Avec la chute du Mur de Berlin en 1989 et la chute du Bloc soviétique qui s’en est suivi, il semblait que le capitalisme et les libertés individuelles avaient triomphé. Eh bien! force est de constater que le spectre de
Archive for November, 2011
Soros Calls for More ECB Intervention
Color me a shade of unsurprised blue. Financial heavy weight and big government buddy George Soros is out with another plan to save the EU. Rather than rely on the forced but subtle nationalization of undercapitalized banks by euro governments,
The Retirement Myth
“The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. They have created paper reserves in the form of government bonds which-through a complex
People will take matters into their own hands
Please, click here to read this article in pdf format: november-21-2011 At this point, we would like to take the time to summarize a few ideas and to provide more clarity on where we have stood and continue
Mises Meet up for December
The next Mises meet up will be on Sunday, December 11th, at 7:30pm at the Royal Oak on the Canal. The address is 221 Echo Drive. Ryan Long and I will be hosting. You are all welcome to attend. Mark enjoys
Another Sign of Canada’s Housing Bubble
Admittedly, I am not overly familiar with Canada’s housing bubble situation though I have seen a number of reports on it in past months. From the The Globe and Mail: Doug Kass, president of Seabreeze Partners Management, he mentioned that
The Income Gap Obsession
Originally Posted on http://whiskeyandgunpowder.com/ The word “equality†is being rammed down our throats every day, with special focus on the so-called “income gap.†The presumption is that we should all denounce the gap, work to eliminate it and embrace perfect equality
The Wheat Board: Farewell to a Wartime Relic
[Originally Published on Le Québécois Libre, November 15, 2011, No 294.] “War Is the Health of the State.” The title of American radical Randolph Bourne’s manuscript referred to the expansion of government power during World War I, but it applies
Chairman of AIG Defends Wall Street Bailout
Stop me if you have heard this one before-”Wall Street needed bailed out or else the world economy would have gone over a cliff.” That’s it, end of story. The possibility that anything but grey skies and storm clouds waited
Honest Graft – George Washington Plunkitt
I thought a good follow up to James Miller’s post on  60 Minutes and Congressional Insider Trading would be this speech by George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall Fame. Refreshing to see this kind honesty – we could use more of
Taylorism, Progressivism, and Rule by Experts
[Originally published in the Freeman, September 2011, Volume 61, Issue 7] The Progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century—the doctrine from which the main current of modern liberalism developed—is sometimes erroneously viewed as an “anti-business†philosophy. It was
The Ethics of Central Banking
Here is a link to my presentation on the Ethics of Central Banking that I did on October 22. This was part of the Austrian Monetary Conference held at the University of Toronto and hosted by the Ludwig von Mises
Gold Confiscation in Tough Times
In the land of central banking where large financial institutions buddy up with government bureaucrats for their fill of private profits and socialized losses, here is just another outcome of an unsustainable fractional reserve banking system: [youtube_sc url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6_sJdTbTQM] Since Gerald
Eugenics: Progressivism’s Ultimate Social Engineering
[Originally published in the Freeman, October 2011, Volume 61, Issue 8] According to the received account of the Progressive Era, an enlightened government swept in and regulated markets for goods, labor, and capital, thereby protecting the hapless masses from the
Papal Economics
My latest op-ed piece for the Financial Post section of the National Post is in today’s newspaper. It’s a critique of a recent paper released by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace calling for a world central bank. Interestingly
The Progressive Era and the Family
While the “Progressive Era” used to be narrowly designated as the period 1900–1914, historians now realize that the period is really much broader, stretching from the latter decades of the nineteenth century into the early 1920s. The broader period marks an
The Federal Reserve A Populist Movement? Puhhhlease
Gregory D. L. Morris, a member of the editorial board of the Museum of American Finance, recently came out with a piece in Bloomberg entitled “How a Populist Outage Gave Birth to the Federal Reserve: Echoes” which goes over the
New Comments on Mises Canada