EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is a TAC member’s blog. All members have access to submit posts and share their views anonymously, or publicly. We occasionally feature those posts here. Not a member yet? JOIN HERE. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) truly understood governmental systems, power, and liberty. He served in the republic of Florence, being especially involved in…
As Colorado’s six month progress report on its legalized pot economy confronted naysayers with news of plummeting crime, the second state to open itself to recreational cannabis sales made headlines of its own. Last Tuesday, marijuana was officially introduced into the above ground market in Washington state, sealing another victory in efforts to nullify unconstitutional…
-- Come out and bring the kids to Family Night!
Congressional efforts to fortify dragnet domestic surveillance advanced last week when a Senate committee approved the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISA). CISA is an addition to the current National Security Act of 1947 creating a subsection 1104 which incorporates private companies into the intelligence community under voluntary measures. It is intended to make…
No protesting the government? No freedom of the press? Lawmakers jailed? Is this the story of the Soviet Union during the Cold War? No. It describes the United States in 1798 after the passage of the Sedition Act. The History Channel describes it as one of the “most egregious breaches of the U.S. Constitution in…
The people of the state of Kansas are under attack and the weapon being deployed is aimed at depriving them of their right to keep and bear arms, and their right to enact state laws protecting that right. On Wednesday, July 9, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence filed suit in the U.S. District…
"Not bad, if you like perks, 8-hour days, and bureaucratic security. This is the opinion of two-thirds of its employees who responded to the GlassDoor inquiry. It’s fat city in Fat City. And why not? Working for the Federal Reserve is a license to print money . . . literally. Click the link to see what the good life is like for America’s legal counterfeiting operation." Continue reading →
"Last year, SNP chief Thomas Jordan requested a [buffer] to be introduced for Swiss banks, forcing them to hold an additional one percent of risk-weighted assets to stave off the potential dangers of the housing boom. Earlier this year, as worries about a bubble increased, the SNB instigated a number of policies to prevent any more dramatic rises. This included doubling the capital buffer requirement to two percent. However, despite a partial slowdown since January, Jordan told reporters in March that the work was not yet done. 'The pace has slowed, but we are far away from the soft landing we want. We don’t yet see the slowdown that we would like to see.'" Continue reading →
"Sweden’s economy, which it oversees, grew three times faster than the euro zone’s in 2010 and dodged Europe’s double-dip recession in 2012-13. The Riksbank felt confident enough in recovery to start raising interest rates in 2010. The Riksbank worried that rising household borrowing and soaring house prices could lead to trouble down the road. It therefore opted to 'lean against the wind', in central bankers’ parlance, and deflate the credit boom before it burst catastrophically. It seems instead to have taken the air out of everything but exuberant markets. Unemployment in Sweden has held steady, while Swedish private-sector debt as a share of GDP is higher now than it was in 2010." Continue reading →
"Central banking has taken interest rate reduction to its absurd conclusion. If observers thought the ECB had run out of room by holding its deposit rate at zero, Mario Draghi proved he is creative, cutting the ECB’s deposit rate to minus 0.10 percent, making it the first major central bank to institute a negative rate. Can a central-bank edict force present goods to no longer have a premium over future goods? Armed with high-powered math and models dancing in their heads, modern central bankers believe they are only limited by their imaginations. More than half a decade of zero interest rates has not lifted anyone from poverty or created any jobs—it has simply caused more malinvestment." Continue reading →