Category Archives: Economy

Price, Bananas, and a Pesky Soil Fungus from Asia

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banana_fruit_healthy_223064Keynesian economists tell us that under perfect competition, if there is no government interference and no central planning or directing, producers and consumers make uncoordinated decisions to produce exactly the quantity of each good that satisfies the equation MC=MU and scarce resources are allocated efficiently.
Marginal cost (MC) is the cost incurred by producing one additional unit of a commodity while marginal utility (MU) is the maximum amount of money a consumer is willing to pay for one more unit of a commodity. Continue reading →

How Long Before the Founding Fathers’ America Disappears?

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Courtesy: CFP

Courtesy: CFP

One of my readers sadly remarked that this is no longer America that she grew up in. And the change that occurred at a dizzying pace happened relatively overnight. It was not a gradual transformation born by normal change over time; it was a fundamental forced transformation from a constitutional republic to a rule by a corporatist and international banking oligarchy that pulls the strings of the former branches of government, executive, legislative, and judicial.
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Promotion of Marxism Disguised as Income Inequality

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Lately, as the social justice, income disparity, income inequality, economic justice rhetoric intensifies, more global and Hollywood elites crawl out of the woodwork to confuse, agitate, and inflame the low information voters.

When almost 50 percent of the American public does not work and relies on some form of government welfare paid for by the other 50 percent of the working population, it is perplexing when former White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers states that “The U.S. may well be on the way to becoming a ‘Downton Abbey’ economy.”
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Identity Theft and Data Breaches

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Identity thieves have victimized 12.6 million Americans in 2012 to the tune of nearly $21 billion. Eighteen percent of all Federal Trade Commission complaints received that year involved identity theft. More complaints were lodged in 2012 when compared to 11.6 million in 2011 and 10.2 million in 2010. (Javelin Strategy and Research, 2013 Identity Fraud Report: Data Breaches Becoming a Treasure Trove for Fraudsters, February 2013)
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Lesson Learned and Lessons Missed from the Attempted Land Grab

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Cow
Photo: freedigitalphotos.net
The recent standoff at the Bundy ranch in Nevada has taught us many lessons, but the most important one was missed. We learned that the government will do anything to private citizens in order to grab land and private property either under the guise of protecting an “endangered” desert tortoise that is actually overpopulated, or getting rid of “feral” and destructive “trespassing cattle” grazing the land for generations, cattle that are in the way of developing a $5 billion Chinese solar panel plant (ENN), and the exploitation of rare earth elements in the larger adjacent area.
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Where Do We Find Money When We Are Broke?

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Where do we find money to fund so much out-of-control spending when we are so broke, our national debt ($17.5 trillion) with unfunded liabilities ($128.3 trillion) exceeds $145.8 trillion? Where did the Democrats find almost $4 trillion to fund this year’s budget when Gross Domestic Product is $16.1 trillion and the total national assets are $112.1 trillion for almost 318 million Americans? http://www.usdebtclock.org/
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Voodoo Economics and Unemployment

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Ninety-two million Americans are unemployed yet the spin masters are telling voters with a straight face that the economy is recovering nicely. The much touted 6.7 percent (U-3) unemployment rate has dropped again miraculously in December thanks to voodoo economics and statistics that totally discount millions of discouraged workers who have dropped out the labor force and stopped looking for work.

If Americans out of the labor force are counted, the unemployed rate is the U-6 reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 13 percent. The civilian labor force participation also dropped to 62.8 percent.
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The Skinny on Bitcoin

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Precious metals, gold, silver, copper, have been used as payment for goods and services as early as 2500 B.C. Such money made of precious metals was called commodity currency because it had intrinsic value, the precious metal which could be melted or shorn on the edges to make gold dust.

Currency circulating today, not backed by gold or silver since August 1971, is fiat currency, created and authorized by governments as their official currency. It has value only because the government says it does and there is faith in that particular government that prints the currency.
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What Is a “Living Wage?”

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The recent fast food workers strike sponsored by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) demanded a “living wage” of $15 an hour. In progressive public policy, the “living wage is considered the minimum necessary for a worker to meet needs considered basic.” Who decides what the “basic needs” are? Are everybody’s needs the same? Why stop at $15, why not $50 an hour?
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