Let us see how close this venture capitalist comes to putting a $3 trillion price tag on Amazon at its all-time high stock price. Amazon stock is now valued at $670 per share and is valued around $200 billion. He believes it will be worth $3 trillion in ten years time. That should be easy to achieve with hyperinflation.

A popular fallacy considers entrepreneurial profit a reward for risk-taking. It looks upon the entrepreneur as a gambler who invests in a lottery after having weighed the favorable chances of winning a prize against the unfavorable chances of losing his stake. This opinion manifests itself most clearly in the description of stock-exchange transactions as a sort of gambling. From the point of view of this widespread fable, the evil caused by confiscatory taxation is that it disarranges the ratio between the favorable and the unfavorable chances in the lottery.

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.