It’s been three weeks since four students at the University of Idaho were stabbed to death at a home in Moscow, Idaho, and law enforcement officers say they have no suspect. In the early hours of November 13, three women and one man were murdered in an off-campus home where two other roommates were also sleeping. Yet, somehow the killer or killers managed to escape the premises without being seen or even waking the other roommates.

In last week’s column, I discussed Christophers Coyne’s excellent book In Search of Monsters to Destroy, a cogent account of America’s endeavor to build a “liberal” informal empire. Coyne shows the inherent contradiction of using brutal means to achieve humane values. This week, I’d like to discuss an even more deplorable part of American foreign policy, one which threatens the world with destruction.

“It is not Wisdom but authority that makes a law.”

                               -- Thomas Hobbes

That meal, guest or package that came to your front door this month is part of a massive delivery industry. Free Range Entrepreneurs (FREs), drivers whose transportation work is varied, temporary, and frequently changing, are critical to our economy and all consumers. It is a national market with State rules. A self-regulating, wage clearing market, with high turnover.

[T]he confidence in the unlimited power of science is only too often based on a false belief that the scientific method consists of a ready-made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the substance of scientific procedure, as if one needed only to follow some cooking recipes to solve all social problems. 

— Hayek, F. A., The Pretence of Knowledge, Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 11, 1974.

A full 83 percent of all government employees are in state and local governments.

In November, the Pentagon announced it had failed yet another audit. In spite of the fact that the Department of Defense has had years to get its act together, the Pentagon still doesn’t know how it spends or maintains its trillions of dollars’ worth of taxpayer-funded assets and income. As Breaking Defense noted last month:

Think about it. FTX collapsed (probable theft/ponzi scheme), therefore calls for regulation increase. Should this become reality, consider the implications to follow, starting with a new government agency; let’s call it the Department of Regulating Cryptocurrencies or DORC for short. One of the first decisions the government must determine is the DORC’s annual expenditures.

Should $100 or $200 million a year be spent regulating cryptocurrencies?

In mid-November, while the whole world was focused on the Ukraine crisis, the US midterms or whatever other “big story” the media decided was more important, a truly momentous shift took place in the global financial system. It might seem like a small step on the surface, but it has the potential to bring about a real and possibly irreversible sea change in the way we use money; or better said, the way it uses us.