The line for the self-checkout registers at my neighborhood Albertsons stretched into the store’s produce section. Is this human progress? I wondered, scanning my groceries—this just after I had filled my car’s gas tank at a not-so-convenient convenience store near work.

The emergence of money is a market phenomenon. By surrendering fewer marketable goods for more marketable goods, individuals move closer to the goods they ultimately wish to consume but cannot acquire through direct exchange. The most marketable goods become common media of exchange (i.e., money).

Those who know Wall Street lore sometimes recall that Fed chairman William Miller—Paul Volcker’s immediate predecessor—joked that most Americans believed the Federal Reserve was either an Indian reservation, a wildlife preserve, or a

Johan Smit wrote an opinion piece in which he highlighted the double standards of treatment in situations where the private sector was treated more harshly than the state when both parties committed similar offenses.

The purpose of this essay is not to convince the reader of the necessity for change. It is to present some commonsense policy changes to attempt to mitigate the economic harm that has been done to Western economies, especially to the United States and the United Kingdom, since the end of World War II. Please watch Godfrey Bloom and Alasdair Macleod’s recent interview with Sonia Poulton.

The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice
by Wendell Berry
Shoemaker and Company, 2022; x + 513 pp.

Wendell Berry, a poet, novelist, and philosopher well known for his protests against mechanized agriculture and for his defense of the “land ethic,” is not a thinker one would immediately associate with Ludwig von Mises, and indeed, in economic theory the two are far apart. But there is nevertheless a passage in Mises’s Socialism that is central to Berry’s concerns.