Those who are familiar with the work of thinkers like Milton Friedman know that inflation is actually a second form of taxation that is caused by government action, and acts by eroding the purchasing power of dollar-denominated assets.  This effect happens when the government increases the amount of currency in circulation faster than the growth of real production.  The net effect is more dollars chasing after fewer goods and services.
The inevitable “next question” is to find out what inflation means to us as individuals, and how we can fight against …

An article was recently published by Reuters entitled: “The New American Dream is Renting to Get Rich.” The thesis of this article is that home ownership is not the fast-track to wealth that it used to be.  It also makes the point that many people would be better off renting and investing their surplus income in wealth-building investments than by sinking all of their income into owning a home.  The article also went on to explain how many people who had purchased homes during the boom lacked the financial resources …

Anybody who has taken accounting classes in school is familiar with the terms asset and liability.  Typically, assets are things you own that have value, and liabilities are obligations that you owe to pay for your assets.  This definition is very consistent with how accountants view the world, but Robert Kiyosaki has advanced a different way of viewing assets and liabilities that may be very enlightening.
Kiyosaki advocates classifying ‘assets’ as things that generate cash flow and ‘liabilities’ as things that cause a cash outflow.  This perspective throws a large monkey …

Of all the information that is available in the universe, it is the information we don’t know that is the most important.  The reason for this is because things that we do not know are that which create the greatest risks.  Overpaid mathematicians who wear ties and have long titles develop elaborate models to coax their feeble minds into a false sense of security because of a statistical model that says their risk of failure is impossibly low.  The principal problem that these pseudo scientists continually fail to internalize is …

One of the peculiar things about the human condition is that we tend to look backward while we are attempting to move forward.  When the problem shifts from individuals to organizations and government, the problem becomes much greater in severity and much larger in scale.  The fundamental reason why human beings look backward so often when seeking wisdom, is that past experience is something that feels concrete while the future is always murky and unknown.
The inherent danger in this tendency to grasp what we know and scorn what unknowable is …