Author: Gary North

A site member posted this: A couple reports by the Congressional Research Service…”Maintaining financial balance after trust fund insolvency would require substantial reductions in Social Security benefits, substantial increases in income, or some combination of the two. The trustees project that following insolvency of the combined funds in 2034, Congress could restore balance by reducing scheduled benefits by about 23%; the required reduction would grow gradually to 27% by 2091. Alternatively, Congress could raise the Social Security payroll tax rate from 12.4% to 16.0% following insolvency in 2034, then gradually increase it to 16.9% by 2091.” Social Security: What Would … Continue reading →

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Jesse Cornish was a familiar face in the hard money movement from 1975 until his death in 1986. He was the master of ceremonies of the seemingly endless series of hard money conferences. He was the go-to guy when it came to introducing speakers. Jesse was a Lutheran equivalent of Burt Blumert. Burt was everybody’s favorite coin salesman in the hard money movement from the early 1960’s until his death in 2009. There is a Wikipedia entry on Burt, as well there should be. He was always in the background, ready to write a check for a libertarian cause. He … Continue reading →

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How do steel and concrete turn into dust before our very eyes? Why don’t our brains acknowledge what we are seeing? Because of this: “This is not possible, by definition.” Seeing is not believing. Wild theories abound. None gets traction. Here is a wild theory. It is supported by impossible videos. The videos are real, however. Aye, there’s the rub! Time to buy old US gold coins Crashes to crashes, dust to dust. But crashes to dust? That’s a problem. There has to be a cogent explanation out there. There just has to be. This one cannot be correct, we are … Continue reading →

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Recently, I wrote an article on lost causes on the Left. I began it with this quotation from a civil rights activist in the mid-1960’s: Mel Leventhal. Everything meaningful that’s ever happened in the world, any change, any improvement comes about because of optimism. The pessimists don’t get anything done. They’re naysayers. You have to see the potential for change. And you’ve got to see it not in terms of the moment but in terms of the long view, the long haul. Two days later, the president of the Mises Institute, Jeff Deist, published an article on the optimism of libertarian economist … Continue reading →

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The great thing about being a historian is that you can write about almost anything and get away with it. Everything that happened in the past that left chronological records is fair game. If you’re really good, you can even fake the chronology. Of course, most historians don’t write, once they get their Ph.D. degrees. They write term papers in college. They write longer term papers in graduate school. They write a Ph.D. dissertation. Then they stop writing. There is another major problem with writing social history. Historians are specialists. They survive by being specialists. Yet there is no form … Continue reading →

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“Everything meaningful that’s ever happened in the world, any change, any improvement comes about because of optimism. The pessimists don’t get anything done. They’re naysayers. You have to see the potential for change. And you’ve got to see it not in terms of the moment but in terms of the long view, the long haul.” — Mel Leventhal Mel Leventhal was involved in the civil rights movement in the deep South in the mid-1960’s. He was part of Martin Luther King’s inner circle, but because he was white in 1965, he was being pushed out of that circle by increasingly … Continue reading →

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I came to political awareness in the height of the anti-Communist movement in 1956. I was brought into the conservative movement at a lecture by the Australian anti-Communist physician Fred Schwarz. I have told my story in a collection of reminiscences by 82 libertarians, I Chose Liberty. You can read it here (pages 239ff.). Historians usually date the rise of the conservative political movement in the United States with the 1948 hearings that were triggered by Whittaker Chambers’ accusation that former State Department official Alger Hiss was not only Communist, but a spy for the Soviet Union. At the time, Hiss was the … Continue reading →

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Here is a list of 14 warnings from Mr. Trump on how the U.S. government must get out of Afghanistan. On Monday, August 21, President Trump announced that he has reversed his previous plan to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. His speech is here. Politicians know they can promise anything before they are elected, yet they can easily reverse course and suffer almost no lasting political damage. Their true believers, also known as schnooks, who voted for them will shrug their shoulders and not miss a beat. It doesn’t bother them at all. They get all hyped up during the election, … Continue reading →

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I created the Ron Paul Curriculum. It is up and running, K-12. It has enrolled a lot of families. What I am saying is not hypothetical. Somewhere in the United States, there is a Roman Catholic bishop who is a conservative. He probably doesn’t say it publicly, but he would prefer that the Latin mass were still in use. That world is gone. He sees around him parishioners who share his beliefs. There may not be a lot of them, but in a church with 77 million members in the United States, there are several million of them. The fact of … Continue reading →

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I have been writing refutations of monetary cranks for over half a century. I wrote my first essay on a monetary crank, Gertrude Coogan, in 1965. Her book was Money Creators. It came out in the 1930’s in the Great Depression. That was the golden era of anti-gold standard fiat monetary cranks. I wrote the essay because R. J. Rushdoony had been taken in by the cranks in the late 1950’s. Specifically, he read the greenbackers. He also read Mises, but he did not understand Mises’ monetary theory. The greenback monetary cranks have always been opposed to the Federal Reserve. Why? … Continue reading →

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Milton Friedman always wanted to make the welfare state slightly less perverse. He wanted to make education slightly less statist. He proposed vouchers. Supposedly, this was going to lead to greater parental choice. The scheme was nuts from the beginning. No school district ever adopted it. It was fantasy economics, politically speaking. It was designed to make the fascist system slightly more efficient, slightly less overbearing. It was never a serious proposal to restore liberty in education. It always involved stealing money from taxpayers in order to transfer it to educational bureaucrats. There is no way to make that system … Continue reading →

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John Mauldin wrote a report that deserves wide circulation. Benchmarks like the Consumer Price Index try to reflect the experience of an “average” family, but few families are actually average. We all have our own preferences and priorities.And I want to clear up a common misconception. Deflation is actually good for your household budget in that it means that you have to spend less to get the same goods and services. Inflation, in contrast, means that you have to pay more. Governments like to have inflation because they want to inflate away their large debts. I find it passing strange … Continue reading →

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Professors of liberal arts courses other than economics at obscure little Christian colleges — virtually all Christian colleges are obscure and little — are generally opposed to the free market. They got their Ph.D. degrees way back when, and all they really remember about economics is what they learned in a sociology course. That course satisfied the social science requirement for the B.A. They might have taken a course in economics, but they took one look at the textbook, and they could not figure it out. It looked complicated. So, they took a sociology course instead. It qualified for the … Continue reading →

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I am on a vegan diet to deal with my cancer. I eat no animal protein. I probably never will again. That’s because I have cancer, and I have read Dr. John Kelly’s book, Stop Feeding Your Cancer. I have been researching diets for five decades. I was restored to health by Francis Pottenger in 1949-50. His diet had a lot of red meat. It had no refined sugar, no processed white flour, and lots of steamed vegetables. I have asked myself this: Do vegans live longer? They don’t. Statistical evidence is now available. This video reports on detailed studies involving thousands … Continue reading →

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Men don’t like talking about their erectile dysfunction. I am making an exception. Yesterday, I found out from my urologist that my bone scan showed nothing irregular. My prostate cancer has spread outside my prostate, but not far. It is advanced, but not immediately life-threatening. Had he not caught it in time, things would have gotten much worse. He caught it in time because of my ED. I began noticing a problem last February. At age 75, I figured it was statistically commonplace, but only for other guys. Not me. I made up my mind not to pay retail for … Continue reading →

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