June 28, 2019 is the centenary of the Treaty of Versailles. The notorious treaty, signed by Germany on June 28, 1919, was the most important of the peace treaties that ended the First World War. Although each defeated nation signed its own treaty, the entire settlement is often called the Treaty of Versailles. The war and peace settlement caused a century of statism and war. On the centenary of the Treaty of Versailles, it is appropriate to reassess its consequences and its lessons for the future.

Despite significant economic progress since ancient times, most people in agrarian societies continued to live at the subsistence minimum until modern times. By the nineteenth century, it was said that these societies fell into a “Malthusian trap.” The Malthusian trap describes a situation that keeps population growth in line with available resources. The increase in income per person was not sustainable in the long run, as economic growth was inevitably consumed by population increases.

This week the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government can keep secret the food stamp sales totals of grocery stores. By a 6-3 vote, the court decided that such business records are exempt from disclosure under the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). This case, started eight years ago by the Argus Leader (a member of the USA Today network), is another landmark in cloaking federal data from the American people.     

Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek was, as he says in the 1990 introduction to his Denationalization of Money: The Argument Refined, one of the chief “gold bugs” of the 20th century. And he reminded us, so long as politicians want to control money, gold-backed currency is essential to protect our liberty from the politics of inflation.

While many of America’s founders are justifiably famous, others have received too little attention. St. George Tucker is one.

There’s a remarkable confusion in the modern debate over energy sources. Informed by geological rather than economic considerations, energy sources and some raw materials are thought of either as “Renewables” or “Non-Renewables” — and the former is somehow much preferred to the later.

For a long time, Marxists have blamed the private ownership of the means of production for impoverishing the masses. The gentrification of the Western proletariat then led the critics of capitalism to update their catastrophic scenario. They turned to rhetoric about the Third World and how the wealth of the countries of the North was fueled by the poverty of the countries of the South. But then this narrative collapsed as globalization made even the Third World better off than before.

Recently, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed legislation permitting Briarwood Presbyterian Church to establish its own police force for its church and school campuses, which are used by 2,000 students and faculty, as well as 4,000 parishioners. The legislation is to take effect in the fall.

[Excerpt from “Public Goods and Private Solutions in Maritime History,” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 7, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 3–27.]

Last month, 82 percent of Denver voters voted down Initiative 300, which would have overturned the city ban on camping in public spaces.