Paradocracy

In Minneapolis, Minnesota, two recent shootings involving officers of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency have left two citizens dead. This has caused an uproar from those who don’t appreciate the simplicity of this issue, those who have their clever ways of getting around or ignoring these simple facts: those who enter or remain illegally within the borders of the United States are criminals and fugitives from justice. Those who interfere with or obstruct any lawful investigation or lawful apprehension of such persons are also in violation of the law. Beyond this, any added complexity amounts to obfuscation, complexity for the sake of confounding the issues and confusing minds, reframing for purposes of virtue-signaling, fomenting outrage, or attempting to moralize and thereby draw people into the protests (whether as active participants or as contemptuous supporters).   In almost every case, however, it is a person distracted or hypnotized by the narrative, away ...

At the time of this writing, the price of silver is down over $31/oz (27 percent) on the day, with gold posting losses of $480/oz (8 percent). These are huge losses, growing larger as the sell-off creates its own momentum as markets approach the Friday close. With this historic sell-off during American trading hours, gold is now trading below the $4,900/oz level, with silver trading below $84/oz. These represent the steepest dollar declines in the two metals since 2011, after gold and silver peaked above $1,900/oz and $49.50/oz, respectively.  On September 23, 2011, silver posted a single-day decline of 16.5 percent, with gold sliding by 6 percent on the day. The case of 1980 was even more extreme: on January 22, 1980, gold prices declined by more than 13 percent; a couple of months later, on March 27, 1980, silver prices were slashed in half. As for today's sell-off, it comes just days after silver and gold set all-time highs (at least nominally), when the metals rose to around $1...

There have been many private sellers coming out of the woodwork since the silver spot price busted through the $100/ounce level, and since gold followed suit in shattering what many have erroneously regarded as the $5,000/oz “ceiling”. By all appearances, prices for both metals shot right through those levels without as much as a passing glance. Now there are many who have already started making sales, whether of their physical metals or some shares of mining stocks. Some small. Some fairly substantial. And then some, like the prominent investor Rick Rule, liquidating large chunks of their portfolios.  When Rick Rule made this announcement at the Metals Investor Forum in Vancouver, Canada, on the 24th of January, he made a number of excellent points, issued sound guidance on the probable course of the current bull market, and ultimately urged his audience to not “waste this bull market”. He proclaimed that, while this bull market may go on for years, those who believe that 2026 wil...

There are many people who reject ‘anarchy’ without truly understanding what it is; without understanding that — far from the chaos with which it is associated, and far from the violent malcontents who erroneously call themselves ‘anarchists’ — true ‘anarchy’ is the ultimate desirable outcome, the great ideal that is not only necessary in adherence to universal ethics but the end goal of any system truly embracing liberty. It is merely, by definition, the absence of government; or, put another way, the absence of that system which maintains a monopoly over the institutions of force and coercion in a given jurisdiction.   Critics would be correct to point out that ‘anarchy’ would bring about chaos and disorder in America today, but what they (conveniently or otherwise) neglect to acknowledge is that the modern conditions are due precisely to the defects of statism, and that statism (being the very antithesis to anarchy and liberty) assures an even more extreme suffering, just one tha...

When people in the precious metals space call fiat currencies ‘worthless’, it is (1) in comparison to sound money (and superior long-term stores of value) and (2) relative to low-risk opportunity costs and asset classes that actually preserve wealth and protect against the threat of inflation.  Fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar are best utilized as mediums of exchange to cover immediate costs or to meet short-term liabilities.  In fact, the very reason that so many people are willing to assume long-term debt obligations denominated in dollars is that they expect the dollar to continue to decline toward ‘worthlessness’; the fact that the dollar has lost roughly ninety-nine percent of its real value (more or less, depending on the basis of comparison) since the conception of the Federal Reserve in 1913, and the fact that the Federal Reserve guarantees a minimum level of two percent inflation per annum, the dollar is a guaranteed losing proposition.  When considering the ...