Doctors for Socialized Medicine

by | Jul 15, 2012 | Healthcare

This is perhaps my favorite line from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged with regard to doctors who support, or tolerate, socialized medicine: “Let them discover, in the operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man they...

Tax Increases (or Cuts) Not the Real Issue

by | Jul 14, 2012 | Taxation

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s figures, extending the Bush tax rates will only increase the deficit by 4 percent. Actually, critics of the way the CBO figures this out are saying the 4 percent number is too high. They charge that the CBO does not take...

Reply to Salerno on Freedom in Banking

by | Jul 13, 2012 | Money & Banking

Oh no: I’ve gone and punched the 100-percent wasp’s nest again, and the wasps are responding predictably. Among them Joe Salerno stands out like a hornet among gall wasps, for Joe is an outstanding historian of monetary thought, and no mean monetary...

Is Buying for Others the Secret to Consistent Happiness?

by | Jul 13, 2012 | Business

Freedom (our own and that of others) to choose values, including the level of wealth to which we aspire and what we want to do with it, is the first requirement of happiness. Any proposals for limiting our freedom—by imposing limits on income or a duty to share it with others—should be rejected as anti-human and anti-happiness.

The Real Fiscal Cliff

by | Jul 10, 2012 | MARKETS

The media is now fixated on an apparently new feature dominating the economic landscape: a “fiscal cliff” from which the United States will fall in January 2013. They see the danger arising from the simultaneous implementation of the $2 trillion in...

Germany Loses to Italy, Again

by | Jul 9, 2012 | Europe, WORLD

Poll after poll makes it perfectly clear that the German people have no interest in exposing their hard-earned savings to the ravages of unending bailouts and currency debasement.

Return of the Gold Standard

by | Jul 5, 2012 | Money & Banking

In my latest book, The Real Crash: America’s Coming Bankruptcy – How to Save Yourself and Your Country, I devote a full chapter to the merits of the historical gold standard and reasons to reinstate it. What I did not mention and few investors notice is...