According To The Kauffman Index of Startup Activity1 the share of new entrepreneurs who started businesses to pursue opportunity rather than from necessity is now up more than 12 percentage points higher than in 2009 at the height of the Great Recession. This of course is a very encouraging nationwide trend and I extend my admiration to all those individuals who have ventured out into an endeavor where only about half survives the first five years in operation. Obviously, by any measure, these are certainly not great odds so I also applaud their courage and their desire to start their very own enterprise.

I argue in my talk that Nelson Nash should be considered an intellectual heir to the founder of the Austrian School of Economics, Carl Menger. The specific thread that ties these two men together is the subject of capital. Unfortunately, the idea of capital is fuzzy. Ask 100 people what it is, you’ll get 150 answers.

The many contradictions among different philosophical theories have caused much confusion over the years. Unfortunately, too few teachers and textbooks explain the basic principles that could help students discriminate
intelligently among them and understand the ethical code which fosters freedom, morality and social cooperation. Thus, Henry Hazlitt deserves special credit for bringing logic and clarity to the subject. His book, The Foundations of Morality, was first published in 1964. After having been out of print for several years, it is again available thanks to Nash and the Institute for Humane Studies.

When I wrote Building Your Warehouse of Wealth, a short chapter was devoted to my personal experience with U.S. Silver Eagle coins. A short review of the decision to purchase these coins is necessary. In 1977 two partners and I bought some timberland on Interstate 20 in Talladega County, AL. On the North side of the highway we had the highest point in that broad valley — an ideal spot that attracted owners of cellphone towers. Several years later we got a lease from one of them at a modest annual income for five years — and with a provision that the income would increase 20% each five years as long as they wished to do so.

Individuals who own one or several dividend-paying Whole Life insurance policies that are designed in the special way advocated by Nelson Nash’s Infinite Banking Concept (IBC) are often faced with a perplexing question and a decision they must make whenever the need arises to purchase or pay for something.

Earlier in this series of articles I wrote a little bit about Social Security. But, it kept haunting me that there is much more that needs to be revealed about this unbelievable con game. And so, I offer just a few additional facts about it and my observations of human financial behavior because of it.

In the May 2017 issue of the LMR, I wrote the first part of this series. I began to tackle a common objection that Carlos and I get when we talk to crowds familiar with Austrian economics. Specifically, people wondered how Carlos and I could be in favor of the Infinite Banking Concept (IBC), after we had systematically explained that the Federal Reserve’s actions since 2008 had set the U.S. economy up for another crash, and also threatened the U.S. dollar. In such an environment, why in the world would somebody want to load up on a dollar-denominated asset like life insurance?

It is time to re-examine the origin of the word — ruminate. To do so we will have to understand “Cow Biology”: A cow has four stomachs. The rumen is the first — and by far — the largest compartment of the stomach of a ruminant from which food is regurgitated for rumination. She eats grass and chews on it in the first stage of digestion. She swallows it and it passes into the second stage of digestion in the rumen where it remains for a certain period.

A common method of showing the public the power of Nelson Nash’s Infinite Banking Concept” (IBC) is to stress its feature of “constant compounding.” In contrast to many other asset classes, dividend-paying Whole Life insurance always increases in value. Indeed, some proponents of IBC enthusiastically declare: “There’s nothing else like it!”