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 | George F. Smith - Barbarous Relic |
 Better than the alternative  |
| As people age we sometimes hear them say it beats the alternative, which is usually left unsaid.It’s an old joke technology aims to eliminate by treating aging as a disease and curing it.
But there’s another sense in which the alternative is assumed to be far worse than the present condition. I’m referring to the type of government almost all people live under, which is the nation state. As bad as states might be — we’ve all been taught — it certainly beats the alternative, anarchy.
RWednesday, February 14, 2018 |
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 | Oilprice.com - oilprice.com |
| The Blockchain Revolution Is Heading To Space |
| There is a new wave of coders and hackers looking to upend the entire internet, signaling the start of a brand new space race.
No, this isn’t an episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley, this is actually happening.
Currently, the internet is built by large centralized services including server owners, data managers, cloud providers, search engines, telecommunication companies, and social media websites. And these entities are beginning to expand their reach.
Internet security and net neutrality are quickWednesday, January 24, 2018 |
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| Oilprice.com - oilprice.com |
 Meet The World’s Most Powerful Bitcoin Backers |
| Cryptocurrency may be one of the biggest threats to governments, security and the entire financial system that we’ve ever seen. It can help fund terrorism and its anonymity makes it almost impossible to track. Most importantly, it is poised to revolutionize global finance and banking.
But our new Enemy No. 1 can’t be fought; it can perhaps be controlled. Banks have figured that out and are bringing crypto currency into the fold.
The superpowers—U.S., China and Russia--will have to face the new rTuesday, November 28, 2017 |
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 | Keith Weiner - Monetary Metals |
| Falling Interest |
| Last week, we discussed the marginal productivity of debt. This is how much each newly-borrowed dollar adds to GDP. And ever since the interest rate began its falling trend in 1981, marginal productivity of debt has tightly correlated with interest. The lower the interest rate, the less productive additional borrowing has in fact become.
Let’s look at a recent event: the Ikea acquisition of TaskRabbit. You might wonder, why does a home goods company need to own a freelance labor company? SuperfiMonday, October 23, 2017 |
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| George F. Smith - Barbarous Relic |
Were Americans ever fit for stateless government  |
| Jacob Hornberger recently posted an article discussing his reasons why he considers the advent of the US national security state to be the worst thing the government has ever done.Bad as they are, the income tax, the federal reserve act, and government schooling don’t come close.His reason: The US national security state has “the power to kill Americans (and others) without risk of any criminal or civil liability. . . . All that US officials have to do is relate the killing to ‘national securityWednesday, October 4, 2017 |
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 | Mark O'Byrne - gold.ie |
| The Oscars – Worth Their Weight in Gold |
| 89th Oscars to air this weekend
Oscars have been dipped in 24 karat gold since 1929
If the Oscars were made of solid gold they would weigh 330 ounces
330 ounces of gold is worth $408,210 at today’s prices (nearly €400k & £330k)
Oscars cannot be sold, making them a tricky investment piece
Steven Spielberg keeps his gold Oscar with the Academy for ‘safe-keeping’
Shows importance of owning gold in safest ways
Price of gold has climbed from $20.67 since the first Oscars ceremony to over $1,237 todayThursday, February 23, 2017 |
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| George F. Smith - Barbarous Relic |
| From here to anarchy |
| It’s surprising to me that libertarians take presidential campaigns as an opportunity to promote small government candidates — or in some cases establishment candidates with a sprinkling of libertarianism in their rhetoric — when they could be using this time to advance their vision of a stateless society. One reason they don’t, of course, is that many of them don’t support a stateless society. They want the state, but much less of it. Coercion in small doses is just fine.
Another reasonSaturday, March 19, 2016 |
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| George F. Smith - Barbarous Relic |
| Why we should abandon the State |
| Revisionism, according to Harry Elmer Barnes, is bringing history into accord with the facts.Why would history and factual evidence be at odds?Because governments, per Orwell, falsify the past to keep the population subservient.If people really knew what governments had done they would want less of it than they have.
How much less is the question Lew Rockwell addresses in his book, Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto, released in May, 2014. As the title makes clear, Rockwell aTuesday, July 28, 2015 |
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 | Dan Popescu - GoldBroker |
| The Calm Before the Storm in the Gold Market |
| US Dollar Index vs Spot Gold
Again this week the gold price tested the $1,200 level dropping below it on higher US dollar against most fiat currencies. It is assumed that a stronger US dollar against the euro and other fiat currencies is also negative for the price of gold. However gold is not a hedge against the US dollar but rather against all fiat currencies. Even though gold’s price has been falling, in India and China gold premiums have increased signifying a rising demand. We have alsWednesday, October 8, 2014 |
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| George F. Smith - Barbarous Relic |
The Great Enabler  |
| Commentaries about World War I frequently talk about causes and consequences but almost never mention the enablers.At best, they might mention them approvingly, as if we were fortunate to have had the Fed and the income tax, along with the ingenuity of the Liberty Bond programs, to finance our glorious role in that bloodbath.
Economist Benjamin Anderson, whose Economics and the Public Welfare has contributed greatly to our understanding of the period 1914-1946, and is a book I highly recommeWednesday, May 14, 2014 |
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 | Andy Hoffman - Miles Franklin |
| The Post-Fiat Future |
| President’s Day is one of those strange holidays when some, but not all businesses are closed. Miles Franklin is open but the U.S. stock market is not. Thus, barring a sudden, dramatic crisis, global markets will likely be relatively calm. I’m writing this Sunday morning – under the assumption tomorrow will be just that; and if not, perhaps I’ll edit my comments. As it is, I have two topics I’d like to discuss; the first, in this article, discussing why Precious Metals’ value is timeless; anTuesday, February 18, 2014 |
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 | Jon Matonis - The Monetary Future |
| Bitcoin Ideology and the Tale of Casascius Coins |
| A weekend article in The New York Times examined the
ideological underpinnings of the bitcoin cryptocurrency. While the
article got most of it correct, it missed some additional principles
that are core to the adopters of bitcoin.
First of all, a vote for
bitcoin is essentially a vote against the established monetary order
with its centralized authority, legacy infrastructure, and diminishing
financial privacy. Moreover, it is also a vote for an individual’s
choice in currency and freedoFriday, December 27, 2013 |
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 | Jesse - Le Cafe Américain |
| Paul Krugman On Money: Why Economics Has Become a Disgraced Profession |
| "I write to you from a disgraced profession. Economic theory, as widely taught since the 1980s, failed miserably to understand the forces behind the financial crisis.
Concepts including “rational expectations,” “market discipline,” and the “efficient markets hypothesis” led economists to argue that speculation would stabilize prices, that sellers would act to protect their reputations, that caveat emptor could be relied on, and that widespread fraud therefore could not occur."
James K. GalbraMonday, December 23, 2013 |
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 | Lew Rockwell |
| Read Rothbard |
| We’ve just completed another successful Mises University, the summer instructional seminar for students hosted by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Interest in Austrian economics continues to grow: we could accept fewer than one-third of qualified applicants.
Although the students are widely read, they share a particular fascination with the works of Mr. Libertarian, Murray N. Rothbard, whose books and articles are far more widely read today than they were in his lifetime. Rothbard – economist, hiThursday, August 8, 2013 |
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 | Mish - Global Economic Analysis |
| Drones are a Major U.S. Export and they Perpetuate War |
| Tired of perpetual war? So am I but US drone policy ensures perpetual war is here to stay. Blatant military waste is here to stay as well, and the all but useless F-35 project is a prime example.
Those are my opinions, but they also the opinions of guest writer Robert Taylor.
What follows is a well-stated guest-post courtesy of Robert Taylor and PolicyMic. I dispense with my normal indented block-quote style for this post.
Drones Are Becoming a Major U.S. Export, and They Kill Democracy in EvMonday, July 22, 2013 |
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| Keith Weiner |
| Theory of Interest and Prices in Paper Currency Part I (Linearity) |
| Under gold in a free market, the theory of the formation of the rate of interest
is straightforward.¹ The rate varies in the narrow range between the floor
at the marginal time preference, and the ceiling at the marginal productivity.
There is no positive feedback loop that causes it to skyrocket (as it did up
until 1981) and subsequently to spiral into the black hole of zero (as it is
doing now). It is stable.
In irredeemable paper currency, it is much more complicated. In this first
Monday, May 13, 2013 |
|
 | George Maniere - Investing Advice |
| Tensions Continue in The Middle East |
| Tuesday, March 1, 2011 |
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 | Tom DiLorenzo - lewRockwell |
| Was There a 'Culture of Violence' in the Old West |
| Contrary to popular perception, the Old West was much more peaceful than American cities are today. The real culture of violence on the frontier during the latter half of the nineteenth century sprang from the U.S. government's policies toward the Plains Indians.
The Not-So-Wild, Wild West
In a thorough review of the “West was violent” literature, Bruce Benson (1998) discovered that many historians simply assume that violence was pervasive — even more so than in modern-daWednesday, September 22, 2010 |
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 | Justice Litle - Taipan Publishing |
| Europe Is Being Held Together With Duct Tape |
| Wednesday, June 10, 2009 |
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