The 14th Amendment has been used extensively to decide on the constitutionality of many issues, among others segregation in schools, “civil rights,” immigration, and abortion. Debates over the meaning of the Amendment have produced an enormous literature. But there is a more fundamental issue that is generally ignored. Was the 14th Amendment legally ratified? If it wasn’t, the framework for much of subsequent constitutional law collapses.
On March 7, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was granted US Patent No. 174,565 for the speaking telegraph or telephone. Three weeks earlier, on February 14, both Bell and another inventor, Elisha Gray, submitted their respective ideas to the US Patent Office. On March 10, Bell used a liquid transmitter (an early microphone) to call his assistant, Thomas Watson, with the words, “Mr.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently took to X to celebrate what he called one of the “highlights of the Warsh Fed.” His post didn’t have anything to do with what kind of monetary policy a Warsh-chaired Fed will do. It was about the humiliation of mainstream financial journalists—which is fine by me, but let me digress on “Fed independence” between mouthfuls of popcorn.
“Many products of Western European societies, from coins to castles, moved eastward in medieval times. So did more advanced agricultural methods, such as improved plows, the horse collar, and new systems of crop rotation. Germans living in Eastern Europe became in effect enclaves of Western European culture there. The landed nobility of Eastern Europe often deliberately attracted German farmers by allowing them to settle in towns and villages under German laws.
As Sophie Cunningham of the Indiana Fever drove toward the basket for a seemingly easy breakaway layup, DiJonai Carrington of the Chicago Sky bore down on her. Carrington, an aggressive defender, is well-known in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) for blocking shots from behind, but this potential block had no potential at all.
“Trying to defer America’s fiscal reckoning by monkeying with debt instruments is the trick used by broken hegemons through the ages. It is a Faustian pact.”
As Trump’s “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth demands a fifty-percent increase to the war budget—topping an eye watering $1.5 trillion—it may be instructive to remember that war spending has always and everywhere been the primary enemy of sound money. Some advocates of the warfare state like to lay the blame on social spending, but it has historically been wars that end up ruining currencies and blowing the top off the public fisc.
The total fertility rate needed to sustain a population is 2.1. Averaged over 2020–2024, South Korea’s stands at 0.78, Taiwan’s at 0.89, and Hong Kong’s at 0.79.
