Walter Williams' documentary Good Intentions based on his book, The State Against Blacks (1982). The documentary was very controversial at the time it was released and led to many animosities and even threats of murder.

In Good Intentions, Dr. Williams examines the failure of the war on poverty and the devastating effect of well meaning government policies on blacks asserting that the state harms people in the U.S. more than it helps them. He shows how government anti-poverty programs have often locked people into poverty making the points that:

- being forced to attend 3rd rate public schools leave students unprepared for working life
- minimum wages prevent young people from obtaining jobs at an early age
- licensing and labor laws have had the effect of restricting entrance of blacks into the skilled trades and unions
- the welfare system creates perverse incentives for the poor to make bad choices they otherwise would not

Dr. Williams presents the following solutions to these problems:

Failing Public Schools - Give parents greater control over their children's education by setting up a tuition tax credit or voucher system to broaden competition in turn revitalizing both public and non-public schools

Minimum Wages - Remove the minimum wage from youngsters to give more young people the chance to learn the world of work at an early age instead spending their free time idle an possibly falling into the habits of the street

Restrictive Labor Laws, Jobs Programs - Eliminate government roadblocks that prevent new entrepreneurs from starting their own business

Welfare Programs - Enact a compassionate welfare system such as a negative income tax which would remove dependency and dis-incentives for the poor to get themselves out of poverty

Scholars interviewed in the documentary include Donald Eberle, Charles Murray, and George Gilder.

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

- Thomas Jefferson

"The Congress shall have Power To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures; No State shall make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of debts. "

-U.S. Constitution

Find out why some feel the Federal Reserve’s practices are a violation of the U.S. Constitution and others feel it’s simply a bunch of organized crooks. Discover why experts agree the Fed is a banking cartel that benefits mainly bankers and their corporate clients as well as a Congress that would rather increase the National Debt to $9 trillion than raise taxes.

Money As Debt is a fast-paced and highly entertaining animated feature by artist & videographer, Paul Grignon. It explains today's magically perverse DEBT-MONEY SYSTEM in terms that are easy to understand.

Money As Debt II-Promises Unleashed explores the baffling, fraudulent and destructive arithmetic of the money system that holds us hostage to a forever growing DEBT... and how we might evolve beyond it into a new era. Bailouts, stimulus packages, debt piled upon debt...Where will it all end? How did we get into a situation where there has never been more material wealth & productivity and yet everyone is in debt to bankers? And now, all of a sudden, the bankers have no money and we the taxpayers, have to rescue them by going even further into debt

Check out his website: http://www.moneyasdebt.net/

Thanks to kirilk

"In 1996, in a documentary called "The MoneyMasters", we asked the question why is America going broke. It wasn't clear then that we were, but it is today. Now the question is how can we get out of this mess. Foreclosures are everywhere, unemployment is skyrocketing -- and this is only the beginning. America's economy is on a long, slippery slope from here on. The bubble ride of debt has come to an end.

"What can government do? The sad answer is -- under the current monetary system -- nothing. It's not going to get better until the root of the problem is understood and addressed. There isn't enough stimulus money in the entire world to get us out of this hole.

"Why? Debt. The national debt is just like our consumer debt -- it's the interest that's killing us.

"Though most people don't realize it the government can't just issue it's own money anymore. It used to be that way. The King could just issue stuff called money. Abraham Lincoln did it to win the Civil War.

"No, today, in our crazy money system, the government has to borrow our money into existence and then pay interest on it. That's why they call it the National Debt. All our money is created out of debt. Politicians who focus on reducing the National Debt as an answer probably don't know what the National Debt really is. To reduce the National Debt would be to reduce our money -- and there's already too little of that.

"No, you have to go deeper. You have to get at the root of this problem or we're never going to fix this. The solution isn't new or radical. America used to do it. Politicians used to fight with big bankers over it. It's all in our history -- now sadly -- in the distant past.

"But why can't we just do it again? Why can't we just issue our own money, debt free? That, my friends, is the answer. Talk about reform! That's the only reform that will make a huge difference to everyone's life -- even worldwide.

"The solution is the secret that's been hidden from us for just over 100 years -- ever since the time when author L. Frank Baum wrote "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz."

http://still2012.com/

Thanks to DrDissent - Film runs for around 200 minutes

THE MONEY MASTERS is a NON-FICTION, historical documentary that traces
the origins of the political power structure. The modern political power
 structure has its roots in the hidden manipulation and accumulation of
gold and other forms of money. The development of fractional reserve
banking practices in the 17th century brought to a cunning
sophistication the secret techniques initially used by goldsmiths
fraudulently to accumulate wealth. With the formation of the
privately-owned Bank of England in 1694, the yoke of economic slavery to
 a privately-owned "central" bank was first forced upon the backs of an
entire nation, not removed but only made heavier with the passing of the
 three centuries to our day. Nation after nation has fallen prey to this
 cabal of international central bankers.

http://still2012.com/

College Conspiracy debunks many myths, including the belief that Americans with college degrees earn $1 million more in lifetime income compared to high school graduates without a college degree.

The most important basic fact that most Americans don’t understand about 4-year colleges is that most Americans spend 6 years attending them before graduating. With U.S. tuition inflation for private colleges averaging 5.15% over the past half a decade, assuming this same rate of tuition inflation continues, a college with tuition of $30,000 today will have tuition of $38,563 in the sixth year a student attends it.

In College Conspiracy, NIA analyzes the total cost to attend college by factoring in not just rapidly rising tuition expenses, but also the interest payments on student loans, and the lost income that college students would have earned if they worked at an average entry-level job that doesn’t require a college degree.
read more

I.O.U.S.A. boldly examines the rapidly growing national debt and its consequences for the United States and its citizens. Burdened with an ever-expanding government and military, increased international competition, overextended entitlement programs, and debts to foreign countries that are becoming impossible to honor, America must mend its spendthrift ways or face an economic disaster of epic proportions.


Part of the series on Economics. Go here to browse films in this category

Excellent documentary about the british welfare state, and the lies it is founded on. Made by Martin Durkin, who also brought us the marvelous documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle". A real Hero, out there changing the world for the better! - Highly recommended.
(Found it on  Monokultur )


Interesting Q&A with the filmmaker followed the broadcast on Channel 4

Found it at Drokles´ place and thanks to Chooze for the upload

In times of crisis people seek strong leaders and simple solutions. But what happens when their solutions are identical to the mistakes that caused the very crisis?

'Overdose' is the story of the greatest economic crisis of our age - the one that awaits us.

The documentary traces the origins of the financial crisis and explores the eerie similarities with today's situation, where states like Greece, Iceland and even the U.S. seems to be in danger of collapsing.

Among those interviewed are experts who were mocked when they predicted the current crisis. Other interviewees include Nobel laureate Vernon Smith and former US Comptroller General David Walker (I.O.U.S.A).

The film is shot in the U.S., Sweden and Germany and makes extensive use of music, archive footage and graphics

connect on facebook

18-part playlist - runs for about 11 hours
Thanks to LibertyInOurTime for this upload!
"This is Ludwig von Mises's magnum opus, the magisterial contribution in which he develops his flagrantly controversial philosophy of the social sciences, his brilliant entrepreneurial theory of the market process, and his devastatingly consistent classical liberal perspective on political economy, into an overarching system of extraordinarily impressive scope. Human Action is a work that has, for almost half a century, retained its freshness and its relevance, showing how deep economic understanding is to be attained, not by virtuosity of mathematical technique, but by subtlety and penetration of economic insight and interpretation. Recent developments in the economics profession suggest that the most far-reaching impact upon economic thought exerted by this celebrated work may be that still to come." -- Israel M. Kirzner, New York University

I made a short appetizer about six months ago trying to raise a little attention to this remarkable book by Mises.

I finally found this all-time favorite in decent quality streaming. Enjoy!

A Time for choosing.
This speech is a verbatim transcript of "The Speech" given as a portion of a pre-recorded, nationwide televised program sponsored by Goldwater-Miller on behalf of Barry Goldwater, Republican candidate for the presidency whom Ronald Reagan actively supported.
4,626 words

Thank you very much. Thank you and good evening. The sponsor has been identified, but unlike most television programs, the performer hasn't been provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to choose my own ideas regarding the choice that we face in the next few weeks.

Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy "accommodation." And they say if we only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he will forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer--not an easy answer--but simple.

If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based upon what we know in our hearts is morally right. We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion now in slavery behind the Iron Curtain, "Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skin, we are willing to make a deal with your slave masters." Alexander Hamilton said, "A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one." Let's set the record straight. There is no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there is only one guaranteed way you can have peace--and you can have it in the next second--surrender.

Admittedly there is a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face--that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight and surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand--the ultimatum. And what then? When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we are retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary because by that time we will have weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he has heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he would rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin--just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well, it's a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." There is a point beyond which they must not advance. This is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits--not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

We will keep in mind and remember that Barry Goldwater has faith in us. He has faith that you and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny.

Thank you very much.

CNBC presents the defining story of our time. Correspondent David Faber investigates the origins of the global economic crisis and the events leading to the most devastating financial collapse since the Great Depression.

Commanding Heights Part Two: The Agony of Reform "As the 1980s begin and the Cold War grinds on, the existing world order appears firmly in place. Yet beneath the surface powerful currents are carving away at the economic foundations. Western democracies still struggle with deficits and inflation, while communism hides the failure of its command economy behind a facade of military might. In Latin America populist dictators strive to thwart foreign economic exploitation, piling up debt and igniting hyperinflation in the process. In India and Africa bureaucracies established to end poverty through scientific planning spawn black markets and corruption and stifle enterprise. Worldwide, the strategies of government planning are failing to produce their intended results. From Bolivia and Peru to Poland and Russia, the free-market policies of Thatcher and Reagan are looked to as a possible blueprint for escape. One by one, economies in crisis adopt "shock therapy" -- a rapid conversion to free-market capitalism. As the command economies totter and collapse, privatization transfers economic power back into entrepreneurial hands, and whole societies go through wrenching change. For some the demands and opportunities of the market provide a longed for liberation. Others, lacking the means to adapt, see their security and livelihood swept away. In this new capitalist revolution enlightened enterprise and cynical exploitation thrive alike. The sum total of global wealth expands, but its unequal distribution increases, too, and economic regeneration exacts a high human price.

The Commanding Heights Part One: The Battle of Ideas "A global economy, energized by technological change and unprecedented flows of people and money, collapses in the wake of a terrorist attack ....
The year is 1914. Worldwide war results, exhausting the resources of the great powers and convincing many that the economic system itself is to blame. From the ashes of the catastrophe, an intellectual and political struggle ignites between the powers of government and the forces of the marketplace, each determined to reinvent the world's economic order. Two individuals emerge whose ideas, shaped by very different experiences, will inform this debate and carry it forward. One is a brilliant, unconventional Englishman named John Maynard Keynes. The other is an outspoken émigré from ravaged Austria, Friedrich von Hayek. But a worldwide depression holds the capitalist nations in its grip. In opposition to both Keynes and Hayek stand not only Hitler's Third Reich but Stalin's Soviet Union, schooled in the communist ideologies of Marx and Lenin and bent on obliterating the capitalist system altogether. For more than half a century the battle of ideas will rage. From the totalitarian socialist systems to the fascist states, from the independent nations of the developing world to the mixed economies of Europe and the regulated capitalism of the United States, government planning will gradually take over the commanding heights. But in the 1970s, with Keynesian theory at its height and communism fully entrenched, economic stagnation sets in on all sides. When a British grocer's daughter and a former Hollywood actor become heads of state, they join forces around the ideas of Hayek, and new political and economic policies begin to transform the world. "

Released in 1975 by World Research, Inc. Includes an introduction by then-Secretary of the Treasury, William E. Simon, and interviews with professors Walter Heller (University of Minnesota) and Milton Friedman (University of Chicago). Moderated by Dr. Richard Rogge (Wabash College). The film also features a cameo appearance by Murray N. Rothbard. Written by Karl Keating, Susan Love Brown, Patrea Post and Stuart Smith.

This online version of the film is adapted from a 1/2" black-and-white EIAJ-1 open-reel video.

Documentary Produced by the nobel prize-winning economists at the Mises Institute - People in the know, that is.
Apart from laying out the inherent problems of failing oversight, human failures and other hazards, related to the abandonment of the gold standard, it also deals with the failure of the Federal Reserve and Big Government, which according to the Mises institute ultimately caused and deepened the great depression.
Considering how the current president of the United States of America tries to cast himself as a new FDR in dealing with the financial crisis, this documentary gets a gloomy relevance once again.

What kind of man was Ludwig von Mises? As this unique film shows, Mises (1881-1973) was a man who never stopped fighting for freedom: not when the Nazis burned his books, not when the Left blackballed him at universities, not when it seemed as if statism had won. With courage and genius, he fought big government until the day he died ... in 25 books, hundreds of articles, and more than 60 years of teaching.

Mises's battles against Communists, Nazis, and other socialists, are featured in this film, as are his ideas of Liberty. There is also the old Vienna he loved, the Bolshevik prime minister he dissuaded from Communism, and a cast of villains from Lenin to Hitler, as well as such supporters and students as Murray Rothbard, Ron Paul, Bettina Greaves, M. Stanton Evans, Mary Peterson, Joseph Sobran, and Yuri Maltsev.

Among his many accomplishments, Mises showed that socialism had to fail, that central banking causes recessions and depressions, that the gold standard is honest money, and that only laissez-faire capitalism is fully compatible with Western civilization.

Mises was the twentieth century's foremost economist, and one of its most important champions of Liberty. Here is a film that does justice to this extraordinary man, and to his equally extraordinary ideas.

The legendary television show "Free to Choose" by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman is now available on Google Video


Volume 1: Power of the Market
Volume 2: The Tyranny of Control
Volume 3: Anatomy of a Crisis
Volume 4: From Cradle to Grave
Volume 5: Created Equal
Volume 6: What’s Wrong With Our Schools?
Volume 7: Who Protects the Consumer?
Volume 8: Who Protects the Worker?
Volume 9: How to Cure Inflation
Volume 10: How to Stay Free