PRay TeLL, Dr. Hash

Faith in leadership is at an all-time historical low, primarily because most people are more comfortable with decisions they make for themselves over others that want to make decisions for them. This is especially true in a Liberty society but even in totalitarian nations, the general populace is at least sophisticated enough to know there’s no elite class that has their best interests at heart an...

Retro is usually considered to be the style you went through puberty with: the clothes, furniture, entertainment. Going retro is a good way of reliving that time, presumably you have mostly good memories from when you were a kid, just before becoming an adult with the maturity & responsibility that comes with it. If you take pride in your retromania, other people will respect & admire you...

Collecting things, whatever they may be: physical as in coins, temporal goals, or ephemeral experiences, allows people to control their lives. This leads to a sense of satisfaction which is a major component of happiness. Collecting need not be intentional, and often isn’t, but if you want to consciously use collecting as a mechanism of control, collect something that you enjoy collecting; don't m...

People are mostly happy; that’s how evolution made us, optimistic; those who weren’t didn’t survive, or they had no self-awareness, like animals, but when asked, people admit that things could be better. They’re not sure what the things are that would make them happy but money is certainly #1 on their list because the perception is that money can cure all ills. Contrary to what most Advice columni...

I've already accepted that American-style liberty has lost and the next step is to be like Europe. I've already accepted that if there is a backlash, it will be from the Fascists, not the defenders of liberty. I've already accepted that there's no place to run because the infection will spread from those trying to escape. I’ve already accepted that my children, and certainly my grandchildren, are...

I sometimes imagine that I’m surrounded by a transparent sphere, almost a forcefield, that protects me from the craziness, because just on the other side the world seems to be in chaos, from my perspective at least. I call it my “calm sphere,” and recommend it to my friends & family. We all have an idealized version of our life that everything would be perfect if just a few things were fixed,...

Blocking Whenever someone speaks up to support traditional American values, they are shouted down in every conversational sphere, mainstream media & social media. The speakers are gaslighted, brigaded, and suffer an endless stream of vituperative & insults. Any serious discussion is ruined, no chance to maintain any coherent train of thought. It is especially egregious online, where the ta...

Older people still expect arguments, especially political ones, to be between people who generally want the same thing but differ on how to achieve it, but that only works in a homogeneous society, one with optimism where envy, resentment & perversity are discouraged. All people wanted to be happy, to make something of themselves, to build a life and leave something to their families. Mental i...

Everyone likes to talk about money & wealth: 1. Life Insurance is the ultimate altruism because you don’t get any benefit. 2. As the dollar devalues, real things increase in value. 3. A new reserve currency would really put pressure on the old reserve currency. 4. Money has less real value than glitter. 5. Hyperinflation is inflation’s inflation. 6. Capitalism needs people who are rich on pape...

When I got married, we were both going to college while working part-time. We had a cheap car, cheap apartment, and still went to Europe for a month. Then we bought a house at 21% interest, a car, and had 3 kids who needed baby-sitting, all on the income of entry-level jobs with no help from anywhere, and both of us still going to school part time for another degree. Can't do that now. Over the de...

It’s the distribution of wealth that makes redistributing it an imperative. If 1% of the population own a third of the real wealth, especially if they can pass it down through the generations, that’s simply an aristocracy without titles. The people who have the wealth, of course, like it like that but as history shows, if wealth distribution doesn’t somehow align with people’s expectations in beni...

The idea of Scrooge McDuck sitting atop a pyramid of gold is part of the American zeitgeist; nobody really asks why, it’s just assumed that’s the pinnacle of happiness. It takes too much self-awareness & introspection to determine that wealth does not equate to happiness, or even knowing if you’re happy. If there was a spiritual guide who could help you determine such things, they would say th...

I used to think the anti-tax but pro-UBI position was ironic, similar to "keep government’s hands off my social security," but my sense of humor is being crushed by self-interest, illogic & irrationality. A coming Universal Basic Income, UBI, is almost a certainty, assuming the economy lasts long enough to implement it. It already exists for a large part of society: 19% on welfare, 1...

Business is good for society; in fact, the most important aspect of a Liberty society is business, especially creating & running your own. Because liberty facilitates inequality, a large portion of the population who is intimidated by the success of others, even the perception that someone else is achieving something, often want to penalize the people who make them feel inadequate, most often...

The difference between inflation and hyperinflation is important because the former can go on indefinitely, though inconveniently, while the latter indicates the end of an economy. Hyperinflation is accelerating inflation. There’s also the smokescreen that the government uses to cover for inflation: for the past couple of decades, they show that the inflation rate has hovered around 2%, which it h...

Money is imaginary but nobody notices; it’s an illusion, like a magic trick, based on the audience’s preconceptions of what’s going to happen. However, if you know how the trick works, it’s easy to see it happening. To get past your conditioning, every time you think about money, picture glitter in your mind: beautiful in its reflectivity, seemingly complex, it arouses your avarice. We live in the...

America’s military might is formidable but that’s not what gives the United States control of the world, for that they use finances. Since money is imaginary, if two countries trade with each other, how do they transfer from one imaginary currency to the other? Behind most international money and security transfers is the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, called SWIFT i...

America alone has printed more money in the last few years than the world has ever seen, and that’s only part of the money-printing worldwide. Milton Friedman economists used to insist that printing money was the source of inflation, and hence devaluation of the dollar, but several decades of huge deficits and zero inflation proved them wrong, the value of the U.S. dollar stayed strong. On the oth...

Life insurance, unlike most insurance, is guaranteed to payout. Whether Life insurance pays more than you paid into it is another question, and in the case of Term Life, if you don’t die during the term, it’s just as worthless as any other insurance. Whole Life is the one that doesn’t go away and you can borrow from it. In modern times, where men are no longer the only breadwinner, and half the wo...

Let’s review the concepts of taxes & jobs: 1. Death taxes are the only bulwark against a rising aristocracy. 2. Consumption taxes are the worst kind of taxes. 3. How will we know when an economic crash finally comes? 4. Credit Default Swaps intentionally move risk onto gamblers who don’t care who they hurt if they go broke. 5. The Robot Age always seems to be a decade away. 6. A shortened work...

There’s a romance about farmland that affects all parts of culture; from the organic growers to the industrial combines. There’s a wholesomeness that surrounds farmland, even when it’s commercialized, because we’re reminded of farms every time we go into a grocery store; and the beauty of fruits & vegetables also has a lot to do with it. Disconcertingly, many children have never even visited a...

The most productive, hard-working, intelligent guy in the world can’t produce 20 times more than another productive, hard-working, intelligent guy. Anything more than that is simply a jackpot. Jeff Bezos isn’t smarter, wiser, or more experienced than me, and he didn’t work harder or longer. In fact, I wrote a White paper in 1993 while at Microsoft, titled “Buying Blue Jeans on the Internet.” It wa...

Internships are lauded at prestigious businesses, though less common in mundane, non-elitist enterprises. It’s implied & assumed that interns are selected via merit but nepotism plays a much bigger role, and for those that aren’t connected, many of the best internships are actually paid for by the parents or someone. A lot of jobs are like that too, especially writing jobs at magazines, or som...

Given that productivity, especially due to mechanization, will continue to increase, how many employees would forego part of their salary if they were able to work shorter hours? The top 20% income earners can choose to work part-time but most people have to do their 40 hours to make the mortgage & utilities, and raising a family is 2 full-time jobs. Productivity would have to be much greater...

There’s no problem with productivity in American, especially considering the upcoming Robot Age: robots driving cars, robots cleaning houses, robots growing & preparing food, robots doing all the clerking tasks, even robots tending children; it will be just like the science fiction stories. Robots imply less work for the same Quality-of-Life, so presumably a huge chunk of the population could...