“The modern central bank business model is being disrupted.” claims Saifedean Ammous, economics professor and author of The Bitcoin Standard: The Dcentralized Alternative to Central Banking. Ammous’ well-written exposition of an Austrian-School understanding of the nature of money — in a free market and not — concludes with several cha

My family moved to California in 1950, part of the post-WWII westward migration. My widowed mother, tired of Boston’s dreary winters, felt the westward pull. My eldest brother, a WWII Navy veteran, had heard good things about San Diego from sailors who had been stationed there during the war. So, California, here we come.

2019 was the year that the blood-test requirement for marriage was finally abolished in all 50 US states.

This past March, the governor of Montana signed the legislature’s bill abolishing the state’s requirement that women submit to blood tests to be screened for rubella prior to the granting of a marriage license.

While much of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom focused on correcting erroneous ideas and sloppy thinking that misled (and still mislead) many to support socialistic expansions of government power, that is not all it did. It also reiterated the case for individualism and its economic manifestation—free markets.

In addition to providing crucial insights into the cleavages between social organization based on freedom and social organization based on coercion, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom provided many other insights. Many of them dealt with the morality of collectivism. In honor of the books 75th anniversary this year, please consider Part 2 of our considerations— Collectivism and Morality. (See Part I here.)

Back when I taught political science, a phrase I used when preparing students for the tests was “he who makes distinctions well, teaches well.”

That is, if we’re talking about regime types, dear student, you better know the difference between a totalitarian regime, and a regime that is merely authoritarian. If we’re talking about eighteenth-century American ideologies, you better know the difference between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. If we’re talking economic policy, know the difference between fiscal policy and monetary policy.

The Americas are unusual because citizenship is often granted based on birthplace, rather than on the citizenship or place of origin of one’s parents. Countries in North and South America have historically tended to more freely grant citizenship due to their relatively low populations, abundant land, and a historical dependence on migrant labor to take advantage of the region’s vast natural resources.

The 2019 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel – colloquially known as the Nobel Prize in Economics – has gone to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer are pioneers in the use of field experiments, or randomized-controlled trials (RCTs), to study economic phenomena. An RCT in economics is analogous to its counterpart in medicine.

Can the increasing politicization of life in America be stopped, or even slowed?

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2019 to Abhijit Banerjee (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and to his wife Esther Duflo (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and to Michael Kremer (Harvard University).

From the Nobel committee: