There is a limit to how much money an individual or country can borrow. We all intuitively know this. If you grow your debt faster than your income and your ability to service the debt over a long period of time, people will eventually stop loaning you money. This is true for individuals, businesses, and nations. The end result is a restructuring of the debt (default by one of several means, including serious inflation) or a very reduced standard of living (by previous standards) for a period of time in order to service the debt. For individuals, that may mean cutting off the cable, no eating out, no vacations, etc. For countries it means reduced government programs and benefits, and higher taxes.

Certainly, what I (as myself, not as a Hayek persona) find fascinating about the debate is there is a group of people in America who say smaller government and less spending is bad. Another group says bigger and more [spending] is bad. And I think a lot of people are ill-informed, both on the left and the right, about what the government is doing, to be blunt.

Now there are two essential differences between the market for political parties and those for most other products. For non-political goods, consumers “go to the polls” every single day without exception. And the firms selling those goods are pursuing profits. For political goods, elections are held at fixed intervals and the seller’s primary objective isn’t profit, but the acquisition of power.

If you are in school today the technologies you will use as an adult tomorrow have not been invented yet. Therefore, the life skill you need most is not the mastery of specific technologies, but mastery of the technium as a whole – how technology in general works. I like to think of this ability to deal with any type of new technology as techno-literacy. To be at ease with the flux of technology in modern-day life you’ll need to speak the language of the technium, and to master the the following principles:

Guess who will be elected the latest member of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council on May 20? That’s right: Syria.

Ultimately, QE2 screwed savers by robbing them of income through the Fed’s treasury purchases, undermined banks’ earnings by in effect swapping a higher yielding treasury with bank reserves that today yield a mere .25%, and eviscerated the living standards of the middle class by helping to spike the speculative punch bowl in the commodities space. Not a bad trifecta for a Fed Chairman who claims to be doing everything in his power to prevent us from becoming the next Japan but who in fact is hastening our arrival at that very destination.

President Obama named Steven Chu his Secretary of Energy just three months after Chu told the Wall Street Journal in a high-profile interview that “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” Presumably Obama put Chu in charge of energy policy because he shared Chu’s objective of driving American gas prices far above their then-current level. The policies that Obama, Chu and Obama’s EPA have subsequently followed confirm that higher energy prices was their objective. Now, confronted with the political fallout from his policies and facing rejection at the polls in 2012, Obama is flailing helplessly to re-cast himself as an advocate for American consumers. But he still is not willing to do the one thing that is within his power and that will bring down energy costs: turn loose America’s vast energy resources for development.

Trouble is, of course, that no class of people over the past two centuries enjoyed such an absolute (and relative) improvement in their standard of living than did the very working classes from whom capitalist wealth was supposed to be extracted through exploitation. If that’s the fate that exploitation visits on its victims, I pray to be exploited good and hard and often!