Do you own property? How does it feel to have a piece of land that is yours, that no one can take from you?

Unless of course, you don’t pay your yearly rent, or rather property tax, to the town.

And then of course the government could always just take your land for “public use” providing “just compensation,” a price which will be decided by the government.

Oh and the government could also steal your land for private use, because they decided “public use” can include tax revenue gained from the land.

And if you are suspected, not convicted, of a crime, governments in many states can take your land through civil asset forfeiture.

Do you have water on your land? Even a drainage ditch means the EPA really owns it.

Private property means sovereignty for the individual; something the power elites cannot stomach.

Government Can Take Your Land

You are probably familiar with Kelo v. New London, the 2005 Supreme Court case in which a woman’s dream home was stolen from her using eminent domain, authorized by the Fifth Amendment. Her property was handed over to the private corporation Pfizer. Since the corporation pays higher taxes, that was considered public “use” of the land.

Basically the bigger the business, the more land they can steal, authorized by the federal government.

Some states, like Indiana, strengthened laws to prevent this from happening.

But if there is one thing government is good at, it is being creative in their oppression.

Charlestown Indiana is trying a new tactic: fine private property until the owners can hardly afford to live there. Then, waive those fines if they sell their property to a developer.

The fines are issued for things like tall weeds in the yard, torn window screens, and chipping paint. The fines are usually $50 per day after assessment, and the residents usually won’t receive them immediately. So when the city issues three fines, and notifies the homeowners five days later, the homeowner owes $750 in fines immediately, increasing by $150 per day, unless they sell their home to the developer.

Did I mention this is a low income neighborhood filled with retirees?

Feudalism Reorganized

Bottom up approaches mean freedom; individuals control their property, which they organize into larger voluntary groups controlled by those individuals. But feudalism was the opposite. The King owned all the land, and awarded some to the Lords, who likewise reigned over the serfs.

Originally America was supposed to resemble the former, where individuals had the most power over town governments. Local officials then controlled state government, which controlled federal government. Now it is the opposite, where the feds issue orders to the states, and the states control the towns.

And each government really controls all the land in their territory, and graciously allows us peasants to rent it from them, unless and until they decide to take it back.

The big question many have is, if the government cannot steal private property for actual public use, then how would we get projects like roads done? This is just like the Kings used to provide roads, and the Lords protection. We need them, right?

But in a non-feudal system, our “superiors” would have to offer actual just compensation. How can the government consider something just compensation if the owner of the property gets no say in that? The government somehow comes up with a market value, but that is not necessarily the same as the value to the homeowner.

Real just compensation is whatever the homeowner will accept. At some point, Kelo would have sold her property, she just hadn’t been offered enough money yet. If Pfizer really wanted it that bad, they could have offered her $1 million for a $300,000 house. If she still said no, up the price until she says yes! How bad does Pfizer want her land?

Would highways have been way more expensive to initially build? Probably. But why are highways immune from economics? Maybe they weren’t worth the price, which includes the oppression and precedent of kicking people out of their homes for the greater good!

Maybe some better form of transportation would have been born out of free market economics. Instead it is taken for granted that highways and roads are a good thing. Yet we are still burning fossil fuels to get places, and allowing the economic waste of individual car ownership.

We are now stuck in an outdated transportation system; just one of many bad result from not having ownership over “our own” land.

Marx Would Be Proud

Private property doesn’t really exist in America, seeing as local, state, and federal authorities can tell you what you can and cannot do with it, as well as charge you money for occupying it.

These authorities can also use various methods to take the land from you altogether. Even if they give you what they decide is “just compensation” it still means the land is not owned by you, because you have no say in whether or not to sell the land, nor in the price.

Hopefully we can work towards a private property system where individuals actually own their land. And then, they would have actual control, like sovereign nations, over their land, and over how they interact with their neighbors.

Do you think we can (or should) get their in our lifetimes? Comment what you think.

Is immigration really a terrifying threat to our safety? Or perhaps it is yet another source of fear the power elites use to maintain control.

There are two paradigms of thought which are both based on premises the government hands down.

One seems independent enough; that borders are statist, and therefore bad. The government has no business restricting freedom of movement (which is true), so they should stop oppressing foreigners and let them in, whatever the consequences.

The other opinion is that while open borders would be great, even ideal, the current state is such that we must restrict access… using the state. If we want to be safe, and not have immigrants leaching off the system, we have got to keep them out!

And the latter is generally the fear that Trump promotes, including in Tuesday’s speech to Congress. The idea is that illegal immigrants are flooding across the border, on a murdering rampage. If we don’t stop them from coming in, and kick out those already here, the system might collapse under their weight, and your family might be murdered.

Yet according to the PEW Research Center, illegal immigration has largely stabilized, and some studies suggest illegal immigrants are statistically less likely to commit crimes than native born citizens.

On the other hand, in America, our behavior is restricted by government. If we could really do as we please on private property, then we could take actions to reduce our risk if it turned out immigrants do introduce new dangers.

But in America, it is considered discrimination to refuse service. And it is increasingly, it is the citizen’s job to do police work in preventing crimes, lest we wind up in the government cross-hairs for “harboring” criminals.

This fear leads to more power for the U.S. policing agencies, and more money that the government gets to spend on your behalf. And by now who hasn’t seen the mass of videos from random rights-violating “immigration” checkpoints within U.S. borders?

The government doesn’t care which of their prefabricated opinions you hold, because each one gives them more power.

Government is too Incompetent to Process Immigrants

So about the idea that the government is too incompetent to take in immigrants, and it would burden the system.

Remind me who will be keeping them out?

Oh that’s right, government.

And what has government prohibition of peaceful action always led to? Corruption, and selective enforcement.

The drugs, criminals, and terrorists are still going to get through, it will just be the ones that government chooses.

Especially since the Department of Homeland Security is loosening hiring standards for Border Patrol in an effort to find 6,000 extra agents that President Trump has authorized. I guess we are going quantity over quality.

If government is too incompetent and corrupt to let the right immigrants in, it is definitely too dysfunctional and sketchy to keep the right immigrants out.

If the argument for keeping them out is to not further burden the welfare/ entitlement state, I am afraid we are well beyond that. And expanding government agencies burdens the system as well.

You’re an Immigrant

Have you heard this one: “You don’t like immigrants? Well guess what, your ancestors are immigrants, maybe the Native Americans shouldn’t have let them in?!”

The proper response: “Uh, yeah, the Native Americans shouldn’t have let them in! Look how it turned out for them!”

Of all the comebacks to wanting to ban immigrants, this one is the most perplexing. Why would you use an example that ended in utter disaster for the native population when supporting immigration?

In fact, had the Native Americans had the ability to erect a yuuge beautiful wall between them and the Europeans, maybe they would have fared a little better.

In John M. Barry’s book Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul, Roger Williams is quoted about a tribal meeting he attended, where the Narragansetts and Pequot discussed joining together for war against the English.

The Natives feared the immigrants–the English–would “overspread their country, and would deprive them thereof in time, if they were suffered to grow and increase… the English were minded to destroy all Indians.”

And that prediction basically came true.

So if you support an open borders policy, maybe steer clear of the Native American metaphor.

Private Property Solves Everything

When private property comes into play, it is very clear who make the rules: the property owner. If you want to build a twenty foot electrified wall around your estate, you should be able to do that.

Many Americans have nothing in common except public land the government presides over, and pretends belongs to all of us. It doesn’t, they just want us to pay for it, and pay for their “stewardship” of the nation.

So the government created this involuntary group of citizens who now all need to decide on common policy. This causes fear, anger, and frustration.

If voluntary groups were to form the bedrock of society, there would be a million different immigration policies. We would see which ones worked and which ones caused disaster. We could experiment with governing principles, and implement the best.

So is the issue immigration, or is the issue free association and private property?

We have to peel away the layers before we understand these issues were all created by government forcing us into a group. The issue of immigration is only an issue because the government never gains consent of those it forces to do things.

Best Solution

This is one of those issues where the best solution is internal, in our minds. Clear your mind of the state. Let go of the fear and anger that they attempt to inject into us. If you cannot control something, let it go.

But don’t construe this to think I am suggesting we are powerless. I just think the solutions are not going to happen on the southern federal border.

The government wants you to look over there, and the solution is much closer to home.

Why bother fighting over it? Both ways are wrong, because the current structure of society is wrong. The entire premise is wrong.

Do you think any power elite really cares if Mexicans get in or not?

Why not focus efforts locally? Decentralize the power structure, and strengthen property rights.

Pit the states against the federal government. Live in the cities, states, and countries which best fit your ideas of immigration, which may be entirely different than the two options the feds give you to ponder over.

This is a power tactic, to limit the available options so that whatever you choose, it works for the oppressor.

The premises should never have been accepted. Reject the government premises on the immigration issue, and the cloud surrounding the debate begins to dissolve.

Do you agree? Comment with where you fall on the issue.

You are about to embark on a journey with The Daily Bell as we shift gears, and cruise down the open road towards freedom.

You will still receive relevant daily news insights. And don’t worry, we will still be unabashedly biased towards libertarian ideals of freedom.

There are a lot of roadblocks for the freedom lover, and it is important to keep those in mind. The Daily Bell will always be here to alert you to what governments are doing to stop our progress towards a better world.

But there is a fork in this road, and we are taking the scenic route. We are taking the route that moves us individually towards freedom. And when individuals become free, the world becomes free.

This new trajectory that The Daily Bell is taking will be more interesting since we will be stopping to see the sights; all the great advancements that are being made in freeing humanity from old rotting power structures.

It will be a positive trip, because the bad news about government overreach and oppression will be analyzed in the context of speeding steadily away from that dilapidated mess.

Let’s rev the engine, take the top down, and burn some rubber. We aren’t getting any younger, so let’s take this road trip while we can, and it might be surprising how many hidden gems of freedom we find along the way.

Get in, and let’s go for a ride. Welcome to the new Daily Bell!

Who is The Daily Bell?

My name is Joe Jarvis and I just hopped into the driver’s seat.

The Daily Bell has always been committed to alerting you to the propaganda in the media. As your escort, if you will, for The Daily Bell, I will take that one step further to analyze current events in the context of focusing on solutions.

I am a big believer that becoming free is an individual journey. I’ve been frustrated, of course, by what can sometimes seem like a steady march towards statism. But when you really think about it, this is the best time ever to be alive.

Poverty is at an all time low, and access to information is at an all time high. Individuals all over the world truly have the power to grab the bull by the horns, and claim the fruits of their labor.

Technology is at the point where government is rapidly becoming irrelevant–though they won’t let go easily I’m sure. Never-the-less, decentralized governance is developing, alternative media is proliferating, and free market tools of regulation are advancing.

For years I have been on a personal journey in search of individual freedom. I am thrilled to have this opportunity to steer The Daily Bell towards the multitude of available options that will liberate individuals in the modern world.

Did you know that the libertarian dream of a seastead is getting off the ground (uh, water?) in French Polynesia? There are a ton of microstates being created, and some already in existence, where you can pick a government best fit for you.

You probably know that Bitcoin is at it’s all time best, not just in price, but in number of transactions per day. It is already paving the way for competing currencies like Ethereum, which will wrest the purse from manipulative governments.

And of course experimentation with block-chain governance is growing.

Companies like Freelancer, AirBnB, Uber, HeroX and so many others are undermining the government stranglehold on business.

I can’t wait to hear your thoughts on alternatives to cable, barter websites, and the best ways to legally avoid taxes.

And at times we just need to take a step back, take a deep breath, and make fun of the liberal clowns and conservative shills for being so ridiculous.

I hope you’ll forgive me if go too far at times to make a point. In a world where you can offend everyone just by discussing truth, I feel inclined to abandon all attempts at political correctness, and just let my somewhat impish nature run rampant.

Of course this is a serious, intellectual publication, but sometimes it is just so damn fun to rustle the crybabies in the mainstream media and intelligentsia! With your help, The Daily Bell can find a good balance.

Who is Joe Jarvis?

I did the whole electoral politics thing in the past, and got burnt out on it pretty quickly. Sure, there is always progress to be made on the political front, and important power grabs to stop. But getting my mind in the right place, as a libertarian, has been a rewarding challenge.

I have written two novels; warnings of the negative outlets in which power is manifested, but also exhilarating visions of future society.

And for years I have written factual analysis of government laws, and regulations. I enjoy taking lessons from history, and melding those with current events to find a likely trajectory of where society and government is going.

My conception of The Daily Bell is a vibrant community of libertarian-ish freedom lovers voluntarily joining together to improve the world, and enhance our own lives, through the sharing of knowledge and discussion.

Join me, and the Daily Bell, as we explore the best ways to live a free lifestyle. Let’s create a dialogue that melds the steadfast principles of libertarianism with a modern and technologically advancing world.

Of course, the Daily Bell isn’t really about me, I will simply be presenting our research and analysis.

You are The Daily Bell, because it would not exist without our amazing readers.

We appreciate your loyalty! And we do love feedback, so please keep us up to date on how you live the libertarian lifestyle!

It’s a Great Time To Love Freedom

There are plenty of paths that can all lead to a truly liberated humanity, which will bring peace and prosperity to Earth.

The more feedback, comments, likes, and shares we get, the better we will be able to serve you.

As a source you trust, The Daily Bell always wants to be transparent. I am new to the publication, and would greatly benefit from your feedback.

Comment with your insights on the Daily Bell. Constructive comments are always appreciated, our skin is only so thick! But seriously, criticism will always be taken graciously here. We are, after all, promoting truth.

Oh, one more thing! Wouldn’t it be fun to have a tag line, or motto? I have a few ideas, like, “Ringing in Liberty!” or “Keeping You Alert!” or “The Vigilance to Preserve Freedom.”

But I’m sure you all can come up with some better ones, so why don’t you suggest some, and we can have a poll when some popular ones start to emerge. 

Armed with knowledge of the past, and invigorated by a firm grasp of the present, through our vision, we will forge a bright bold future!

Universities in America have typically been dominated by a liberal
bias. … The mindset of employees at such institutions is quite different than one might think. We’re not going to name any names in this essay; this isn’t about a person or individual University. It’s about the intellectual class, really the only public intellectual class in America with any respect; the Ivory Tower. If you haven’t heard this expression before, it refers to the high brow raised lip attitude class of University Professors and their associates. They have influence on every aspect of society. -ZeroHedge

This article states that academia is changing for the better after so many years of getting worse. It also makes the point that academia doesn’t really have any power, certainly not the way business does.

The intellectual class, the article says, is like Adam Smith’s hidden hand. They are subtle advisers who don’t control things “like the Illuminati does.”

They have influence rather than out-right power but they know how to wield that influence. They’ve influenced “literally every aspect of human life in America.”

More:

…  Have you been hearing recently “Studies show that … Obamacare is more popular after the election” or some such nonsense. Who are they polling? They claim their polls aren’t biased, they are scientific. But these are the polls and methods that had Trump losing by a landslide!

What does this mean? The article states we’re experiencing a major paradigm shift in which the influence exercised by academia is gradually waning.

“Many published research findings are false or exaggerated, and an estimated 85 percent of research resources are wasted.” It’s likely that some researchers are consciously cherry-picking data to get their work published … The problems of false findings often begin with researchers unwittingly fooling themselves: they fall prey to cognitive biases, common modes of thinking that lure us toward wrong but convenient or attractive conclusions.

This is a good deal of falsity, a massive amount actually, enough to render the entire academic infrastructure unworkable. But it feels right to us. We’ve wondered ourselves about the polls that show such a visceral and deep dislike for Donald Trump.

The article states that “We interpret observations to fit a particular idea. Psychologists have shown that “most of our reasoning is in fact rationalization.” Within this context academic “studies” can certainly have a large amount of rationalization. Scientists may ask “How am I right?” instead of asking, “How am I wrong,” which is what should be asked.

Partially as a result of the Trump election, the Ivory Tower Psychosis is happening in an obvious way now, at a class level, as a group.  Reality is crashing down, as it doesn’t fit with a given “reality.”

Their “Reality Based Community” is coming apart. The reality generated by empire is not working properly at a time when the current administration is anti-empire in many ways.

This is a very important point, though we would tend to think that the crashing of this reality is ultimately related to the Illuminati itself. We don’t think any of these realities are entirely de-linked.

In fact to take it a step further, we’ve often observed that, at this point in time, a chief goal is to spread chaos. There’s no reason why at the very top, chaos is being disseminated in academia as well as elsewhere.

Conclusion: In that case, the current chaos will probably grow a good deal worse along with many other kinds of disruption. The ultimate goal is to take down existing society and academia is part of that larger structure. It will therefore be part of the larger chaos and the disruption will continue.

Trump’s Fed Can Start a Central Bank Revolution … President Donald Trump will select three members of the Federal Reserve board during his term in office, including a replacement chair for Janet Yellen when her appointment expires early next year. He should seize the chance to refresh the Fed with faces from the business community, adding executives to the roster of PhD economists who currently run monetary policy in most of the world. -Bloomberg

The Federal Reserve and its defenders are changing the subject. At one point Trump had talked about auditing the Fed and others had talked about using the audit to damage the Fed so badly that it would have to shut down.

But now the end result has shifted. The idea is not to shut it down but to make it better by hiring people from the business community instead of from academia.

More:”

Appointing executives to the Fed who’ve had to take fiscal and monetary policy into account when making decisions on where and when to build new factories or make other capital expenditure decisions makes sense.

Torsten Slok, the chief international economist for Deutsche Bank AG, sent around a chart last week showing how the composition of the Fed has become increasingly focused on PhD economists:

It’s little wonder that in this populist age central bank independence is under attack. As Bloomberg News reported on Monday, the rise of populism is putting pressure on central banks as “institutions stuffed with unelected technocrats wielding the power to affect the economic fate of millions.”

The emphasis on hiring business people for the Fed comes at a very good time. The Fed is in a great deal of trouble and only will become  even more mired in difficulty,

We read somewhere that pre-Internet it was easy to confuse people about what the Fed did. But now with the Internet a click away, it is very easy. Everybody knows or seems to know.

The Fed basically fixes the volume and price of money. That’s indefensible. Price fixing is anti-market. It makes no sense to have an agency fixing the price of the US dollar.

But the Fed will fight to the bitter end to keep its anti-market privileges, which it pretends benefits the market.

There can be some changes of course. Perhaps the Fed has hired too many academics and not enough business people. That’s what the book “Fed UP” by Danielle DiMartino Booth maintains.

She believes if more business people are hired, the Fed will recover its former glory. How is this possible. The Fed was never glorious. It was always an entity that tried to fix prices for a small group of bankers.

Making the Fed better means making it better at stealing.

Ms. Booth came along at a good time. Her book is being lifted up by desperate Fed workers who are trying to change the subject from shutting the Fed down to improving it.

It may result in a bestselling book but it won’t make a bit of difference for the Fed. So long as the Fed continues to fix the volume and value of money, impoverishing the middle class in the process, nothing is going to change.

Conclusion: The Fed will remain an evil, price fixing entity. Any changes will be merely cosmetic.

George W. Bush invaded Iraq to remove its – ultimately nonexistent – weapons of mass destruction. Barack Obama used cyber weaponry and sanctions to deter Iran from building its own atomic bomb. Now Donald Trump faces North Korea, but stopping its nuclear and missile program may prove impossible, creating what may be his first and perhaps defining international crisis. -Reuters

President Donald Trump is being urged to confront North Korea and also to build up the army which, some say, has been neglected in the Obama years and even before.

He needs to do this as well because North Korea is supposedly getting close to having a usable nuclear force.

This is a crisis everyone has seen coming. That’s why Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been so desperate to court Trump, visiting him even before the inauguration. As North Korea launched an intermediate medium-range ballistic missile on Sunday, Abe was once again with the president – this time on a golf and bonding trip to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida retreat.

… Pyongyang first demonstrated its ability to detonate a crude nuclear device in 2006 – becoming the only Iraq- or Iran-style “rogue state” to ever get that far. Since then, it has continued to develop not just the bombs but also the missiles to deliver them.

Ultimately, the regime would love to have the ability to strike the continental United States – a prospect Trump has tweeted to say “won’t happen”. For now, however, there are few signs anyone has a plan to stop it.

The article goes on about North Korea’s land-based “nuclear rockets” and the progress it is making in creating and distributing them.

But who is making these claims? One of the only ways to know is to measure earth quakes. America is doing that, but the Pentagon has nearly as many reasons to exaggerate the North Korean threat as North Korea itself.

We don’t believe that North Korea has much in the way of nuclear weapons. It may have none at all. Not even the “mini-nuke” that you can possibly pick up in both hands. But with Trump banging the drums for more armament, North Korea has suddenly become a big threat to the United States.

There is no real evidence for North Korea having a large nuclear force. But because we are told it is so, we should believe it. These are the same kind of observations that go back some 75 years to Hiroshima and Nagasaki even though its fairly clear that both cities were firebombed.

Some sort of nuclear device may have been dropped as well, but if it was nuclear device it wasn’t a very effective one. Crawford F. Sams, who ran the post-war nuclear program in Japan has said,

When the bomb went off, about 2 thousand people out of 250 thousand got killed [in Hiroshima] – by blast, by thermal radiation, or by intense x-ray, gamma radiation … You see, it wasn’t “Bing” like the publicity here [said]: a bomb went off and a city disappeared. No such thing happened. That was the propaganda for deterrent …

When I came back to this country, I was appalled, from a military standpoint, to find that our major planners in the War Department were using their own propaganda, 100 thousand deaths, Bing! …

You don’t hear much about the effects of Nagasaki because actually it was pretty ineffective. That was a narrow corridor from the hospital … down to the port, and the effects were very limited as far as the fire spread and all that stuff. So you don’t hear much about Nagasaki.

It makes very little sense that nuclear weapons have been around for 75 years but never have been used. Never as in not once. Except for the supposed uses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And there is a good deal of doubt they were actually used then. In fact, they are still basically the same size and shape.

Trump seems determined to build up the military to a size never before seen. In this he may agree with Republican chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas and Sen. John McCain of Arizona. These two have asked for base military budget of $640 billion in 2018. That would be $100 billion more than in 2017.

The larger picture according to Pentagon budgets is up to one trillion over the next ten years or so to dramatically hike the Pentagon’s nuclear forces.

But the  entire history of nuclear warfare is muddied by a lack of real reporting and credible eye witnesses. The New York Times had only one reporter assigned to nuclear weapons during their formative years. That person turned out to be on the Pentagon payroll as well.

Conclusion: There are a good many questions as to how nuclear weapons work – and if they work and when they work. Before we spend another $1 trillion adding to such weapons, we should ask some hard questions about them. We shouldn’t believe everything we hear. When it comes to America’s “nuclear program” we should be skeptical.

Google isn’t a state. It’s not a service. It’s a private company. They can censor whatever they want. Use a different company. If they want to cut off 1000’s of people from their services, that’s fine. They are free to do so … This is capitalism, Google isn’t a right. Facebook and Twitter are not free speech. They are private companies. – 4Chan

Google really isn’t a private company. If it continues to attack alternative media like Alex Jones and NaturalNews.com, it may find lawsuits headed in its direction. The same may go for Facebook too.

By portraying itself as a private company, Google can do as it chooses, when attacking companies that don’t live up to its standards from an advertising point of view.

It can help cut off companies that don’t properly advertise according to the Google rule book. The rule book is general and vague. But Google is supposedly a private company so it really doesn’t matter. Google can do pretty much as it wants. And so can Facebook.

Yet there is plenty to rebut this perspective. The best or most comprehensive article on Google along with the CIA and Pentagon is an Insurge Intelligence article entitled, How the CIA Made Google.

It shows that one of the founders of Google, Sergey Brin virtually reported to the Pentagon/ CIA while developing the project that would eventually become Google. Interestingly, later in the article, people close to the CIA and Pentagon are quoted as denying a close relationship. So obviously there is a good deal of sensitivity around the topic.

When it comes to Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg was funded indirectly by the CIA via Peter Thiel. Thiel is a cofounder of PayPal with Elon Musk of Tesla fame.

Thiel invested $500,000 into Facebook but supposedly this was a CIA investment. Thiel is very close to the CIA. His company Palanitir, supposedly worth some $20 billion, runs secret algorithms for the CIA and other intel agencies. It was just the subject of a Daily Mail story  here. Thiel is supposedly a libertarian but we don’t see how he can be.

Later, Thiel invested 12.7 million in Facebook. Companies that owe their existence and direction to public intelligence agencies are not private. They ought not to be run as they were.

Facebook has not yet launched an overwhelming assault on Alex Jones or Natural.News but with its determination to root out “fake” news it will surely be part of a large attack at some point. Google has not made a special attack on Alex Jones but it too is headed in that direction.

There are even large issues surrounding Facebook and Google and their determination to harass firms in alternative news community. Like all large companies, they have taken advantage of intellectual property rights, corporate personhood, central banking and regulations – the more the better.

Regulations are helpful to large companies because large companies can follow them more closely than smaller ones. Over time, regulations can put smaller companies out of business. Meanwhile, Central bank fiat money is available in copious quantities to large companies like Facebook and Google.

Corporate personhood blames the company rather than the executive for problems. Thus in the case of any difficulties the company can receive a fine, but the corporate executive may escape untouched.

Intellectual property rights are the final and perhaps most important area when it comes to court decisions that have artificially expanded the might and size of corporations. Both Google and Facebook are built on intellectual property rights paid for by others.

Intellectual property rights expanded drastically post civil war. Before the war there were very few corporations but after the war, the Supreme Court handed down decisions that buttressed both corporate personhood and intellectual property rights.

More recently the Court has attacked intellectual property rights, but the basics remain pretty much untouched. Inventors are given a right to “own” their products for a long fixed period of time. This is fundamental to the wealth creation of Google and Facebook.

It shouldn’t be this way. Just because you have invented something doesn’t mean you own it for 20 or 30 years. Or if you do own it, you should protect it with your own money, not with taxpayer dollars.

Additionally, if something is not produced but is an idea, that idea is shared immediately on publication. That’s our perspective anyway. There’s no reason why the Supreme Court should protect an idea. If someone else uses the idea, he has not directly damaged you. The idea has been made available.

Without various investments and relationships, and most importantly without intellectual property rights, corporate personhood, central banking and regulations, both Google and Facebook would be a shadow of what they are now. There would be many more such companies and a good deal more progress would have been made as well.

Conclusion: Corporations are fictitious entities created basically by Supreme Court decisions. They shouldn’t exist as they do, and one day perhaps they won’t.

Updated.

Ireland passes law making it a crime to buy sex … The country follows Canada, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Northern Ireland in introducing legislation designed to punish men who use prostitutes without criminalising those driven into prostitution.

Now sex is being recriminalized. If people want to work as prostitutes, they should be allowed to do so. Under laws now passed in several countries people won’t have the opportunity to work as they choose.

Not every prostitute remains involved in the sex trade for her entire life. Some go on to marriage, or have longer term relationships that provide an income while they do other things.

The article says that the law protects women from being forced into prostitution via sex trafficking. But many women are not “trafficked’ and are involved in prostitution because they can make a good living for a period of time.

More:

Under the new law which came into force on Wednesday, anyone convicted of using a prostitute in Ireland faces a maximum fine of 500 euros ($525) for a first offence and 1,000 euros for a second. Anyone who uses a trafficked woman faces up to five years in jail.

“This law will, for the first time in our history, firmly place legal responsibility on the exploiters rather than the exploited,” said campaigner Rachel Moran, who worked in prostitution for seven years from the age of 15, and has led calls for reform.

“It will have the effect of educating future generations … as to the simple wrongfulness of buying your way inside someone else’s body, and it will finally frame prostitution as the act of violence that it is.”

But not everyone sees prostitution as a miserable, dead end. Laura Lee, is a sex worker and also a law school graduate, She maintained that talk of sex trafficking in Ireland  was a kind of ruse.

“This has nothing to do with trafficking – that’s a smokescreen,” Lee is quoted as saying. “It’s hooded abolition and an attempt to put a complete stop to prostitution. We should be looking out for the most vulnerable women in society – not trying to make their lives ten times harder.”

Lee is going to court against the law and obviously thinks there are other issues at play. Culturally, Ireland has has a long history intertwined with Catholicism. It is certainly possible that has played a role in Ireland’s official perspective regarding sex.

Child pornography and general pornography laws were strengthened as well. There are some who estimated hundreds of women in the country have been trafficked. Many of these women supposedly came from countries like Nigeria, Brazil, Colombia, Romania and Bulgaria.

These women are told they will be coming to Ireland to learn English and to get a job. Instead they are “trafficked” – placed in prison-like conditions and then raped and put to work as sex slaves.

The argument is that the law will make Ireland less attractive to traffickers, but trafficking may not have been a large problem in Ireland to begin with,

As a libertarian publication, we believe woman have a right to do what they wish with their bodies and their time. That does not mean we endorse sex trafficking of any other coercive sexual practice. We don’t.

Conclusion: But if a woman wants to avail herself of prostitution, especially on the way to another career or professions, she certainly ought not to be stopped. These laws are likely moral in nature, only masquerading as something else.

Milton Friedman had many ideas that I disagree with, and others that I think haven’t stood the test of time. But there’s no denying his influence over the world of economics; he was one of the field’s greatest popularizers and explainers. … For many Americans, the face of Milton Friedman is still the face of economics. -Bloomberg

No, we don’t need another Milton Friedman. We need a person who enunciates the real differences between socialism and free markets.

Friedman didn’t do that. On the big issues like central banking and taxation he was muddled at best. He was most eloquent and firm about smaller issues.

The result is a message that is not homogeneous or even well argued. His narrative is one that evades significant issues while celebrating minor ones.

More:

Economists now generally favor as much or more government intervention in the economy as the general public.

… Economics has also changed. The kind of simple supply-and-demand analysis that people learn in their Econ 101 courses — which economists call price theory — is no longer at the forefront of academic thinking. More complex theories are now the norm, and these new theories often require very different intuition and very different conclusions. Even more importantly, the whole discipline of econ has shifted away from theory and toward empirical studies.

We need a new Milton Friedman for this new age. Economics and the world have both changed, but public discussion is still too often based on the ideas of the 1970s and 1980s. Many writers are trying to remedy that situation, and educate the world about the new paradigms and the new ideas. But someone with Friedman’s academic pedigree — he won the Nobel in 1976, and was hugely influential within the discipline — would have more credibility than any writer.

This article doesn’t seem to want a Friedman after all, just someone who can promote “post-Friedman” ideas that are more socialist than not. Who are some candidates for this neo-Friedman role? The article lists Thomas Piketty and Joe Stiglitz as prominent economists who are also writers.

But Paul Krugman is closest to a modern-day Friedman  in the author’s opinion.

He is unrivaled in his ability to use economic theory, both simple and complex, to explain policy issues in a way the public can understand. Like Friedman, Krugman seamlessly integrates economic theory and political ideology ….

But still the author wants more. He believes the current crop, no matter how good, are too theoretical and not empirical enough.

He is looking for someone who will use real-life examples and illustrate concepts will real-life perspectives.

From our point of view, none of this will matter very much. Just because someone is empirical doesn’t mean they are correct. Just because economists are more socialist than ever doesn’t mean we should follow them.

The reason economics is held in low repute is not because of those who explain it but because of those who set its direction.

Even Friedman was not good enough. He advocate things like a steady state Federal Reserve. And he was the one who suggested to the federal government that prepayment of taxes would be a good idea.

Perhaps it was only supposed to last for the duration of the Second World war. Buy we are still living with it today.

We need someone like Murray Rothbard, but even more broad minded and willing to embrace a wide array of anarchical solutions and monetary possibilities, so long as they are private.

Conclusion: Socialism doesn’t work. The closer we can get to marketplace remedies for marketplace problems, the better.