The Irish “rescue package” finalised over the weekend is a disaster. You can say one thing for the European Commission, the ECB, and the German government – they never miss an opportunity to make things worse.

In other words, South Korea agreed to allow Uncle Sam to continue to impose additional financial burdens on Americans who buy automobiles made in South Korea, for no reason other than to make life easier for Detroit. So much for the Obama administration’s courageous refusal to allow special-interest groups (in this case, U.S. automakers and the UAW) to dictate policy – so much for our leader’s eagerness to get the policy right even if doing so means getting the politics wrong – and so much for all the ballyhoo, out of Detroit and Washington, about U.S. automakers again being world-class producers who can compete successfully with foreign automakers.

Courtesy of the Greenspan and Bernanke Fed, we threw the biggest housing party in history. This is the payback. No one in mainstream media will say it but I will: There is much more pain to come, and highly likely in the stock market as well. Solid recoveries are not built on the quicksand of stimulus.

The conservative wants the government to be conservative, with little concern about its size. The libertarian wants the government to be small, with little concern about whether it is conservative.

When you think about it, the connection is obvious, but I confess I was surprised by this new report by Tim Carney and Dick Patten on who’s lobbying for the estate tax. The report was paid for by a small-business group that opposes the tax, and it outlines who’s been opposing them behind the scenes. Answer: the life insurance industry. In the halls of Congress. With bushels of money.

Pretending that QE2 is a well established economic policy without risk of externalities is frankly as absurd as saying it is an unmitigated evil.