Social Issues

Brazil's landmark labor reform bill, intended to relax the country's restrictive labor laws and a main plank of embattled President Michel Temer's efforts to bolster investment and pull the economy out of its worst recession ever and widely seen as the country's second most important reform agenda after the Pension bill, was unexpectedly rejected by a special committee in Brazil's senate, with 10 votes against it, 9 in favor and 1 abstention. 

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

In recent years, we've examined any number of ways of decentralizing the American political system. These step-by-step moves can include decentralizing the monetary system, decentralizing the military, decentralizing immigration policy, and decentralizing elections.

Via The Daily Bell

The leviathan created by the modern welfare state is one of the gravest threats facing the American republican system. Dangers levied by the continued use of the government’s dole come both fiscally and socially. Fixes being floated from Congress to community organizations still lack a cohesive focus on reform in the mainstream public discourse.

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The "fixes" to the stagnation of postwar Capitalism in the 1970s were financialization, globalism, and the sustained expansion of debt--all have run out of steam.

Via Global Macro Monitor,

The last words my father spoke to me before he died in 1996 was, [“Gregor], somebody is going to have to do something to help the poor.”

Fast forward to 2017.   Never has the wealth gap in America been so wide.  This creates the initial conditions for a very uncertain and potentially unstable and explosive political and economic future.