Author: Charles Hugh Smith

Healthcare/sickcare will bankrupt the nation by itself. If you want to understand why the U.S. healthcare system is bankrupt, financially, morally and politically, then start with this representative anecdote from a U.S. physician. I received this report from correspondent J.F. on the topic of direct advertising of pharmaceutical products to the public (patients). As background information, pharmaceutical companies were not allowed to advertise directly to consumers (patients) in the good old days. Now, as we all know, half the adverts on TV are for pharmaceutical products, and many of the remaining half are advertising lawsuits relating to pharmaceutical products that harmed … Continue reading →

The post US Healthcare Isn’t Broken appeared first on LewRockwell.

How do we explain our obsession with relatively low risk dangers and our collective blindness to manufactured/marketed scourges that kill tens of thousands of people annually? If you’ve bought a new vehicle recently, you may have noticed some “safety features” that strike many as Nanny State over-reach. You can’t change radio stations, for example, if the vehicle is in reverse. Who knows who or what you’ll run over in reverse if you were allowed to change radio stations while in reverse gear? How many injuries can be traced to people changing radio stations while in reverse? A friend recently told us … Continue reading →

The post How Safe Are We? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The migration is only beginning, but that’s only half the story. You know it’s serious when the newspaper of record finally reports it: A $76,000 Monthly Pension: Why States and Cities Are Short on Cash (New York Times). It’s a long article but the summary is brief: corrupt politicos promised the moon to public employees, and now the fiscal chickens of insolvency are coming home to roost. Public pension obligations are rising so fast that even repeated tax increases can’t keep up. This is setting up a second front in the war between entitled Baby Boomers and younger taxpayers who pay most of the federal and local taxes. Public … Continue reading →

The post The War Between Public Pensioners and Tax Donkeys appeared first on LewRockwell.

Anyone accepting “facts” or narratives from any interested party is being played. About the only “fact” the public knows with any verifiable certainty about Syria is that much of that nation is in ruins. Virtually everything else presented as “fact” is propaganda intended to serve one of the competing narratives or discredit one or more competing narratives. Consider a partial list of “interested parties” spinning their own narratives about events in Syria: (in no particular order) 1. The government of Syria 2. non-state groups in Syria 3. Turkey 4. Saudi Arabia 5. Iran 6. Jordan 7. The government of Iraq 8. non-state … Continue reading →

The post What Do We Know About Syria? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Though the Powers That Be will attempt to placate or suppress the Revolt of the Powerless, the genies of political disunity and social disorder cannot be put back in the bottle. The saying “the worm has turned” refers to the moment when the downtrodden have finally had enough, and turn on their powerful oppressors.The worms have finally turned against the privileged elites — who have benefited so greatly from globalization, corruption, central bank stimulus and the profiteering of state-enforced cartels. It doesn’t matter as much as the punditry assumes whether they are turning Left or Right; the important thing is that the … Continue reading →

The post The Genie’s Out of the Bottle appeared first on LewRockwell.

The saying “the worm has turned” refers to the moment when the downtrodden have finally had enough, and turn on their powerful oppressors. The worms have finally turned against the privileged elites — who have benefited so greatly from globalization, corruption, central bank stimulus and the profiteering of state-enforced cartels. It doesn’t matter as much as the punditry assumes whether they are turning Left or Right; the important thing is that the powerless have finally started challenging their privileged overlords. Though the Powers That Be will attempt to placate or suppress the Revolt of the Powerless, the genies of political disunity and … Continue reading →

The post The Worms Have Finally Turned appeared first on LewRockwell.

Nothing stays the same in dynamic systems, and it’s inevitable that the current glut of low costs / cheap stuff will give way to scarcities that cannot be filled at current low prices. One of the books I just finished reading is The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. The thesis of the book is fascinating to those of us interested in the rise and fall of empires: Rome expanded for many reasons, but one that is overlooked was the good fortune of an era of moderate weather from around 200 BC to 150 AD: rain was … Continue reading →

The post The Fate of Rome appeared first on LewRockwell.

As for Iraq, the implicit gain was supposed to be access to Iraqi oil. Setting aside the 12 years of “no fly zone” air combat operations above Iraq from 1991 to 2003, the U.S. has been at war for almost 17 years in Afghanistan and 15 years in Iraq. (If the word “war” is too upsetting, then substitute “continuing combat operations”.) Since the burdens and costs of these combat operations are borne solely by the volunteers of the U.S. Armed Forces, the American populace pays little to no attention to the wars unless a household has a family member in uniform … Continue reading →

The post 15 Years of War appeared first on LewRockwell.

Alas, fakery isn’t actually a solution to fiscal/financial crisis.. This chart of “debt securities and loans”–i.e. total debt in the U.S. economy–is also a chart of the creation and distribution of new money, as the issuance of new debt is the mechanism in our financial system for creating (or “emitting” in economic jargon) new currency: when a bank issues a new home mortgage, for example, the loan amount is new currency created out of the magical air of fractional reserve banking. Central banks also create new currency at will, and emitting newly created money is how they’ve bought $21 trillion in … Continue reading →

The post How Long Can We Get Away With It? appeared first on LewRockwell.

So who’s holding the hot potato of systemic risk now? Everyone. One of the greatest con jobs of the past 9 years is the status quo’s equivalence of risk and volatility: risk = volatility: so if volatility is low, then risk is low. Wrong: volatility once reflected specific short-term aspects of risk, but measures of volatility such as the VIX have been hijacked to generate the illusion that risk is low. But even an unmanipulated VIX doesn’t reflect the true measure of systemic risk, a topic Gordon Long and I discuss in our latest program, The Game of Risk Transfer. The financial industry has … Continue reading →

The post Never Mind Volatility appeared first on LewRockwell.

The irony that is most gagging is that America’s power elite is destroying the nation’s social order by its concentration of wealth and abuse of power. The irony of the Deep State’s obsessive focus on “Russian meddling” in the precious bodily fluids of our hallowed democracy is so overwhelming that it’s gagging. The irony is a noxious confluence of putid hypocrisy and a comically abject terror at the prospect that the citizenry may be awakening to the terrible reality that America has lost its soul as well as its democracy. The foul stench of hypocrisy arises from the long and sordid … Continue reading →

The post Russian Meddling? appeared first on LewRockwell.

The tragedy is so few act when the collapse is predictably inevitable, but not yet manifesting in daily life. That chill you feel in the financial weather presages an unprecedented–and for most people, unexpectedly severe–winter of discontent. Rather than sugarcoat what’s coming, let’s speak plainly for a change: none of the promises that have been made to you will be kept. This includes explicit promises to provide income security and healthcare entitlements, etc., and implicit promises that don’t need to be stated: a currency that holds its value, high-functioning public infrastructure, etc. Nearly “free” (to you) healthcare: no. Generous public pensions: no. … Continue reading →

The post Our Winter of Discontent appeared first on LewRockwell.

The tragedy is so few act when the collapse is predictably inevitable, but not yet manifesting in daily life. That chill you feel in the financial weather presages an unprecedented–and for most people, unexpectedly severe–winter of discontent. Rather than sugarcoat what’s coming, let’s speak plainly for a change: none of the promises that have been made to you will be kept. This includes explicit promises to provide income security and healthcare entitlements, etc., and implicit promises that don’t need to be stated: a currency that holds its value, high-functioning public infrastructure, etc. Nearly “free” (to you) healthcare: no. Generous public pensions: no. … Continue reading →

The post Our Winter of Discontent appeared first on LewRockwell.

How can central banks “retrain” participants while maintaining their extreme policies of stimulus? Human habituate very easily to new circumstances, even extreme ones. What we accept as “normal” now may have been considered bizarre, extreme or unstable a few short years ago. Three economic examples come to mind: 1. Near-zero interest rates. If someone had announced to a room of economists and financial journalists in 2006 that interest rates would be near-zero for the foreseeable future, few would have considered it possible or healthy. Yet now the Federal Reserve and other central banks have kept interest rates/bond yields near-zero for almost nine … Continue reading →

The post 3 Crazy Things appeared first on LewRockwell.

The hope of 1968 that public demonstrations can actually change the power structure has been lost. 1968 was a tumultuous year globally and domestically. The Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia–a very mild form of political and cultural liberalization within the Soviet bloc–was brutally crushed by the military forces of the Soviet Union. The general strikes and student protests of May 1968 brought France to a standstill as demands for social and political change called the entire status quo into question. On the other side of the planet, the Cultural Revolution was remaking China’s still-youthful revolution, to the detriment of the political status … Continue reading →

The post The Ghosts of 1968 appeared first on LewRockwell.