Who thought this was ever going to work? Who thought we could build a society in which an ever-increasing number of citizens are told that they don’t have to work and that their needs will be provided for by somebody else—while the burden is shoved onto the shoulders of an ever-smaller, ever-more-despised minority of producers?

The fact that the “rest of the world” rushed to judgment on this incident, almost invariably condemning Israel based solely on “facts” handed out by anti-Israeli forces, is no reason why we should. The Obama administration has behaved admirably by declining to join the herd and by saying it wishes to understand the facts fully before it judges them … the imperative that the news cycle imposes on news organization should not trump the responsibility of governments to get the facts right. The same news organizations that are jumping on the State Department for not having embraced a particular set of facts will be the ones that lambaste it if it gets any facts wrong.

What’s more, the sea of governmental red ink made worse by both the crisis and the recession that followed it looks set to spread out for years to come if nothing is done about it. Europe is now finding out that simply shifting debt from private hands to public ones can stress what had been even the soundest of sovereign credit ratings. What started in subprime here in the U.S. eventually infected the rest of the system; likewise the EU is seeing country after country enter the financial sick ward. We may be lucky enough to have already seen the lows in equity prices for now, but it sure seems as if there is some unfinished business to the downside in the months ahead. Like BP, all we can do is make the best choices possible to limit the damage. And, just like oil in a salt marsh or on a bird’s feathers, cleansing ourselves of the sticky debt burdens we’ve taken on will not be easy.

Stephen Colbert has this bit (or at least used to) where he brings up one of Wal-Mart’s latest “crimes”, and then follows up with something like, “but hey, I can get a pack of tube socks for a buck ninety-nine!”, as if the compensating advantage was something to scoff at. While most of Colbert’s affluent fans might not care about the difference in price between tube socks at Wal-mart and tube socks at some higher-end place, for the average shopper at Wal-Mart, saving money on a regular basis on everyday goods IS a big deal. When retailers drive prices down, they concomitantly drive living standards up. With every cost-cutting and value-adding innovation, Wal-Mart continually makes lives better.

Even though the American media was obsessed with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it is striking that so much that grips Europe is utterly ignored in America.

Many of my commenters seem to think that the point of the Gaza blockade is simply to keep war materiel from reaching insurgents in Gaza. That is not the reason for the Gaza blockade, though it may be one goal. But the strategy is much farther reaching than that: it is to topple Hamas by immiserating the people who elected them. Check out some of the war materiel being blockaded:

There are, indeed, two Americas: the increasingly straitened world of the private sector, where jobs are competitive, money is scarce, and job security is, for many, nonexistent; and the lush world of the government employee, where competition is more or less unknown, salaries and benefits often double those available to private workers, retirement is ten or more years earlier than in the private sector, and it may take a felony to get fired. This is the central economic conflict of our time, between lavishly compensated and ever more gluttonous government employees, and wealth-creating private citizens who are increasingly unable to support their public-sector masters in the style to which they have become accustomed.