Here is the deal, public unions along with corrupt politicians have bankrupted nearly every state in the union. This is one of the biggest issues facing the US, if not the biggest issue.

The result is that the social benefits of corporate innovations and competition are easily overlooked, ignored, taken for granted, forgotten. But these benefits are enormous. And any assessment of the worthiness of corporations in modern life had best take them into accurate account lest we adopt policies that make us all poor and miserable.

The private debt is about 6 times larger than our government’s public debt; about 4 times larger than our government’s gross debt (including the government debt used to fund our Social Security shortfall); and about 2.5 times the gross government debt plus the total state and local debt. Household debt alone is equal to 96% of GDP; private domestic nonfinancial debt is 183% of GDP; total credit market debt is 357% of GDP (see first chart Selected Debt Measures as a % of GDP). Please note that the only form of debt that isn’t rolling over is the government debt.

Instead, the Obama administration supports higher taxes, more government, and the status quo on existing overpaid public union workers. Is it any wonder the outlook for small business and startup hiring is bleak?

Public union greed and arrogance is off the scale everywhere, as they perpetually bitch and whine and moan about how much they are contributing (and about everything else, too). The only solution is to privatize everything, totally eliminating public unions along with their greed and arrogance.

Singapore, I think, has the closest thing to the sort of system Hayek had in mind. Among wealthy countries, it spends the smallest percentage of GDP on health care, and it gets about the best results. You know what that’s called? Efficiency. How do you get it? Competitive markets with freely moving prices under the rule of law! It’s the sort of thing you’re in favor of if you want everybody to have access to really good health care and money to spend on things other than health care.

No sensible person – much less any scientist – should be surprised by this reality. Pres. Obama is a politician. His promises to voters to pursue science rather than politics are as credible as a prostitute’s promises to a client to pursue love rather that profit.

More low-income housing credit has been one of the few issues on which President Bill Clinton’s administration, with its affordable-housing mandate, and that of President George W. Bush, with its push for an “ownership” society, agreed. In the end, though, the misguided attempt to push home ownership through credit has left the US with houses that no one can afford and households drowning in debt. Ironically, since 2004, the homeownership rate has been in decline. The problem, as often is the case with government policies, was not intent. It rarely is. But when lots of easy money pushed by a deep-pocketed government comes into contact with the profit motive of a sophisticated, competitive, and amoral financial sector, matters get taken far beyond the government’s intent.

Here are the latest bank closings for this week as announced by the FDIC. I wish to remind readers that I intend these announcements to be a positive thing for the economy. By trying to prevent bank closings, needed liquidity is thwarted from reaching the economy. This is one of the major factors hindering a recovery. Thus when you see the FDIC closing a bank, capital is no longer bring wasted and tied up in failing enterprises. It is a sign of a recovering economy.

But literature, especially classic American literature, has virtually been banished from the university curriculum since the “cultural revolutions” that savaged America in the l960s. Historians when writing or teaching about great decisions (which they do very little of, if any at all) distort reality because they study the case long after the fact, when all the data and documents are available to them. What they are oblivious to is the reality that the decision maker at the time of the crisis did not and could not have all such knowledge in front of him. So historians tend to distort what really happened because they are “all-knowing” when the men they study were not.