Small Government Reduces the Impact of Corruption

Entry Points Into Our Lives. The politically-driven expansion of the federal government is what enables special interest distortions to penetrate deeper and deeper into every aspect of a society. Each new special interest issue creates an “entry point” for politicians to burrow their way into our communities and into our homes. As the physical and financial […]

How Does the Federal Reserve Really Work?

Preface.To avoid any confusion, I want to emphasize up-front that all the functions of the Federal Reserve (and any central bank) are entirely unnecessary in an economy based on a well-designed cryptocurrency, which automatically provides the relatively useful technical functions that central banks provide. Additionally, all the toxic elements of central banking that plague our […]

What Caused the Great Depression? (Part 3)

Americans Are Sentenced to Generational Debtor’s Prison. As we learned in Part 1 and Part 2 of this “What Caused the Great Depression?” series, specific humans in the U.S. Congress, White House, and the Federal Reserve made conscious choices to sentence the American people to debtor’s prison to pay for a foreign war that posed no significant existential or economic threat to the United States. […]

What Caused the Great Depression? (Part 2)

Too Much Debt. The total private debt-to-GDP ratio in the United States was nearly 300% by the time the Great Depression started in 1929. In fact, “never before in this country had such a volume of funds been available at such low rates for such a long period,” said Harry Jerome in Mechanization in Industry (1934). The reasons for all this […]

What Caused the Great Depression? (Part 1)

Bad Diagnosis Leads to Bad Solutions. This is the most important question that any person can ask if they want to understand how an economy works and what is wrong with their economy today. We’ve all heard various explanations from partisan politicians and political pundits, but given the severity of the Political and Economic Toxic […]

Corruption & The Path to Political Purgatory

Syndrome of Distortions. With the exception of economically destructive natural disasters, every financial or political crisis is caused by either a corrupt regulatory process, prodigal fiscal policy, short-sighted monetary policy, or all of the above. Distortions in any one of these three processes can cause great damage to a nation’s economy and its democratic processes. This […]

Beware of the Congressional Experience Myth

“Is experience in Congress required to be a good congressional representative?” This question is rooted in a common misconception perpetuated by the politicians themselves and all the lobbyists and staffers who feed from the trough of the existing political establishment. As we learned previously, the reality is that approximately 80% of a politician’s time is consumed by […]

Exploiting Sick Americans to Subsidize Foreign Wars is Bad Policy

The CIA, Crack Cocaine, and the Sabotage of Nicaragua. During the 1980s the White House and several influential members of Congress gave explicit and detailed orders to the State Department, CIA, DEA, FBI, and the NSA to actively sabotage and overthrow the Nicaraguan Government. This included using U.S.-owned C-123K military cargo planes (among other vehicles) […]

The Paradox of Campaign Finance Reform

How Do You Take Away a Citizen’s Rights Without Violating Their Rights? Trying to compel the U.S. Supreme Court to reduce or cap private campaign finance spending is a monumental waste of time and national resources. There is no logical or intellectually consistent way to ignore the deep, philosophical conundrum that has perplexed the Supreme […]

Monetizing Misery by Penetrating the Privacy Wall

Introduction to Gawker v. Peter Thiel. The initial inspiration for this article was the recent Gawker v. Hulk Hogan lawsuit, in which the famous wrestler Hulk Hogan sued the online gossip magazine Gawker for invasion of his privacy. However, there’s an even more interesting backstory that I’ll informally label as Gawker v. Peter Thiel. It […]