those with higher incomes, it is going to severely impact many job creators and further depress economic growth and heighten unemployment
Aug 11, 2010 05:27 PM
In the name of still another "stimulus," Democrats are rewarding their own political funders, putting the most fiscally responsible states into even greater distress, and postponing the day of reckoning for spendthrift states. Oh, and Mr. Obama rushed to sign the state bureaucrats bailout bill Tuesday, violating his campaign pledge to give the public five days to read legislation online. As we say, the only way for voters to stop such fiscal abuse is to run this crowd out of town.
Aug 12, 2010 09:31 PM
The economy is stuck in record postwar stagnation because since the beginning of this recession it has been addressed with throwback Keynesian economics, proven to fail long ago, rather than the more modern supply-side economics that proved so successful in leading to a 25 year economic boom starting in 1982. President Bush joined with the Democrat Congress to enact a Keynesian stimulus package in February, 2008 that had no discernable beneficial effect on the economy. President Obama, elected promising change, passed another Keynesian stimulus package a year later, only 6 times larger, which has again failed to generate any real recovery.
Aug 12, 2010 11:44 PM
Some of us are old enough to remember Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America" that produced huge Republican victories in both houses of Congress back in 1994. However, what did that "Conservative Revolution" (as it was called then) actually produce? The answer: NOTHING! Newt's promise of smaller government was immediately forgotten. Instead, Gingrich, along with Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, facilitated and helped orchestrate further expansion of the federal government. The "less government" theme that swept house freshmen such as Joe Scarborough, Steve Largent, Sonny Bono, Bob Barr, Helen Chenoweth, John Shadegg, and J.C. Watts into Congress quickly evaporated and this new neocon Republican Party was born.
Aug 16, 2010 09:08 AM
At a return of less than 2.5 percent, Social Security is a bad deal for me but it is going to be much worse for those who are younger than I. For today's 21-year-old, Social Security offers a negative return.
Aug 16, 2010 09:36 AM
If social justice is your goal, go ahead and raise marginal tax rates for the rich. Making the rich poorer will certainly reduce inequality. Why should you care if the total amount of taxes paid by the rich goes down, economic growth goes down, fewer jobs get created, and the government falls deeper into debt? In fact, this is a perfect way to create a permanent crisis that never goes to waste. As a full throated Progressive you can run for Congress claiming that you are looking out for the little guy because you are sticking it to the rich.
Aug 16, 2010 04:53 PM
Social Security has a problem that’s even bigger than its insolvency, which is that it offers a terrible deal for young workers. For young, single workers all Social Security promises (a promise it can’t even afford to keep) is about a 1.5 percent real rate of return. What it can afford to pay is more like half a percent, which is more like passbook interest than a real investment return. Polls consistently show that strong majorities of younger workers don’t expect to ever collect any Social Security benefits.
Aug 17, 2010 06:42 AM
Do what you can to defeat any incumbent, no matter which party he belongs to, if he is squishy on the issue you regard as fundamental. Why is this so important? Incumbents must become deathly afraid of your movement. Take out a few dozen of them in the next election and the one that follows, and many others will cooperate. As Sen. Everett Dirksen put it so long ago, "When we feel the heat, we see the light." In short, you do not settle for the lesser of two evils. You eliminate them both, one election at a time: first the softie, then the newbie.
Aug 17, 2010 08:06 AM
The real kicker came last month when Obama enlisted the beloved Andy Griffith to star in a tax-paid TV spot allegedly designed to allay seniors' fears about Obamacare. But as FactCheck.org noted, the ad was grossly misleading and seniors' fears about Obamacare's $500 billion in Medicare Advantage spending cuts are entirely justified.
Aug 18, 2010 07:54 AM
A convergence of liberal-progressives with conservative-libertarians centering on the autocratic, corporate-dominated nature of our government may be growing. No matter how often corporatists call themselves conservatives, the two hail from very different moral, historical and intellectual antecedents. Once this slowly awakening giant of American reform shucks off the corporatists who divide, distort and deny many common identities, a dynamic civic force for freedom, fairness and prosperity will define and advance its own political and electoral agendas.
Aug 20, 2010 10:54 AM
Under ObamaCare, seniors who rely on Medicare will replace Medicaid recipients at the bottom of the health-care ladder as early as 2019, five years after the individual mandate kicks in.
Aug 20, 2010 02:01 PM
During the past three years, the trend toward "criminalization" of everyday conduct has intensified greatly. (Criminalization is the conversion of conduct that was once considered a contractual dispute, or merely socially stigmatized, into a criminal offense.) This trend won't reverse itself until we convince lawmakers that criminal sanctions aren't necessarily the best way to deal with moral, social, or political problems and disputes.
Aug 20, 2010 02:40 PM
Everything that comes out of this administration, from its pronouncements on the overseas front to its own unemployment numbers, is a lie: it’s all lies, all the time. The farcical "withdrawal" from Iraq, which amounts to merely increasing the number of mercenaries in the region, is a complete fabrication, motivated by pure politics and an infinite faith in the cluelessness of the Average Joe, who is too busy looking for a job to care. As to what they’ll do when the insurgency starts to rise again, not to worry: no one will notice but the soldiers in the field. Surely the American media won’t be so rude as to point it out, unless the Green Zone goes up in flames and they have to evacuate stragglers by helicopter as they did in Vietnam. In that case, the visuals would be too good to pass up.
Aug 21, 2010 03:18 PM
The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city. In an age that appears increasingly unmanageable, cities rather than states are becoming the islands of governance on which the future world order will be built. This new world is not -- and will not be -- one global village, so much as a network of different ones.
Jul 01, 2010 09:02 AM
The administration's stimulus program has failed. Growth is slow and unemployment remains high. The president, his friends and advisers talk endlessly about the circumstances they inherited as a way of avoiding responsibility for the 18 months for which they are responsible.
Aug 12, 2009 02:04 PM
The cat that had it's ugly head out the whole time is now out of the bag. Dem's and supporters are fessing up that ObamaCare, as its being presented, is logically impossible.
Jul 22, 2009 11:41 AM
Have you given even ten minutes to pay attention to what your President wants to do to you? If you had, you would not be so complacent. He wants to control your health care; destroy what you have, or what you are supposed to have. He wants to go "green" and reduce carbon emissions; save the planet and create millions of "green" jobs. He is great at telling you what "he" says is wrong; what he doesn't tell you is what he will do, or what it will cost you. What did he tell you about Gitmo?...
Aug 03, 2009 11:55 AM
There was recently a letter to the editor supporting a government plan because private insurance companies make a profit (Health Reform Would Be Efficient; 7/29/09). Such ignores progress from competition and consumer choice and the situation with current government plans. Medicare and Medicaid costs are out of control and on the way to bankrupting the two systems. There are several reasons for this...
Aug 10, 2009 09:07 AM
I remember, every summer before Labor Day, most all County Seats had a Fair, and/or Carnival; there were also State Fairs that were much larger and more expensive. There were many things in common among all fairs but the one that stands out in my memory was "THREE NUTSHELLS AND A PEA". This is the game (?) where the pitchman (con man) sets up shop, anywhere there is a crowd, on a small fold-up table...
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Friday, May 18, 2012
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Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Source: ABC News
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