Franz Ferdinand was a difficult person in many ways. Dark. Angry at times. He became heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary when his cousin, Rudolf (whose tutor was the father of the Austrian School of Economics, Carl Menger) died in an apparent murder-suicide with his young mistress in 1889. The death of Rudolf was only one of many tragedies in the Habsburg family in the two generations leading up to World War I. Besides the cases of consecutive heirs to the throne, Franz Josef’s glamorous wife, Elisabeth, died at the hands of an assassin in 1898.

The City government of Seattle has voted unanimously to raise the minimum wage in the city to $15/hour to be done is a number of stages over the next few years. College students seem to realize that such increases could be a threat to current and longer term job prospects. According to the College Fix:

Germany has now decided that its gold is safe in the hands of the Federal Reserve after all. The budget spokesman for Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party, Norbert Barthle, said “The Americans are taking good care of our gold.”

Germany initially made the request in January of 2013 after attempts to inventory the gold in 2012 were rebuffed. Juergen Hardt, also from the Christian Democratic Union party told reporters in May that there was no concern that German gold in the New York Fed has been tampered with.

Over at

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Edward C. Prescott and Lee E. Ohanian provide some important commentary on the causes of continuing slow recovery, the Bush-Obama-Fed Great Stagnation. Their conclusion:

In the past week there has been a hugely entertaining brouhaha on Peter Boettke’s Facebook page concerning the most fruitful approach to promoting libertarian social change.