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Claude Monet Grand Canal, Venice 1908

Our freedoms are cancel-cultured one by one, and by now hardly anyone notices anymore, because the media is in on it. But this cannot end well. We better stop this now, or it will get awfully out of hand. It’s a sliding scale bouncing down a slippery slope that gifts politicians and “health authorities” the world over with ever more powers, which they really should not have, as everyone would agree with who takes a step back to look at the bigger picture.• ONLY doctors are experts.

• We use ONLY vaccines to fight Covid, no prophylactics. No vitamin D, HCQ or ivermectin.

• We have ONLY Emergency Use Authorization vaccines.

• We can soon ONLY travel after having been inoculated with such vaccines.

• We can ONLY express officially approved opinions.

• ONLY doctors are experts.

You can’t let your country be run by doctors, virologists and epidemiologists. Anyone can understand that. But this is the reality:

Advisory Committee On Pandemic Needs Variety Of Experts, Not Just Doctors

The existing committee of experts advising the government on the pandemic must reshape to add experts from different research disciplines instead of one to become more efficient, according to a professor on Friday. Manolis Dermitzakis, professor of genetics at the University of Geneva, told Skai television that, in the first wave of the pandemic, the decisions for the committee were simple. It ONLY had to decide whether some activities should open or close, while the public largely complied with the restrictive measures. But the complexity of the situation as the pandemic continued from the summer onwards was so great that a commission which includes ONLY doctors could not function. Dermitzakis also argued that the panel must have fewer members. “A committee that has 30-40 members and consists ONLY of doctors cannot function,” he said.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The End of Paper Money – the Digital Revolution

March 5, 2021

The End of Paper Money – the Digital Revolution

The assumption in governments has always been that WE ARE THE PROBLEM – not them! They have really believed that if they could tax the underground economy they would have balanced budgets. We all know that in reality, no matter how much money they collect, they will always spend more. This idea that digital currency will wipe out crime is rather absurd. I was talking to a young person who buys their weed, like so many these days. They make a phone call, it is dropped off in their mailbox, and they pay by some cash transfer application. So they never even see the person anymore. So the move toward digital transactions has not eliminated the underground economy, it has actually improved it making it more efficient.

Meanwhile, the criminals have to learn now how to code in order to hack into systems. It seems that this trend is forcing criminals to become much more professional in their endeavors.

Japan Embraced Debt As a Way Out of Its Budget Crisis. It’s Not Working.

October 16, 2020

JAPAN EMBRACED DEBT AS A WAY OUT OF ITS BUDGET CRISIS. IT’S NOT WORKING.

The sudden resignation of Japans Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has led to evaluations of his so-called Abenomics. Many have praised Abe’s aggressive monetary policy because the long shopping list of the Bank of Japan (government bonds, corporate bonds, ETFs and real estate investment trusts) has inflated stock and real estate prices (Shirai 2020; Financial Times 2020). Concerns remain on the fiscal side since Abe’s consumption tax hikes from 5 percent to 8 percent in 2014 and to 10 percent in 2019 are widely seen as a failure (The Economist 2020). Indeed, Abe resolved Japan’s deep-seated fiscal problems only superficially.

Figure 1: Tax Revenues of Japan’s Central Government

Source: Ministry of Finance, Japan.

The core of the problem is cheap money issued by the Bank of Japan, which had caused a stock and real estate bubble in the second half of the 1980s. While the bubble had inflated tax revenues, its bursting was followed by an unprecedented economic slump during which the corporate and income tax revenues collapsed from 43 trillion yen (approx. 390 billion dollars) in 1990 to 23 trillion yen (approx. 185 billion dollars) in 2012 (Figure 1), when Abe took office.

Figure 2: Social Security Expenditure and Local Allocation Tax as Share of Total Tax Revenues

Source: Ministry of Finance, Japan. Central Government.

At the same time Japan’s aging population ballooned the government contributions to the public pension and health insurance system, from 12 trillion yen (approx. 110 billion dollars) in 1990 to 36 trillion yen (approx. 327 billion dollars) in 2019. In addition, the so-called local allocation tax grants of around 16 trillion yen per year (approx. 145 billion dollars) to the economically exhausted Japanese periphery continued to constitute a heavy burden for the central government. In the wake of the global financial crisis, both together had increased far beyond the central governments’ tax revenues (Figure 2).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

No Go Zones: A Guide to Western Failed States and European Secessionist Movements

September 6, 2020

No Go Zones: A Guide to Western Failed States and European Secessionist Movements

The failed state is to post-modernity what the nation-state was to modernity. It’s a recent development that is a hallmark of our age – like a state, but incapable of exercising sovereignty over all of its nominal territory. And while it might sound a little far-fetched, the failed state isn’t just coming to the West. It might already be here.

What Is a Failed State?

A failed state is a state no longer exercising effective control over the whole of its nominal territory. This can take a number of forms in practice, such as:

A de facto separatist nation or nations existing within the boundaries of their de jure territory, competing for the monopoly on legitimate use of physical force.
Failure of the legitimate authority of the nation to make practical, collective decisions.
Inability to adequately provide basic social services such as policing, firefighting or emergency medical services to some or all of its territory.
Inability to connect with other states through diplomatic channels; a lack of participation in the international community.
A central government incapable of collecting enough tax revenue to operate effectively.

One or several of these factors can be present in a failed state. Once a state is “failed,” this often means widespread crime, corruption and outsized influence by non-state actors.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Panic in Real Estate

August 21, 2020

Panic in Real Estate

COMMENT: I live in central West Texas, I am passing on to you the fact that there is a “rush” of sales in rural property’s. Houses with small amounts of land attached are “flying off of the shelves” so to speak. This is occurring throughout all of West Texas and in the Panhandle. The effort to getting out of the cities. Even cities as small as 25,000 is in full swing! People are well aware of the potential of what is in the near future and are not sitting around wondering what they should do.

They are acting!

REPLY: There is a massive exodus from California and New York in particular. Even in North New Jersey, houses are selling in just days and over asking prices for cash. People are bailing out of New York City in herds. Here in Florida, condos are selling as fast as they can get them up in St Petersbourg. These lockdowns and COVID restrictions that are insane in the major cities have set in motion a massive exodus that these authoritarians never anticipated. As they flex their muscles to try to make this so draconian over nothing, they are complete the cycle which has been pointing to the collapse of urbanization, and the rich will flee.

One of my favorite stories of the Sovereign Debt Crisis is the City of Mainz, in Germany, around 1440. The goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, which began the Printing Revolution that enabled the Renaissance to flourish with the printing press which could produce up to 3,600 pages per workday compared to the hand-copying by scribes which would produce only about 40 pages per day. The printing press then spread within several decades to over two hundred cities in a dozen European countries.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Great Reset – The Final Battle Against Marxists

June 18, 2020

The Great Reset – The Final Battle Against Marxists

The rising civil unrest is starting to take notice of Bill Gates and his consortium hell-bent on changing the world economy. They have used the coronavirus as a ploy to shut down the world economy all for their Climate Change Agenda. There is a mountain of circumstantial evidence that points to Fauci funding the creation of this virus and transferring it to the Wuhan lab where neither China nor the United States leaked it, but this consortium which has planned this Event 201 on how to destroy the world economy and rebuild it from scratch. They are already introducing Guaranteed Basic Income, assuming they can wipe out over 300 million jobs and then pay people to sit home and watch TV, where they recreate the world in their own image which they are promoting as the Great Reset.

This has all been planned and it is being promoted by the infamous Davor — World Economic Forum. These people are all elitists who would never walk among us who they consider the great unwashed. They have unleashed domestic violence on the world and encouraged all the suicides by imprisoning people, and stripping them of all human rights. Their view is that the world is overpopulated, so thinning the herd to save the planet is justified and not genocide. Countries like Thailand saw their tourist trade collapse and countless food lines, all for a fake virus. These people have used the press to terrorize the people to achieve their goal to recreate the world economy as “greener, smarter, and fairer.” The World Economic Forum is promoting a Marxist agenda with a 50-page manifesto organized by the communist Thomas Piketty. The Forum promotes a new Marxist world, calling upon Piketty’s “urgent new message on how to fight inequality” where they want to attack anyone with wealth. Their proposal for Europe is to increase taxation by 400%!

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bankrupting America

April 8, 2020

Bankrupting America

Source: AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Two weeks ago, President Donald Trump signed the largest stimulus bill in U.S. history: more than $2 trillion.

For once, both Republicans and Democrats agreed. The Senate voted 96-0. The House didn’t even bother with a formal vote.

At the White House, a reporter asked the president, pointing out that the bill includes $25 million for the Kennedy Center, “Shouldn’t that money be going to masks?”

“The Kennedy Center has suffered greatly because nobody can go there,” Trump responded. “They do need some funding. And look — that was a Democrat request. That was not my request. But you got to give them something.”

“Something” they got. The bill includes $25 million for Congressional salaries, $50 million for an Institute of Museum and Library Services and lots of other wasteful things.

Only a few politicians were wary. Rep. Thomas Massie complained that he wasn’t even allowed to speak against the bill.

Rep. Alex Mooney asked: “How do you pay for it? Borrow it from China, borrow it from Russia? Are we going to print the money?”

Those are good questions.

Our national debt is already $24 trillion. Now it will jump, percentage-wise, to where Greece’s debt was shortly before unemployment there hit 27%.

Greece was bailed out by the European Union. But the United States can’t be bailed out by others.

How will we pay off our debt? That’s the topic of my new video.

There are really three options:

1. Raise taxes.

2. Print money.

3. Default.

Let’s consider each:

1. Raising taxes on rich people is popular. Even Michael Bloomberg wants “higher taxes on billionaires” like him.

But raising taxes on the rich often kills the wealth and jobs some rich people create. And it won’t solve our debt problem. Even if we took all the billionaires’ wealth — reducing their net worth to zero — it would cover only an eighth of our debt.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Will It Take to Get the Public to Embrace Sound Money?

January 18, 2020

What Will It Take to Get the Public to Embrace Sound Money?

In the last decade, the combination of virulent asset price inflation and low reported consumer price inflation crippled sound money as a political force in the US and globally. In the new decade, a different balance between monetary inflation’s “terrible twins” — asset inflation and goods inflation — will create an opportunity for that force to regain strength. Crucial, however, will be how sound money advocacy evolves in the world of ideas and its success in forming an alliance with other causes that could win elections.

It is very likely that the deflationary nonmonetary influences of globalization and digitalization, which camouflaged the activity of the goods-inflation twin during the past decade, are already dissipating.

The pace of globalization may have already peaked, before the Xi-Trump tariff war. Inflation-fueled monetary malinvestment surely contributed to its prior speed. One channel here was the spread of highly speculative narratives about the wonders of global supply chains.

Digitalization’s potential to camouflage monetary inflation in goods and services markets, on the other hand, has come largely via its impact on the dynamics of wage determination. It has forged star firms with considerable monopoly power in each industrial sector. Obstacles preventing their technological and organizational know-how from seeping out to competitors means that wages are not bid higher across labor markets in similar fashion to earlier industrial revolutions. These obstacles reflect the fact that much investment is now in the form of firm-specific intangibles. Even so, such obstacles tend to lose their effectiveness over time.

As deflation fades, monetary repression taxes (collected for governments through central banks’ manipulation of rates to low levels so as to achieve 2 percent inflation despite disinflation as described) will undergo metamorphosis into open inflation taxes as the rate of consumer price inflation accelerates. Governments cannot forego revenue given their ailing finances. Simultaneously, asset inflation will proceed down a new stretch of highway where many crashes occur.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Postmedia, Torstar Take Taxpayer Cash, Fight to Keep Public in Dark about Cuts

October 31, 2019

Postmedia, Torstar Take Taxpayer Cash, Fight to Keep Public in Dark about Cuts

Media giants continue to fight disclosure of evidence about 2017 deal that shuttered 36 newspapers.

Torstar claimed $4.5 million in subsidies under government plan; Postmedia $7 million. The two are being criminally investigated by the Competition Bureau.

Newspaper giants Torstar and Postmedia have both just claimed millions in taxpayer subsidies from the federal government’s controversial news media fund.

But at the same time they’re counting the cash, they’re continuing to fight in court to keep the public from learning about their 2017 deal that resulted in 36 newspapers closing across Canada.

Postmedia’s latest financial report included $7 million from the fund in its revenues — and that’s just for nine months.

Torstar claimed $4.5 million in subsidies from the fund, also just for nine months, when it released its quarterly financial report Wednesday.

Critics feared the fund, which promises almost $600 million over five years, would enrich shareholders or hedge funds while media corporations continue to slash staff and close newspapers.The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada

That’s what Postmedia and Torstar did in 2017. The two corporations swapped 43 newspapers, and on the same day the deal was announced closed 36 of them. Almost 300 people lost their jobs and 36 communities lost a news source. In many of them, competition was replaced with a monopoly controlled by one of the two corporations.

That situation sparked a continuing Competition Bureau investigationinto “alleged anti-competitive conduct.” The bureau later announced it was pursuing the investigation under the criminal conspiracy provisions of the Competition Act.

And while Torstar and Postmedia are taking taxpayers’ money, the two companies have been fighting to keep the public or prosecutors from seeing documents seized in searches of their offices or used to obtain search warrants.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fourth Turning Economics

August 5, 2019

Fourth Turning Economics

“In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way. If foreign societies are also entering a Fourth Turning, this could accelerate the chain reaction. At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability – problem areas where America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe

The quote above captures the current Fourth Turning perfectly, even though it was written more than a decade before the 2008 financial tsunami struck. With global debt now exceeding $250 trillion, up 60% since the Crisis began, and $13 trillion of sovereign debt with negative yields, it is clear to all rational thinking individuals the next financial crisis will make 2008 look like a walk in the park. We are approaching the eleventh anniversary of this crisis period, with possibly a decade to go before a resolution.

As I was thinking about what confluence of economic factors might ignite the next bloody phase of this Fourth Turning, I realized economic factors have been the underlying cause of all four Crisis periods in American history.

Debt levels in eurozone, G7, US and Germany

The specific details of each crisis change, but economic catalysts have initiated all previous Fourth Turnings and led ultimately to bloody conflict. There is nothing in the current dynamic of this Fourth Turning which argues against a similar outcome. The immense debt, stock and real estate bubbles, created by feckless central bankers, corrupt politicians, and spineless government apparatchiks, have set the stage for the greatest financial calamity in world history.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Doug Casey Debunks Four Myths About Trump, Taxes, and the Economy

June 16, 2019

Doug Casey Debunks Four Myths About Trump, Taxes, and the Economy

International Man: For many years, President Trump has made no apologies for trying to pay the least amount of taxes possible. He’s clearly stated this in many interviews.

His desire to minimize his taxes has brought scorn from many in the mainstream media, and politicians from both sides of the aisle. These people are of the opinion that paying taxes is an honorable and necessary responsibility. It brings to mind the wrongheaded saying “taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society”, which came from US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Many people believe this.

But if that’s true, how come low tax locales like Singapore, the Cayman Islands, Monaco aren’t backward hell holes, but rather sophisticated and civilized?

Doug Casey: Almost any lie can be accepted as truth if it’s said often enough and with enough certainty. That absolutely applies to what Holmes said. It’s shameful how people don’t think about its meaning, but slavishly repeat it.

Taxes aren’t the price we pay for civilized society. They’re a sign of the fact that society is becoming uncivilized. A civilized society is based on voluntarism. Taxes are all about coercion.

People don’t seem to recognize or remember that before 1913 there was no income tax in the US. There was no reporting of any kind to the US government. It was a much more civilized and far freer country then.

As far as Trump minimizing his taxes, congratulations to him. The object should be to cut the size of the US government in half, and cut it in half again, and again. And along with it, cut the tax burden that it imposes on the average American.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Force that is Ending Freedom

June 10, 2019

The Force that is Ending Freedom

Every empire is a dictatorship. No nation can be a democracy that’s either heading an empire, or a vassal-state of one. Obviously, in order to be a vassal-state within an empire, that nation is dictated-to by the nation of which it is a colony.

However, even the domestic inhabitants of the colonizing nation cannot be free and living in a democracy, because their services are needed abroad in order to impose the occupying force upon the colony or vassal-nation. This is an important burden upon the ‘citizens’ or actually the subjects of the imperial nation.

Furthermore, they need to finance, via their taxes, this occupying force abroad, to a sufficient extent so as to subdue any resistance by the residents in any colony.

Every empire is imposed, none is really voluntary. Conquest creates an empire, and the constant application of force maintains it.

Every empire is a dictatorship, not only upon its foreign populations (which goes without saying, because otherwise there can’t be any empire), but upon its domestic ones too, upon its own subjects.

Any empire needs weapons-makers, who sell to the government and whose only markets are the imperial government and its vassal-nations or ‘allies’.

By contrast, ’enemy’ nations are ones that the imperial power has placed onto its priority-list of nations that are yet to become conquered. There are two main reasons to conquer a nation.

One is in order to be enabled to extract, from the colony, oil, or gold, or some other valuable commodity. The other is in order to control it so as to be enabled to use that land as a passageway for exporting, from a vassal-nation, to other nations, that vassal-nation’s products.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What were Roman Taxes v Modern Taxes?

May 30, 2019

What were Roman Taxes v Modern Taxes?

QUESTION: You do a lot of comparison to the Roman Empire. What was the size of the government relative to GDP? Can you estimate that?

ANSWER: The Roman economy was more like the USA during the mid-19th century in that it was pre-industrial. About 80% of its inhabitants worked in agriculture, which was about where we were in 1840. There was no social agenda of trying to redistribute wealth from one class to the other. Still, there were social programs. But the socialistic agenda that was adopted by modern governments has sought not merely to redistribute wealth among the classes, but it has justified bigger government on a grand scale never before witnessed in history. The tax rate in the ancient Roman Empire was about 5% with some paying as little as 2%. The actual cost of government during the Roman Empire was minimal compared to the modern standard. The Roman Emperor Trajan (98-117 AD) formalized the alimenta, which was a welfare program that helped orphans and poor children throughout Italy. It provided general funds as well as food and subsidized education. The program was supported initially out of Dacian War booty, and then later by a combination of estate taxes and philanthropy. So there were programs to take care of people who needed help.

Virtually all the taxes and rents raised by the imperial government were spent on the military, which came out to be about 80% of the imperial budget in 150 AD. This military spending constituted about 2.5% of the empire’s GDP. Obviously, we do not really see separatists movement until the mid-3rd century when Valerian I (253-260 AD) was captured by the Persians. With the cost of the military coming in about 2.5%, this explains the lack of tax rebellions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Income Tax is Destroying the World Economy

May 17, 2019

The Income Tax is Destroying the World Economy

It is imperative that we MUST eliminate the income tax. It is a purely a Marxist development that is destroying the world economy. The income tax has become such a tyranny that our liberty, freedom of movement, and world economic growth are all at great risk. Never before in the history of human civilization do we find an income tax. It is true that Ben Franklin once said that the two certainties in life were death and taxes. It is equally true that taxes, in general, have been around since the beginning of civilization. We do know that the earliest recorded tax was implemented in Mesopotamia over 4500 years ago, where people paid taxes throughout the year in the form of livestock, which was the preferred currency at the time. The ancient world also had inheritance taxes, also known as estate taxes or death taxes. The earliest recorded evidence of a death tax came from ancient Egypt (700 BC), where they charged a 10% tax on property transferred at the time of death.

The most serious crisis we face is that with the dawn of Marxism (Communism/Socialism) the way we pay taxes has changed significantly. Yet, one for the record took place in 2006 when China eliminated what was the oldest existing tax in history. The agricultural tax was created 2,600 years ago and was eliminated in 2006 to help improve the well-being of rural farmers in China.

Taxation in the United States can be traced to the colonists when they were heavily taxed by Great Britain on many things from tea to newspapers. Legal and business documents were required to display a Stamp Tax. Most colonists objected to this form of taxation, since they had no political input about the creation of new taxes, giving rise to the term “taxation without representation.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Most Important Chart in Economics?

March 26, 2019

The Most Important Chart in Economics?

Earlier this month, the U.S. Federal Reserve quietly released the Financial Accounts of the United States. Like most government data, the 198-page report (known to insiders as the Z1) is almost impossible to understand.

However, to the economists and accountants who wade their way through the mess, the implications are clear.

America has been growing government, business and household debts faster than its economy for more than four decades. Despite the huge runup in asset prices during that time, the country is essentially bankrupt.

The impending disaster becomes even clearer when presented visually.

The above chart, compiled on the St-Louis Fed’s FRED site, strongly suggests that economists have been pushing a GDP expansion that has been fueled almost uniquely by debt.

The three stages of scam economics

The story of how the American government and the Federal Reserve—with the quiet backing of university academics—fueled this elaborate Ponzi scheme unfolded in three stages.

Tax and spend

The first signs emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s, when American companies, after an almost three-decade free ride, began to get competition in international markets from countries such as Japan and Germany, which had been bombed back to the stone ages during World War II.

By that time, the American public had gotten used to constantly-rising living standards. For politicians, asking voters to work harder or to curtail constant demands for “more” became increasingly more difficult.

Governments responded with what became known as “tax and spend” economic policies.

Taxing the hard-earned savings of workers and passing the cash to bureaucrats to spend instantly created “sugar highs,” due to the short-term effects of dumping extra cash into the economy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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