Free speech is not something that people would normally see as a realm of economics, but in many ways, an economic understanding of the support and opposition to free speech can shed a lot of light on what’s happening now in the West.

In Janet Yellen’s Q&A with the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. Tom Emmer asked about the possibility and consequences of negative interest rates.

Emmer (R-MN): “Will the Federal Open Market Committee ever rule out going to negative interest rates?”

A ballot measure to legalize marijuana in Ohio failed this week, although as Mark Thornton notes, it was really just a scheme to give a government agency a cronyist monopoly on cannabis sales.

The BBC reports this week that a secession movement in Hawaii continues to simmer under the surface:

An upcoming election has highlighted the deep disagreement between native Hawaiians over what the future should look like. For some, it’s formal recognition of their community and a changed relationship within the US. Others want to leave the US entirely - or more accurately, want the US to leave Hawai’i.

Ireland has announced plans to decriminalize drugs, including heroin and cocaine, in the near future along with needle exchange programs. However, this is not just another blip reform like Portugal in the 1990s. I expect the United Nations to issue new guidelines regarding the war on drugs. The current guidelines call for a tough war on drugs that the United States sponsors.

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of listening to Nobel Laureate Andre Geim talk about graphene, the wonder material he and Konstantin Novoselov discovered at the University of Manchester in 2004.

Leave it to NPR to add guilt to your pleasure. That bon-bon hidden behind your two-year-old bottle of Scotch just took on a whole new layer of sin. With child slavery in the production of chocolate and animal cruelty in the harvesting of coconuts, the conflict confection is born.

Our booming green-industrial complex built up by administrations of both parties in the US is effectively using the United Nations, its thirty two “sister” institutions — such as the World Bank, UNESCO, and numerous “tribunals” — and hundreds of training and research centers. This huge international bureaucratic buildup is already employing over a million “international civil servants” to administer what our socialist visionaries hope will become the world government of the future.