John T. Reed’s news blog

I look up the price of junk silver every ay in the WSJ. Today, it was $15,107 for a bag with $1,000 face value. That means those pre-1965 dimes, quarters, and half dollars are worth 15.107 times their face value..Jeez! That is the highest I recall in some time. It was only a few months ago that I wrote about how LOW that price was here. It was below $10,000 which I did not remember seeing in a long time..Then I turn to the next page in the WSJ and read the headline “Soaring Silver Prices Lure Haven Seeking Investors.”.Anybody...

You are hit with a daily barrage of intellectually-dishonest arguments Social media, the office water cooler, arguments with acquaintances, TV news. There is an inaccessible branch of academia that is supposed to teach you how to deal with this—the philosophy department of universities. They call it logic fallacies. But they are more interested in obfuscating the subject to keep it the sole province of the Ivory Tower than teaching it to you. How do they do that? By giving all logic fallacies a Latin name and by using Venn diagrams and phraseology like syllogism, set theory, inference, deductive, premise.  Plain English...

A facebook reader of mine said he thought Trump planned to default on the national after he wins the 2020 election as he did when he filed bankruptcy six times for his companies. Here is my answer:. Trump filed six Chapter 11 bankruptcies; one for a Manhattan hotel and the other five for Atlantic City Casinos..The president of the US does not have the power to default on the national debt. Indeed, it would be unconstitutional..Fourteenth Amendment, Section 4: The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and...

You can now order my new Book How to Spot Dishonest Arguments and keep your own thinking straight from my web site. However, it is not yet pictured on my home page. Underneath my photo is the word “books” with a carat. That part of the Web page is called the menu. Click on the word “books” and you get a pull-down menu with How to Spot Dishonest Arguments listed in it. If you click on the book title, you are taken to the books page where you can read more about it and order it.   I am waiting...

The second editorial in today's WSJ has the call out, "we are all modern monetary theorists now.".That is a take-off of a misunderstood statement by Milton Friedman that “We are all Keynesians now.” The late Friedman would likely be raving against the hyperinflation threat pose by our current national debt to GDP ratio, now up to 117.76% compared to the all-time record of 122% after WW II and the Korean War..Keynes was not even a Keynesian. He was a famous economist and economists get their greatest recognition when they give intellectual cover to politicians who want to use taxpayers money...