Paradocracy

In his riveting new work Pragmatic Capitalism , Cullen Roche, founder of Orcam Financial Group, a San Diego-based financial firm, sets out to correct the mainstream schools of economic thought, focusing on  Keynesians, Monetarists, and Austrians alike. This new macroeconomic perspective claims to reveal What Every Investor Needs to Know About Money and Finance . Indeed, Roche introduces the layman to various elementary principles of economics and financial markets, revealing in early chapters the failed state of the average hedge fund and mutual fund operators  —  who are better car salesmen than financial pundits, Roche writes  —   who have fallen victim to the groupthink phenomenon, responsible for their nearly perfect positive correlation to the major indexes; and thus, accounting for tax, inflation, and service adjustments, holistically wiping out any value added by their professed market insight.  Roche also references popular stu...

The most radical extremist is the one whose personal understanding of self is incompatible with the mystic expectation held by the sum of thoughtless, unquestioning, and uninspired persons who comprise society. The most radical extremist is he who has developed an understanding far too complex and enigmatic to even momentarily halt the inertia of the ever-developing and familiar establishment of the institutional status quo. To challenge the status quo is to question the progress of mankind. To challenge the absurd momentum of illogical opinion is to make you a person, and no person shall trump the will of society.  No person shall rule over society unless that person is to further the development of society and its agendas. Somehow the extremist is the one who remembers that the smallest unit of society is the individual, and that without the preservation of that individual, "social progress" is moot and self-defeating. The very mention of extremism or radicalism isolates ...

There's been a lot of talk about Bitcoin and the electronic monetary system as both a sound mode of exchange and a substitute for conventional hedges against inflation. Bitcoin and its various counterparts are indeed fine ideas, and they unquestionably offer grand excitement for the fly-by-night-type investor; however, if you intend on planning for the long term, you may want to look beyond the gimmicks. Much like the tulip mania of the 1630s, or MySpace and its preceding dot-com flurry of the 1990s, and the eventual departure from Twitter and Facebook, Bitcoin and the other crypto-currencies will have their fame and will fade into the night, eventually forgotten by most but remembered by some as a cautionary tale.  Let us remember, money can conceivably take any form. The most effective form of money, however, is one which is valuable, usable, predictable, portable, divisible, acceptable, durable, fungible and scarce. The latter two of these characteristics are distinguishin...