Gradually, momentum is building for a return to financial sanity. The Krugmanites appear to have peaked. The rise of the Tea Party (Tea Parties, to be technical), which in core financial ideology appears to me to mirror the Perot movement, reflects the thinking of the center of gravity of America. Stay tuned. Something good just may be coming. Converts such as Mr. Evans-Pritchard are valuable and do not come easily. Unfortunately Dr. Bernanke and President Obama can do lots of “stimulatory” damage before their influence wanes, but the cavalry may be out there just beyond the horizon to rescue us from the slings and arrows of their outrageous policies.

When the price is not allowed to perform its function of supply-and-demand rationing, something else will.[3] In the case of the Canadian healthcare system, this price substitute is our time. But many of us may not be aware of the destructive nature of this hidden and steep price tag. While the unseen costs are always easily ignored, they are constantly eating up the economy’s productive resources.

Congress is preparing assail China for protectionist policies, like a 105.4% tariff on US poultry.
But anyone who thinks America is a perfect practitioner of free trade needs to wake up.
The International Trade Commission lists over 12,000 specific tariffs on imports to America. Hundreds of agricultural, textile, and manufacturing items are highly protected. So are obscure items like live foxes.
As American deindustrialization continues apace, that list will just get longer.

Your party claims to be “reality-based.” I challenge you to live up to that claim by looking at the evidence and abandoning your commitment to a thoroughly discredited 16th-century ‘theory’ that asserts that national wealth is enhanced by monopoly privileges.

Or maybe it’s become just too obvious that we created the financial crisis. As even Oliver Stone showed in his movie, we borrowed all that money and thought the housing boom would never end. We saw the risks in the disclosure documents but ignored them, or refused even to look. We heard the doomsayers and preferred to ignore them. We elected the politicians who subsidized the housing bubble, and decided which firms should live and which should die. Maybe we have seen the face of the financial crisis. In the mirror.

You all know the feeling. You get back from vacation mellow and full of good cheer for your fellow man, and then reality rushes in. It sometimes takes until Monday lunch, but rarely longer.

Please tell me why such a pattern of trade – with Americans routinely getting lots of imports in exchange for relatively few exports – is something to fear. Shouldn’t we celebrate it? If as workers we strive to exchange each hour of work for the greatest possible number of goods and services – that is, strive to import ever-more goods and services into our households for each hour of work that we export from our households – why shouldn’t we also want to get as many goods and services from foreigners in exchange for each dollar’s worth of goods and services that we sell to them?

The failure of the administration’s liberal economic policies to bear fruit–the fact that, on the contrary, they have worsened our economic problems–is always unexpected to those who, apparently, have no knowledge of economic history. Some stories, though, are not just foreseeable but inevitable. This one, from the New York Times, is in that category: Job Loss Looms as Part of Stimulus Act Expires.

The US is in a mess of its own making. Screaming about “fair trade” is a scapegoat for preposterous US economic policies on military spending, entitlements, policing the world, public sector pensions, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, too big to fail, and numerous other disasters at the state and federal level.