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Our old buddy and former Congressman Barney Frank just joined a bank board. I thought it would be good to recap on the later part of his career, especially when it comes to finance.

First off, his top contributors back when he was a congressman were The Goldman Sachs and was one of the top recipient of taxpayer funds given through fannie/freddie (Number one? Chris Dodd, of course).

As the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, he ignored the housing bubble--not that anyone here a

Recently I had a debate on here about different countries, the measure to which the are capitalist, and how that correlated with standards of living.

My "opponent," if you want to call him that, quoted Noam Chomsky that basically the only countries which could call themselves "authentically capitalist" were also 3rd world, and actually that was only through imperialism (don't worry, like Chomsky, he cited no sources and his examples were thoroughly destroyed).

And in fact the only societies that could authentically be called capitalist are the ones that had the free market rammed down their throat by imperial powers -- they're what we call the third world, not least for that reason.

Jonah Goldberg is a columnist for National Review Online, and considers himself a conservative. He's written at least 2 great books, the best of which is called "Liberal Fascism" -- which, before you judge it by its title, you really need to know why it's called that (trust me, it's hysterical).

The man himself has had some mean and uninformed things to say about Libertarians in the past, as has Ayn Rand, by the way. However he's got a clear mastery of US history and his work on Fascism and the early left in the US is excellent.

"Liberal Fascism" is a must-read for any libertarian interested in US history of the early 1900's. The title itself has an interest

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The video shows Scott trying to exit the car and being ordered back in and then a couple of minutes later getting out of the car and running away. At the time, Slager had possession of Scott's driver's license. Scott also left his Mercedes behind and a passenger in the car. Nevertheless, Slager chose to pursue Scott, eventually shooting him eight times in the back, as caught by bystander video.[ ... ] Slager has not explained why he chose to pursue Scott rather than, say, meet him at the address on his license or wait for him to try to retrieve his Mercedes from police custody

Same as title - as a thought experiment, say Bob Murphy were dropped into the driver's seat of the fed after black Monday, 1929 - what would he have done? Flooded the market with new money as Friedman said the fed should've done? Dismantle the fed and say "it'll be better in the long run" ? Sing Karaoke?

A lot of libertarian authors like Burt Folsom seem to think the fed should've dumped money in, but they're probably not Austrians; I'm interested in the Austrian take.

EDIT: Austrians On the Great Depression [source]

Basically during WWI, England de-pegged the pound from gold, printed a shit ton of money

I mean it. Molyneux is actually one of the main voices that brought me from minarchist to Anarchist. Even a few years ago when I started listening to him, he always did have a few cringeworthy moments like that whole child abuse thing, but he had some amazing (to me, at the time) philosophical points that really hit home. Essentially, he just took public choice theory to its logical conclusion for me. For whatever reason, the hints of idiosyncrasies in his old content have evolved into full-blown bat-shit craziness (see edit) and have taken over his entire persona.

As a side note, I really loved when he and Peter Joseph had it out. I started clapping my dorit

Phoenix police chief, Daniel Garcia was just fired. Technically he was fired for holding a press conference effectively begging to keep his job (the irony). The question is: Why was he begging?

Apparently a few months ago an officer named Craig Tiger was caught driving drunk. After the fact, he came forward and said the entire thing was because he had PTSD from a previous shooting he was involved with. The Chief made the decision to fire him. Afterwards, Craig Tiger killed himself. Here is an interview of the chief talking about it, and you'll note in the comments people saying what an A-Hole the chief was for firing him (not that youtube comments are an indic

My understanding of the Comcast throttling Netflix is that Comcast was clearly in the wrong. If it weren't for them being the gov't-backed middleman for so many subscribers, they could never have gotten the money they extorted out of Netflix.

My understanding is Comcast was the bandwidth provider for its paying customers (who presumably all paid their bill), Cogent was the bandwidth provider for Netfix (who paid their bill), and the two of them being Tier 1 providers were supposed to work out a deal so their customers could interact at full speed. Adding to this is that that whole infrastructure argument was clearly nonsense as Comcast flipped a switch and the bandwidth was immediately "res

Say for a minute that the Federal Government spends everything it possibly can. For every dollar of revenue or debt they get their hands on, they spend it. Occasionally they screw this calculation up and the Fed steps in and buys the difference (QE, for instance), this is undesirable as it can create runaway inflation when done to excess, which will increase interest rates / debt service on future/existing debt.

Politically, politicians need to tax as little as possible and borrow as much as possible (because voters like government services more than they fear the national debt).

If you accept all these premises, wouldn't that mean that every dollar of extra tax revenue actually permits th

In this movie, written and directed by Uwe Boll, a guy loses everything in a recession, including his wife who effectively lost her insurance after getting cancer. He then decides to kill the capitalists that burned him.

The movie starts with a one-dimensional CEO of a brokerage basically "screwing" his clients over to serve his stock holders. Our protagonist had all of his apparently very large retirement savings in a mortgage-backed securities fund that this CEO is apparently responsible for destroying. After an unnecessarily long sob story about how a hard-working guy get