There's a lot of mystical, teary-eyed attachment, especially among my fellow libertarians, to the idea of a hard backing such as gold for the dollar.  The reality is simple supply and demand.  People need dollars to pay their taxes.  There is effectively no substitute.  Mortgages and other financial instruments in the U.S. are also tied to the dollar and there is no sign that somehow bitcoin or any other replacement - including gold - is immediately av...

Note: 12/12/2015  This blog was written shortly before the San Bernardino terror. Dylan Watkins, the founder (?), ramrod of OCVR kept telling me over the past year that my ideas were SOOOO close to this other writer that I HAD to check his book, Daemon.  Finally I remembered to Google and the first thing that shows up is " Daemon and Freedomᵀᴹ comprise a two-part novel by the author Daniel Suarez about a distributed, persistent computer application, known as The Daemon, th...

http://www.wenningadvice.com/?tag=federal-reserve-board Back around 2008, I posited that the U.S. was going exactly backwards, bailing out the crooks while ignoring the victims, the millions of people who lost their retirement or their homes.  Surprise, surprise, the crooks are now doing fine, while the victims are often still struggling to recover and, in many cases, failing. All reflected in the recent focus on financial inequality, of course. I suggested back then that a real pro...

I posted the blog below about two weeks back as a prequel to my commentary in my post on the solution for poverty. "Breaking news!  The world currency exchange bank has announced that things are looking uncomfortably like 2007 all over again.  People are reportedly bidding up "asset bubbles" right and left in a desperate, frenzied attempt to beat the odds and get something - ANY positive return on their money.  A few people at the top of these multitude of instant pyramids jump...

Alexis de Tocqueville got a lot of things right in 1831, but I don't specifically recall him envisioning how the elected officials would conspire to vote themselves entitlement to the treasure of the nation.  Maybe it was just too obvious to mention. The problem is that this has no easy legal solution.  These retirement funds are based on contracts mutually agreed to by bureaucrats for fellow bureaucrats, to be sure, but the elected officials who appointed the to-be-retirees or okay...

OK. Just for a moment, ignore the odds and assume that Ron Paul is prez. What could he actually DO ? Well, first off, the margin to get virtually any new legislation through would jump to 67%, in order to get past Paul's vetos. Only legislation that reduced illegitimate government (from a limited state libertarian point of view, not necessarily the same as my anarchist position) would make it without a two-thirds majority. So, every bill would probably come in as a trade-off, ...

Update: 08/29/09 The Tustin libary just opened its new branch last week, with something on the order of 75 computers for adult use, plus the wifi.  The head manager of the library had assured me, several months prior, that bandwidth and access would not be a problem anymore.  (ROFL) I predicted that within two months the bandwidth problem would be back and they would have lines waiting for access, and I stated the argument for that prediction. It didn'...

See a previous discussion: Now it seems that a lot of people who otherwise qualified for assistance from FEMA in the Katrina disaster cannot get it, or have already lost their chance, simply because they weren't using Windose and IE6. I heard a long interview on NPR with a woman whose home, business, vehicles were all destroyed, so she found out about a limited time offer of a $2,000 debit card to families such as hers. Problem is, her only computer was her husband's Mac portable, with...

In Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" (which came in right after the Bible as the book that most influenced American's lives, when the Book of the Month Club did a survey in 1991 - not bad for a 1958 novel, which still sells quite briskly in 2005), there is a classic scene in which two of the good guys are facing a crew of state sleezebags who are utterly certain that they have them under their thumb. The baddies have succeeded in having passed a whole set of draconian laws which nobody could foll...

So, with just the lucky chance of my noticing from my mailing from the Orange County Peace Coalition that the IPC was meeting locally, I drove up to Anaheim after dealing with the gang once again at my storage unit (see my article Life Goes On... .).It took a while for the IPC quorum to arrive, and there was Rafael Ranteria, with yet another resolution to create racial/ethnic quotas for programming at KPFK. He literally wanted percentages for every group in the universe, and a rule that ...

I think if was back in the late '60's that the Reader's Digest published a little economic analysis showing what percentage of the costs of everyday items was taken up by taxes, tariffs, sudsidies, etc., as opposed to the full and complete costs of manufacturing, marketing and delivery to the store shelf. At that time, a loaf of premium bread would typically be on sale at the supermarket for $.25, or 4 for a dollar, which was about half or so of the typical retail price. According to the ...

OK, I've had it with so-called "intellectual property." It's a great idea in principle, but in practice it frankly sucks big time. Please see my "Virtually Real" article for more details. The bottom line is that, far from encouraging innovation by protecting intellectual property, the way our legal system and today's patent office works is that if you are a big corporation, then you can get and protect patents and you can pretty well ignore patents owned by anyone else who doesn't ha...

The other day, I attended a meeting of young Democrats - as in, early-teen - in order to hear one of the local adult candidates speak. There were actually only a couple of kids present, both resident children of the hosts, and they were right out of Harry Potter. They actually looked the parts - the boy, with his long black wizard cloak, could easilly have done Harry, with some glasses - and the girl had that distracted eatherial quality, not to mention being quite beautiful, and was wear...

I was asked to write up my experiences as a homeless person recently for use in a possible dramatic presentation. I haven't really qualified for the title for over a decade, so much of my knowledge may be out of date, but here goes: When I moved to California in early '76 to start the revolution, I had about $1,000 total in cash, plus a large camper pickup truck full of my junk. At that time, $1,000 was five or six months rent for a decent-sized apartment or a small house in Long Beach. ...

In the early '80's I ran into an interesting guy who was not a libertarian, to my surprise, especially as we met at a party hosted by Anthony L. Hargis & Co., a gold depository service. Hargis had started his gold depository in the mid-'70's, offering a way for people to reduce exposure to inflation by accounts denominated in either gold or dollars. Hargis' main focus was on capital preservation, although the feds have recently alleged that some of his customers may have been using his se...