Peoples of the world – outraged and horrified at the US occupation of Iraq, which has decisively discredited the Bush administration and inflicted deep damage to the image of America in all lands, which has been characterized by martial law, looting, human-rights violations, and more than 10,000 dead civilians – were stunned to find all this mayhem and madness has at last received a characterization by the Commander-in-Chief: “training wheels.” [READ MORE]
In Greek mythology, the adhesive adjoining feathers to the wooden frame of Icarus’s wings melted away when the young man flew too close to the sun, causing him to plummet from the sky.
It seems Argentina is poised to suffer the same fate, differing from Daedalus’s headstrong son in that the government’s penchant for economic interventionism will undermine a high-flying recovery and scorch other South American countries along with it.
Two recent discussions about resource prices conveys much good information.
With gas prices exceeding $2 per gallon, an alarmed American public is prone to believe scary predictions about a future without gas. And so into this hyper-charge environment will step a number of commentators who claim to marshall all the data to show that we must dramatically change our lives.
For example: “Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime in this century unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels.” Alarmist David Goodstein begins and ends his new book, Out of Gas, with this warning.
The two main problems with the financial system are debt, as Peter Eavis argues, and inflation as Jim Puplava illuminates in his commentary. The government can expand credit and create money, ensuing that the price of something, somewhere, will go up, but they have less control over relative prices.
One year ago March, in an effort to spoof the arguments then being used to justify an invasion of Iraq, I wrote a column called “Invade Latin America.” It featured analysis such as:
Every time one crosses the border between Kuwait and Iraq, one crosses 2 trenches that stretch as far as the eye can see, about 20 feet across and 20 feet deep.Here I am standing on the Iraqi side. The camera is facing South toward the border town of Safwan. The location is US Army Main Supply Route Tampa that runs parallel to and north of the main road that runs through Safwan.
May marks both the birth (May 20, 1806) and death (May 8, 1873) of one of the leading advocates of liberalism in the 19th century: John Stuart Mill. Of his works, perhaps the most important was On Liberty, in 1859. It dealt with “the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.” Because we now live in an era when the limits he argued for in defense of individual freedom have been trampled beyond recognition, it is worth revisiting what Mill had to say about liberty.