Freedomshift

The story of the Austrian School begins in the fifteenth century, when the followers of St. Thomas Aquinas, writing and teaching at the University of Salamanca in Spain, sought to explain the full range of human action and social organization. These Late Scholastics observed the existence of economic law, inexorable forces of cause and effect that operate very much as other natural laws. Over the course of several generations, they discovered and explained the laws of supply and demand, the cause of inflation, the operation of foreign exchange rates, and the subjective nature of economic value--all reasons Joseph Schumpeter celebrated them as the first real economists. The Late Scholastics were advocates of property rights and the freedom to contract and trade. They celebrated the contribution of business to society, while doggedly opposing taxes, price controls, and regulations that inhibited enterprise. As moral theologians, they urged governments to obey ethical strictures again...

Chase and Citibank announced via their websites that they are no longer participating in (Federal Deposit Insurance Company) FDIC Transaction Account Guarantee Program. Both banks are still insured under the general FDIC program, however. What is the FDIC? It’s the government entity that makes it safer to keep your money in the bank rather than stuff it in a mattress. In the case of a bank failure, your funds deposited in that failed bank are guaranteed and will be returned to you. From the FDIC website: The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is an independent agency of the United States government that protects funds depositors place in banks and savings associations. FDIC insurance is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. Since the FDIC was established in 1933, no depositor has ever lost a single penny of FDIC-insured funds. What does dropping the Transaction Account Guarantee protection mean to you? Actually, you should be pretty scared. ...

Here is the extraordinary story behind the extraordinary story of 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'. Most of us have seen the movie version of this allegorical tale, but few of us are aware of what the various characters, places and things represented in the mind of Frank Baum, the tale's author. Professor Quentin Taylor of Rogers State University invitingly titles the piece presented below 'Money and Politics in the Land of Oz'. Though 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' was written over 100 years ago, the themes will be recongizable to those with an interest in golden matters. Though gold is painted as a villain in Baum's story, it represented then many of the same things fiat money does today. Whereas gold was considered a tool of oppression by the Populists of 1900, it is considered an instrument of financial and personal freedom today. So, as you can see, we have come full circle, and gold has travelled a yellow brick road of its own. Happy reading. --Mike Ko...

KY Sen Poll: Paul Takes Commanding Lead In GOP Race The same grassroots energy that propelled Ron Paul from a little-known Congressman to a force in the presidential primaries now seems to be transferring to his son in his Senate run in Kentucky. Public Policy Polling's (D) latest survey shows him easily ahead of Secretary of State Trey Grayson, who was recruited by the national party after Sen. Jim Bunning (R) was pressured not to seek re-election. Republican Primary Election Matchup Paul 44 Grayson 25 Und 32 Some of Paul's advantage seems to come from a name-ID edge, somewhat surprising given that Grayson is a statewide officeholder and Paul is a political newcomer. Favorable Ratings Grayson 22 / 15 Paul 39 / 13 Read more at: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/politics_nation/2009/12/ky_sen_poll_paul_takes_command.html

Introduction In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I have analyzed US and NATO geopolitical strategy since the fall of the Soviet Union, in expanding the American empire and preventing the rise of new powers, containing Russia and China. This Part examines the implications of this strategy in recent years; following the emergence of a New Cold War, as well as analyzing the war in Georgia, the attempts and methods of regime change in Iran, the coup in Honduras, the expansion of the Afghan-Pakistan war theatre, and spread of conflict in Central Africa. These processes of a New Cold War and major regional wars and conflicts take the world closer to a New World War. Peace can only be possible if the tools and engines of empires are dismantled. Eastern Europe: Forefront of the New Cold War In 2002, the Guardian reported that, “The US military build-up in the former Soviet republics of central Asia is raising fears in Moscow that Washington is exploiting the Afghan war to establish a ...

Marijuana's addiction potential may be no big deal, but it's certainly big business. According to a widely publicized 1999 Institute of Medicine report, fewer than 10 percent of those who try cannabis ever meet the clinical criteria for a diagnosis of "drug dependence" (based on DSM-III-R criteria). By contrast, 32 percent of tobacco users and 15 percent of alcohol users meet the criteria for "drug dependence." Nevertheless, it is pot – not booze or cigarettes – that has the federal government seeing red and clinical investigators seeing green. As I reported for Alternet last year, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) – which overseas more than 85 percent of the world's research on controlled substances – recently appropriated some $4 million in taxpayers' dollars to establish the nation's first-ever "Center on Cannabis Addiction." It's mission: to "develop novel approaches to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment ...

TSA and Its Brethren Going in a Bad Direction Without Wanting To By Fred Reed ( http://www.fredoneverything.net/TSA.shtml ) After hearing acount after account from friends and acquaintances of rude and sometimes abusive behavior by federal officials in Immigrations, TSA, and others, I spoke by telephone to a fellow at TSA in Washington. He was agreeable and helpful, which is not a response one always gets in the capital. Anyway, I subseqquently wrote him a letter, reproduced below, which addresses matters that in the past have been of interest to readers. Dear Mr. , After our conversation of last week (and I appreciated your taking the time) I thought carefully about the problem of “TSA”—which, as I mentioned, has become a catch-all world for everything people don’t like about governmental intrusion on traveling. It is true that in airports the emigrations officers are much more obnoxious than the genuine TSA personnel. I discussed the matter with a group of friends who, l...

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By Jake Towne Published 10/29/09 http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php Last week, the U.S. Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, responding to a reporter's question of whether the Constitution gave Congress the authority to enact individual health insurance mandate, kept repeating, "Are you serious?" Now, let's give Speaker Pelosi the benefit of the doubt and attribute her impolite reply to simple disbelief. In fact, from her point of view her authority is unchallenged per a September press release, and many others such as Politico's Erwin Chemerinsky and even the contemporary Supreme Court agree. From her press release, Pelosi states: "The Constitution gives Congress broad power to regulate activities that have an effect on interstate commerce. Congress has used this authority to regulate many aspects of American life, from labor relations to education to health care to agricultural production. Since virtually every aspect of the heath care syst...

By Robert Higgs You need a strong stomach to endure the messages disseminated by the mainstream news media, especially by its premier outlets, such as the New York Times. Of course, at this late date, nobody expects anything like political non-partisanship or sound economic analysis from the Times, yet one continues to hope that the writers will not flaunt their leftish sensibilities in an utterly buffoonish manner. If you happened upon a September 28 article “Europe’s Socialists Suffering Even in Downturn,” by Steven Erlanger, your hopes in this regard must have been violently shattered. Much might be said about the article’s main content, but I won’t get into that material here. What struck me comes right at the beginning in an explicit statement of the writer’s assumptions. The article begins well enough — splendidly, in fact — as its first sentence tells us, “A specter is haunting Europe — the specter of Socialism’s slow collapse.” The next sentence, however, begins with the...

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Two centuries ago, in 1776, there were two books published in England, both of which are read avidly today. One of them was Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and the other was Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon's multivolume work is the tale of a state that survived for twelve centuries in the West and for another thousand years in the East, at Constantinople. Gibbon, in looking at this phenomenon, commented that the wonder was not that the Roman Empire had fallen, but rather that it had lasted so long. And scholars since Gibbon have devoted a great deal of energy to examining that problem: How was it that the Roman Empire lasted so long? And did it decline, or was it simply transformed into something else (that something else being the European civilization of which we are the heirs)? I've been asked to speak on the theme of Roman history, particularly the problem of inflation and its impact. My analysis is based on the premise that monetar...

In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal "cradle-to-grave" healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine. The "right to health" became a "constitutional right" of Soviet citizens. The proclaimed advantages of this system were that it would "reduce costs" and eliminate the "waste" that stemmed from "unnecessary duplication and parallelism" — i.e., competition. These goals were similar to the ones declared by Mr. Obama and Ms. Pelosi — attractive and humane goals of universal coverage and low costs. What's not to like? The system had many decades to work, but widespread apathy and low quality of work paralyzed the healthcare system. In the depths of the socialist experiment, healthcare institutions in Russia were at least a hundred years behind the average US level. Moreover, the filth, odors, cats roaming the halls, drunken medical personnel, and absenc...