PRay TeLL, Dr. Hash

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Price gouging is illegal in 34 States. It's tough arguing on the side of price gouging: suppose someone in a boat finds a family stranded on their roof for 2 days, and won't pick them up until they give everything they have, maybe even a nubile young daughter. Yes, extortion is profitable, and somewhere there's a line between abducting a child for ran...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Bitcoin is imaginary money NOT controlled by government. Its primary appeal is to people who want to evade taxes, or buy cocaine. Bitcoin's promoters claim they save money by eliminating Third Party fees, but Credit Cards are actually a means to loan money to people who don't have it, fees are of a secondary concern to them. Plus, for the segment of t...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Because money is imaginary, it can be exploited by people who understand how it operates. To prevent the connected, the privileged, and the unscrupulous from debasing the concept of money, conscientious people tried to institute stopping measures, of which the Gold Standard is the most famous. Theoretically, there can be an unlimited supply of money,...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><a name="page-body"></a>Practically no one truly understands economics, including so-called economists who think that balancing a budget is of paramount important. Well, it's not except in the realm of accounting, but economics is definitely not accounting even though a lot of people confuse the two. Economics is how a society in...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The biggest & most egregious example of Welfare-for-The-Rich is the intentionally obscure practice of Quantitative Easing by a semi-public organization known as The Federal Reserve... The Fed. The Fed's very existence is often questioned; its main purpose seems to be one of comfort & reassurance, the illusion that the U.S. economy can be fine-...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The most abused word in economics is "inflation." Inflation is evoked as a counter to any new economic policy by those against it, so often that it has lost all credibility, and frankly, it should. Thinking about it even for a moment, inflation occurs when the demand for a product exceeds the supply, but in America, most staples in life have...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">There are a lot of highly-educated people who claim special insight, and the ability to use the past to predict the future: “economic cycles” is one of those old canards. Business textbooks written by theorists point at some correlation between imports-exports, worker availability, public opinion, or some other subset of the infinite factors that make...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Let's review society's social contract:</p> <ol> <li> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">If you're down on your luck, and ask nicely, Americans will provide a social safety net.</p> </li> <li> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Perception is reality because people want it to be.</p> &lt...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><font color="#333333">After all the demigogery & sactimonious posturing, the Social Safety Net still needs to be administered. Unfortunately, Market Forces do not apply; the only place profit can come from is by siphoning it off from the people who we are supposedly helping, so social programs become one of those few areas that gov...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The whole problem with poverty is its definition. What is poverty? Money won't cure poverty because money isn't the problem. Poorhood is much more a measure of ignorance, incompetence and a surrender to the baseness of human motives. Poorhood's first cousin, Victimhood, is the ultimate excuse for not relying on your own actions but expecting someone e...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Liberty is most threatened by the people who don't want it. Many people simply don't like responsibility, and certainly would rather lounge around all day than work. Those two underlying motivations, under cover of socialist gibberish, are a huge part of the government dependence problem. Folks who have come to expect everyone else to take care of the...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">America is changing: work-ethic is down, prestige-seeking is up & irrationality abounds. Repeating opinions you've already heard is not what we do here, so any discussion of the sense of entitlement exhibited by the children of GenX is Old News, but that doesn't make it any less real. And there's no need to mention the featherbedding by Baby-Boome...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Productivity allows us to work less and get more for our labor. The Industrial Revolution was just the start; productivity has been on an upward slope ever since, and eventually increasing productivity, usually through automation, will lead us to Star Trek Replicator levels of goods & services. However, whether it's automation or shifting jobs ove...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">People are responsible, not institutions. People should suffer the legal consequences of their actions at an institution, not the entire institution. The parishioners of a church aren't responsible for the sins of the priest; the stockholders of a company are not responsible for the missteps of its employees; taxpayers are not responsible for the brut...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Society is comprised of people. Part of The Deal that people in a Liberty society make is to protect one another, to care for the vulnerable, and to respect others. Obviously, these expectations can only be made between people, not objects or imaginary constructs like businesses, which is why business is secondary to the needs of people. Business serv...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">A well known political axiom is that “perception is reality.” If the mob perceives a witch, there is a witch, regardless of common sense, logic, or reality. But how can that be in a sophisticated world? How can advertisement-savvy consumers be so easily fooled in the political arena? They aren’t… Perception is reality in politics because people tacitl...

<p lang="en" style="margin-bottom: 0in; font-weight: normal;"><font color="#333333">There's an important difference between how Americans perceive the Social Safetynet & what socialists want. To Americans, if you're down on your luck, and you ask nicely, we'll provide charity as part of The Deal, but it's up to us, and we're going to put some expectati...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Let's review the issues of America's arising aristocracy:</p> <ol> <li> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">People will honor The Deal as long as it's the best option for them.</p> </li> <li> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Folks who flip heads 10 times in a row think they deserved it.</...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The goal of wealth redistribution has nothing to do with fairness or inequality, those are socialist concepts; it's simply that wealth concentration limits liberty if the goal is the-most-liberty-to-the-most-people. Capitalism is a good mechanism for spreading wealth but it also concentrates wealth in a tiny handful of people. Other than catastrophe,...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">America chose liberty so that people could make decisions for themselves & control their own lives, and Capitalism was their economic system of choice because it closely matches the liberty ideal. But Capitalism can be detrimental to liberty because it creates an unequal distribution of wealth, and concentrations of wealth concentrate opportunity...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Humans hold a reverence for money, however it was obtained, inherited money being the most common. Lots of money provides a sense of inevitability, the assumption that whatever The Rich do must be correct, and gives them an air of invincibility. This makes commoners reluctant to question them out of lack of conviction in their own thoughts because the...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Citizens of a nation really only have three things to give, the same three things that, not coincidentally, they expect to get: help, laws, and defense. Defense is the one thing that everyone absolutely, positively has to have because humans are predators & we don't live in peace naturally. Rich people have the most to lose, of course, and there a...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The aristocracy in America has changed: a century ago, the concept of Social Darwinism was fashionable, the idea that wealthy people became that way through some kind of natural selection, even mystical intervention. Aristocrats thought Divine Providence justified their feelings of superiority & self-righteousness, and simply took it for granted t...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">From the outside, many people exhibit the visible indicators of success: prestigious jobs, peer acclaim, and the accumulation of trendy goods. However, how much of those people's trajectory in life has been through behind-the-scenes circumstances & machinations in which merit played little part? Why should graduating from an Ivy League University...

<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">If you were flipping a coin, and you had never done it before, and you got 10 heads in a row, wouldn't you think it was easy? That's what most successful people believe: they attribute their winnings to hard work & skill, where in reality they were simply at the extreme margins of probability. Unfortunately, since nothing but chance separates the...