Essays

Iraq back at the brink

"It was Britain that triggered Iraq's modern tragedy, starting with its seizure of Baghdad in 1917 and the haphazard reshaping of a country to fit the colonial needs and economic interests of London. One could argue that the early and unequalled mess created by the British invaders continued to wreak havoc, manifesting itself in various ways until this very day. But of course, the US now deserves most of the credit of reversing whatever has been achieved by the Iraqi people. It was US secretary of state James Baker who reportedly threatened Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz in a Geneva meeting in 1991 by saying that the US would destroy Iraq and 'bring it back to the stone age'." Continue reading →

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Government Ban On Bitcoin Would Fail Miserably

"Government prohibition doesn’t even do a good job of keeping drugs out of prisons. The demand for an item, in this case digital cash with user-defined levels of privacy, does not simply evaporate in the face of a jurisdictional ban. One could even make the case that it becomes stronger because an official recognition that Bitcoin is not only a 'renegade' currency but a 'so-effective-it-had-to-be-banned' currency would imbue the cryptographic money with larger than life qualities. Ironically, the ban would create something like theStreisand effect for Bitcoin generating an awareness for entire new demographic groups and new classes of society." Continue reading →

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Detlev Schlichter: Of interest and the dangerous habit of suppressing it

"Interest is an essential component of human action and the charging of interest rates an integral component of human cooperation on markets. Abolishing interest rates or depressing them through policy intervention will never make markets work better, will never make financial markets more stable, and will never make society more prosperous." Continue reading →

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David Galland: Three Levels of Survival Skills

"While we all hope that things will turn out for the best, and they very well might, I suspect that, like me, most of you sense that something is fundamentally wrong in the world today. Trying to ignore the risks, effectively keeping your alert level at 'White,' leaves you woefully unprepared. Now is the time to think this stuff through, while you still can do so calmly. Now, moving on, I want to share with you stories from two individuals faced with severe disruptions in the norm – one from old friend Roger S. from Zimbabwe, who reports on the current state of things there and the other from an individual who survived the war in Sarajevo." Continue reading →

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Egypt, Syria – it’s just the end of them

"Two years and 60,000 casualties into Syria's civil war, the foreign ministries of the West have nothing to show for their peacemaking efforts except a wad of airline and hotel receipts. Egypt is proceeding with grim inevitability towards financial exhaustion, and the government has just announced a three-pita-per-day bread ration. Most alarming is the emergence of a black market in Egyptian pounds, with a street rate February 10 of 6.95 pounds to the US dollar, against an official rate of 6.72. United States President Barack Obama has asked congress to renew Egypt's $1.8 billion in annual aid, but two-thirds of that is military assistance." Continue reading →

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Bipolar Silver: How to Profit

"Most precious-metals investors know that silver is more volatile than gold. But do they know just how big that difference really is? We thought it would be interesting to measure how much greater silver's daily moves are – both in gains and declines – than gold. We documented the daily price movements for both metals, and then calculated the difference using absolute values." Continue reading →

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The Social Deterioration of Funny, Floating Money

"Most of our important relationships with other humans are monetary in nature. We have employment contracts, lending contracts, pension agreements, annuities, welfare, taxes, and, more broadly speaking, the prices paid for goods and services. The basis for all of these relationships is money. When the money becomes 'immoral,' all of these relationships also lose their moral character. Instead of investors, builders and producers, we become traders: trading assets; trading jobs; trading money for favors; trading spouses; trading our supposed 'beliefs,' for short-term gain in a zero-sum, and in fact negative-sum society." Continue reading →

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The Social Deterioration of Funny, Floating Money

"Most of our important relationships with other humans are monetary in nature. We have employment contracts, lending contracts, pension agreements, annuities, welfare, taxes, and, more broadly speaking, the prices paid for goods and services. The basis for all of these relationships is money. When the money becomes 'immoral,' all of these relationships also lose their moral character. Instead of investors, builders and producers, we become traders: trading assets; trading jobs; trading money for favors; trading spouses; trading our supposed 'beliefs,' for short-term gain in a zero-sum, and in fact negative-sum society." Continue reading →

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Karl Hess: Tools to Dismantle the State

"Karl Hess was a noted speechwriter (for Barry Goldwater among others) and author, and later in his life became known as a tax resister and market anarchist. In this video from a Libertarian International conference in Stockholm in 1986, Hess speaks about everything from his time as a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater to Euclid, the impending collapse of global communism, children's education in America, the dawn of the personal computer, new management styles in business (he somewhat accurately predicts the way Google treats its employees based on Cray Supercomputers' management style at the time), and several other fascinating topics." Continue reading →

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Oil and Water: An Armed Citizenry and a Police State

"So, it is the worst of times and it is the best of times. It is the worst of times in terms of the expansion of federal administrative law. It is the best of times in terms of the inability of central governments to impose their plans on their populations apart from a vast expansion of the money supply, which is going to lead to the undermining of the welfare state and the destruction of federal legitimacy in the eyes of the people. It is more of a train wreck than it is a tipping point. It is more of a collision between assertions on paper in Washington versus the expansion of monetary digits, which is also taking place in Washington." Continue reading →

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