Category Archives: Essays

The morning after: When a government destroys its currency

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“This is a familiar story that repeats across history. Despite obvious warning signs, people almost universally allow themselves to ignore reality.  It’s human nature to want to believe that everything is going to be OK. And when our political leaders whisper soothing words of hope and optimism, we take the bait.  Looking back, it was plain as day that Mexico was going to devalue the peso. Everything about the economy and currency was totally unsustainable. Deep down people knew it.  Similarly, it was plain as day that Hitler was going to decimate Poland. And people knew it.  Yet millions allowed their confidence to be misplaced in leaders who assured them that everything was OK.  Are we so different?”

http://www.sovereignman.com/trends/the-morning-after-what-happens-when-a-government-destroys-its-currency-14925/

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The Fed: Strangling the Saving Ethic and Values

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“Around the time Nixon was pulling the plug on what remained of the gold standard, the personal savings rate in America was north of 12.5%. These days, it’s 5.4%, and that’s up from 2.2% in the boom year of 2005. The 2008 crash tightened people’s belts. However, prudence is not bursting out all over. The WSJ says the personal savings rate has increased ‘in large part because it counts reductions in personal debt, such as mortgages and credit-card balances, as savings’, but that most debt reduction has been driven by defaults, rather than paying back.  It’s clear that since the last tethers tying the dollar to gold were cut, money production has soared, and a casualty has been the savings ethic.”

http://www.caseyresearch.com/articles/the-fed-strangling-the-saving-ethic-and-values

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The Forfeiture Curmudgeons

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“Cash became the crime.  The government figured out that drug sales weren’t done on Visa or MasterCard, but in currency.  Evil currency. So they criminalized cash.  But that still wasn’t enough to feed the hunger of the government and starve the drug kingpins, so then the ‘instrumentalities of the crime’ was conceived. If you drove to a drug deal, the car was an instrumentality. If the drug deal happened in a house, the house was the instrumentality. And even if there was no drug deal at all, it was all an instrumentality or substituted proceeds.  Take the profit out of crime.  This became as important, if not more so, than proving the existence of a crime at all.  And it was so much easier.”

http://blog.simplejustice.us/2014/09/20/the-forfeiture-curmudgeons/

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Perfecting Tyranny: Foreign War as Experimentation in State Control

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“Writing at the dawn of the twentieth century, Mark Twain provided ominous commentary about a hypothetical ‘Great Republic’ that had adopted a foreign policy of actively intervening in distant societies.  What if Twain’s scenario were not hypothetical, but rather real? What if foreign interventions abroad have the long-term effect of undermining liberties and freedoms at home? This paper explores how interventions abroad can affect domestic government activities in a way that reduces its citizens’ freedoms and liberties. Although our analysis is generalizable, we focus on a specific ‘Great Republic’—the United States—because of its global dominance in economic and military affairs.”

http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=1012

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Bill Bonner: Too Busy to Read Ben Graham? Do This Instead…

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Bill-Bonner2

“How do you figure out how much a stock is really worth? Read Ben Graham and David Dodd’s 1934 classic, Security Analysis. Everything you need to know is there.  No time for Graham and Dodd’s tome?  Well, our STS (Simplified Trading System) is about as simple as it gets. Buy when the Dow is selling for under 10 times reported earnings. Sell when it trades at over 20 times reported earnings. Otherwise, do nothing. (That’s the hard part.)  Your editor likes STS because he doesn’t have the temperament for detailed stock analysis.  Will it work for you?  No one knows. All we know is that it worked in the past.”

http://bonnerandpartners.com/busy-read-ben-graham-instead-market/

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Bill Bonner: The Best Wealth Building Advice You’ll Never Take

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Bill-Bonner2

“For most people, investing is not a good way to make a fortune. It is just a good way to keep… and maybe grow… a fortune.  You make your real money by providing real goods and services to others. It is not realistic to think you can make much money, while you sleep, from the hard work and enterprise of others.  Here’s our investment philosophy:  1) Think a lot. Do a little.  2) Always buy low. And for safe measure, buy very low.  3) Never believe anything a salesman says about an investment. There’s a good chance that he is ignorant, dishonest or stupid. Or all three.  4) Be reasonable. But take a swing at a grand slam pitch from time to time. Heck, it’s not just about the money; it should be fun, too. [..]”

http://bonnerandpartners.com/best-wealth-building-advice-youll-never-take-investing/

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Jeffrey Tucker: Why Imagining Freedom Is Essential

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“My whole experience suggests that personal inspiration is the ingredient lacking in the current generation of people who have come to love liberty. They have access to texts, knowledge, and theory as never before in human history. What they lack is a method for using what they know and the personal drive to do so. People are too quick to blame outside forces for failure without realizing that outside forces conspiring against progress are part of the structure of all environments in all times and places. This book provides that missing element, that key to brush away despair and unlock the inner drive to make a difference.”

http://tucker.liberty.me/2014/06/08/imagining_freedom/

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Obama Follows Bush’s Iraq Playbook

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“Obama speaks of protecting the American people. He means Americans both abroad and at home. Americans of course are free to travel anywhere. If the U.S. government is to have the power to protect or avenge them abroad, it will have to be able to exercise military power globally. Such imperial power, which the government has long exercised, should disturb peace- and freedom-loving Americans precisely because it creates the potential for perpetual war, invites retaliatory terrorism, and requires high government spending and borrowing. It may be taken for granted that a president can go to war when an American is killed overseas, but that kind of power is too dangerous to accept meekly.”

http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/obama-follows-bushs-iraq-playbook/

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How Empires End

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“Histories are generally written by academics. They, quite naturally, tend to focus on the main events: the wars and the struggles between leaders and their opponents (both external and internal). Whilst these are interesting stories to read, academics, by their very nature, often overlook the underlying causes for an empire’s decline.  When the history is written about the era we are passing through, it will reflect, in large measure, a rehash of the news. As the media of the day tend to overlook the fact that present events are merely symptoms of an overall decline, so historians tend to focus on major events, rather than the ‘slow operations’ that have been the underlying causes.”

http://www.internationalman.com/articles/how-empires-end

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Breaking the last taboo – Gaza and the threat of world war

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“Since 2001, the United States and its allies have been on a rampage. In Iraq, at least 700,000 men, woman and children are dead as a result. The rise of jihadists – in a country where there was none – is the result. Known as al-Qaeda and now the Islamic State, modern jihadism was invented by US and Britain, assisted by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The original aim was to use and develop an Islamic fundamentalism that had barely existed in much of the Arab world in order to undermine pan-Arab movements and secular governments. By the 1980s, this had become a weapon to destroy the USSR in Afghanistan. The CIA called it Operation Cyclone; and a cyclone it turned out to be.”

http://johnpilger.com/articles/breaking-the-last-taboo-gaza-and-the-threat-of-world-war

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