Legendary investor Bill Gross calls on the Fed to bring about Friedman’s “helicopter money.” The idea of helicopter money was introduced by Chicago school economist Milton Friedman in 1969. The idea was to be able to fight deflation, although ironically the US was then on the precipice of a decade of harmful inflation.

It is no surprise that President Obama has weighed into the Brexit referendum debate firmly on the side of the EU establishment. Nor is it surprising that the British PM Cameron should have given the opportunity to the president to threaten UK citizens that if they do not vote in favor of the establishment they will be punished by being put at the back of the queue for future trade deals with the US.

In his article on conscription today, Ron Paul writes:

Some proponents of a military draft justify it as “payback” for the freedom the government provides its citizens. Those who make this argument are embracing the collectivist premise that since our rights come from government, the government can take away those rights whether it suits their purposes. Thus supporters of the draft are turning their backs on the Declaration of Independence.

A new ECB white paper has found evidence that many major market-moving data releases in the US are leaked in advance of their official publication, allowing some investors to profit from trading stocks and Treasury securities when those data are released. Included among the data releases studied are two from the Federal Reserve Board, on industrial production and consumer credit.

Last week the House Armed Services Committee approved an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act requiring women to register with Selective Service. This means that if Congress ever brings back the draft, women will be forcibly sent to war.

While you are likely still recovering from Tax Day, don’t be lulled into thinking that the pain is over. Your property is never fully safe from government confiscation.

One of the few areas of innovation in which the state excels is how to extract ever more wealth from the productive class, and one of the fastest growing sources of revenue for insatiable governments is civil asset forfeiture (CAF).

Last weekend, John Crudele at the New York Post noticed, in an article titled “Americans haven’t gotten a raise in 16 years”  that in spite of the current administration’s many claims of economic prosperity, the voters don’t seem particularly pleased:

Why aren’t Americans happier?

It’s easy to get discouraged in the Age of Obama, a man who can say, in Castro’s Cuba, that there is not much difference between communism and capitalism. And in his warped mind, I guess it’s sort of true, since his program is a mixture. That is, it’s fascist.

Combine his corporatism with envy, perpetual war, negative interest rates, the police state, fascist health care, total surveillance, vicious political correctness, and a host of other horrors, and you can wonder about the future. The other pols, with very few exceptions, aren’t much better, or even worse.

When a country goes off the gold standard and onto the fiat standard, it adds to the number of “moneys” in existence. In addition to the commodity moneys, gold and silver, there now flourish independent moneys directed by each government imposing its fiat rule. And just as gold and silver will have an exchange rate on the free market, so the market will establish exchange rates for all the various moneys. In a world of fiat moneys, each currency, if permitted, will fluctuate freely in relation to all the others.

The United Kingdom (UK) is about to hold a referendum on June 23rd on whether it should leave or remain within the European Union (EU). Once unthinkable, the “Brexit” is becoming more and more plausible. It is seen by the mainstream media as a factor of uncertainty in Europe. For its critics, Brexit would lead to increasing nationalism and protectionism. Nevertheless, those same critics forget the European Union is not a free-trade area.