This article was first published at the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, November 20th, 2013:
Six federal agencies were invited to a Senate committee hearing on Monday to explain why each should be granted the privilege of regulating the Bitcoin. Four showed up:
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, March 30, 2018:
Vivien Kellems, American industrialist and tax protester
Vivien Kellems, along with her brother Edgar, invented a specialized cable grip for electrical cables and founded Kellems Cable Grips in 1927. The company prospered.
But in 1943, during the Second World War, Congress passed the Tax Payment Act, which required the payers of wages, not the receiver of wages, to withhold estimated taxes and remit them quarterly to the Bureau of Internal Revenue (later called the IRS).
The injustice was apparent to Vivien and in 1948 she refused, declaring that “If they wanted me to be their agent, they’d have to pay me, and I want a badge.”
They didn’t, and instead simply seized the amount the agency thought she owed from her company bank account. She sued in federal court and finally got her money back.
Withholding has allowed the government to collect far more money far more efficiently with far less bleating from the sheep as explained by the U. S. Department of the Treasury:
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, March 15, 2018:
The New York Times fairly chortled when it reported on Democrat Conor Lamb’s victory over Trump-endorsed Republican Rick Saccone in Tuesday’s special election in Pennsylvania. The liberal Times wrote:
Conor Lamb, a Democrat, pulled off a narrow but major upset by winning a special House election in the heart of Pennsylvania Trump country. Mr. Lamb won in the state’s 18th Congressional District, a reliably Republican seat in recent elections and an area that Donald J. Trump won by nearly 20 percentage points in 2016. The victory is an ominous sign for Republicans ahead of this year’s midterm elections.
What the Times failed to mention is that Conor Lamb won because he sounded more like a Republican than the Republican, taking pro-gun, pro-life, pro-tariffs, and — ready? — anti-Nancy Pelosi stands. Those stands are a warning to Democrats seeking to repeat Lamb’s victory: They will have to adopt much more conservative positions than usual to win in November.
Republican Representative Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania’s 3rd District said Lamb was “more like a Republican” in his positions. House Speaker Paul Ryan said the race was unique:
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, March 16, 2018:
Despite claims by the mainstream media that the victory of the Democrat in Pennsylvania’s special election on Tuesday over the Trump-endorsed Republican sounded the death knell for Republicans in November, the exact opposite is true. The only way Democrats have any chance of turning the 25 seats they need in the House in their direction is for them to become Republicans. That’s the lesson from Pennsylvania.
It wasn’t so much a battle of Republican versus Democrat but a battle of Americanist A versus Americanist B. Americanist A, one Conor Lamb, looks like he was selected from central casting: handsome, articulate, and skilled in public discourse. Americanist B, Rick Saccone, didn’t measure up. Lamb’s campaign supporting the Second Amendment, Trump’s tariffs, the local coal industry, the right to life for the unborn left Saccone without any leverage. How does one debate someone who already agrees with you on the basics?
Add in one more topic:
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, February 17, 2017:
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson said many things on which classical liberals and libertarians agree. The one most apropos to Obamacare is this: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”
Anything that requires government force (or threat of) to gain compliance is, on its face, immoral. But Obamacare did something else: it was a deliberate forced attempt to shift personal responsibility for one’s health care from a citizen to his government. Jefferson had this to say about that:
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, March 21, 2016:
Official Seal of the Government of the United Mexican States (Mexico) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Officially Mexico says it honors the sovereignty of the United States and has no intention of interfering with the presidential elections in November. Privately, however, Mexican diplomats are gearing up to help Mexican immigrants obtain U.S. citizenship, and then urging them to vote in November. Adrian Sosa, a spokesman for the Mexican consulate in Chicago, exposed the official posturing as a lie, speaking at an event last week:
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, September 11, 2015:
Milton and Rose Friedman published their work Free to Choose – A Personal Statement 35 years ago when it became a best seller, topping best seller lists for five weeks. Ten years later PBS created a telecast with Dr. Friedman interviewing, and often debating, experts from across the political spectrum, including Walter Williams on the right and Frances Fox Piven on the left.
In the video chapter “The Power of the Market” Friedman makes the point that the free market’s greatest benefit is the power of options: where to live, where to work, whom to marry, how to worship, and on and on.
Walter Wriston, considered by many to be the single most influential commercial banker of his time, serving as chief executive of Citibank from 1967 to 1984, condensed Friedman’s chapter into one pithy quote that reverberates today:
This article first appeared at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, January 21, 2015:
Libertarian economist Murray Rothbard
Coinciding with the announcement from the IRS that January 20 is the start of the 2015 tax season came the report from two wealth management consultancies, Wealth-X and National Financial Partners, that the largest transfer of wealth in world history is about to take place. With Obama’s help and the acquiescence of the Congress, the IRS is hoping to partake in the windfall.
According to the Family Wealth Transfer Report, an estimated $16 trillion of wealth belonging to 211,275 ultra-high net worth (UHNW) individuals worldwide will pass to their heirs over the next 30 years. $6 trillion of that wealth is
This article was first published at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, September 8, 2014:
In her promo for her article titled “America’s Car Capital Will Soon Be … Mexico,” which appeared in Forbes on Monday, Joann Muller claimed that “wise trade policies south of the border have quickly created the global auto industry’s factory floor” and wondered rhetorically if Washington was listening or watching to learn Mexico’s lesson. She wrote:
Seemingly overnight, Mexico’s automotive output has soared, bolstered by a flood of investment from foreign-based carmakers, including Nissan, Honda, Volkswagen, and Mazda. With $19 billion in new investment, production has doubled in the past five years to an estimated 3.2 million vehicles in 2014.
And it’s all because of NAFTA, she claims:
Jane Wells, a business news reporter for CNBC, after reviewing the latest report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on who pays income taxes in America, claimed that the rich pay them all. The CBO, wrote Wells, showed that the top 20 percent pay nearly 93 percent of all income taxes, while the top 40 percent
On the surface, the reelection of Chris Christie as New Jersey’s governor was remarkable, winning with a resounding 60% of the vote in a dark blue (liberal Democrat) state.
A closer look reveals that Christie was running as a Republican in name only, against a weak opponent who was earlier slated to lose by a much higher margin. Christie won for his ability to
The national media are beginning to pay attention to movements threatening to secede from existing states and form their own new ones. There’s even a competition between efforts in western Maryland, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, northern California’s Siskiyou County, and parts of southern Oregon to be the first to become the country’s 51st state.
None are as far along, however, as those efforts pushing to win the honor for
On Saturday Newsmax.com reported on Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) continuing attempts to revive interest in the House to consider the immigration bill the Senate just passed. He thinks that with a little tweaking the House can come to terms that the Senate would approve, and all will be well once again:
This article first appeared at the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor:
Peter Ferrara’s long and persuasive article in Forbes magazine last weekend is another body blow to the global-warming meme promoted by so many for so long: that anthropogenic (human-caused) warming will doom us all unless something is done! That something, of course, always and forever involves
When libertarian scholar Peter Ferrara asked rhetorically in Sunday’s issue of Forbes, “Economically, Could Obama be America’s Worst President?” he relied heavily on statistics provided by the chief enabler of the Great Recession,
You’ve no doubt been watching this technology unfold, perhaps more rapidly than anyone expected. But the day has arrived: anyone with a 3D printer and some software available on the internet for free can print his own gun. 3D printers are now for sale at just over $1,000. The software is available here.
The developer is a libertarian law student (is that an oxymoron?) from
It isn’t often that I conclude that Dan Mitchell misses the mark, but this time I do. He has a rule: “The private sector should grow faster than the government.” I like my rule better:
Sandy Ikeda, writing at The Freeman, offered his thoughts on what a truly free society would look like: how would it be organized? Who would build the roads? Who would pay for them, and how?
With the passing of British writer The Right Honourable The Lord Rees-Mogg, a voice that for more than 60 years resonated in the freedom firmament was stilled.
Upon graduation from Oxford in 1951 (as president of Oxford Union), William Rees-Mogg began his journalism career at The Financial Times in 1952. He moved to the Sunday Times in 1960 where he
On Tuesday, December 18th, Republican House Speaker John Boehner spelled out some of the details on his “Plan B” offer to the White House in case Plan A goes nowhere. It appears that Plan B will go nowhere as well, but not because of resistance from the White House, but from other House Republicans who are intent on keeping their word.
According to Boehner’s office, Plan B “Does not raise taxes. It is a net tax cut that prevents a $4.6 trillion tax hike on January 1.”
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