Essays

Take Steps Today To Say “Adieu” Tomorrow

"Governments are becoming increasingly hostile toward citizens that leave for greener pastures, and they will use any means to prevent the outflow. They will publicly humiliate expats; Hollande has called Depardieu 'pathetic' and 'unpatriotic.' They will enact laws to specifically punish expats for leaving; the US Congress attempted to pass a law aimed at punishing Eduardo Saverin, the Brazilian-born co-founder of Facebook who renounced his US citizenship. They will even take proactive steps to prevent citizens from leaving, either by limiting their citizens' ability to freely travel or by limiting their citizens' ability to relocate their capital abroad." Continue reading →

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Why Expansionist Central States Inevitably Implode

"We are at the inflection point indicated on the chart where the lines cross, just before the crisis: tax revenues are lagging spending in an enormous structural deficit; the State dominates the economy and its spending cannot possibly be contained, due to the political promises made to entitlement constituencies, fiefdoms and cartels, and the drag of unproductive State spending has sent the economy into systemic decline. Each constituency, cartel and fiefdom is convinced that they are acting in their own best interests in demanding more State funding and subsidies." Continue reading →

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The safest place in the world

"Every few hundred years, wealth and power shifts. This has happened so many times before, it’s hard to even keep track. Mesopotamia. Persia. Macedonia. Greece. Roman Empire. Byzantium. Mongolian Empire. Ming Dynasty. Ottoman Empire. Habsburg Empire. French-Bourbon Monarchy. British Empire. Third Reich. United States of America. This change is as old as human civilization itself. And it’s happening again. Decades of unsustainable debt have caught up to the West, and wealth and power are once again shifting." Continue reading →

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A Little Bit Of History To Think About

"We hear very little of Wounded Knee today. It is usually not mentioned in our history classes or books. What little that does exist about Wounded Knee is normally a sanitized 'Official Government Explanation.' And there are several historically inaccurate depictions of the events leading up to the massacre, which appear in movie scripts and are not the least bit representative of the actual events that took place that day. Wounded Knee was among the first federally backed gun confiscation attempts in United States history. It ended in the senseless murder of 297 people." Continue reading →

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The Death of Privacy

"If the War on Drugs was an erosion of the Fourth Amendment, the 'War on Terror' sounded its death knell. The NSA’s warrantless domestic spying program has turned America into the most surveilled society in history, eclipsing conditions of East Germans under the Stasi. The government is illegally monitoring (in real time) activities not tethered to any suspicious or illegal conduct—for example, phone calls, purchases, email, text messages, Internet searches, social media communications, health information, employment history, travel, and student records—and creating dossiers on everyone (even senators, congressmen, and decorated generals)." Continue reading →

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Gun Restrictions Have Always Bred Defiance, Black Markets

"From one country to the next, across barriers of language and culture, government officials in even the most benign, stable democracies that have attempted to disarm their subjects, or to limit the weapons available for legal ownership, or even to do no more than track gun owners and register guns, have run into overwhelming resistance. Mass defiance has crippled registration programs, hobbled confiscations schemes and made a mockery of licensing programs. Given a choice between complying with restrictions on firearms ownership and defying the law, a clear majority of people in most jurisdictions have chosen rebellion." Continue reading →

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Themes for 2013: Eight trends to follow in 2013 and beyond.

"Rather than attempt to predict the unpredictable – that is, specific events and price levels – let’s look instead for key dynamics that will play out over the next two to three years. Though the specific timelines of crises are inherently unpredictable, it is still useful to understand the eventual consequences of influential trends. In other words: policies that appear to have been successful for the past four years may continue to appear successful for a year or two longer. But that very success comes at a steep, and as yet unpaid, price in suppressed systemic risk, cost, and consequence." Continue reading →

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Secrets and Lies of the Bailout

"It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it." Continue reading →

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