Topics / Economics

• The Top 5 things the powers-that-be do not want you to know! Thomas Jefferson wrote, "The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty." This article dives into the five biggest misconceptions that lead to the majority of discontentment in our society.

• Inflation or Deflation? Inflation or Deflation, that is the question. What fate does the United States of America face as we start 2008? This is a very critical question to ask, because the potential investment strategies for these scenarios are polar opposites.

• The Top-Tier Candidates will continue to tank the Economy Every "top-tier" candidate has their own plans to address the problems in our society, but every plan presented by any of top-tier candidates has one thing in common: increased government spending. Increase government spending will only serve to undermine the economy and send us into a Greater Depression.

• An Attention Currency for an Attention Economy In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

• The Mortgage Interest Deduction Fraud The first thing everyone tells you about buying a house is that you can deduct your mortgage interest from your income taxes. This tax law is supposed to promote buying a home over renting, but what does it really do? This deduction does nothing more than lower the effective interest rate on a loan and push the average house price up. Ultimately the home buyer pays the same amount of interest, because they are forced to take on more debt to buy the same house.

• Do Government Backed Education Loans Really Help? Most people come to believe that government backed education loans are a good means to make college education available to more people and that it ultimately helps the country, but do these loans really help or are they doing more harm than good?

• Can we use a Fractional Reserve Tax to Eliminate Other Taxes? Fractional reserve lending is nothing more than the bank taking on interest free unsecured debt at the expense of their depositors (the public) and then taking a gamble by lending that money to others at interest. This process depends upon government force, so could we eliminate most other taxes by taxing fractional reserve lending?

• Do you have a Debt or Obligation to Society? Does the average man owe a debt to his society? I have had many conversations with individuals about the income tax, property tax, inflation tax, and the draft. All of these things depend upon the assumption that society or government owns or is owed all of the labor, property, and life of its citizens.

• Fractional Reserve Banking, Fiat Money, and Gold Standards Fractional reserve banking is a very controversial topic. On one side you have the bankers and big business who claim that fractional reserve lending is necessary to support economic growth, and on the other side are hard money advocates who claim that fractional reserve lending is nothing less than fraud. In this article I will review what fractional reserve banking is, how it causes economic booms and busts, and what, if anything, can be done to compromise.

• Authority to Counterfeit Today our government claims the power and authority to deny you the right to own property (real estate or otherwise) and the right to earn a living doing honest work. They claim this authority through the use of property tax, income tax, and inflation (printing of money). The authority to tax 1% is no different than the authority to tax 100%. The authority to devalue your savings by 3% is the same authority needed to devalue your savings by 100%. Just because the government restrains its use of this authority (to prevent killing the host that it feeds on), does not mean that it does not claim and exercise a part of that authority.

• Fiat Money With each day that passes the American people are becoming increasingly aware that something isn’t right with our economy, but most people are not aware that the federal reserve notes (FRN) in our wallet or bank accounts represent debt instead of wealth. To be more specific, these FRNs are nothing but an IOU from the Federal Reserve. Unlike most IOU’s, the FRN doesn’t specify WHAT is owed.

• Inflation will lower, not raise, home prices! When measured in dollars, the median home price from 2000 to 2007 has soared by 60% across the United States with some areas seeing more than 100% gains. If we instead measure home prices by the dollar index (a basket of other currencies), we see that todays home prices are only up by 14% from 2000 levels.

• The falling dollar doesn’t help the United States Every article I read about the falling US dollar makes some statement to the effect of “the falling dollar should help US exports”. While most people take this at face value and automatically assume that this “helping of US exports” is good for our economy, I decided to look deeper and explore “how does the falling dollar help exports?”

• Is Privatization of Social Security a good idea? The privatization of social security is one of the major ideas proposed to solve long-term social security solvency. Whether or not this is a good idea depends upon who you talk to. Many arguments for or against social security plans make an appeal to emotion rather than presenting compelling logic. This article will attempt to present a logical analysis of the various social security privatization ideas.