Walking away is not just for homeowners anymore. Now banks have joined in and are walking away, leaving thousands of homes vacant because they don’t want to be responsible for maintaining them. While housing bulls urge investors to buy up houses, banks that could control property ownership merely by foreclosing and paying the back taxes, […]
Laissez-Faire Today
If It Moves, Tax It
A contributing factor in the rise of Internet commerce, a feature that gave it a kick-start, was that you didn’t have to pay sales tax on what you purchased out of state. Ah, the glory days of the 2000s, when you could order anything and, for once in your life, not get hammered by the […]
Denial Is Not Just a Polluted River in Egypt
Here we go again with the Earth Day/global warming nonsense. Monday was Earth Day, and this week is Earth Week, so a politically correct network like the NBC family, including CNBC, has turned its peacock green with the tagline “Green Is Universal.” Tell the folks in the upper Midwest that global warming will destroy the […]
Bumps on the Bitcoin Road
Now that Bitcoin seems to be on the way toward monetization, or at least the long process is noticeably under way, there are a number of issues that are troubling people. I will deal with a few here. Note this crucial distinction that is somehow lost on many commentators on the Bitcoin issue. The flaws […]
Government Wants it Both Ways
Back in 2010 the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), a government agency, sued 14 executives of failed credit union Wescorp seeking at least $1 billion from the defendants or their insurers. The giant credit union was seized by the government in March 2009 after incurring nearly $7 billion in losses, “largely because of bad investments […]
Beware of Government “Extras”
Beware the government that provides “more.” Fear the government that provides “extra.” “More government” always means more of something, but not always more of something a productive individual desires. More government means more rules and regulations, more agencies to enforce the proliferating rules and regulations, more taxes to pay for the proliferating agencies that enforce […]
Sailor Tales From the Bitcoin Seas
As someone who only recently dived into the rocky Bitcoin waters — and discovered a world I had never imagined — I enjoy talking to others who have been there longer. There are some amazing stories out there. We are sitting here today with Bitcoin comfortably trading at 1 BTC to $134, and we take […]
Right vs. Left, but What About Truth?
It was once incontrovertible: The mainstream press leans left-liberal. It’s been a proven fact that Republican presidents receive 20-30% less positive economic coverage from the nation’s newspapers. But times seem to have changed a bit. Now a new mainstream has emerged that leans right-conservative. It takes the form of Fox News, mainly, but there are […]
Is There an Infinite Amount of Money Available to Fund U.S. Debt?
I am often asked, “How can anyone not see the problems of growing debt in the U.S.? Why can’t we get a consensus to change?” Part of the problem is that too many in power just don’t see the impending crisis that you and I see, or at least they don’t see the need to […]
Gold and the Wacky Human Mind
The voting machine that is the market deemed an ounce of gold to be worth $1,600 a few days ago and then, whoops, two days later, that same market, the collection of rational minds that trade in the metal, valued that same ounce to be worth less than $1,400. Keep in mind: These prices are […]