To make this point is not to cavil. It is to warn against being misled by the flawed mercantilist notion that trade’s benefits lie in what we produce for others. In fact, trade’s benefits lie overwhelmingly in what others produce for us.

Once an economy becomes sufficiently distorted by an effusion of newly-created money and too-easily extended credit; once the resulting process of malinvestment becomes not just engrained but actively self-aggravating and its increasingly cashless continuation assumes the role of driver of ’growth’ and wellspring of notional earnings, there remain only two alternatives: to keep adding more and more fuel to it to the point it achieves a hyperinflationary escape velocity or bunker down in some reinforced concrete bolt hole, deep under ground and await the multi-megaton impact of its collapse.

But unless the most basic laws of economics cease to hold, the smallholder farming future envisioned by the local farming movement could jeopardize natural habitat and climate change mitigation efforts, while also endangering a tenuous and temporary victory in the battle against human hunger.

Even though the Congress is exempt from insider trading law, many of 60 Minutes’s findings are hugely damming, which you can tell just by looking at the stunned faces of John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi when Steve Croft questions them about their special dealings.

If we ask why economists would believe something about the world that seems to fly in the face of evidence, my answer would be that it is the easiest path for them. The vast majority of economists have no interest in upsetting the apple cart. They wanted to be economists because it is a relatively well-paying and prestigious profession. The way you move ahead in the profession is you repeat what the people who are more prominent than you are saying. This carries no risk. If they are right you can share in the glory. If they end up being wrong, then you have the “who could have known?” excuse. In terms of the leading lights of the profession, they have no reason to change what they are saying because no one is ever going to cause them to lose their job or even their standing because they are wrong. How many people even missed a promotion because they failed to recognize the largest economic crisis since the Great Depression? Since the status quo position in the profession fits in well with most powerful interest groups, and everyone has been in the habit of repeating the same lines, there is little real pressure for change.

Given the IAEA’s report this week, we should ask ourselves the counterintuitive question (for most) of whether Iran’s development of nuclear weapons might actually be a good thing for the region.

The distortions created by easy money and deficit spending will naturally try to reverse themselves as surely as night follows day. The recession that follows the temporary boom is the way an economy cures itself from unsound money and government intervention. This is hard for interventionist governments to accept because it strikes at the heart of their existence. And while printing money and credit is always popular with an electorate that does not understand what is happening to their money, reversing the process is readily noticed and immensely unpopular.

Conservatives have big appetites for ideology; liberals don’t. There are, of course, taxonomies of conservative schools of thought. People on the right classify themselves as libertarians, neoconservatives, social conservatives, traditional conservatives, and the like, and spill oceans of ink defining, debating, and further subdividing these schools of thought. There is no parallel taxonomy on the left.

… there is now simply more debt in the world than can ever be paid back.