Category: Social Issues
The analysis published under this category are as follows.
Friday, May 08, 2015
Resilience is The New Black / Politics / Social Issues
By: Raul_I_Meijer
This is another essay from our friend Dr. Nelson Lebo III in New Zealand. Nelson is a certified expert in everything to do with resilience, especially how to build a home and a community designed to withstand disasters, be they natural or man-made, an earthquake or Baltimore. Aware that he may rub quite a few people the wrong way, he explains here why he has shifted from seeing what he does in the context of sustainability, to that of resilience. There’s something profoundly dark in that shift, but it’s not all bad.
Friday, May 08, 2015
Shaking The Shackles Of Collectivism: The Birth of Modernity / Politics / Social Issues
By: Jeff_Berwick
The following post is by TDV Senior Analyst, Ed Bugos- Individualism is the ethic that, in the west, laid the foundation for massive industrialized societies to emerge from the economic principle of the division of labor… for the abandonment of slavery… and, ultimately, which raised so many people out of poverty.
Under the ancient regime - before the doctrine of individualism and of individual rights in the natural sense came about - the individual never had rights. One may have been part of a family or tribe, where maybe the head had rights in some sense as the citizen of a state.
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Tuesday, May 05, 2015
Don’t Be Part of the 95% / Politics / Social Issues
By: Harry_Dent
I heard a speaker make a great observation at a major conference I was speaking at. He said: “95% of people are a genius at something.”That doesn’t mean they’ll be Einstein or a CEO of a large corporation or a visionary entrepreneur… it just means everyone displays their brilliance in other, sometimes less-noticeable ways.
I have always found that to be true. I am good at what I do, but horrible at so many other things. I couldn’t fix a door knob if you gave me a ten-step, illustrated guide with online assistance from a personal consultant!
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Tuesday, April 28, 2015
What Makes Brussels More Equal Than Others / Politics / Social Issues
By: Raul_I_Meijer
Dutch daily Algemeen Dagblad ran a little article recently that we’re surprised no other news organization picked up. It concerned a proposal in the European Parliament in which the parliamentarians got to vote on raising their own paycheck (always a good idea). The best thing about the story is that not everyone voted in favor.
Most did though. It much amused me to see that apparently it was Angela Merkel’s party, the German Christian Democrats, which was behind the proposal. Initially, they had even wanted double what they actually got. Here’s some numbers and details – and please forgive me for not being a math wizard -.
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Monday, April 27, 2015
The Real War on The Middle Class / Politics / Social Issues
By: Dr_Ron_Paul
One of the great ironies of American politics is that most politicians who talk about helping the middle class support policies that, by expanding the welfare-warfare state, are harmful to middle-class Americans. Eliminating the welfare-warfare state would benefit middle-class Americans by freeing them from exorbitant federal taxes, including the Federal Reserve's inflation tax.
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Thursday, April 23, 2015
Poverty, Child Rearing, and Government Incentives / Politics / Social Issues
By: MISES
Adam Vass Gal writes: When examining cyclical poverty, it is important to study the typical tendencies of people that have generational success. Some like to equate financial success to a level of work ethic, and assume the harder you work, the more you will make. This book’s study takes a different approach.
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Why Europe Lets People Drown / Politics / Social Issues
By: Raul_I_Meijer
That Europe let almost 1000 people die in the Mediterranean in one night shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, at least not to those who are still occasionally awake. The Club Med migrant crisis has been going on for a long time, and the EU’s only reaction to it has been to slash its budget and operations in the area, not to expand them.
So when the New York Times opens with “European leaders were confronted on Monday with a humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean..”, they’re a mile and a half less than honest. Brussels has known what was going on for years, and decided to do less than nothing.
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Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Wealth Destruction for the 99.9 Percent / Politics / Social Issues
By: BATR
Blaming the 1% for diminished prosperity avoids the real reasons for designed poverty. In round terms, the seven billion souls that populate this planet translate into seventy million to be part of the 1%. Well, that amount is still a very large number to blame for the systemic transfer of riches into the hands of the few. A far more relevant approach is to examine the .001% or around seven million that fall into the mover or shakers of asset and possessions. Before targeting this group of mega wealth, that figure includes a very significant number, who are non players when it comes to global politics or transnational finance.
Friday, April 03, 2015
Warren Buffett is Everything That’s Wrong With America / Politics / Social Issues
By: Raul_I_Meijer
I think I’ve never understood the American – and international – fascination with money, with gathering wealth as the no. 1 priority in one’s life. What looks even stranger to me is the idolization of people who have a lot of money. Like these people are per definition smarter or better than others. It seems obvious that most of them are probably just more ruthless, that they have less scruples, and that their conscience is less likely to get in the way of their money and power goals.
Wednesday, April 01, 2015
How the West Invented Individualism / Politics / Social Issues
By: MISES
Roger McKinney writes: Inventing the Individual, by Larry Siedentop, Belknap Press, 2014
I lived in Morocco a few decades ago and needed some furniture for our apartment. A college student I had befriended, Hamid, offered to take my cash and negotiate with the dealer for me while I drank coffee in a nearby qahwa because, as he said, the price of the furniture would triple if the merchant glimpsed an American within a block of his store.
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Monday, March 30, 2015
Economic Recovery, Geopolitics and Detergents / Politics / Social Issues
By: Raul_I_Meijer
Increasingly over the past year or so, when people ask me what I do, and that happens a lot on a trip like the one I’m currently on in the world of down under, I find myself not just stating the usual ‘I write about finance and energy’, but adding: ‘it seems to become more and more about geopolitics too’. And it’s by no means just me: a large part of the ‘alternative finance blogosphere’, or whatever you wish to call it, is shifting towards that same orientation.
Monday, March 23, 2015
The Real Reason The American Dream is Unraveling / Politics / Social Issues
By: James_Quinn
Marketwatch posted an article this week titled Why the American Dream is Unraveling, in 4 charts. As usual, the MSM journalist and the liberal Harvard academic can create charts that reveal a huge problem, but they completely misdiagnose the causes and offer the typical wrong solution of taking more money from producers and handing it to the poor, with no strings attached. This has been the standard operating procedure since LBJ began his War on Poverty 50 years ago. Do these control freaks ever step back and assess how that war is going?
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
"To Be or Not To Be" Part of the Establishment / Politics / Social Issues
By: BATR
The immortal words uttered by Prince Hamlet as he contemplates death and suicide, applies for an entire society. The enormous gravity that permeates William Shakespeare’s tragic hero represents the same fate confronting the normal mortals, who make up the ranks of Americans. The rapid decline in intelligence and moral character has approached epidemic levels. The ROT which has seeped into the popular culture has become a metamorphosis Reign of Terror. The transformers from a heritage of principle, courage and honor have sunk to a level of Slouching Towards Gomorrah. Such a fate was feared by our Founding Fathers.
Friday, March 06, 2015
The Dark Side of the American Dream / Politics / Social Issues
By: MISES
Ryan McMaken writes: A Most Violent Year (2015, 125 minutes) is the third film from writer-director J.C. Chandor who wrote and directed 2011’s Margin Call about a Lehman Brothers-like firm in the early days of the 2008 financial crisis. Margin Call explored the complex relationships between white collar workers, corporate executives, and the firm’s customers in the face of economic ruin. With A Most Violent Year, Chandor returns to similar themes. But in this case, he focuses on a privately-owned heating oil business in 1981 New York City made successful by the relentless determination of Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac), an immigrant who has clawed his way to the top of his industry through a commitment to salesmanship and slow-and-steady growth.
Friday, March 06, 2015
From Organised Religion to Government - The Fall of Confidence / Politics / Social Issues
By: Dr_Jeff_Lewis
Institutional confidence is akin to gravity. We know it’s there, and we understand a lot about it - but we haven’t yet been able to explain it adequately enough. At least not enough to quantify its relationship - or unify gravity with the other physical forces that we do understand. Of course, we are much further from unification of the interactions between confidence (behavior), the economy, and finance.
It’s easy to see the effect finance has on the economy. One can even map the ultimate effect through history, which is riddled with failed currencies. Ultimately, the failure of an untethered financial system culminates with the collapse of a currency.
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Thursday, March 05, 2015
Freedom from America - Getting Out Of Dodge / Politics / Social Issues
By: James_Quinn
LLPOH Writes: About 30 years ago, I took a series of jobs in Australia, turning around failing manufacturing businesses. We were there for a very few years, and during this time became eligible for Australian citizenship, which we took up. In return for saving one such failing business, I received shares in it, which I still hold today. Over the years I have remained an employee of that small private company, as has my wife, and visit regularly to see that it survives and thrives.
Thursday, February 12, 2015
A Brief History of Inequality / Politics / Social Issues
By: STRATFOR
At an event in Beijing last November, I had the good fortune to meet the French economist Thomas Piketty, who has sold 1.5 million copies of his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, since it was first published in 2013. Pacing up and down in front of a packed auditorium, Piketty explained that because the rate of return on capital is now higher than the growth rate of the global economy, the proportion of the world's wealth that is owned by a small elite will likely keep increasing; in other words, we should expect to see a divergence of wealth as the rich get much richer. As his book says, "capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based."
Thursday, February 12, 2015
Fourth Turning Seeds of Crisis and War / Politics / Social Issues
By: James_Quinn
In Part One of this article I attempted to illuminate the concept of generational theory as articulated by Strauss and Howe in The Fourth Turning. In Part Two I provided proof this Crisis is far from over, with ever increasing debt, civic decay and global disorder propelling the world towards war.
Seeds of Crisis & War
“The seasons of time offer no guarantees. For modern societies, no less than for all forms of life, transformative change is discontinuous. For what seems an eternity, history goes nowhere – and then it suddenly flings us forward across some vast chaos that defies any mortal effort to plan our way there. The Fourth Turning will try our souls – and the saecular rhythm tells us that much will depend on how we face up to that trial. The saeculum does not reveal whether the story will have a happy ending, but it does tell us how and when our choices will make a difference.” – Strauss & Howe - The Fourth Turning
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Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Courage to Face True History / Politics / Social Issues
By: BATR
History is philosophy teaching by examples. ~Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War
Human consciousness and the ability to understand that which really occurred in the past, is a skill that many people have little experience with mastering. Scholarship and researching the yesteryear relies upon analyzing accounts of others and is usually based on chronicles written centuries ago. Most of the original evidence used in writing the accounts may be lost, based upon oral myths or accurate translations of vanished languages. Even when the original sources are impeccable in their authenticity or go unquestioned in the ivory towers of academic scrutiny, the crucial question still remains, Was It So? Attempts to provide definitive proof, when it comes to explaining political events, relies more often on the art of understanding the connection among factions, based within the context of their intended agendas than smoking gun documents.
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Tuesday, February 03, 2015
Greece - Is It Socialism or Just Failure? / Politics / Social Issues
By: Raul_I_Meijer
It’s all still about Greece, and that makes sense, if nothing else Syriza is a breath if not a tornado of fresh air. But those too pass. The question at the end remains: did anything really change? It’s quite possible, don’t get me wrong, but Tsipras and Vanoufakis are busy looking out for the people who voted for them, not the rest of the Europe, or the world for that matter. And neither should they.