A Snapshot of Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill was a British politician, military veteran, journalistic war correspondent, and Nobel Prize-winning author of numerous historical and literary works. He served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. His leadership during World War II is widely regarded as the most significant factor leading to the British victory in the […]

The Versailles Treaty and Its Discontents

The hostilities between Germany and the Allied Powers during World War I officially ended with the signing of an armistice on November 18, 1918. Thereafter, the Treaty of Versailles, executed on June 28, 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference, was the first of several international treaties and agreements after World War I. However, the Treaty […]

The Fall of Hard Power

The Biggest Mistake of the 20th Century. “If we can’t persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we’d better re-examine our reasoning,” said Robert McNamara, former U.S. Secretary of Defense. During McNamara’s tenure in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, he was responsible for guiding American military operations—and indeed much of American […]

The Systemic Illusion of American Democracy

Why is the U.S. Political System Dominated by Two Political Parties? This is the first logical question that every American should ask immediately after they are potty trained. Conspiracy theories abound, but we don’t need conspiracy theories when the structure of the system itself is the cause of the problem. The answer to this question […]

How Did Hitler Rise to Power so Quickly?

I’ve seen many people ask questions like, “How was it possible for Hitler to amass so much power so quickly without any resistance from the other European countries?” This is an important question because the answer reveals how dictators can rise quickly when geopolitical conditions create cultures of fear. Today, we are entering a new […]

Distortions in the Incentivesphere Destroy Nations

Spheres of Reality. The composition of this world can be analyzed and defined in many ways. There is the sphere of economics, the sphere of politics, and other social science spheres. From a material perspective, there is the atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, and biosphere. Most of these spheres are dominated by a particularly complex organism called […]

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 […]