The deflation-phobia of our elites is the rational reaction of those who profit from the privileges that our present inflationist regime bestows on them, and who stand to lose more than any other group if this regime is ever reversed in a deflationary coup. Perennial inflation is based on monopoly. Deflation brings in the fresh winds of the free market.
While the Federal Reserve-induced stock market bubble has been flattened, despite continuous inflating by Greenspan's troops, the land price bubble continues to expand in Las Vegas.
Government cannot create something from nothing. But the premise of universal health care is that the government can bestow benefits upon members of society that it had not created for itself. It imposes on the economic body something that did not come from within its own means, or by its own choice, meaning the choices of the many individuals that make up the economy.
One cannot discount the role of politics here. In the end, we could have a well-known person owning a felony record and being sentenced to prison and a once-prosperous company in tatters. We will see some federal prosecutors being feted as though they had just solved the Case of the Century. These are dark times, indeed, for the pursuit of justice in the United States of America.
If there is a solution, the market will find it long before the politicians will. Spam filters have dramatically diminished the problem relative to what it would otherwise be, and these have been provided solely by the pressures of commerce. The efforts to certify ISPs and police the web for spammers, entirely a private undertaking, are ongoing. The methods that work will last and those that do not will be discarded.
The journalist's skill as an observer can only take him so far, if he is observing with the wrong theory in mind. As Thomas Friedman's "Theory of Everything" shows, without the distinction between power and market—the very core of the libertarian idea—a theory of everything can easily turn into a theory of nothing.
No restaurant or bar owner can force anyone to work or eat at his or her establishment, so at best, the state is "rescuing" people from their own free choices, which means that the political authorities—and the activists cheering them on—are in effect also coercing those workers and patrons into making choices that meet state approval.
Weaving a story that combines travelogue with a love story, investment advice, history, geography, economics and world politics is no easy task. But, Jim Rogers succeeds as he had in the investment world.
State efforts to reduce inequality and poverty have been, at best, ineffective. Everywhere we turn, writes Art Carden, the prophets of doom are telling us that the market economy sows the seeds of its own destruction by generating unequal distributions of income.
With growing government outlays and the Fed's reckless monetary policies, it is mission impossible to have an effective cut in taxes, argues Frank Shostak. That the intention is to grow rather than shrink the size of the government was demonstrated by President Bush's signing the increase in the Federal debt limit from $6.4 trillion to $7.384 trillion on the day he signed into law the tax cuts.
