INTERMEX POWER

A Biblical Case for Ron Paul on Four Issues of Importance to Christians. by Michael Eversden

In the debate among Christians about who should be the Republican nominee for president, the discussion is unfortunately informed more often by the Gospel According to O’Reilly and the Book of Limbaugh rather than the Bible. I have therefore undertaken in this article to apply Biblical principles to four issues that are under discussion in this year’s presidential campaign, which are or should be important to Christians, including foreign policy, life, education, and monetary policy. I conclude that Ron Paul’s positions are by far the most consistent with Biblical principles and indeed that the other candidates have decidedly unbiblical views on these issues.

It Usually Ends With Ed Crane. by Murray N. Rothbard

This article was first published in the January-April, 1981 issue of Libertarian Forum, Vol. 14.1-2.

Purged from Cato!

On Black Friday, March 27, 1981, at 9:00 A.M. in San Francisco, the "libertarian" power elite of the Cato Institute, consisting of President Edward H. Crane III and Other Shareholder Charles G. Koch, revealed its true nature and its cloven hoof. Crane, aided and abetted by Koch, ordered me to leave Cato's regular quarterly board meeting, even though I am a shareholder and a founding board member of the Cato Institute. The Crane/Koch action was not only iniquitous and high-handed but also illegal, as my attorneys informed them before and during the meeting. They didn't care. What's more, as will be explained shortly, in order to accomplish this foul deed to their own satisfaction, Crane/Koch literally appropriated and confiscated the shares which I had naively left in the Cato Wichita office for "safekeeping," an act clearly in violation of our agreement as well as contrary to every tenet of libertarian principle.

The Stupid and the Dishonest Join the Attacks on Ron Paul. by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

Yet another neocon Republican establishment political hack has demonstrated ignorance, deceit, and bad manners in yet another attack on Ron Paul. This time it is one Jeffrey Lord, a "contributing editor" to The American Spectator magazine. Writing in a January 15 article on the Philly.com Web site, Lord feigns outrage over the fact that five years ago Ron Paul told NBC’s "Meet the Press" that the Civil War was unnecessary to end slavery. Lord is being deceitful here by taking what Ron Paul said out of context. I remember Ron Paul’s appearance on that show, and the point he was making was that all the rest of the world – the British, Spaniards, French, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, the Northern states in the U.S. – ended slavery peacefully in the nineteenth century. His point was that we should have done what the British did, and used tax dollars to purchase the freedom of the slaves and then ended it forever. That, Said Ron Paul, would have been preferable to a war that ended up killing over 650,000 Americans (850,000 according the the very latest historical research) while destroying a large part of the U.S. economy. Lord is obviously ignorant of all of this history.

Ayatollah Santorum the Sanctimonious (ASS). by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

In a January 18 interview with Glenn Beck Rick Santorum decided to compare his view of the Constitution with that of Ron Paul. His statements can only be described as delusional and totalitarian.

Santorum first claimed to have read an eighteenth-century dictionary that defined happiness as "to do the morally right thing." This is how the founding fathers defined happiness, he said. This is Santorum’s definition of "happiness," not the founding fathers. It’s a good bet he is lying when claiming to have read an eighteenth-century dictionary. (But I suppose anything is possible with a man who brought his deceased infant home who died two hours after birth and slept with it after showing it to his children, as Santorum admits to have done).

Charles Koch Makes a Good Point by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

The word on the street (K Street, that is) is that Charles Koch's lawsuit against the CATO Institute is motivated by his desire to abandon what he once believed was a potentially successful Grand Strategy and replace it with a different institutional strategy. The Grand Strategy was explained to me back in the early 1980s by Richard Fink, the longtime head of the Koch Foundation, when we were both young assistant professors of economics at George Mason University (and before Richie was with the Koch Foundation). The strategy was to use institutions such as George Mason to educate undergraduate and graduate students in free-market economics who would then work for various arms of the Kochtopus, for members of congress or the executive branch, or become journalists or elected officials themselves. In other words, the strategy was all about influencing or taking over the Washington Establishment.

The Future of the Euro

by Philipp Bagus

The problems of the eurozone are ultimately malinvestments. In Greece these days the struggle continues about who will ultimately foot the bill for these investments. During the early 2000s an expansionary monetary policy lowered interest rates artificially. Entrepreneurs financed investment projects that only looked profitable due to the low interest rates but were not sustained by real savings. Housing bubbles and consumption booms developed in the periphery.

Regulatory-Industrial Complex

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

[The Left, the Right, and the State (1990; 2008)]

Socialists want socialism for everyone else, but capitalism for themselves, while capitalists want capitalism for everyone else, but socialism for themselves.
Neither Ted Kennedy nor Jane Fonda practices a vow of poverty, nor are they taking any homeless into their mansions, while too many big companies try to short-circuit the market with government privileges. And one way they do it is through the regulatory agencies that acne Washington, DC.

Stealing Assets, Ensuring Poverty. by Douglas French

Here in South Africa there is plenty of talk of nationalizing the nation’s mines, especially the country’s platinum mines. After all, SA is no longer the world leader in gold production, while the country still produces 80% of the world’s platinum. In fact platinum group metals (PGM) account for the bulk of SA’s mineral value.
However, as Nazmeera Moola points out in her “economic viewpoint” column in the February 24th Financial Mail, PGM production has been falling since 2007 at the same time profit margins fell, despite elevated prices. Ms. Moola writes that margins dropped 5-10 percent last year from the previous year, with rising wage and electricity costs to blame.

The State Is a Harsh Mistress

by David Masten

When I mention that I believe that it is not the proper role of government to subsidize research in space technology, the looks I receive from my fellow aerospace engineering classmates seem to suggest that they want to send me to the dark side of the moon (on the taxpayers' dime).
If there's one libertarian position that is exceedingly difficult to argue, it is the notion that scientific research should not be the concern of the state. This essay will focus on outlining two possible approaches that may allow my dear reader to explain free-market space technology to an outsider without sounding like a green-eyed Martian. These are as follows:

Who Were the Cameralists?

by Murray N. Rothbard

[An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995)]

In contrast to Great Britain, the German-speaking countries were predictably highly resistant to the spread of Smithian views. They had been ruled, ever since the late 16th century, by cameralism. Cameralists, named after the German royal treasure chamber, the Kammer, propounded an extreme form of mercantilism, concentrating even more than their confreres in the West on building up state power, and subordinating all parts of the economy and polity to the state and its bureaucracy. Whereas mercantilist writers were generally pamphleteers scrambling for some particular form of state advantage, the cameralists were either bureaucrats in one of the 360 tyrannical German states, or else university professors advising the princes and their bureaucracy how best to maximize their revenue and power. As Albion Small put it: to the cameralists

Seventeen Years of Boom and Bust

by Clyde W. Richey

The Federal Reserve must bear responsibility for our current recession. The seeds for this recession were clearly planted in 1995 and led to unsustainable booms and busts, and later to high unemployment, increased consumer prices, failed companies, and increased debt. Appropriate at this time is an overview of the Federal Reserve's booms and busts and the shocking similarities with those of the banks before the Federal Reserve was in existence — and a consideration of actions for prevention of these destructive booms and busts in order to establish a more healthy economy.