Catching up on in-box items I missed, I just had the chance to read the funny New York Times article on investment gold bugs: “Believing (and Believing and Believing) in Bullion.” It’s a charming piece of reporting that does no harm to the sector of the investment community that is devoted to gold as a investment.
To answer another question concerning the move from hard money to paper money--from the origin of money in Mises “regression theorem“ to the destruction of money in what Salerno and Huelsman have called the “progression theorem”--I had the occasion to reread J.G. Huelsman’s excellent piece on political centralization from the JLS. The whole article is worth revisiting.
The points made in this article are not new. Namely: 1. The government conceals the extent of its operating budget deficit by counting Social Security revenue. 2. The real liability for Social Security and Medicare is huge. Even official figures peg it at $33.7 trillion over the next 75 years. What is unusual is such strong language coming from a mainstream columnist:
“Let me be circumspect: Government accounting is vile garbage.”
The president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, is “perplexed” that the Euro-zone economy is growing slowly despite low interest rates. Trichet was also perplexed that, with bond yields at their lowest level since at least World War I and inflation-adjusted short-term rates at zero, growth in the 12-member euro zone was modest and consumers and businesses were low on confidence
In another post, I made the offhand comment that the recent Supreme Court marijuana decision shows that libertarian centralists are naive in hoping to get justice from federal courts. Tibor Machan complained that I am not naming names. The issue of “libertarian centralists” has been discussed at length. See the post Healy on States’ Rights and Libertarian Centralists, which contains many links to many discussions of this topic.
A comprehensive survey by the National Institute of Mental Health has found that most everyone will develop a mental illness sometime in his or her life, reports the NYT. There just aren’t enough government programs out there to deal with the problem!
It’s hard to know what to say any more about the insanity otherwise known as “the housing market”. Compare this article: Californians’ home equity up $1 trillion since 2000, BIA says
The stock-in-trade of all Socialist authors is the idea that there is potential plenty and that the substitution of socialism for capitalism would make it possible to give to everybody “according to his needs.” Other authors want to bring about this paradise by a reform of the monetary and credit system. As they see it, all that is lacking is more money and credit. They consider that the rate of interest is a phenomenon artificially created by the man-made scarcity of the “means of payment.”
