Perhaps we’re looking at this the wrong way around: Given the continued German aversion to more broadly-based pan European style fiscal programs, which its populace continues to see as nothing but bailouts for lazy Mediterranean free-loaders, there is another way to solve the euro crisis. Let Germany leave the euro zone.

As long as the private sector is capable of supporting an expanding pool of real savings, this enables true real economic growth to stay in force. As long as this is the case, the government can engage in its endless borrowing game without ever being caught out – note that government borrowings result in the diversion of real savings from wealth generating activities, which in turn only weakens the economy. Obviously, then, if the ability of the government to borrow is curtailed this means that its ability to undermine the formation of real wealth is also curtailed – so what is wrong with this? Once the ability of the government’s capacity to engage in non-productive activities is curtailed, various activities that are supported by government spending come under pressure – these activities cannot support themselves because they survive through a diversion of real savings from wealth generating activities. The emerging crisis then is not a crisis of the real economy as such, but a crisis of non-productive activities. On the contrary, now wealth generators will be able to retain more real savings at their disposal and expand the overall real pie. The major threat to the economy is not failing to expand the debt limit but failing to arrest endless non-productive borrowings by the government.

While I’m displeased to see demagoguery of Medicare reform paying political dividends yet again, I await with glee the eventual collapse of the entire system due to voters’ unwillingness to countenance even small, timid reforms that would help save it.

One of the reasons that anti-trade policies prevail in spite of the ample economic and moral arguments against them is that the benefits of protectionism are concentrated and seen, while the costs are diffuse and unseen. For example, when our politicians are mulling the imposition of tariffs on steel, it’s easy for them to identify the few US steelmakers and workers who will benefit by a large amount, while it’s harder to predict the many, many American steel consumers (and, in many cases, their workers) who are harmed in smaller-yet-equally-real sums. This classic public choice dilemma has confounded free trade advocates for decades

Those of us who don’t belong to the country club set get annoyed that a philosophy of free markets and small government is often attacked as making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Indeed, we see free market capitalism as—far and away!—the greatest anti-poverty, pro-human dignity system ever conceived by the mind of man. Though many in the libertarian crowd like to pretend that there is little difference between Democrats and Republicans on this issue, the truth is that there are vast differences.

And each aging generation fails to “get” the technology of the generations that follow, finding excuses for why the new thing will destroy our brains. Only they never have.