This morning the Nobel Peace Prize committee were woken up by a call from the Ig Nobel Prize committee saying, “Congratulations! you have won!” (The Ig Noble prize people have just gone out of business — they cannot parody the Nobel Prize any more.)

The Nobel Peace Prize has become the Nobel Joke Prize. And not a very funny joke either. Not funny at all when in 1973 they gave it to Kissinger, a man who should have been tried for war crimes. Or maybe it should be called the Nobel Politicized Prize. Seriously, there’s something rotten in this sort of shameless pandering. Timeonline.co.uk calls it a “mockery of the Nobel peace prize” and writes, “Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. . . the prize risks looking preposterous …

What’s destroying the US is most likely this: government grown so big that its insatiable appetite devours the society that created it. Watching the US go down “the road to serfdom,” to use that memorable phrase from Hayek, is scary because what destroys the US can hardly not be expected to destroy weaker countries. Here’s Dan Mitchell arguing forcefully the case for limited government.

Will Durant (1885 – 1981) was an American historian, writer and philosopher. His most famous work is the 11-volume “The Story of Civilization”, published between 1935 and 1975. In a 1931 work, “The Case for India“, he had this to say about India.