Despite Congressman Barney Frank’s blubbering insistence that our nation’s current financial mess is a “new phenomena,” today’s “housing/credit/confidence crisis” is anything but. Our ancestors had already seen all the broken dreams and ignorant greed surfing high on a wave of paper money and hollow credit – more than once before. The America of 1819 and the financial panic its citizens experienced was only the first of what is America’s true national pastime: speculative mania. FULL ARTICLE

In the present recession, advocates of government intervention often evoke the specter of the Great Depression. Unless the government intervenes massively, we are told, we risk an economic collapse comparable to that of the 1930s. To see the fallacy of this claim, it is imperative to understand that government intervention both led to the depression and prevented recovery from it. FULL ARTICLE

The populist impulse within us all, overwritten as it is by false programming, remains quite strong and when repressed turns ugly. The repression of true popular sovereignty can lead to neurotic displacements like genocidal aggression and torture, compulsive secrecy and national security states, preemptive wars, fascism and state terror, rape, child abuse, domestic violence, cancer, hemorrhoids, the heartbreak of psoriasis and other forms of national and personal psychopathology we can plainly see today when we look in the mirror. FULL ARTICLE

The entire process of raining-down fire on walled-in ghettoes of civilians, then plowing-under the remains of what were once apartment building and family homes with bulldozers is not warfare, it is wholesale murder and wanton destruction, the likes of which has, thankfully, occurred only rarely in modern history.  One of the more infamous of these anti-Semitic pogroms, known simply as “Kristallnacht,” is known as a turning point in German history and the opening act of “the Holocaust.”   FULL ARTICLE

Once Roosevelt reversed his campaign rhetoric and embraced the total state, The Nation editors knew they had to take a stand. As Hazlitt’s criticisms of FDR grew, so did the internal complaints about Hazlitt’s philosophy. Rather than simply fire their editor of two years, they scheduled a knockdown, drag-out fight between those who said capitalism had failed (thereby making socialism the answer) and those who said interventionism had failed and that capitalism was the answer. FULL ARTICLE

Nearly every day brings new reports of the collapse of a large financial institution or the impending bankruptcy of a major company. Plans for bailouts and government intervention are in the air. Even those who profess devotion to free enterprise have wavered. Are we not faced with an emergency that calls for immediate action to “save” capitalism?  Faced with this situation, we need to be more resolute than ever in defense of the free market, with no government restrictions whatever. If we do not defeat these measures, we face grave danger. The record of National Socialist Germany during the 1930s shows how quickly government intervention leads to full-scale socialism. Ludwig von Mises warned of this many years ago. FULL ARTICLE

A French-like American Revolution is not inevitable, but as corporations flee the USA and out-source our best jobs to their off-shore enclaves, the social engineering that once locked ordinary Americans into a milquetoast politics of what the superrich will tolerate erodes. Ordinary Americans have less and less to lose by defying the corporate structures, by standing on their own two feet, by devising sustainable economies of scale. Ordinary Americans have more and more to win by setting aside beliefs where they conflict with Constitutional and statute law facts. FULL ARTICLE

For years, many of us puzzled about how something so stupid and destructive as the New Deal could have happened. The stock market crashed because it was over-inflated. That’s nothing new. History is filled with credit-filled bubbles that pop. Resources are reallocated to reflect economic reality and we move on.  FULL ARTICLE

The purpose of the following is to argue that the “gold standard,” as understood by most of the public, did not cause or worsen the Great Depression as current FED Chairman Ben Bernanke has based many of his papers, speeches, and, to a large extent, his entire career on. In our contemporary times, I do believe this blame must be firmly rejected and monetary policy should, at the very least, be debated in a national forum. Indeed many other economists, such as the Friedman family, Anna Schwartz, Alan Greenspan, and Jeffrey “Shock Doctor” Sachs, have all propagated this lie.  FULL ARTICLE

Sometimes it seems like politicians can do virtually anything and get away with it.  Take Josef Stalin, for example.

Tens of millions of people were murdered by his regime, but yet, he was voted Russia’s third most popular historical figure in a nationwide poll that ended on Sunday.

I wonder, will Americans consider the murderer Bush to be their 3rd greatest leader in 2070?  The way the public school system indoctrinates our children to love the government and worship political leaders, I wouldn’t find it too surprising.