Corporate Welfare

The Big Short is a pretty good movie, but there are a few things it leaves out.

The world waits to see if next week is finally the week that the Fed announces its rate hike. Can the economy survive whatever small bump the Fed deals out? Perhaps, but that won’t change the inherent instability of our current monetary regime.

The sugar industry and the corny syrup industry have been fighting in court. But don't be fooled. Ultimately, the two industries are happy to help each other out in order to keep their own crony-capitalist arrangements in place.

Strange centennial somehow makes sense in the world of Leviathan.

There were many state and local elections in the US this week, but few of them will result in anything that will combat widely held and popular errors about central banking, drug prohibition, and the global environment.

UPDATE: The fact that marijuana legalization ballot measure (Issue #3) failed in Ohio is not an indication that legalization is not supported by the people. It was because they rejected government monopoly of pot growing as shown in the victory in the passage of Issue #2 which bans such monopolies. Its a great libertarian victory overall.

Historically, reserve currencies have arisen without the help of the IMF, but we’re now witnessing a situation in which the IMF may declare the Chinese yuan a “reserve currency” as part of a larger game by global elites to manipulate global exchange rates.

It was a big week for Bernie Sanders's brand of socialism, and millions of Americans already agree with him. Thanks to unquestioning acceptance of wild claims about the success of socialism in Europe, many Americans are now wishing for some European-style socialism themselves.

Because conservatives are only nominally less statist than today’s progressives, socialist policies that would have sounded outrageous to many Americans 100 years ago are now the baseline for the modern American political mind. Bernie Sanders is capitalizing on this reality.

Progressives would have us believe that they protect ordinary people from greedy corporations. But in truth, policies like Obamacare and Cap and Trade are immense crony capitalist deals that cartelize markets and greatly favor politically connected corporations.