Recently, the leftist London Guardian posted an article against the nineteenth-century gold coin standard. The author, who seems recently to have begun shaving, has provided a highly useful summary of the Keynesian case against the gold coin standard. His article is a fine mixture of familiar old canards and creative ...read more

What the Federal Reserve System can do and what it will do are two different things. The Federal Reserve System can monetize anything. It can create digital money and buy any asset it chooses to buy. There are no legal restrictions on what it is allowed to monetize. If it were to ...read more

Americans are learning how to beat the system, cheat the system, and outfox the system. As the bureaucrats tighten their many nooses, Americans are finding ways to slip the noose. An article in Forbes offers examples. They are everywhere. Businesses are just ignoring the rules. They hire lawyers to help them ...read more

"Where there is free trade, foreign competition would even in the short run frustrate the aims sought by the various measures of government intervention with domestic business. When the domestic market is not to some extent insulated from foreign markets, there can be no question of government control. The further ...read more

"Centralization induces apoplexy at the center and anemia at the extremities." ~ Lamenais The present political system is clearly insane. It suffers from schizophrenia. Around the world, almost no one trusts the politicians, yet almost everyone votes for incumbent politicians who promise to reform the government. Voters now suspect (correctly) that all ...read more

The Keynesians and declared anti-Keynesians have joined hands in order to promote an intensely Keynesian error: European fiscal austerity as a negative factor. One contributor in Forbes refers to austerity as a death spiral. The word "austerity," beginning with the Greek government's debt crisis two years ago, has been used by ...read more

Ben Bernanke journeyed across town to give a 4-part seminar to 30 undergraduates at George Washington University. This was clearly a public relations stunt. Why would the head of the world's most powerful central bank lecture to 30 undergraduates? This was not quite the equivalent of George W. Bush reading "My ...read more

The West's governments are going to default, one way or another. Politicians cannot bring themselves to stop spending money the governments do not have. The deficits of the major Western governments are now so great as to be irreversible. The governments must now borrow money to be used to pay interest ...read more

The United States is not going to get hyperinflation unless Congress nationalizes the Federal Reserve System. It will get mass inflation at some point: anywhere from 15% per annum to 30%. But it is not going to get 50% or 100% or more. Why not? 1. The temporary nature of the payoff 2. The ...read more

I do not celebrate the fourth of July. This goes back to a term paper I wrote in graduate school. It was on colonial taxation in the British North American colonies in 1775. Not counting local taxation, I discovered that the total burden of British imperial taxation was about 1% ...read more