[Editor’s Note: The following post is by TDV contributor, Wendy McElroy]

First it was a secret “kill list” on which Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama names those he wishes to be assassinated. The names included American citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan who died in a drone strike in Yemen on September 30th, 2011. Neither was indicted or charged with a crime. They were killed as 'terrorists' at the discretion of one man whose signature now constitutes due process.

[Editor's Note: The following post is by TDV Editor, Gary Gibson]

Elizabeth Warren just realized that the minimum wage should be $22 if it had kept up with economic growth. She suspects in her tender, socially conscious heart that greedy employers have been shafting the lowest level employees. But she's laying her suspicions on the wrong bunch of people. She might want to read up on the currency debasement of the central bank, the command economy vampire that sits at the center of America's supposedly free market economy.

Follow (The Debasement Of) The Money

[Editor's Note: The following post is by TDV Editor-in-Chief, Jeff Berwick]

While European politicos negotiate in Brussels, deciding the fate of other people's money in Cyprus, the free market has already moved in to help Cypriots get access to their money via other means...

Banks have been closed for the last week in Cyprus and if they do re-open on Tuesday, it has now been announced that daily withdrawal limits at ATMs will be 100 euros per day.  

A Good Life And Its Punishment

"Gary, I fear what will become of you, but you will always have my admiration. You are a man of both principle and courage, and you will likely suffer the fate of one." I received the preceding communication when I asked readers whether the Parting Shot should live or die. We featured some of the responses on Feedback Friday, but this one haunted me like an omen.

Hello from Georgetown, Guyana,

No, it's not in Africa. Don't feel bad though, I didn't really know where Guyana was either.  But if you are looking to go to a place that is almost completely untapped for profitable potential, put Guyana on your list of places to consider.

It's a tiny country in the northeast of South America with an even tinier population of 750,000... but incredibly rich in natural resources and opportunity overlooked by almost everybody (hint: go where no one else is going). The amount of business opportunities is staggering. As with many such tiny countries like this you can very easily and quickly be in the conversation with all the most influential people.

It's officially spring, dear TDVers. A time of rebirth, a time of renewal. For those of you who live in locales infected by winter's cold, we congratulate you on enduring another brutal snow-filled, sub-zero winter, but we have to ask: What are you doing living in a place where there's winter, usually accompanied by taxes and socialism? Come south, and leave it all behind...

On to the feedback...

HANDOUTS

[Editor's Note: The following post is by TDV Editor-in-Chief, Jeff Berwick]

News came out yesterday that all Cypriot banks will continue to be closed until at least next Tuesday and may remain closed permanently.

Last week, the European Central Bank threatened to cut the Emergency Liquidity Assistance which Cyprus had been receiving unless Cyprus’ major banks implemented legislation which would “tax” all investors who have accounts in Cypriot banks an amount up to 9.9 percent of their total deposits. The tax was rejected by the Cyprus parliament on Tuesday.

[Editor's Note: The following post is by TDV researcher, Justin O'Connell]

“Without big banks, socialism would be impossible.” – Vladimir Lenin

Socialism is not crafted solely on the backs of standing human or robotic armies, police, and bureaucracy.

The modern state must also possess an apparatus of big banks, as Lenin wrote at the onset of the Bolshevik Revolution, for it is banks which perform most accounting and financial recording. In socialism, banks must be expanded, made more comprehensive and, in our globalized age, reach worldwide.

[Editor's Note: The following post is by TDV editor-in-chief, Jeff Berwick.]

The emergency bank holiday in Cyprus has been extended through Tuesday and Wednesday in what as far as the team at Dollar Vigilante has researched, will be the longest emergency bank holiday in Europe or North America since the Second World War.

Marking the first time during the five-year-old global credit crunch, depositors may be forced to pay upfront for their nation's bailout. European finance ministers are reaching into Cypriot savings accounts to backstop a 13 billion euro bailout for Cyprus. The decision was made public early Saturday morning, shortly after which Cyprus banks closed to slow down withdrawals.

[Editor’s Note: The following post is by TDV legal correspondent, Jim Karger]

“Everyone wants to live at the expense of the State. They forget that the State lives at the expense of everyone.” — Frederic Bastiat

Americans struggle.

Cars, houses, spouses, kids, jobs, bosses, and debt, to name a few, but they all boil down to one struggle: money. Or better said, the absence of money. Not enough money to buy a car, to take the wife to dinner, to send the kids to private school, to quit the crappy job, to shop like it was a sport, to take a vacation from a soul-dead existence, to pay off the credit cards, and the list goes on and on.