…Calmly observing the changing world

Across the country today (note to media: April 15th is not called the “Ides of April”), so-called Tea Parties were held to protest – well, to protest against a lot of things.  I was on site at the rally in Salem, Oregon.  If you’re a little lacking in your Tea Party knowledge (or if you’ve [...]

The threats to a republic are many, and the idealized federal republic may be more mythical than real – but it is at the very least, an excellent goal. The republic seeks to tread carefully in that slimmest of passageways between the tyranny of the majority and the tyranny of a minority. It thus eschews [...]

Six weeks ago, President Obama prominently chastised the court for a recent ruling while the judges bristled in their seats (Alito, visibly), being constrained by decorum during the State of the Union.  Last week, Chief Justice Roberts openly wondered, “Why we are there”, and referred to the State of the Union as a “political pep [...]

When we are children, we conceive of banks as places to safely deposit money. If, by chance, you grew up watching It’s A Wonderful Life every Christmas, you probably have the idea that money deposited in banks is loaned out into your community: If modern banking truly worked this way, you would understand that when [...]

Marxist czars are ascending to heights of power over the American economy. Bankrupt corporations stay in business by borrowing money at near-zero interest rates from the equally bankrupt government. The invisible hand of the market has been replaced by the translucent hand of the Federal Reserve as they no longer conceal their “ongoing market activities”. [...]

Sometimes writers and entertainers struggle to come up with content that illustrates the hidden absurdities in the news by drawing comparisons to fictional scenarios which are obviously absurd. However, it seems that more and more, the real news is so bizarre, and so difficult to believe on its own, that no fictional parody is required. [...]

It seems that if you are an economist, you can contort your mind into believing that spending causes wealth. Once you have accomplished this task, everything else seems to flow fairly easily. Pretty soon, you start to believe that governments should increase spending during recessions to boost the economy, and maybe eventually that we can [...]

The global economic crisis affects every country in slightly different ways. For Iceland, it meant a currency collapse, which is perhaps preferable to the non-currency collapse of Ireland, whose Euro-strangled economy is truly on the brink (Telegraph). But what about those countries that are already poor? Do they have even farther to fall, or will [...]

Whenever the economy is “bad”, it is always the number one issue: it’s the economy stupid. So somehow, to get Obama’s policies implemented, he will have to couch them in economic terms. That the result becomes completely nonsensical hasn’t seem to have detered him. President Obama’s latest push for health care involves economic arguments in favor [...]

The monetary system of the United States is controlled by the Federal Reserve, which is a private bank whose shareholders are unknown, whose profits are unknown, and whose policies are only deciphered through Congressional hearings – during which representatives of the Federal Reserve speak in FedSpeak, and run intellectual rings around most of the Congressmen, [...]