John Stuart Mill assisted in the triumph of the idea of progress in the 19th Century but he also had concerns about the future that still seem relevant today. Richard Reeves comments: ‘Mill was not a knee-jerk critic of what Ruskin dismissed as the “steam whistle society”, but nor was he a blind advocate of [...]

… then he’s not serious about freezing or cutting spending.
Glenn Greenwald elaborates on just how friggin’ big and bloated the US “defense” budget is over at Salon. My shorter version:
The US spends almost as much as the rest of the world combined on “defense.” It spends six times as much as the next-largest “defense” spender [...]

The Great Credit Contraction grinds on as the system continues evaporating.  People are realizing the true nature of the worldwide fiat currency and fractional reserve banking system that is built on a fraudulent premise and has become a Ponzi scam of epic proportions, the largest in the history of the world.  Capital, both real and [...]

So far this week, we’ve continued a string of good news following last week’s focus on banking reform. More specifically reports on consumer confidence and the housing market confirm the worst of the recession’s detriments are now behind us.
First in December, existing home prices firmed significantly — up a sizable 4.9% on the median to [...]

Government cannot fix America’s problems.  Only innovative, responsible individuals acting according to their own free will can help cure what ails us.  If government could solve all our problems, then government might as well centrally plan society, but as we have seen in every instance in which this has been tried, the sole result has [...]

Zero Hedge (with help from the Huffington Post) has been all over the biggest fraud perpetrated by the government in economic history.  While trying to avoid some of the minutiae of the transactions that took place, below are some of the highly poignant issues to come out of HuffPo’s (shockingly!) and Zero Hedge’s excellent muckraking.  [...]

Sometimes no news is more telling than one might initially think and although it was hardly earth shattering for the market that the BOJ chose yesterday to keep its main benchmark rate sitting at 0.1% it does highlight the extraordinary difficulties Japan currently face in terms of sparking its economy back into some kind of [...]

Ilana Mercer concisely and elegantly makes a point that I’ve been harping on among big-L Libertarians for some time.
“Targeted tax credits” aren’t “incremental moves toward liberty,” they’re just social engineering — shifting the tax burden from those who spend their money the way bureaucrats decide they should spend it, and onto those who spend their [...]

Robert Shiller wrote a recent New York Times editorial, suggesting that the United States Government sell shares of the gross domestic product (GDP), similar to how corporations sell stocks. Mr. Shiller is obviously a very smart person. He is an economics professor at Yale University and authored various books on finance and the economy. He [...]

The great monetary scientist Isaac Newton, who served as England’s Master of the Mint for 24 years, also did some ancillary work in physics.  The laws of Newtonian physics are known by nearly everyone and are often used by analogy to apply logical reasoning in other fields.  In this case, a few of these laws [...]