Governments Hate Privacy Software
On May 14, Alexey Pertsev, one of the lead developers of Tornado Cash (TC), was found guilty of money laundering by a Dutch court and sentenced to sixty-four months in prison. TC is a privacy-preserving protocol developed for the Ethereum blockchain: it allows users to deposit funds in a TC pool and withdraw them to a different address, thus making it impossib
No One is Above the Law?
In the recent criminal prosecutions of Donald Trump and Hunter Biden, prosecutors and others emphasized that “no one is above the law.”
Really? No one?
How about retired Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper, Jr.? When he was serving as the Director of National Intelligence, he got caught lying under oath to Congress after he falsely denied that “the NSA was collecting data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”
The Latest BLS Unemployment Report, More Signs of Recession
The official (U3) unemployment rate went up one tenth of a percent last month, to 4%. The broad measure of inflation (U6) held steady at 7.4%. These stats are not alarming. However, U3 unemployment was 3.4% last April, and U6 unemployment was 6.5% at the end of 2022. In other words, the two most important measures of unemployment are trending upwards, albeit gradually. A gradual increase in U3 unemployment of .6% over the past year indicates that the economy is slowing, that we may be entering into a recession.
A Hoppean Dissection of Javier Milei
In his book, Democracy: The God That Failed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe talks about the neoconservative movement in the U.S. emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the left became increasingly involved with Black Power, affirmative action, pro-Arabism, and the counterculture of those times. In opposition to all this,
The State’s Most Cherished Power Is its Money Monopoly
Money is never an object when you have a legal counterfeiting racket at the center of the economy; yet counterfeiting, provided it has monopoly power and is conducted by the “best and the brightest,” is virtually unchallenged as necessary for economic growth.
How did this fraud come about? First, some basics:
Defending Gaza (Part I): Natural-Law Principles Vs. National-Interest Statism
The individual’s natural right to life antedates the state apparatus.
Let us not commit the Sin of Abstraction—the sin of escaping into theory, and in so doing, avoiding reality—the reality of Israel’s real sins, real crimes, the crime of all crimes.
When Americans reflect on history’s tragedies and travesties, they habitually extol the virtue of Pax Americana, but never the horrors of it. Having shaped the annals of the past, regime historians, naturally, speak a great deal about Hitler, but hardly at all about Hiroshima.
How Bad Economic Policies Drive Out Good Entrepreneurs
Gresham’s law states that bad money drives out good money. Gresham’s law goes something like this: overvalued money that has less actual value circulates in a market economy, and the undervalued money with the same face value but whose metal has more value is hoarded and thus goes away. People move the good money out of an economy for future use in better markets, while the bad money is circulated and takes over as a common economic good.
There Are Only Downsides to Prolonging the War in Ukraine
Last week, President Joe Biden and a number of top American and European officials met in Normandy to attend a ceremony marking the eightieth anniversary of the D-day invasion.
The Menace of Political Show Trials
In recent days, we have had brought home to us what “show trials” are like. They are not confined to Soviet Russia and it satellite countries during the Cold War but are a very present reality to us in America today. Political opponents of Donald Trump charged him with felonies for acts that were entirely legal. The judge in the case was a political opponent of Trump and worked artfully to prevent the trial jury from hearing testimony that would have exposed the imposture.