Facts don’t speak for themselves. We have to have some kind of worldview to interpret the facts, to filter them, to process them, to organize them. We all suffer from confirmation bias. Facts that challenge our worldview tend to be ignored, minimized, or dismissed as irrelevant. This does not mean that facts don’t matter. Or that evidence is irrelevant. Or that ideologies never change. We learn. We adapt. Uncomfortable facts or evidence that conflict or that at least seem to conflict with our pre-existing ideologies and philosophies and theories can get under our skin and the itch won’t go away. So we can switch. Communists recant. Capitalists can move to the left. People give up the religion they were raised in. They convert to other religions. Atheists can become religious. Lapsed adherents can re-attach themselves to their faith. But these types of changes in science and social science are typically not epiphanies. We change slowly. Evidence accumulates that makes us increasingly itchy and our views eventually evolve and adjust.

Given that the Fed’s official policy is to drive all interest rates to near zero, one may conclude that the Fed seeks to impoverish the widows, orphans, retired people, and all other financially untutored people who rely on interest earnings to support themselves in their old age or adversity. Can a crueller official policy be imagined, short of grinding up these unfortunate souls to make pet food or fertilizer? The politicians constantly bark about their solicitude for those who are helpless and in difficulty through no fault of their own. Yet, the scores of millions of people who saved money to support themselves in old age now find themselves progressively robbed by the very officials who purport to be their protectors. There are many reasons to oppose the Fed’s policy. The reason brought to mind by the official enthanasia of the nation’s small savers deserves far more attention than it has received to date.

Economists at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have just released what they claim to be the crystal ball of economics: a model for predicting a nation’s future growth more accurately than any other techniques out there.

Isn’t society better off when half the population is well off and half is less poor than if absolutely everyone is poor? Isn’t all the talk about inequality really just an urge to see the poor increase their living standards? And if that is true, shouldn’t the whole idea of equality be thrown out in favor of a hope for everyone in society to benefit on the margin from economic growth?

Wealth is not a pizza where, if I have too many slices, you have to eat the Dominos box. My wealth does not create your poverty. Your wealth does not create my poverty. They’re separate questions. And we can generate more wealth.

What is “value” in a world where the single goal of the powers-that-be is to deny the market the ability to have its constituents’ underlying ordering of wants accurately reflected in the price structure? We have no proper market in capital; severely impaired markets in any number of basic goods; false markets in real estate; distorted markets in labour (hence why so many poor souls are still without jobs) and no certainty about anything except the awful certainty that nothing is off limits to those who are desperately trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again in time for the next turn of the electoral cycle rather than accepting the fact that he’s shuffled off this mortal coil and that it would be better now to see whether at least we can salvage a half-decent omelette out of the remains?

If corporations are greedy profit-seekers, why would they risk customers not being able to pay unless they believed that those mortgages could be sold off to government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie and Freddie who would, as they did, get bailed out by the government? If all the traffic lights in Watertown were stuck on green, we’d hardly blame the drivers for the ensuing accidents. When government distorts the signals and incentives facing producers and consumers, the blame for the resulting disaster should fall on government not the private sector. The crisis and recession are what happens when you put “people before profits.”

I’m an American underwater in debt and with a stagnant income. Which group should I support: the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street?