An Essential Resource for Enlightened Minds Since 1972
Do we really need an iPad 3 after it seems as if iPad 2 was released only a few months ago? Was it absolutely necessary that Google give us Google+? Do phones really have to be “smart” when the old cell phones were just fine? For that matter, is it really necessary that everyone on… read more
Read More CommentEvery good dystopian story needs a villain responsible for bringing about the sad state of affairs. Half the interest in the plot concerns how the despotic conditions developed and are maintained. This is precisely why almost all dystopian stories tend toward a libertarian bent, or at least a theme of human liberation from some coercive… read more
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Whatever good you have heard about The Hunger Games, the reality is more spectacular. Not only is this the literary phenom of our time, but the movie that created near pandemonium for a week from its opening is a lasting contribution to art and to the understanding of our world. It’s more real than we… read more
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I’m starting to rethink the whole environmental craze in the culture, which is about as inescapable as pop music and jeans. It was born some 50 years ago and it has spread like a cancer ever since. It’s always annoyed me that its most consistent dogma, pushed without evidence or argument, is that commerce, and… read more
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The final general session of the Oxford Club’s Investment University — the 14th annual and held in San Diego this year — just wrapped up, and a series of afternoon sessions now follow. It is the kind of event that only a tiny percentage of the population — one might say that this is the… read more
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The Canadian gambling site [name had to be removed] thought it had the whole thing figured out. If you stay in Canada, use Canadian servers, block anyone inside U.S. territory from using the site and make sure that you don’t use any American vendors for anything — stay completely away from anything having to do… read more
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Some great books are the product of a lifetime of research, reflection, and discipline. Others are written during a moment of passionate discovery, with prose that shines forth like the sun when new understanding first brings the world into focus. The Market for Liberty is that second type of classic. Written by Morris and Linda… read more
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Shawn Lyttle, a colleague at Laissez Faire Books, did a very dangerous thing yesterday. He shoved into my hand a little book called Three Early Works, by H.L. Mencken. I opened it and felt that whooshing sound of my brain being sucked into the delirious world of the greatest American sociologist. For anyone who loves… read more
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How much does the Internet contribute to our economic life? A lot, yes. But what if we tried to put a number on it? We love numbers, right? We imagine that we can slice and dice the world and look at everything on a spreadsheet, click a button and make it a pie chart, and… read more
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The old adage that we don’t learn from history is true enough, but it needs amendment. Governments, in particular, don’t learn from history. That’s the conclusion I reach after a wild weekend ride with Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls, a delightful book by Robert Schuettinger and Eamonn Butler. They scour history books from… read more
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So you want to see Hunger Games when it comes out on Thursday at midnight? It’s not likely that you will get the chance. Tickets in my community have been sold out for weeks. In fact, the first 10 showings of the film are sold out. This disappoints me greatly because it is one of… read more
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Ah, what a weekend, with blue skies, singing birds, budding cherry blossoms and the government’s announcement that it has totalitarian control over everything. Wait, what was that last thing? It was an Executive Order released late Friday that no one on the planet seemed to notice until about 30 hours later. It is unnumbered, but… read more
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Anyone who read Dr. Suess’s “The Lorax” as a kid might dread the movie version. No one really needs another moralizing, hectoring lecture from environmentalists on the need to save the trees from extinction, especially since that once-fashionable cause seems ridiculously overwrought today. There is no shortage of trees and this is due not to… read more
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Remember that battle over SOPA, in which the world’s largest websites beat back a congressional threat that would have changed the Internet forever? It was pretty obvious within a day after this Pyrrhic victory that the existing laws in place were enough to give the government the power to wreck the digital world. But how… read more
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Few things in life are as satisfying as a transformative and implausible reversal of history that carries with it stern justice for wrongdoing and sweet victory for the side of truth and human well-being. When it happens, the period in which the wrong persisted without correction fades into memory as a mere parenthesis in the… read more
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The story from The Daily swept through the Internet with blazing speed. The report: Criminals around the country are stealing an inordinate number of bottles of Tide laundry detergent. This is not because the criminals plan to go into the laundry business. There is not a “grime wave.” It seems that these Tide bottles are… read more
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Sometimes — why not now? — you just have to reflect on what an amazing man Thomas Jefferson was. I mean, he really got the whole idea of liberty, maybe better than anyone before him, and far better than most people today. What a man! What a dream he had! I’m reminded of his bravery… read more
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BBH Labs is an advertising agency that specializes in new and creative ideas for marketing products. But few ideas have ever generated the heat of one used this past weekend at the Austin, Texas, technology conference South by Southwest. Wireless networks are famously overcrowded at these events, and everyone is scrambling for a good connection.… read more
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Most of us hadn’t thought about Davy Jones of the Monkees in many years. Suddenly, he died at the age of 66 and we were all instantly living in his world. Tributes were everywhere. His YouTube videos were slammed with hits. Praise for his life and works appeared on blogs everywhere. People were honoring his… read more
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in the spring of 2012, Bill Bonner, founder of Agora Inc., took a break from his daily column in The Daily Reckoning, and, like hundreds of thousands of others, I went through withdrawals. Fortunately, I had a copy of his wonderful book, Mobs, Messiahs and Markets, to devour as I awaited his return. This is… read more
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The money masters at the Federal Reserve have done a splendid job, haven’t they? Well, no, and all the more reason to End the Fed, in the legendary slogan of Ron Paul. Every few months since the great meltdown of 2008, there’s been some announcement that appears in the financial press about the latest fancy-pants… read more
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I hate to be the one to bring up a very unpleasant subject, but let me begin with a question… Do you recall the reasons that the Sept. 11 terrorists gave for their rampage, the one that killed so many, did so much damage and led the U.S. government to unleash fury on the world… read more
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The term “nanny state” actually dates to the 1960s, and that’s not surprising. It was about this time that government ran out of ideas for improving society — it didn’t really improve us, but it claimed to — and turned its attention to hectoring us about all the things we do to ourselves that it… read more
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I was reading a wonderful set of small biographies of Gilded Age entrepreneurs and took note of something we all know once we think about it. These men and women worked in productive labor from an early age. They universally credit these early work experiments for instilling an ethic to stick to the job, be… read more
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If you are willing to look past mainstream media coverage of American politics, you can actually find exciting and interesting activities taking place that rise above lobbying, voting, graft and corruption. Consider the Free State Project. It is an attempt, and a surprisingly successful one, to inspire a political migration by lovers to liberty to… read more
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You have probably seen Peter Schiff on television, not once, but many times. Among the legions of indistinguishable talking heads out there, he stands out. He makes sense. He draws attention to reality. He is disregarding of the opinions and conventions that prevail on the financial news networks and just comes right out and says… read more
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We loved it as kids — that amazing substance called Silly Putty. I recently found a version in a hotel room the other day, re-branded as Thinking Putty. It turns out that the names differ based on the targeted market segment. In any case, the whole phenomenon is curious. How it is that this seemingly… read more
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You have heard of unmanned flight. Much more impressive to me is the unmanned grocery store that could be coming to a street corner by you. It’s being pushed by Kroger. It is a large-scale machine stocked with 200 items from the grocery store. Crackers, cheese, milk, bread, chips and dip, maybe even some fruit… read more
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Have you ever heard the claim that paying income tax is voluntary? The term “voluntary” is variously used in government documents, including the 1040 form itself, and some very naive people have actually taken this to mean that they don’t have to pay if they don’t want to. They think that “voluntary” actually means voluntary,… read more
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Do you know about Europe’s problem with the NEETs? This is the name being given to those mostly young workers who are not in school, not employed and not in training. The designation applies to one in five people aged 24 and younger. Unemployment among this generation is frighteningly high all over the eurozone. These… read more
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