Arkady's Thoughts

Believe it or not there are two very important lessons we can learn today from a 1786 rebellion.  For those not familiar, Shays' rebellion took place in Massachusetts and involved Daniel Shays and hundreds of other poor farmers crushed by taxes and debt to launch a full scale rebellion.  However the story is not about citizens rioting because of injustices they felt were thrust upon them, but a state and federal government printing "money" to finance a war and ultimately failing to deliver the gold and silver promised to the holders of the printed "money".  Massachusetts was an especially egregious offender of printing money via their state bank and routinely inflated worthless paper on top of gold/silver they could not ultimately pay out in.   This practice stemmed back for decades prior to the Continental Congress engaging in similar practices ultimately leading to the infamous "Not worth a Continental".  Many argue Shays' rebellion inspire...

Charles Goyette's recent book The Dollar Meltdown is a fascinating book offering not only a thorough and comprehensive analysis of America's financial crisis but a common sense approach in how to protect yourself from the inevitable collapse of our currency. Charles begins with an investigation of how we arrived at our current predicament and tackles the increasingly difficult task of dissecting government's role in today's complex economy.   Charles shows his Austrian influence by bringing up common themes familiar to those partial to the Austrian school of Economics, but also does a fantastic job of presenting important aspects to those readers willing to learn and familiarize themselves in the only school that was able to accurately predict the current crisis.   More importantly, Charles discusses money;  it's origins and what function money serves in today's economy.  You may think you know what money is, after all it makes the world go round, but what is...

Wishing everyone a festive and joyous new year and hope you all have a drink for the coming 2010.   I would be lying if I were to say that politically speaking 2009 was a good year.  America has suffered from a massive erosion of freedom, confiscation of more private wealth, expansion of government at both the federal and state level.  Of course none of this is particularly unique to 2009, but the rate in increase is hard to ignore.  From my humble vantage point it would appear that 2010 will be a scary, strange and exciting year.  While it is always difficult to prognosticate, below are several facts that are important to remember. Debt levels are still out of control.  Due to the policy of the Bush/Obama administration virtually no contraction has taken place and we are deeply in debt.  Not only America, but the entire civilized world.  Stocks are inflated.  The current stock market is a manifestation of a liquidity pump engineere...

HotAir is a big voice in the conservative blogsophere and has done much to advance the cause of those wishing to stop and reverse the growth of a large central government.  Unfortunately Hot Air's Ed Morrissey has brashly thrown his weight behind Scott Brown in the Massachusetts special election.  This is disturbing and disheartening for every tea party, small government loving soul in America.   While I certainly cannot blame casual Massachusetts Republicans for getting excited over Brown's possible win over Martha Coakley, it becomes much harder to justify it in the case of Ed whose life revolves around politics and whose message is fundamentally Jeffersonian. In a piece called Where is the national GOP in the Massachusetts special election Ed shows his frustration over the apparent lack of support for Brown, correctly pointing out that in NY-23 the GOP heavily contributed to the liberal Dede while throwing Hoffman under the bus. While Brown is ob...

WBZ-TV hosted the first televised debate for the Massachusetts's special election being held on January 19th.  The full video can be found on the WBZ archives . My impressions for each candidate.  Scott Brown (R):    Mr. Brown has demonstrated his polish and was extremely smooth, on message and confident.  While he generally espoused traditional Republican talking points about taxes, jobs and fiscal responsibility there was a very obvious and underlying big government aura about him.  On one particular question about single mothers he mentioned offering government assistance, training and education while in the same breath talking about tax cuts - a contradiction in terms.   Just like staying in Afghanistan indefinitely, Brown offers nothing new from the standard GOP platform yet used his political skills to sound very appealing to fiscal conservatives.  Truth is Brown's record demonstrates that as far as lowering taxes he has been missin...

America got very lucky on Christmas, very lucky.  A 23 year old Al-Qaeda Nigerian Muslim jihadist came dangerously close to blowing Northwestern Flight 253 out of the air .  Why did America get lucky?  Was it because Umar Frock AbdulMutallab's father warned the state department?  Was it because our new policy on terrorism prevented a catastrophe?  Was it because Obama's administration crack down of every lead?  No, no and no.  It was because the detonator malfunctioned and instead of puncturing a hole in the side of plane, lit Umar's underwear on fire resulting in third degree burns (yay).  So how do we prevent this from happening in the future?  Very easy, screw the American passenger even further. First of all, let us be very clear as to where the failure happened.  According to the reports, Umar went through regular screening and passed all the regular checkpoints.  Obviously there is only so much you can do when a wo...

This is too difficult to ignore, it appears that the leading Senator in the fight for ObamaCare Mr. Max Baucus got bamboozled into sipping on some spiked eggnog.  While he spends 5 minutes explaining to the American public how he fought for comprehensive health care reform and how the GOP did everything in their power to be obstructionist one cannot ignore the seemingly glaring problem - Max Baucus is wasted.  The Democrats have really lived up to Ted Kennedy's standards now.  Bravo. \