Sometime after the turn of the century, a change began to take place. You cannot mark it precisely. It became fashionable to plant Old World seeds. They grew in soft warm places, often in the gardens of the leisure rich, and flourished in academic soil generally. There appeared in the East an intellectual cult of disaffection, with a sneer in its mind for what it named 100 per cent Americanism and a pose of contempt for the wealth that supported it. Everything American was vulgar. Happy the expatriate who could live abroad with his dollars and forget where they came from.

Money is one of the most misunderstood topics of our time, and we’re seeing the implications of this play out every day. To understand money, one first must first understand that human beings have always been incentivized to participate in exchange. If humans could not, or did not, trade, most people would die young from starvation, disease, or exposure to the elements.

Cryptocurrency enthusiasts generally have a great appreciation for the Austrian school of economics. This is understandable since Austrian economists have always argued for the merit of privately produced money outside government control. Unfortunately, an erroneous understanding of the development and functions of money has emerged and become increasingly dominant among at least some proponents of bitcoin—a narrative that is at odds with the basics of Austrian monetary theory.

There is no doubt that Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan will help the people it is intended to help at everyone else’s expense, as critics correctly point out. The bigger issue is that it does absolutely nothing to lower the costs associated with higher education.

Imagine you accidently shoot yourself in the foot with a nail gun. Enduring incredible pain, you drive to the hospital. Now imagine that the doctor, seeing you in this terrible pain, gives you a prescription for Percocet with infinite refills but does not remove the nail!

European monarchs come and go, but the American media—no doubt largely due to the fact the British speak and write in English—follows the British monarchy more closely than others. American pundits didn’t have much to say when King Juan Carlos of Spain abdicated in 2014 in the wake of an embezzlement scandal. But it’s only been a few hours since the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and the speculation about the future of the British monarchy is already plentiful.