limited government

Eurozone leaders are ready to defend the euro with the equivalent of US$1trillion if necessary. The American Fed and other central banks stand ready to help too apparently. There are several conclusions to be reached from this - and the mainstream and alternative media is generously presenting at least seven scenarios (perhaps our readers can provide more?). Below, we use the article excerpt above as a jumping off point to unpack them for you, explain the significance of each and then choose

We can't help but be a little pleased when the mainstream media occasionally validates our point of view (truly cheap thrills), and in this case, the BBC has posted a report that aligns well with something we wrote in late April. Our intrepid feedbackers provided some pushback to our conclusions (expressing the point of view that the lazy Greeks were getting what was coming to them) but we were fairly confident that we had some points to make.

It doesn't come as too much of a surprise that the measure to audit the Federal Reserve is coming under continuous fire from the central bank and its cronies. For the first time since the Federal Reserve was created nearly a century ago, they have hired an actual lobbyist to pound the pavement on Capitol Hill. This is a desperate effort to hang on to the privilege of secrecy and lack of accountability they have enjoyed for so long. Last week showed they are getting their money's worth in the

We have been predicting along with others in the alternative media that the drumbeat for further consolidation (of the political kind) within the EU would rise steadily as this latest financial crisis unfolded. We have seen signs of it, though few full-blown articles. Now, however, it seems the battle may be beginning in earnest, with twin blasts being fueled by the New York Times and the Economist (see article excerpt above).

Again, the hypnotic clarion call for more centralization is launched. Being as sensitive to these sorts of promotions as a certain kind of princess is to a pea under a stack of mattresses, we notice when rhetoric resembling a promotion is floated. We were startled when we read (we can't remember where) that it was lack of a centralized market that caused the recent trillion-dollar drop in the NYSE's share values last week. But when we read the Reuters article excerpted above there was no doubt

For the country, then, to have developed the pragmatic approach to law and public policy is a tragic contradiction. All of the fundamental ideals and principles that America is known for is rejected by pragmatism and pragmatists. They take them to be myths or, as one major contemporary pragmatist recently emailed me, as pure BS!

The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Mark Thornton. Thornton is Senior Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He serves as the Book Review Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics and as a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. He has served as the editor of the Austrian Economics Newsletter and as a member of the graduate faculties of Auburn University and Columbus State University.

Hardly anyone will dispute that most folks who chime in about ethics consider selfishness wrong. There have been exceptions in history and some of the most prominent ethical philosophers, such as Socrates and Aristotle, can even be said to have been ethical egoists or at least ones who championed the moral virtue of prudence as a vital one for living a good human life. But after some significant changes in how human nature began to be understood, being selfish or self-interested – or even

Greece has gone off the rails, and there are lots of post-mortems being written – especially in the mainstream press – about what went wrong and what could go right. The idea, just as we expected, seems to be that the EU will use this crisis as way of implementing tighter political controls over what were until recently fairly sovereign countries. This Time Magazine article makes just that point, actually.