New Painting

Art Jam -- you show up at 8pm, and for a small fee you are supplied with a canvas, brushes, acrylic paint, some tunes and a couple of glasses of wine, then you've got 3 hours to get something done.  This was painted 90 degrees to the right, but an interesting facial construct appeared at this angle.  Turn your head to your left shoulder if you want to see it's orientation as painted.

The Beginning of the End

I just stumbled across this little gem on Youtube -- it's positively chilling to watch. While America's problems (along with most of the rest of the world) are multitudinous, there's no doubt that this particular action was essentially the beginning of the end.



If you are unaware, the closing of the gold window in 1971 meant that the US dollar, ostensibly backed by gold prior to this action, became a pure fiat currency. A dollar was worth (and redeemable for) 1/35th of an ounce of gold at the time. Now worth only 1/1200th of an ounce of gold, simple arithmetic would indicate that we've already been wiped out over a mere 40 years. I predict that within five years time, the dollar will be worth only a fraction of what it's worth now (so please, if you HAVE money, buy some gold before you get wiped out too).

New Page: Private Law Society

At the very core of the new Renaissance -- Renaissance 2.0 -- lies the concept of freedom.  While the broader concept of freedom is an absolutely vast subject matter, one of my goals is to elucidate its theoretically maximal implementation within the sphere of social and political organization.  I formulate this from what I call a "Private Law Society."

My new page represents an experimental effort in writing, consisting in an outline to a book-length work that I hope to complete and at some point publish.  This outline itself will grow and change over time, but each individual bullet in the outline will be drafted and published as a separate blog post, and when available will be linked from this page.  As time goes by, this mere outline will form into a complete work available to be read in a linear fashion, but the intent is that the individual topics can be read largely independently.

Most critical in this process is your feedback -- I will accept all comments, criticisms, questions, research and supporting facts, etc., and will address and incorporate these into the work.  This is the methodology of Renaissance 2.0 -- leveraging the best of individualism and collaboration to create the best possible works of art, literature, and music.  So without further adieu, I present...

Private Law Society

Upcoming article: Boomless Busts and Bustless Booms

This is a bit of a nit, but again today I have seen an error in the application of Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) that needs correcting.

In this post over at the mises.org blog today, Joseph Salerno makes a quick reference to the fact that the issuance of fiduciary media would generate a business cycle.  I'm not picking on Mr. Salerno here other than the fact that the topic was on my mind and this made a good reference point to link to.

What I will strive to demonstrate is that while the ABCT correctly identifies the causes of business cycle, it cannot be postulated that the phenomenon underlying business cycles either necessarily or probabilistically WILL in fact cause future business cycles.  If future business cycles in fact occur, we will still certainly know the causes through ABCT analysis, but that same analysis carries a highly imperfect predictive capacity.

What's the point?  Everyone using ABCT analysis to try to identify "the next bubble" may well be wrong if no bubble materializes, and it may marginalize ABCT theory or Austrian, Free-market theory more generally if the predictions don't come true.

Here's my prediction: There will be no new bubble, and there won't be a boom before there is a new bust.  The upcoming article will dive into this prediction and talk about the possibility of non-cyclical or at least non-typical booms and busts.

Why the East is succeeding while the West is failing

In case it is not yet abundantly clear, the major states in the West are crumbling, while much of the East is thriving.  It seems a straightforward enough proposition to simply identify the key differences and then apply the methods of the East back to the West, and those differences are so incredibly obvious.  Yet still the West clings to outdated political and economic philosophies with such dogmatic fervor that it seems almost inevitable that they will collapse before changing their ways.

The Corporation IS evil, just not for the reasons you think

The repeated refrain from the left about the "Evil Corporations" is in fact spot on, but the analysis of WHY they are evil is utterly incorrect. While I'm not even sure if there is a coherent opinion of corporations on the Right, the libertarian position certainly posits it's own conclusion -- basically that the relationship between the corporation and the state forms a sort of power cabal that is inherently anti-free market, and more broadly forms the backbone of the warfare-welfare state. While this is true enough, it is only a critique of the symptom rather than the cause of this reality. I will attempt here a proper explanation of the inherent flaw in the corporate entity, refuting the leftist concept of "greed" and in support of an anti-corporatist argument.  At the highest level, suffice it to say that the corporation is evil strictly because it is anti-free market, rather than somehow being an inherent market phenomenon as common experience and insufficient consideration would have us believe.

First painting in a loooong time -- hopefully the first of many.