Treating a good as a “basic human right” is one way to make sure you don’t have enough of it. Treating a good as a “commodity” is the only way to make sure you have plenty of it. I’m thinking about K-12 education, housing for the poor, access to a clean environment, and just about everything in a socialist system.

The important costs in economics are the social costs and the hardships we impose when making the world safer, cleaner, and greener. There can be a high price for low risk.

Jobless claims are up, due to “anomalies” and “unusual events,” claims Bloomberg. Sadly, the real causes are not unusual and not anomalies: the gigantic drag on economic life represent by a billion petty regulations, taxes, trade restrictions, gyrating currency values, and a broke banking system.

Prior to World War I, Congress explicitly authorized bond issues. But because of the huge expense and need for quick action during the war, in 1917 legislators ceded the day-to-day financing decisions to the executive branch, so that the Treasury could issue new bonds to cover cash-flow gaps for the spending programs that the Congress had already authorized. In order to retain the power of the purse, however, Congress placed a statutory limit on the outstanding debt of the Treasury. This is what we now know as the “debt ceiling.”

So what is really happening is not that oil, or gold, or cotton has suddenly gotten more valuable. Rather, the dollar has gotten less valuable. Why? Because of the Fed’s quantitative easing plan, which has the full support of the Obama administration. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that cheapening the dollar makes everything more expensive.

Go back to the campaign of 2008, McCain (remember him?) and Obama. Suppose in the middle of the campaign, someone returned from the future and told you that by 2011, the President of the United States will have kept Guantanamo Bay open, launched a war against Libya, and crossed covertly into an ally’s territory to assassinate Bin Laden. Who would you think that would be? McCain or Obama? Couldn’t be Obama. The man who was repulsed by American exceptionalism, who pledged to close Guantanamo Bay, the man who said the way to deal with bad guys is to talk to them, not attack them. What happened? Three possibilities come to mind.

What we’ve learned about Obama (and power)

But they don’t get it in Washington D.C. And not understanding the problem produces bad policy, and there has been plenty of that. If lending is picking up, it is because customers are showing up and there is a reason to invest and hire. The reverse doesn’t work – you can’t force feed the credit to owners and have more customers suddenly show up (even interest free loans would have to be repaid!). That’s “pushing on a string”. Just ask the banks.

By now, you’ve also probably seen the quote from a once-chaste future president, arguing that even a debate about raising America’s debt limit was a sign of failed leadership (Bush!). A signal, he claimed, that the U.S. government could not pay its own bills, that we were dependent on the assistance of foreigners to fund our “reckless” fiscal policies. Obama was just kidding. Those were impetuous days in 2006 when Democrats railed against increasing the debt ceiling and Republicans — not yet having discovered “The Road to Serfdom” — were doing what they could to power it through. Today, via the magic of partisanship, the role reversal is complete.

I go back and forth as to which side is being more self-defeating. Republicans, who won’t agree to a 21.6 percent of GDP, with the result being that we stay on a path that takes spending much higher. Or Democrats, who won’t agree to reductions in future entitlements, with the result being that we will be forced to cut entitlements in the future, during the inevitable fiscal crisis.

This picture of a briefing in the White House situation room is very depressing. I mean, the leadership if the most powerful nation on earth, and they can’t find a place for people to sit down. This looks like it should be the closet of the situation room, really. President Obama looks like he is sitting on a kiddie chair that someone borrowed from the White House day care center. Whoever designed the situation room should have spent more time watching West Wing. It’s available on Netflix, guys. Chairs for everyone and lots of room. Not to mention, cool lighting.