Doug Casey – Page 6 – The Burning Platform

“Democracy Is Overrated” Doug Casey’s Top 5 Reasons Not To Vote

Submitted by Doug Casey via InternationalMan.com,

Democracy is vastly overrated.

It’s not like the consensus of a bunch of friends agreeing to see the same movie. Most often, it boils down to a kinder and gentler variety of mob rule, dressed in a coat and tie. The essence of positive values like personal liberty, wealth, opportunity, fraternity, and equality lies not in democracy, but in free minds and free markets where government becomes trivial. Democracy focuses people’s thoughts on politics, not production; on the collective, not on their own lives.

Although democracy is just one way to structure a state, the concept has reached cult status; unassailable as political dogma. It is, as economist Joseph Schumpeter observed, “a surrogate faith for intellectuals deprived of religion.” Most of the founders of America were more concerned with liberty than democracy. Tocqueville saw democracy and liberty as almost polar opposites.

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Democracy can work when everyone concerned knows one another, shares the same values and goals, and abhors any form of coercion. It is the natural way of accomplishing things among small groups.

But once belief in democracy becomes a political ideology, it’s necessarily transformed into majority rule. And, at that point, the majority (or even a plurality, a minority, or an individual) can enforce their will on everyone else by claiming to represent the will of the people.

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Doug Casey: Why the Euro is a Doomed Currency

Doug Casey: Why the Euro Is a Doomed Currency

By Doug Casey

For a long time, I’ve advocated that the world’s governments should default on their debt. I recognize that this is an outrageous-sounding proposal.

However, the debts accumulated by the governments of the U.S., Japan, Europe and dozens of other countries constitute a gigantic mortgage on the next two or three generations, as yet unborn. Savings are proof that a person, or a country, has been living below their means. Debt, on the other hand, is evidence that the world has been living above its means. And the amount of government debt and liabilities in the world is in the hundreds of trillions and growing rapidly, even with essentially zero percent interest rates. This brings up several questions: Will future generations be able to repay it? Will they be willing to? And, if so, should they? My answers are: No, no and no.

The “should they” is one moral question that should be confronted. But I’ll go further. There’s another reason government debt should be defaulted on: to punish the people stupid enough, or unethical enough, to lend governments the money they’ve used to do all the destructive things they do.

I know it’s most unlikely you’ve ever previously heard this view. And I recognize there would be many unpleasant domino-like effects on today’s overleveraged and unstable financial system. It’s just that, when a structure is about to collapse, it’s better to have a controlled demolition, rather than waiting for it to collapse unpredictably. That said, governments will perversely keep propping up the house of cards, and building it higher, pushing the nasty consequences further into the future, with compound interest.

With that in mind, a few words on the euro, the EU and the European Central Bank are in order.

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A Huge Change, a Renaissance, and Likely a Boom

By Doug Casey

Some years ago I came to the conclusion that it would be wise to have a permanent footprint outside the U.S. It was a wise decision from many points of view. Living in more than one country allows you to vastly broaden your range of experiences, connections, and possibilities.

Frankly, living in just one country is not just limiting. It’s potentially dangerous. The question is, which of the world’s countries is “best”?

There are a lot of possible answers to that question, and they change over time. When my grandparents left the Old World, there was no question that the U.S. was the best choice. I’m extremely happy they chose to move there and not act like potted plants, rooted to the soil where they were born.

But things change. For decades, America has been changing…in the wrong direction. There’s too much fear. Too much force. Too many taxes. Too much regulation. Too much debt. It’s become as homogenized as an endless field of genetically engineered Monsanto corn, and is becoming just as unpalatable. The system itself has become unstable. I’ve been to over 145 countries, many of them numerous times, and lived in ten of them. I see the world as my oyster. All that travel has given me the opportunity to make some interesting comparisons.

That’s led me to Argentina. I came here for the lifestyle. But now I expect to make a bundle. Here’s why.

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Doug Casey: Why Do We Need Government?

This essay originally appeared in Doug’s hit book, Crisis Investing for the Rest of the 90s.

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Rousseau was perhaps the first to popularize the fiction now taught in civics classes about how government was created. It holds that men sat down together and rationally thought out the concept of government as a solution to problems that confronted them. The government of the United States was, however, the first to be formed in any way remotely like Rousseau’s ideal. Even then, it had far from universal support from the three million colonials whom it claimed to represent. The U.S. government, after all, grew out of an illegal conspiracy to overthrow and replace the existing government.

There’s no question that the result was, by an order of magnitude, the best blueprint for a government that had yet been conceived. Most of America’s Founding Fathers believed the main purpose of government was to protect its subjects from the initiation of violence from any source; government itself prominently included. That made the U.S. government almost unique in history. And it was that concept – not natural resources, the ethnic composition of American immigrants, or luck – that turned America into the paragon it became.

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‘Sitting Ducks in China’s Bathtub, an Overture to World War III?’

Sitting Ducks in China’s Bathtub, an Overture to World War III?

By Doug Casey

It’s always been true, as Bourne said, that “war is the health of the State.” But it’s especially true when economic times get tough. That’s because governments like to blame their problems on outsiders; even an imagined foreign threat tends to unify opinions around those of the leaders. Since economies around the world are all weakening, and political leaders are all similar in essential mindset, there’s good reason to believe the trend towards World War III is accelerating.

Many politicians and pundits in the U.S. blame “those damn Chinese” for taking “our jobs” by filling Walmart with tons of cheap goods, and the swarthy ragheads for making the price of oil too high (usually, but now too low).

The Russians, the Iranians, the Taliban (who will soon reconquer Afghanistan) and ISIS (which is carving out a new nation-state from the ruins of Syria and Iraq) are permanent members on the list of Bad Boys.

But now, since the Obama regime has decided to “pivot to the East,” you can underline China’s name on that list.

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Doug Casey on Education

(Interviewed by Louis James, Editor, International Speculator)

This interview was first published on October 21, 2009

Editor’s Note: The typical American thinks going to school is the best way to achieve success. As President Obama said in a 2012 presidential address, “If we want America to lead in the 21^st century, nothing is more important than giving everyone the best education possible – from the day they start preschool to the day they start their career.”

Casey Research founder Doug Casey has a very different take…

Louis James: Doug, in our recent conversation on global warming, you made some critical remarks about modern education. I know that wasn’t mere drive-by disparagement…can you tell us why you’re so hard on teachers today?

Doug: Sure. Since the school season started recently, it’s probably a good time to talk about schools and education.

L: School season? Is there a bag limit on how many schools you can take down?

Doug: Well, I think that most of the money that’s spent on so-called education is, if not wasted, definitely misallocated.

There was a book written a few years ago called something like All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. I have to admit I never read the book, but the title resonated with me. I think there’s a lot of truth behind the notion. To me, it implies that a person should have absorbed basic ethical values and an understanding how to relate to other people, animals, and objects by the time he’s six years old. Those are the most important things anyone can learn and should be the first things one learns. But it doesn’t seem any institution, and fairly few parents, think to teach them.

But the first thing to do is to ask: What is education?

L: Okay, I’ll bite. What is it?

Doug: Education is the process of learning how to perceive and analyze reality correctly. That would include subjects like ethics, science, history, and important literature.

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Doug Casey on the Nanny State’s Interference in Our Lives

By Doug Casey

(Interviewed by Louis James, Editor, International Speculator)

This interview was first published on March 14, 2012

Editor’s Note: In yesterday’s Weekend Edition, Casey Research founder Doug Casey explained why you should be skeptical of government “science.”

In today’s edition, Doug says the nanny state is tightening its grip on people’s lives…

Louis James: If we end up in a totalitarian police state or nanny state, I don’t want my children to lift their manacled wrists before my eyes and ask me why I didn’t resist while resistance was possible.

Doug: Indeed. In spite of the blatantly obvious and disastrous results of Prohibition, politicians have declared open season on drug users, then smokers, then gun owners – All Things Fun. How far can it be from regulating politically incorrect eaters to regulating just about everyone’s choices on every subject?

L: Not far…

Doug: And it gets worse. Now that we have socialized medical services in the U.S. (which is not the same as health care), genuine bad health choices that used to be individuals’ problems have become everyone’s problems, because we all have to pay for them. Socialized medicine is terrible; it’s entrusting medical services to the same bankrupt organization that can’t even deliver the mail reliably. It’s also a powerful excuse for the nanny state to monitor, inspect, interfere with, and control all aspects of our lives, from what we eat and drink all the way down to what we do in the privacy of our bedrooms…because everything can impact our health, which is now society’s obligation.

L: But it’s all for our own good. “If it saves one child…”

Doug: If it saves one child, how many children does it kill? If you ban Freon over an unproven fear that it contributes to ozone depletion, for example, and require use of a more expensive, less efficient, and incidentally more toxic and corrosive substitute, all because it might save one child, how many babies did you kill with spoiled milk and meat? What other consequences to your intervention are you ignoring?

This reminds me of the time Madeleine Halfbright was told that the sanctions she saw imposed on Iraq had killed about half a million children, and she answered: “Yes, it was costly, but we think it was worth it.” These people are hypocrites, and extremely dangerous. Sociopaths. They don’t care about saving human lives; they are more than willing to expend any number of them, like pawns on a chessboard, to advance their quest for power.

L: Bastiat’s broken window all over again: “the seen and the unseen.” But you’ve got to have a good cover story, like saving children’s lives.

Doug: Of course. If you say you’re doing it for the children, you can get away with almost anything.

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Doug Casey on the Nanny State

By Doug Casey

(Interviewed by Louis James, Editor, International Speculator)

This interview was first published on March 14, 2012

Editor’s Note: As you may have heard, the World Health Organization (an arm of the United Nations) issued a major report this week. The report claims that eating processed meat, like bacon, causes cancer. The report also says eating any kind of red meat may cause cancer.

In today’s Weekend Edition, Casey Research founder Doug Casey explains why you should always be skeptical of government “science”…

Louis James: Doug, you’re going to love this. There’s a new study out purporting to show that eating any amount of any kind of red meat is bad for you; making you 13% more likely to die, in fact. So, with your growing herd of cattle in Argentina, you’re close to becoming a mass murderer.

Doug: I saw that. I wonder what you have to do to make it 26% more likely to die. If I go back to skydiving, does that mean I’m 1,000% more likely to die? It’s rather strange, in that I always thought we’re all basically 100% likely to die.

It’s yet another sign of how degraded U.S. society has become, that something so ridiculous can be passed off as news. According to the LA Times article I read, the “study” was just a survey of people’s reported eating habits. So, at best (assuming people responded accurately and honestly) the survey might show us a correlation. But even a high-school student should be able to tell you that correlation does not establish causality. The typical science journalist may be even more ignorant and misinformed than the typical financial journalist, which is saying something. It’s why I read the papers mostly for entertainment.

L: The study failed to consider, for example, if those who reported eating more meat happen to include more people who ride motorcycles, party hardy, or engage in other higher-risk behaviors, which could easily be true of steak lovers. This survey wouldn’t catch such patterns. And yet I read one of the authors claiming:

“This study provides clear evidence that regular consumption of red meat, especially processed meat, contributes substantially to premature death … On the other hand, choosing more healthful sources of protein in place of red meat can confer significant health benefits by reducing chronic disease morbidity and mortality.”

Doug: It sounds as if the authors might have a political agenda. But what do you expect from government “science?” Much of it is politically driven, and if you don’t arrive at politically correct answers, funding might dry up.

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Doug Casey Answers Five of Today’s Biggest Investment Questions

By Doug Casey

Editor’s Note: Casey Research founder Doug Casey answered dozens of investment questions during the recent Casey Research Summit. We transcribed five of Doug’s best answers, and we’re sharing them with you below. What you’re about to read is Doug speaking to a live audience. His responses are unrehearsed.

• When asked about the implications of cheap oil…

Doug Casey: I always look on the bright side, and the bright side of low oil prices is that most of the countries that produce oil are just horrible places. Low oil prices will help to bankrupt the governments of these places, and that will, hopefully, set the stage for things to get better.

Look at the countries that produce a lot of oil: Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria…they’re all just horrible. It’s no accident. Easy wealth, owned by the state, is a formula for disaster.

Hopefully the oil price will bring on the collapse of the Saudi regime, one of the U.S.’s longtime puppets. It’s amazing how the U.S. has gone around and destroyed all kinds of regimes – most of which, frankly, were abusive and corrupt and needed killing – but the Saudis are one of the worst of them. Hopefully low oil prices and their ridiculous spending habits will bring down that terminally corrupt theocracy. Among others…

Another good thing about cheap oil is it should show anybody that’s got half a brain that Russia and Putin are non-entities. They’ve got a decent military, but all they can do is export oil. It’s like a primitive, third-world country with a first-world military. Well, kind of a first-world military.

So low oil prices are a very good thing. I don’t know how long they’ll stay low. But they’re going lower for the time being. Production is stable to up, but consumption is headed down with a slowing economy.

And I’m all for oil going even lower. I hope it goes down to $10 a barrel. At that point you can buy it reflexively and make a huge killing. But I’m still short oil at the moment.

• When asked who will win the U.S. election…

Doug Casey: I’ll put my money on Trump.

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Doug Casey’s Top Five Reasons Not to Vote

(Interviewed by Louis James, Editor, International Speculator)

This interview was published on October 22, 2012

Editor’s Note: Longtime readers know that Casey Research founder Doug Casey doesn’t vote. In today’s Weekend Edition, Doug explains five reasons why voting isn’t just stupid, it’s evil…

Louis James: Doug, we’ve spoken about presidents. We have a presidential election coming up in the U.S. – an election that could have significant consequences on our investments. But given the views you’ve already expressed on the Tea Party movement and anarchy, I’m sure you have different ideas. What do you make of the impending circus, and what should a rational man do?

Doug: Well, a rational man, which is to say, an ethical man, would almost certainly not vote in this election, or in any other – at least above a local level, where you personally know most of both your neighbors and the candidates.

L: Why? Might not an ethical person want to vote the bums out?

Doug: He might feel that way, but he’d better get his emotions under control. I’ve thought about this. So let me give you at least five reasons why no one should vote.

The first reason is that voting is an unethical act, in and of itself. That’s because the state is pure, institutionalized coercion. If you believe that coercion is an improper way for people to relate to one another, then you shouldn’t engage in a process that formalizes and guarantees the use of coercion.

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Find Out What Doug Casey Is Buying Today

By Dan Steinhart

Doug Casey was asked to leave the stage…

If you’ve never heard Doug speak, you should. His controversial opinions always rile up the room. This time was no different…

The founder of Casey Research opened our ninth annual Casey Research Summit this weekend in Tucson, Arizona, with a lively talk about “the perversion of words.”

Longtime Casey readers know that Doug insists on precisely defining words. “If you can’t define a word,” Doug says, “then you actually don’t know what you’re talking about. Imprecise language leads to sloppy thinking.”

That’s why Doug was fired up to talk about the perversion of language in the United States…

• Doug said politicians have tried to change the definition of certain words…

“The politicians use these words to control the conversation…and all the monkeys follow along,” Doug said.

“Take the word ‘stimulate,’ as in ‘stimulate the economy,’” he said. “Where did that term come from? It really just means ‘print up money.’ But calling it what it is sounds bad. Politicians don’t want to say ‘print money.’ So they use terms like ‘stimulate’ and ‘quantitative easing’ instead.”

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Doug Casey on Guns

By Doug Casey

(Interviewed by Louis James, Editor, International Speculator)

This interview was originally published on March 17, 2010

Editor’s Note: In yesterday’s Weekend Edition, Casey Research founder Doug Casey explained his controversial views on drugs, alcohol and guns.

In today’s edition, Doug explains why it’s essential to own a gun…and tells us about the guns he personally owns.

L: What would you say to our European readers or readers from other places with less tradition of firearms ownership than there is in the U.S.? Many of them think that governments keep people safe, and that individuals should not have firearms – or any weapons at all – only the police should have them.

Doug: I think that’s a ridiculous attitude that flies in the face of history and the abundantly evident darker side of human nature. I think such people are both deluded and degraded.

It’s striking how much things have changed on this front as well. As late as the 1930s, the period of the Indiana Jones movies accurately portray the hero as taking his pistol with him anywhere in the world, even on airplanes. In the ’60s, when I was a kid, I put my rifle and my pistol in the overhead compartment on a couple of flights in the U.S., and nobody thought twice about it, including me. If you read Sherlock Holmes stories, which I’ve always enjoyed, you’ll find that not only was Sherlock Holmes a notorious smoker of tobacco, but he was also known to indulge in other chemical substances that are illegal today. And he would often sit at his flat on Baker Street, shooting his revolver into the mantelpiece to practice his marksmanship. It wasn’t mentioned, but I hope he was wearing ear protection.

L: Maybe he loaded his own ammo and made some light rounds for practice? He must have gone through a lot of mantelpieces…and had to replace the masonry of his chimney often. But that was a different world – many people say that individuals don’t need guns today, that they are an anachronism.

Doug: They are simply wrong. And fools. In places where it’s assumed that almost everyone has guns in their homes, like West Virginia and Alaska, the crime rate is very low. In places where guns have been outlawed in recent years, like Australia, violent crime rates have risen. And in Washington D.C., once the murder capital of the U.S., the crime rate plummeted after the city’s draconian anti-gun laws were reduced. Of course, that never gets mentioned in the popular press.

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The Deep State

By Doug Casey

Master speculator and economic expert Doug Casey believes a global financial crisis is just around the corner, which will result in what he has termed the “Greater Depression”…

This essay originally appeared in The Casey Report. In it, Doug details a hidden but powerful force known as the “deep state” that’s ruining the country.

Whether you agree with his views or not, I’m sure this will be one of the most educational – and most entertaining – pieces you read this year…

Until next time,


	Nick Giambruno Senior Editor International Man

The Deep State

By Doug Casey

I’d like to address some aspects of the Greater Depression in this essay.

I’m here to tell you that the inevitable became reality in 2008. We’ve had an interlude over the last few years financed by trillions of new currency units.

However, the economic clock on the wall is reading the same time as it was in 2007, and the Black Horsemen of your worst financial nightmares are about to again crash through the doors and end the party. And this time, they won’t be riding children’s ponies, but armored Percherons.

To refresh your memory, let me recount what a depression is.

The best general definition is: A period of time when most people’s standard of living drops significantly. By that definition, the Greater Depression started in 2008, although historians may someday say it began in 1971, when real wages started falling.

It’s also a period of time when distortions and misallocations of capital are liquidated, and when the business cycle, which is caused exclusively by currency debasement, also known as inflation, climaxes. That results in high unemployment, business failures, uncompleted construction, bond defaults, stock market crashes, and the like.

Fortunately, for those who benefit from the status quo, and members of something called the Deep State, the trillions of new currency units delayed the liquidation. But they also ensured it will now happen on a much grander scale.

The Deep State is an extremely powerful network that controls nearly everything around you. You won’t read about it in the news because it controls the news. Politicians won’t talk about it publicly. That would be like a mobster discussing murder and robbery on the 6 o’clock news. You could say the Deep State is hidden, but it’s only hidden in plain sight.

The Deep State is the source of every negative thing that’s happening right now. To survive the coming rough times, it’s essential for you to know what it’s all about.

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Three Reasons Why the U.S. Government Should Default on Its Debt Today

By Doug Casey

The overleveraging of the U.S. federal, state, and local governments, some corporations, and consumers is well known.

This has long been the case, and most people are bored by the topic. If debt is a problem, it has been manageable for so long that it no longer seems like a problem. U.S. government debt has become an abstraction; it has no more meaning to the average investor than the prospect of a comet smacking into the earth in the next hundred millennia.

Many financial commentators believe that debt doesn’t matter. We still hear ridiculous sound bites, like “We owe it to ourselves,” that trivialize the topic. Actually, some people owe it to other people. There will be big transfers of wealth depending on what happens. More exactly, since Americans don’t save anymore, that dishonest phrase about how we owe it to ourselves isn’t even true in a manner of speaking; we owe most of it to the Chinese and Japanese.

Another chestnut is “We’ll grow out of it.” That’s impossible unless real growth is greater than the interest on the debt, which is questionable. And at this point, government deficits are likely to balloon, not contract. Even with artificially low interest rates.

One way of putting an annual deficit of, say, $700 billion into perspective is to compare it to the value of all publicly traded stocks in the U.S., which are worth roughly $20 trillion. The current U.S. government debt of $18 trillion is rapidly approaching the stock value of all public corporations — and that’s true even with stocks at bubble-like highs. If the annual deficit continues at the $700 billion rate — in fact it is likely to accelerate — the government will borrow the equivalent of the entire equity capital base of the country, which has taken more than 200 years to accumulate, in only 29 years.

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