The Humble Libertarian original

One set of rules for small business owners. Another set of rules for the people who make the rules. How many more examples are we going to need?

"Imagine living in a home that costs you nothing to heat or cool. Imagine building this home yourself. Imagine growing your own vegetables year-round in this home. Imagine no utility bills. Imagine easily available, limitless natural [and salvaged] resources to build this home..." Expect to start hearing more survivalists ( like this one ) talk about earthships. These are just way too cool. I want one:

By: Wes Messamore This nasty period of high unemployment that has plagued the U.S. economy since 2009 will not come to an end until policymakers begin to think more economically. Read my entire article at The Independent Voter Network . Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

By: Wes Messamore In this ninth full episode of the back-from-the-dead Wes Messamore show , Wes Messamore and Drew Martin take your calls to discuss the intersection of Liberty and Finance. They will also be interviewing Tom Brown of The TGB Report . Show runs from 5 - 7pm Central today (Friday, April 6), streaming live to your computer! Visit this page to tune in or to catch the archived podcast afterward if you miss the live show. We will be taking your calls ! Call in number is: (646) 716-4214. If you missed Monday's awesome episode on alternative libertarian strategies for achieving a free society, you can listen to the archived podcast of it here ! Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

By: Wes Messamore What do you do when one of the very few economic analysts to predict the financial crisis would strike in ’07 or ’08 says another, even more catastrophic economic collapse will hit the United States economy in 2013 or 2014? Read my entire article at The Independent Voter Network . Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

"Watch this you guys! I am now holding down inflation levels through mind control." Have you ever seen those short infomercials about some pill that you can take before a night of heavy drinking and *using my smooth, deep, infomercial announcer voice* magically wake up refreshed and alert the next day! No more headaches! No more hangovers! Our proprietary, patent-pending formula has been proven in clinical trials to… blah blah blah, blahblah blah blah… yours today for only $19.99! Yeah, I never believed those commercials and I never ordered their little pill. Actions have consequences. Drinking too much will stress the body in all kinds of nasty ways that lead to a hangover the next day. You’ll feel good while you’re doing it, but there’s just no such thing as a magic pill to avoid the effects of partying hard. I also don’t believe the Federal Reserve’s new approach to quantitative easing that could boost the economy without causing inflation. I’m actually ...

When I first heard the news that Texas Congressman Ron Paul waved a silver coin at Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke during his testimony at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee Wednesday, I was instantly excited to write this week’s Fed News Friday piece. While waving the coin at Bernanke, Rep. Paul lectured him about the importance of sound commodity-based money that holds its value over time, as opposed to paper and electronic fiat dollars that all-too-easily lose their value as the central bank issues more and more currency. As he waved the one ounce silver coin, Paul said: “You took over the Fed in 2006. I have a silver ounce here, and this ounce of silver back in 2006 would buy over four gallons of gasoline. Today, it will buy almost 11 gallons of gasoline. That’s preservation of value.” I was thrilled to hear sound-money advocate Ron Paul use the same illustration we’ve been using here at Silver Circle , both on this blog and at our booth ...

The Christian Science Monitor reports : “Obama sought to deflect growing Republican attacks over rising prices at the pump, blaming recent increases on a mix of factors beyond his control, including tensions with Iran, hot demand from China, India and other emerging economies, and Wall Street speculators taking advantage of the uncertainty.” But it gets better. It gets so much better. You’re not going to believe what else Obama actually said while defending himself against criticism over rising gas prices. It’s so perfect one can’t help but wonder if it was intentional and Obama is being deliberately, malevolently funny. Here it is, also from the Monitor : Read the rest of my article at T he Silver Underground . Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

Amid the heated rhetoric of a presidential election year, President Barack Obama’s latest federal budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2013 is already eliciting strong reactions from both sides of the partisan divide and foreshadowing a big, politically-charged fight over taxes and spending... Read the rest of my article at The Independent Voter Network . Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

The day after a big win in Florida, Mitt Romney tells a CNN anchor he isn't concerned about the poor : Romney says, "I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair , I'll fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich.... I'm concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling." O'Brien asked him to clarify his remarks saying, "There are lots of very poor Americans who are struggling who would say, 'That sounds odd.'" Romney continues, "We will hear from the Democrat party, the plight of the poor.... You can focus on the very poor, that's not my focus.... The middle income Americans, they're the folks that are really struggling right now and they need someone that can help get this economy going for them." This is just so much more evidence of exactly what I was explaining in a post Monday , when I said that Mitt Romney...

Oops. California's government is coming up $3.3 billion short by March. Some lawmakers are acting like it's a minor hiccup. Some analysts say Facebook's IPO will save the Golden State's finances. Wesley Messamore says this is no minor hiccup and there's no way the NASDAQ is going to fix CA's problems: Read it all at IVN.us . Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

Last week, we explored the three functions that money serves and learned that money has enabled so many of the modern world’s advances in material prosperity and standards of living by acting as a: 1) Medium of exchange, 2) Unit of account, and 3) Store of value. If you haven’t already read it, please read What is money? (Part I) to familiarize yourself with these roles that money plays and why they are so essential to the material success we all enjoy today. If you’ve read Part I, you’re ready for Part II below, where we’ll explore what characteristics money has to have in order to fulfill these roles… Read the rest of my article at The Silver Underground . Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

“Crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.” -MIT economist Rudiger Dornbusch At President Obama’s State of the Union Address this year, which was heavy on recycled platitudes and light on substance , the president did more to prepare for the upcoming general election than actually give a genuine assessment of the state of the union, but that’s pretty par for the course. A sincere state of the union by the President of the United States may be more than most Americans are ready for yet– the horror of listening to the president describe the true economic realities we face might be more than many people could handle. I hope I’m wrong and most Americans would welcome an honest word from a major politician as a breath of fresh air. What would a sincere state of the union address look like? The president could just show us graphs of economic data and leave it at that. It would be the most radical truth-t...

By Grant Davies About a month ago I was fortunate enough to attend a book signing luncheon   in downtown Chicago, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, where I had the opportunity to hear Tom Palmer make a presentation on the topic of a new book that he edited, titled The Morality of Capitalism . A small book full of big ideas, it's very readable and I recommend it highly. During that speech*, Palmer (who, because I was a few moments late, was lucky enough to be seated next to me for lunch) referred to a term that I immediately knew would, at some point, be used when I got around to writing about what I consider to be a huge, but often ignored, problem. Even though I'm a know-it-all, somehow I always learn something fun and useful at these luncheons. The term was "undertaker" and the etymology was explained as; "an old English phrase meaning; one who undertakes some activity or task", or as it might be expanded, a risk or a business. The more mode...

No, no, no! Emphatically, NO ! This Friday, I covered the release of five-year-old transcripts last week by the Federal Reserve which show just how clueless everyone at the Fed was about the impending housing crisis and economic crash. If you didn’t give it a read, I highly recommend you check it out so you can marvel for yourself at “just how clueless everybody at the Federal Reserve was about the very thing that they are supposed to be the most well-informed and best-able to forecast and positively influence.” In the article, I also point that there were many economic commentators (mostly of the Austrian school of economic thought) like Congressman Ron Paul and investment broker Peter Schiff who were able to predict the economic calamity to come, even with with less privileged knowledge than that available to the Federal Reserve’s open market committee members. So is the solution to simply fire Ben Bernanke and company ( as Newt Gingrich proposes ) and replace th...

New Op-Ed By: Wes Messamore Mitt Romney has done well for himself in early Republican Primary contests this year, but what he doesn't want you to know is that if Wall Street had a primary, Mitt Romney would win that too. His top three contributors this election cycle are Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse Group, and Morgan Stanley. In addition to these three, four more of Mitt Romney's top ten contributors are also "too-big-to-fail" banks and giant international financial corporations, including: HIG capital at #4, Barclays at #5,  Bank of America at #7, and JPMorgan Chase & Co at #10. Of the remaining three of Mitt Romney's top ten donors, two are major international law firms that consult and litigate for big finance: Kirkland & Ellis and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Sullivan & Cromwell is another major law firm that heads up Romney's biggest supporters, clocking in at #14 on his list of top donors and followed by even more big Wall Street banks, with ...

Doug Wead on Fox Business tells Neil Cavuto that Ron Paul may be the economic Winston Churchill for America. Doug refers to Ron Paul's Sept. 10, 2003 detail prediction of the coming crisis. Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

ABC News reports : Romney Gives Unemployed Woman Cash on Ropeline Amid shaking hands and signing campaign posters, Mitt Romney did something he has never done before on the ropeline: He took out his wallet and handed a wad of cash to a woman waiting to shake his hand. The woman, 55-year-old Ruth Williams, says she has been following the Romney campaign since he arrived in the state on Jan. 11, when she said she received a message from God to track him down... “He was kind to me and he made Gov. Haley come see about me,” Williams said. “He stopped doing everything.” Williams, who would not specify how much money Romney gave her, said also that South Carolina Treasurer Curtis Loftis paid her light bill on Thursday. A spokesman for Loftis, one of Romney’s major endorses in the state, confirmed to ABC News that he paid Williams’ bill. While Loftis didn’t know the amount of the bill, he confirmed that he gave her $150. “God didn’t tell me to go to nobody else, he told me to pra...

Yesterday the Fed released transcripts of its meetings that show just how clueless they all really were about the impending economic crash. At this point do they have ANY credibility left? Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

It was October of 2009 near the end of President Obama’s first year in the White House. The Tea Party was at its zenith, raging across America in full swing in opposition to Washington’s Wall Street bailouts, the trillion dollar stimulus package from earlier that year, Obama’s health care plan, a lagging economy, and a 10-percent unemployment rate. The previous month, one million Tea Party activists swarmed Washington DC to make their voices heard ( yes, one million , probably more! ). Obama was under close scrutiny and facing strong criticism (some of it warranted, some of it maybe a little far-fetched) for every liberty he took, from his ritzy Valentine’s Day vacation with Michelle Obama, to his occasional indulgence of a cigarette, to his golf game. So of course, we all remember the fallout over Obama’s lavish, star-studded, Alice in Wonderland-themed Halloween party that October, right? No? That’s because the White House was awfully shy about publicizing the details o...