An End to Progress

Guest Post by Jeff Thomas

“Progress may have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.”

I’ve always been fond of that quote. Back when Ogden Nash wrote it, it was quite clever. Today, the quote is a bit less entertaining, as we are living in a period when, more and more, world leaders seem to be headed in the wrong direction – away from progress. As the Great Unravelling plays out, people are coming to the conclusion that the directions taken by their leaders are, in Doug Casey’s well-chosen words, not only the wrong thing to do, but the exact opposite of the right thing to do.

The first category in which this seems to be true is economics. Most world leaders are quite committed to the idea that Keynesian economics will provide all the answers to solve any economic problem. However, the further each country goes down the Keynesian road, the clearer it becomes that Keynesian theory simply does not work. In fact, many countries that have followed it are on the brink of economic collapse, yet they are charging forward all the more determinedly with solutions that are based upon the very theories that caused the problems.

Continue reading “An End to Progress”

Social Capital

Guest Post by The Zman

My dentist is located on a side street in a professional building. It’s one of those generic commercial buildings you see in business parks all over America. It’s not a big building, just two floors and half a dozen suites or so. It’s an odd stretch of road as there is a public library and a school on the street, along with my dentist, but the rest is a residential neighborhood of nice single family homes, most of which were built in the middle of the last century. It’s a nice little neighborhood where everyone knows one another.

Continue reading “Social Capital”