Keep your eyes on this story: the UK is the first Western country in recent memory to attempt a comprehensive overhaul of its welfare state.

The stock market is a quintessential feature of capitalism.

So the conventional wisdom - that a sharp decline in consumer spending caused the economy’s downturn - is wrong. What did cause the downturn? The answer is: a sharp decline in private investment. In fact, the ups and downs of the business cycle are always driven by investment spending, not by consumption spending.

Many campaigning politicians love to blame “outsourcing” for the woes of the US job market, and to brand their opponents as supporting policies - like US FTAs and blanket opposition to tax hikes on US multinational corporations - that “send American jobs overseas.” Indeed, the “outsourcing” bogeyman has become an express part of the Democratic Party’s “Make It in America” campaign platform, and “pro-outsourcing” accusations are a staple of Democrats’ campaign advertisements for the 2010 mid-term elections. Now, there are plenty of economic and historical facts undermining these politicians’ anti-outsourcing demagoguery - something that Democrats themselves have recently admitted. And these same Democrats have also acknowledged that one of their primary motivations for pushing the outsourcing meme - despite its, ahem, factual limitations - is because the issue polls well (i.e., most Americans are scared of, and/or confused about, outsourcing). But that’s not the only reason our elected officials like to blame outsourcing for the troubled American economy. Indeed, as today’s IBD editorial demonstrates, pols also like to focus on offshoring because it diverts voters’ attention away from what actually causes American companies to move offshore: a startling decline in the American economy’s global competitiveness caused by our elected officials’ awful tax and regulatory policies.

The challenges of a welfare state should be no excuse for treating immigrants like lepers. A confident country should welcome immigrants. We say we are a free people. By what hypocrisy do we exclude others from the freedom we claim as a basic human right?

Germany has paid the last of its Versailles debt. Oh but we are still left with unspeakable political mess created by WWI, which essentially meant the end of liberalism (or, as Hoppe would put it, civilization).

The Democrats are forever challenging Republicans to explain where they would cut spending, as though that were a hopeless conundrum. It seems obvious to me that education is one area where we could cut spending at all levels (local, state and federal) without losing anything. In fact, if education budgets were cut, it might force school districts , educators and parents to re-think priorities in a manner that would actually improve results.