[Deleting the State: Requiem for an Illusion by Aeon J. Skoble (Independent Institute, 2026; xiii +134pp.)]

In economic science, as with any science, appropriate, accurate, and precise terminology is essential, but there are often challenges to fitting real phenomena into established categories. In a previous article, “Massachusetts 1690: The First Western Fiat Experiment,” I examined the first experiment with government-issued bills of credit. This article answers the following question: according to Mises’s taxonomy of money, where do the bills of credit of colonial Massachusetts fit?

“A ‘multitude’ of intelligence reports provide ‘consistent analysis that the regime is not in danger’ of collapse and ‘retains control of the Iranian public.’”

A central problem of political theory has long been the question of “who watches the watchers?” This stems from the fact that it is generally assumed that it is necessary to grant the civil government a monopoly on coercive power in order to protect the subject population from domestic crime and from aggression by some other state. (Once the civil government obtains this monopoly, it is transformed into what we call a “state.”)

In the spring of 1812, British textile workers smashed power looms across Nottinghamshire, convinced that the machines would make their skills worthless and their families destitute. They were right about the disruption. Mills did displace hand-weavers. Communities that had organized themselves around a particular kind of skilled labor were genuinely torn apart. The Luddites weren’t stupid, and they weren’t wrong to feel the ground shifting. They were wrong about one thing: the conclusion. The labor those machines displaced didn’t vanish.

“The recent increase shows that, unlike other producers, their shipments are unimpeded and that China hasn’t lost its appetite for Tehran’s crude.”

A flurry of bad news has drawn fresh scrutiny to the roughly $2 tln private credit market, as investors question the health of loan portfolios.

The rise in oil prices defied a U.S. effort hours earlier to reassure markets with an announcement of the second-largest ever release from the nation’s petroleum reserve.