To do serious business in America requires vast campaign contributions to several layers of elected politicians, an army of lobbyists in Washington, retired government employees on your board and public devotion to the American civic religion. It goes on every year and restarts every election cycle.
Even then, it is hard to know if you are going to get what you pay for.
It's easier and more efficient in Mexico. You pay bribes directly. The decision maker gets the mo... (more)
In the modern world, a country's natural resources have very little to do whether goods are on the nation's shelves for people to buy. Singapore isn't rich in resources, neither is Hong Kong, but both have vibrant market economies and shoppers can find whatever their collective heart's desire on the shelves of stores in these two cities.
On the other hand, there is Venezuela, a country rich in resources. It is one the world's top oil producers at the same time gas prices are soa... (more)
If you are in college right now, you will most likely either be unemployed or working a job that only requires a high school degree when you graduate. The truth is that the U.S. economy is not coming anywhere close to producing enough jobs for the hordes of new college graduates that are entering the workforce every year. In 2011, 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor's degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed. Millions upon millions of young college gradua... (more)
Most everyone is really down on financial companies these days. What kind of scam are they running, anyway? It seems as if everywhere we turn, there are fees, fees, fees. Because most everyone has some kind of credit or debit card, the popular mind is particularly focused on them, expecting to find signs of exploitation and graft.
Let's look a bit closer.
A friend of mine is in a Virginia diner and receives an odd offer with the check. There is a note: If you pay wi... (more)
The Democrats, the Republicans and especially Barack Obama promised that something would be done about the too big to fail banks so that they would never again be a threat to destroy our financial system. Well, those promises have not been kept and the too big to fail banks are now much bigger and much more powerful than ever. The assets of the five biggest U.S. banks were equivalent to about 43 percent of U.S. GDP before the financial crisis. Today, the asse... (more)
It's often thought that the technology sector is the least regulated and therefore has been the most productive during the past couple of decades. Famously, Bill Gates had no interest in politics. "In the beginning, Microsoft tried to ignore the powerful political forces arrayed against it, hunkering down in Redmond, Washington, to focus on its core businesses," William F. Shugart wrote in the Freeman. Of course, the Department of Justice snapped Mr. Gates to attention.
Is there one thing that Tony Robbins, Ron Paul and Ben Bernanke can all agree on? Yes, there actually is. Recently they have all come forward with warnings that the national debt crisis could destroy America if something is not done. Unfortunately, our politicians continue to spend us into oblivion as if there will never be any consequences. When Barack Obama took office, the U.S. national debt was 10.6 trillion dollars. Today, it is 15.6 trillion dollars and it is rising at the rate of abo... (more)
The renowned Dr. Doom also known as Dr. Marc Faber joined FSN today to discuss his latest commentary that it might just be time to start looking at real estate investments in severely distressed markets such as Florida and Arizona. Dr. Faber explained his outlook for the Western Economies, his forecasts for Gold and Silver, and his take on "printing press" economics.... (more)
In the last decade, something astonishing has happened that has escaped the attention of nearly every American citizen. In the past, and with good reason, we were inclined to imagine that if we were living here, we were living everywhere. We were used to being ahead. The trends of the world would follow us, so there wasn't really much point in paying that close attention. This national myopia has long been an affliction, but one without much cost. Until very recently.
And this is good news, great news, it was freedom which created the prosperity in America and now that it's being murdered the previously least free places on earth are going in the opposite direction because they're sick of being poor. These other countries are now the "new America" and these trends will only continue as the U.S. spends itself into bankruptcy. - Chris
PBS just ran an interesting episode of "America Revealed: Food Machine," in which Yul Kwon explores how the industrial food machine manages to feed so many people through technology and engineering marvels. The show is mostly an endorsement of the food machine without delving into the politics of government intervention or the costs of the corporate state industrial food machine in terms of human health and the problems of long-term sustainabi... (more)
Here's a good example of "unrestrained free market capitalism destroying America"... oh wait never mind, it's the exact opposite.
MONROE, Mich. (WXYZ) - It's The Dog Pound vs. the City of Monroe, and it's been tied up in a legal battle for nearly two years.
All over a hot dog cart stand.
[...]Detroit attorney John Gillooly, who was hired to represent the city, says a number of reasons went into council's decision not to allow the hot dog cart in d
Get this: The federal bureaucrat who last month started the litigation against Apple and book publishers for e-book pricing is the same person who, back in the stone age, represented Netscape in its lawsuit against Microsoft.
Recall that Microsoft was trying to give away its Internet Explorer to computer users for free. Netscape went nuts and got the government to clobber Microsoft for being so nice to consumers. It put the company through litigation hell and even demanded that Mi... (more)
Outside of an asylum for the clinically deranged, it's difficult to find anyone as reality-impaired as Paul Krugman, the purported economist and apologist for the Federal Reserve who was awarded a Nobel Prize for peddling Keynesian nostrums from his perch on the New York Times editorial page. Actually, that comparison is unfair: Even those who suffer from acute mental illness have a better understanding than Krugman of the relationship between cause and effect.
Tax season is winding down once again, but the progressivity of the tax code is still with us. Most Americans who had more taxes withheld from their paychecks than they owe in taxes have already filed for their refunds. But not only did many Americans have no tax liability, some of them who didn’t owe any taxes to begin with still received a refund, all thanks to our Marxist tax code.
At the end of section two of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, in addition to calling for the abolition... (more)
