The purchasing power of the US dollar has been debased by over 99 percent since the foundation of the Federal Reserve. (An ounce of gold cost $20.67 in 1913. According to the Wall Street Journal as of Friday, January 16 its price was $4,588.40. That means that the dollar is worth less than one half of one percent of its 1913 purchasing power [$20.67/$4,588.40=.0045]). Its remaining purchasing power may eventually become zero. There is no discipline in US spending and the Fed has become a willing accomplice to this crime.

History presents us with a troubling paradox: states that most fervently defend economic freedom at home often pursue the most aggressive foreign policies. Nineteenth-century Britain—the birthplace of free trade and the Industrial Revolution—was also home to the largest colonial empire in history. Today, the United States—certainly one of the freest economies—maintains nearly 800 military bases around the world.

Thomas Sowell is one of the most influential and insightful voices in American academia. At 95, he wrote a new website: Facts Against Rhetoric. His work is known for its willingness to challenge even the most set notions with objectivity and command of empirical evidence.

Classical liberals, as well as some libertarians, have long placed great faith in constitutions as instruments capable of restraining political power. Particularly following the Renaissance and Enlightenment, written constitutions began to be celebrated by limited government political theorists as rational devices designed to bind rulers, limit coercion, and protect liberty through clearly-enumerated rules.

Redistribution lies at the heart of the problems currently plaguing Western societies and all those who emulate them. A hint comes from the prefix“re-” in this word, which implies a second distribution taking place on top of a previous one. Implicit is the idea that this second distribution takes place because the first one is considered flawed. Yet, this original distribution is the natural process of the free market, while the second distribution—or redistribution—is artificially organized by the state.

In my article “Carl Menger’s Overlooked Vital Evolutionary Insights,” I tried to summarize and bring attention to founder of the Austrian School of economics Carl Menger’s “vital evolutionary insights” regarding the evolved, non-human-designed emergence of social institutions like “law, of language, of the origin of markets, the origin of communities