Source: Macroeconomic Policy Nexus
by David Beckworth
“In the sections that follow, I will briefly look at the two different paths being taken by the United States and Europe in their pursuit of digital currencies. To paraphrase poet Robert Frost, there are two roads diverging in the digital currency woods, but unlike Frost’s traveler we get to see both roads taken. The question is which one will make all the difference.” (08/14/26)
“Living through a global resurgence of fascism, the greatest difficulty has proved to be not arguing against it, but convincing non-fascists that fascism’s adherents really mean it. That they believe what they are telling us they believe—and they will act accordingly. The overwhelming instinct is to view calls for 100 million deportations in the US, civil war in the UK, arresting or executing political leaders, eliminating of trans people, rolling women’s rights back centuries, legalising domestic violence, and global genocide as a sort of trolling, or ugly incoherent rhetoric. But these are plain statements of intent. That modern fascists haven’t fully achieved these goals doesn’t somehow prove they don’t want to.” (08/14/26)
“[O]ne need not accept the Pope’s Christian faith in order to oppose usury as a social relationship of unjust, exploitative power. And it is a relationship of power rather than one of mere economics, as if the latter exists in a sphere separate from the former. It may surprise some that one of American history’s most ardent and consistent proponents of free markets and individual liberty was also one of its greatest critics of usury. The anarchist Benjamin Tucker set forth to confront ‘a most momentous question,’ the question of who receives ‘the surplus wealth that labor produces and does not consume.’ For Tucker, usury was the key characteristic of capitalism, but it was the result of political power, not economic relationships of free and voluntary exchange.” (08/14/26)
“California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been frantically trying to restart a presidential campaign that appears moribund, with polls showing him losing in some states to figures such as Pete Buttigieg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In his absence, his multibillion-dollar high-speed train also seems to be going nowhere fast. A new report from the state inspector general revealed that the train will be delayed again and that the public is being kept in the dark about ongoing problems with Newsom’s signature project. Oh, and one more thing: the project will run out of money by December 2027. Benjamin Belnap’s report revealed the project is again running out of money. It found missing details in the project’s 2026 business plan, and concluded that the project will again be out of money by next year. The state has already spent $18 billion, but it will need at least another $18 billion to finish the first segment.” (08/15/26)
“The 47th president has a habit of waffling on important issues ranging from abortion to gun rights, but another position he has long maintained is his commitment to protectionism. Not only did Trump use executive action during his first term to impose tariffs on aluminum, steel, and other products, he also promised the nation that tariffs would be a centerpiece of his second-term economic vision. ‘To me the most beautiful word in the dictionary is ‘tariff.’ It’s my favorite word,’ he said in a 2024 interview. Occam’s razor suggests the president was not duped by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, White House advisor Peter Navarro, or postliberal pseudo-economists (to be generous) such as Oren Cass any more than he was ‘fooled’ by Bibi Netanyahu or the late-Senator Lindsey Graham. The man just loves tariffs, despite the data.” (08/14/26)
“Of course, understanding who Locke was, or what he actually believed, has always been more difficult than proclaiming what he represents. Despite his qualms about Catholics—and atheists, too, as we shall see—Locke is still commonly celebrated as the inventor of the modern liberal approach to tolerance, understood as a commitment to separating church and state and protecting individual rights.” (08/14/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Joshua Mawhorter
“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. Watson—Come here—I want to see you.’ This is commonly regarded as the first intelligible voice transmission over an electrical wire. With that in mind, this year not only marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, the 100th year of Murray Rothbard, and 40 years of Mises University, but also 150 years since the official invention of the telephone. This provides an opportunity to review the history of how telephone invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship—combined with cronyism, patents, regulations, and monopoly—shaped the landscape of the telephone industry for generations.” (08/14/26)
Source: Common Dreams
by Judy Albert, Claire M Cohen, Ed Grystar, Ana Malinow, Julie Noh-Smith, & Kay Tillow
“On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass addressed the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society with an oration called, ‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’ In 1852, the United States was a young country, only 76 years old, and given its youth, Douglass held out hope for the country that put him and 3 million Black men, women, and children in chains. He called Congress and judges ‘inhuman, disgraceful, and scandalous’. He accused the church of being the ‘bulwark of American slavery, and the shield of American slave-hunters’. Still, he held out hope.” [editor’s note: SIX co-writers? I know all too well how song cowriting by committee turns out, most of the time – SAT] (08/15/26)
