It's Not the Principle. It's the Money

• Cookie Jill at skippy highlighted an article from AlterNet and threw in this graphic.
  
  As you probably don't know, three card monte is legal because it is not a game of chance.
• At Naked Capitalism, Philip Pilkington analyzes the scam that is "Austrian economics" and the gold market.  (Double-underscored links are ads.  You know that, right?)  A sample:

  [Izabella] Kaminska wrote that were it not for the central banks the gold market would be largely dead because Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) had begun piling out in 2010 – probably moving toward equities at that time. I would tend to agree with this analysis to some extent, but I’d also point to the growth in the ‘Bar & Coin Investment’ component in those years. This is the precisely the component of the industry that is supported by the Austrian School and the fear industry. As we can see it began to grow substantially in 2011, although again (and rather ironically given the ideology of these people) it would not have been sufficient to hold up the price without central bank intervention.

  There are illustrative graphs and charts.