Governments, corporations, and elites have always been fearful of the power of a free press, because it is capable of exposing their lies, destroying their carefully crafted images, and undermining their authority. In recent years, alternative journalism has been growing and more people are relying on social media platforms as sources of news and information.

An article in the Washington Post revealed that a Google engineer who had worked with Google’s Responsible AI organization believes that Google’s LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), an artificially intelligent chatbot generator, is “sentient.” In a Medium blog post, Blake Lemoine claims that LaMDA is a person who exhibits feelings and shows the unmistakable signs of cons

Seventeen months ago, as the keys to the oval office changed hands, for all of the political animus and theatrics, one thing seemed a given: the US economy would roar back to vitality in historic fashion, a point of optimism in a nation of discord and incertitude. Yet hope would give way to ambivalence, which, in turn, gave way to serious doubt. Today, a pathetic 23 percent of Americans feel economic conditions are even “somewhat good.” The primary reason for such abysmal economic sentiment?

Currently the world is on a fiat money standard—a government-issued currency that is not backed by a commodity such as gold. The fiat standard is the primary cause behind the present economic instability, and is tempted to suggest that a gold standard would reduce instability. The majority of experts however, oppose this idea on the ground that the gold standard is in fact a factor of instability.

Bertrand Russell is one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century but isn’t usually studied as a social or political philosopher, though I am hardly the first to think that his contributions to these areas are underrated. He did not support the free market but nevertheless had much to say about the state that readers of the Mises page will find congenial, and I’d like in this week’s column to look at some of his comments on this topic in his Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916).

Now that interest rates are rising with much further to go, the global banking system faces a crisis on a scale like no other in history. Central banks loaded with financial securities acquired through QE face growing losses, and their balance sheet liabilities are now significantly greater than their assets—a condition which in the private sector is termed bankruptcy. They will need to be recapitalized urgently to retain credibility.