Amazing Liberty

Teaching Yourself Economics in 90 Minutes

2009-05-22T15:39:00.000-07:00

The news is filled with reports of high unemployment, deficits, inflation, deflation, and bailouts. There are conflicting news stories and commentaries on the causes (deregulation, fear, greed, low interest rates, etc.) and the solutions (government spending, bailouts, borrowing, bankruptcy, etc.) Much of what is being said is propaganda to support the agendas of people whose interests are not necessarily your interests. To sort out the wheat from the chaff, I recommend you do some study of your own so that you can analyze what they are saying.

The reason much of the information is contradictory is because there is bias in the world view of the writers. Richard Maybury identifies 5 different paradigms: Keynesian, Marxist, fascist (corporatist), monetarist, and Austrian. My bias is that the Austrian view is most accurate. The Austrian view has a theory of business cycles and has correctly forecast past downturns and today’s mess. Do your own self study based on how much of your own time you want to invest.

90 minutes or less

The comic book version takes about an hour:
http://www.takelifeback.com/hegawid/

even if you don’t want to bother reading it, someone else (a non-native English speaker) will read it to you
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/026397.html

There are some longer text primers like this one by Gary North
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/mom2.html

6 hours or less

If you have more time, the best beginning economics book I’ve ever read is “Economics in One Lesson” by Henry Hazlitt. That’ll take you a few hours, depending on how fast a reader you are.

A good book by rep that I haven’t read is “Whatever happened to Penny Candy” by Richard Maybury

If you want to read the books that predicted the current crisis, there’s Crash Proof by Peter Schiff (very accurate) or Financial Reckoning Day by Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin (less accurate, but gets the gist).

If you want to read an analysis after the fact, there’s “Meltdown” by Thomas Woods. I haven’t read this book, but it has strong reviews and Woods writes very clearly.

More than 6 hours to invest

If you want to get into scholarly work, then the Austrian theory was developed by Ludwig Von Mises and furthered by Murray Rothbard. Their books are at the site
www.mises.org

In the end, you can invest months studying. But for the quick down and dirty – which will put you ahead of most journalists (stenographers for government mouthpieces) who write for the Times or Newsweek -- the comic will put you ahead of 95% of everyone else.

Prophetic Sci-Fi Writer?

2009-01-16T19:42:00.000-08:00

A radio interview with science fiction writer David Brin has stayed with me many years. The theme was about how we should stop resisting state and corporate spying but work on getting that technology to the general public to use as a means to enhance freedom. It was years ago, and apparently, he must have been flogging a book (1999) on his theme "The Transparent Society" (which I haven’t read). But his premise is bearing out: there's no stopping the privacy invasion, but freedom can be enhanced by technology in the hands of ordinary people. Enter: cell phone cameras in the hands of private citizens are being used to resist tyranny. Butler Schafer's horizontal society is evolving.

HOT COMMODITIES by Rogers (Review)

2008-01-30T19:34:00.000-08:00

Book: Hot Commodities
Author: Jim Rogers
Subject: Investing

In Hot Commodities, Jim Rogers gives us an introduction to the world of commodities investing. Of the different asset classes available to investors, the commodities class receives little attention from average investors or the institutions that sell investment services. However, Rogers references studies that show that commodities give comparable returns to stocks. Moreover, he explains how stocks and commodities traditionally run in inverse cycles: when stocks are in a bull market, commodities are often in a bear market and vice-versa. Since long term bull and bear markets can run in cycles of 13 to 18 years, sticking to either to the exclusion of the other means your investments can needlessly languish due to ignorance of how to diversify into commodities.

The book is divided into four parts. First, Rogers familiarizes the reader with the history, terminology, and mechanics of how the commodities markets work. In the next section, he analyzes the demand side of the commodities market in the growing economies of Asia, especially China. The third part of his book analyzes specific commodities including oil, gold, lead, sugar and coffee. And the final section of his book is a collection of reference charts and graphs of different indexes and histories.

The strong lesson I took from the book is that you cannot be a dilettante commodities investor. Whereas you might buy a stock being totally ignorant of how to value it and watch it rise in market price because a lot of other ignorant investors are bidding it up, in commodities you are working against professionals in a very simple market. There are not lots of nuanced measures to interpret like price-to-earnings or book-to-sales in stocks. In commodities, there’s just one: supply versus demand. If the demand for a commodity outstrips supply, the price will go up. If the supply exceeds demand, it will fall. You make money either way by making accurate readings of the available and new supplies versus the current and future demand. The other powerful factor in commodities trading is that you are buying on margin. In other words, you only have to pay for a small percentage of the commodity lot you buy. This presents opportunities for huge gains or losses in a very short time.

Buying on margin is the source of the horror stories of the amateur commodities investor. For example, the rules of the exchange might allow you to buy LONG $100 worth of a commodity A for $5 (different commodities have different percentages). Buying long means you are speculating that the price will go up. If the price does go up to $105, you can sell your contract and you’ve made a 100% gain! However, if the price falls to $95, your entire investment could be wiped out as all accounts are cash accounts that have to be settled at the end of the trading day. To make money investing in commodities, Rogers recommends study and specialization. In other words, he advises speculators to become experts in a single market like copper or sugar and to put in the study to learn just how much of the stuff is out there and how it gets used.

Current returns place us today in the midst of a commodities bull market. Rogers happened to have predicted its advent fairly accurately and places its beginning in 1999. The historical trend is that the long term commodities bull will last around 18 years placing us somewhere in the middle of the current run. As evidence of these facts, many commodities like gold, oil, corn, sugar, plutonium and copper have doubled in price or increased in value by many multiples of their 1999 value. By comparison, the S&P 500 has languished in the same territory over that period and the NASDAQ has never recovered its peak value. A sensible definition of true investing (as explained by Professor of Finance Michael Rozeff) – as opposed to speculation – requires diversifying your wealth across as broad a range of the asset classes as possible to get the average value of the markets. To that end, I can recommend Roger’s book as an excellent introduction to an education in commodities.

CRASH PROOF by Schiff (Review)

2008-01-30T19:08:00.000-08:00

Book: Crash Proof: How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse
Authors: Peter Schiff, John Downes
Subject: Financial

Review by Robert Jackson

Peter Schiff's CRASH PROOF is an easy-to-read narrative that gives the author's prediction of the coming collapse of the American standard of living and his prescription of how to safeguard or even enhance your material well-being as it unfolds. Schiff's background is president of an investment fund group and being the contrarian prognosticator on several cable television business programs.

The book is laid out in 2 parts, the first two-thirds describing the macro economic trends to support his prediction and the last third covering his advice to readers on how to thrive in the midst of a crumbling American economy.

My introduction to Peter Schiff was through You-Tube as I watched him on a cable business show accurately predict the housing bubble collapse we are now experiencing even as his position was being ridiculed by the other talking heads on the show. After reading another review of this recently released book, I decided I wanted to read it for myself to find out what his insights were on the present growing global financial crisis. The book is easy reading and interspersed with amusing metaphors that make his analysis understandable to readers without deep financial literacy.

Schiff begins by laying out background knowledge in understandable terms. He explains money, savings, consumption, investment, inflation, the housing bubble, the trade deficit and the other vocabulary in a way a neophyte could understand. He then explains how the American economy has evolved to its present condition citing the theories of classical economists such as Say and Mises. In an amusing metaphor, he compares the American economy to an inhabitant on a deserted island with a few other Asian inhabitants, making it clear to the reader that if the Asians are catching cleaning cooking and serving the fish, the American is not an "indispensable" member of this economy as the "consumer of the meal." For those of us with a good memory of the 1970's, he makes a good case for the return of "stagflation" which is characterized by rising prices even as the economy shrinks in size, two conditions that are not supposed to happen together in the models of Keynesian economics.

Speaking in the most general terms, Schiff's solutions lie in getting your personal wealth out of the U.S. dollar. His book goes into some detail (including offering his own investment group as agent to make these investments for you). For the most part, he's addressing people who do have some wealth as opposed to people who are already deep in debt or in dire straits. But he does offer some common sense advice usable even to penny savers.

The book was written some months ago at the peak of the housing bubble and well before the alarms in the banking sector that began happening this past August. So we are treated to his accurate analysis of the collapse of the housing bubble as confirmation of his insight. Still, the window has not closed on his advice though the opportunities he's talking about could disappear quickly in the short months ahead. Overall, I can recommend "Crash Proof", and will continue to find it handy as an introductory reference of how to invest in some non-mainstream ways.

Global Warming Remedy

2007-05-07T21:51:00.000-07:00

Connecticut senator Chris Dodd appeared on Meet the Press yesterday (May 6th) and announced his plan to fight global warming with increased corporate taxes and regulations! Now who could have guessed that?

Spiderman 3

2007-05-05T22:44:00.000-07:00

My usual rule is to keep low expectations about movies, especially adaptations and sequels. But the Spiderman movie franchise is my favorite, bar none, and I thought the first sequel was the best superhero movie ever made. As a result, I couldn't contain my excitement to see the 3rd movie. When I walked out of the midnight show, I was not disappointed.

Director Sam Raimi's affection for Spiderman is obvious. It also nearly undid his movie this time around. While it was fantastic to see so many well-rendered characters from the Spiderman mythos like the Stacy family, Venom and Sandman, there were so many characters and subplots that a couple of times I disengaged from the movie as I actively wondered how he was going to tie all of the elements together. This was the exact problem of the third X-men movie. There were too many new characters and subplots. The ending did not make sense, and I wasn't even able to get through a second viewing of characters I loved without falling asleep.

In this movie, Raimi successfully wraps thing up in a heroic last half hour. While the weakest of the three movies, it's still one of the best of the genre. If the first movie was a 9 of 10 and the second a 10 of 10, this one is a solid seven.

Global Warming Hysteria

2007-05-05T22:22:00.000-07:00

I should not be surprised, but the success that the global warming zealots have had in convincing Joe Public that the carbon dioxide coming out of their cars will end life on earth is just incredible.

Of all of Mencken's hobgoblins that the elites could use to keep the public agitated and manageable, the idea that human beings will be able to manage the climate of the entire planet seems so preposterous that I find it inconceivable that it could be believed. People who never passed a Geometry or Chemistry test in high school will argue with you until they're blue in the face of how "the scientists" are right, and "we've got to do something." The frosting on the cake is they believe that the same state institutions that can barely manage entirely man made traffic control or central banking systems will somehow know how to manipulate the climate to save the beach houses of upper class people.

The more of a whopper you try to put over, the better chance you'll pull it off, it seems.

To Vote or Not to Vote

2006-10-25T23:04:00.000-07:00

An old timer, a vet of WWII, called C-Span yesterday to make known his irritation with the 50% of the population who don't vote. But if you simply explore his scenario a little further, whether more or fewer people vote won't affect the outcome of the election in a significant way. Whether 1000 or ten million Americans vote, they're only two outcomes to most of the questions that were already pre-determined before any sheeple enter the voting booth. So the question becomes what difference does it make, especially where these hack candidates are concerned?

On the other hand, I get a vicarious joy at voting against referendums for bond measures and tax increases, so in terms of personal enjoyment, it's not a total waste of time.

Hess for Governor of Arizona

2006-10-19T22:09:00.000-07:00

Kudos to Barry Hess for his performance in the AZ governor's debate. His presence in the debate forced the republocrat and demopublican to actually debate ideas like elimination of Arizona's state income tax.

Accordingly, I have no problem with libertarians who participate in state politics. Without a doubt, their efforts are educational, as I learned about libertarianism in large part because of the campaigns of Harry Browne. Nor do I have a problem with anarchists who want no part of the process. That's the beauty of self-ownership. You get to make up your own mind, and those people who don't like the way you think can go take a flying leap!

Nukes in North Korea

2006-10-17T21:44:00.000-07:00

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

And if North Korea has nukes and no American knew it, would anyone care?

Are the same people with trembling voices who call C-Span even aware of which countries do and do not have nukes, or have had them in the past, or have the technical ability and wealth to easily recreate them again?

I'm fairly confident that Ecuadoran Indians or Albanian peasants don't give the subject a second thought. Good for them -- I'll follow their example.

ANARCHIA

2006-07-23T23:46:00.000-07:00

I mentioned before that I got the idea for Anarchia from a commentary by Walter Block on capital punishment. On analysis, how should a libertarian bystander deal with a murderer? One cynic asked me what exactly do libertarian super people do -- stand by doing nothing but griping about the government while sociopaths run around raping and killing? The short answer is no. A libertarian hero doesn't initiate aggression. But the question remains of how much a busybody the libertarian hero should be.

Meantime, what do you think of Anarchia?

The Amazing Liberty Writing Group

2006-05-17T21:26:00.000-07:00

My intention for AmazingLiberty.com is that it become a self-perpetuating site of entertaining comics and short fiction with themes that celebrate individuality, non-aggression and private property. As time goes by, I invite all interested writers to join and run your fiction past the group. When enough good stories come in, the next step will be to publish an e-book and (if the interest is there) a print book of the best stories that are submitted to the group. There are more and more distribution options for circulating small press materials. You would retain full ownership of any work you contributed.

I've yet to send out invitations to join the group, but if you're interested, contact me and I will send you that invitation. In the coming weeks, the yahoo webpage will slowly become more inviting. To begin with, I am uploading a satire of a couple of years ago, "The Gambit of Conspirator."

The Obedient have Little to Fear

2006-05-14T21:55:00.000-07:00

This past week, the lewrockwell.com blog had several posts commenting on the news that their writer Michael Kreca had been shot and killed by police. It brought to mind the fate of poor mentally ill Rigoberto Alpizar who was shot and killed by the TSA in Miami in December, 2005. The only witnesses were the shooters themselves, and their story is that their victims made suspicious movements or gestures.

Against this backdrop, we have the latest news of spying by the government on its citizens -- the NSA is tracking the phone contacts of everyone in the nation. Of course, there's no shortage of apologists for the state flooding into call-in shows and posting their comments in blogs. They repeat a tedious refrain: "I don't care -- the innocent have nothing to fear."

I think a more honest mantra would be "the obedient have little to fear." The two unfortunate souls of my example may have died because they didn't realize they were about to receive the death penalty for not being immediately and completely submissive to the authorities. Of course, being innocent and submissive won't necessarily save you either. Joseph Schultz found that out when he was shot in the face by an FBI agent as he was trying to obey. The FBI had detained them in search of some robbery suspects. Schultz 16-year-old girlfriend was witness to that assault. Otherwise, one is left wondering whether Schultz would have been reported "to have made a threatening gesture" before he was nearly killed.

Anarchia and Amazing Liberty

2006-05-11T20:02:00.000-07:00

And so it begins! There are a dozen little tasks to get Amazing Liberty up and running. Warrior Son postcards have been ordered. E-mail boxes and auto-responders to get set up on the website. Also, I put in a call to my good friend MR Wildheart (many thanks to him for all of his support) to start coloring ANARCHIA so there will be a new feature to put up next month.

The idea of Anarchia began after reading a commentary on capital punishment by Walter Block. Block is against state adjudicated capital punishment. But he elaborated on the point with the comment that ideal justice would be a machine that transferred the life force of the murderer back into his victim. Presto -- Anarchia is born, comic books not being limited by a minor constraint like "reality."

The first Anarchia story was written by me and drawn by the talented Victor Cabrales. It's slated for a June posting. Stay tuned!

The Nightmares Continue

2006-05-11T19:56:00.000-07:00

Wendy McElroy left a link in the LRC (lewrockwell.com) Blog to watch the press roast G.W. Bush got from Colbert. Apparently, his joke about rearranging deck chairs on the Hindenberg instead of the Titanic started the gears moving. In this dream, my 4 year-old son, 7 year-old son and myself were drafted into the "drigible" corp to fight in what looked like a World War One era war. My 4 year-old was killed in a strafing raid on our airfield by an attacking fleet of drigibles. It was devestating to the point that I woke myself up almost feeling sick.

Night of Nightmares

2005-07-29T05:24:00.000-07:00

Maybe this is what happens when you fall asleep watching the Dave Chappelle show.

Elizabeth and I managed to rouse ourselves off the couch at 2:30 a.m. I finished some edits to a script I'm working on and went to bed to begin my odyssey of unpleasant dreaming.

First, I went to visit my regular doctor for a check-up only to discover him wearing a blouse, skirt and pumps. When he and his 200+ pound nurse tried to hold me down and put me under, I decided I wasn't going to put up with the indignity and forced myself to wake up.

My meager 4 hours of rest interrupted, I nodded off again to be reading my sons a bedtime story, only to get a knock at the door. One of my neighbors brings back Tommy who he plucked off the window ledge of our high rise apartment. I turn around, and while I was reading the story, genius son had forced through the screen to go walking around the ledge like the movie "Baby's Day Off" or whatever it's called.

My subconcious not done with me yet, in my next incarnation, I'm a teen-ager who makes a trek through a bothersome stretch of woods to reach a warehouse store to save about 2 or 3 bucks buying cookies and other junk, skipping the local store. I go through the hassle of the long trip, climbing through the ravine and bramble, only to reach the major road to get back to my apartment complex and be stopped by a patrol car. The cops look at my snacks, take them all from me to save for later and decide to arrest me for some project they're discussing between themselves. I'm about to run, but then think -- I'm supposed to have faith that Christ will protect me from all things, so I let them put me in the police car. Thinking back, even with faith, I'm not willing to put up with the indignity of scenario number one.

Finally, I next show up at the post office to mail some more comics that I've been hawking on e-bay. I'm getting even worse service than usual when I discover in the desk tray of one of the employees (a cross between nurse Ratchit and Shirley McClain) the two comics I'd mailed the week before just sitting there, in dogged shape. I start arguing with these clowns and they start rolling out STAMPS for a bribe, asking, "how many is it going to take to make you go away."

Mercifully, the alarm clock rescued me at that point.

My wife said we had the thermostat set too high last night. I suppose the upside is when your dreams are getting this detailed, you're supposed to be in a creative zone.

Elmer Gantry and Inferno

2005-07-05T20:43:00.000-07:00

Odd juxtaposition of movie and book to check out. I enjoyed Elmer Gantry. There was the smug edge to it of a hollywood screenwriter, but Burt Lancaster was so good in the role that I forgave it its cheap shots. He was terrific. I think I also have a soft spot for womanizers. As far as sins go, I'm completely empathetic. I didn't get the hardwiring in me that delights in killing my fellow man or stealing to get something for nothing. But as far as being enraptured with the opposite sex, it's almost not fair that it's a sin.

Inferno was a fun compelling read. Science fiction writers Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven took us on a return trip through Dante's seven circles of hell. I didn't read the Divine Comedy - I only knew the circles through summary descriptions. So going through on a narrative was - like I stated - a compelling read. What was also interesting was the prioritization of sins. For example, the violent people - which I hold to be particular awful sinners - were in the fifth circle in the lake of boiling blood. But liars and panderers were down in the sixth circle in a river of flowing human excrement. That means, kill someone without repenting -- get the 5th. Be a lying telemarketer without repenting -- get an even rougher ticket.

It was also amusing to read the shot they took at an unnamed writer (I'm guessing, ol' L'ron Hubbard) they happened to find down there for creating his own religion. I enjoyed this Niven/Pournelle collaboration as much as any of them.

A Guilty Pleasure

2005-06-06T17:54:00.000-07:00

A couple of decades ago, I remember watching Ebert and (Siskel) praise the marketing genius of the "Dirty Harry" movie franchise. Paraphrasing Ebert's comments from memory, "Harry shot people for all audiences. He shot up a gang of black armed robbers and a sadistic killer who ‘escaped justice on technicalities’ in his first picture - then turned around and shot up a conspiracy of white fascist cops in his next picture." In later pictures, he went on to partner with vengeful victimized feminists. He carried out equal opportunity killing for an evolving emotionally beleaguered audience in need of some cathartic relief.

That critique comes to mind as I read Vin Suprynowicz's The Black Arrow. In this novel, the protagonist sticks black feathered shafts in tyrants big and small, whether they are thuggish DEA agents, rapist cops, lying tax assessors or conniving property-stealing politicos. Modeling his criminal perpetrators from news we read today, the reader is treated to an alternative scenario where the scions of the state are held responsible (in vivid anatomical detail) when they destroy the lives and property of their victims. This book hits the spot when you're taking a time-out from forgiving your enemies.

Outsourcing the Amazing Liberteens

2005-05-22T19:54:00.000-07:00

The Amazing Liberteens will turn into a fantastic comic book feature because I am able to outsource the artwork to people who can bring it to life. Today, I had the opportunity to meet the talented Robert Hawkins and his wife Joy who will help make the Amazing Liberteens comic book adventure a better drawn book than much of what you'll find on the newstands. The fact that we can forge relationships and trade goods and services improves all of our daily lives. What's hard to understand about this to collectivists is mind-boggling. What if there were rules that prevented us from trading services or priced them beyond our ability to make advantageous trades? The fact is, there are in most walks of life.

Welcome

2005-05-21T08:10:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Amazing Liberty. Here you'll find posts to alert you to the encroaching hand of abusive state and mercantilist power. At the same time, I'll try to bring you cause for optimism as we watch the failure of abusive power to crush the human spirit. Welcome aboard.