Quote of the Day: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Greece’s economic ills are a trivial menace to the global economy compared with the much graver threat posed by a heavily-indebted and seemingly immobile U.S. government, author Nassim Taleb said Monday. ‘There is a serious problem in the U.S.,’ Taleb said after speaking at a business conference here. ‘The U.S. deficit is around $1.5 trillion. It’s far more dangerous than Greece.’”

“Mr. Taleb said investors and government officials around the world are unwise to focus so much on Greece when the real ‘elephant in the room’ is the U.S.”

“This is not an insoluble problem,” he said of the U.S. debt crisis. “You can fix it with some fiddling here and there. But you need the will to do it. And you need consciousness about the importance of debt. I don’t see that. Politicians are good at getting elected, not at solving problems like this.”

~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb as reported by Taos Turner, Dow Jones

Economy Freedom and The Quality of Life

David Stockman on Bernanke and the Blackberry Panic of 2008

This is David Stockman at his best. He agrees that Ben Bernanke is a dead man walking after his "clueless" comments last week. Especially enjoyable are his musings on Supreme Crony Capitalist Jeff "I Melt Money" Immelt.

Quote of the Day: Donald Boudreaux

Regarding the graphic pictures that, by government decree, will adorn all cigarette packs sold in America, Christopher Buckley writes: “I’m not against the new cigarette labels, but I’m not sure I’m for them. Cigarettes kill – no argument there. So does alcohol. If that pack of Marlboros is going to look like a page from a medical textbook, shouldn’t bottles of Bud carry pictures of car crashes, or cirrhotic livers, or beaten wives? Shouldn’t Big Macs come with photos of early contestants from ‘The Biggest Loser’?” (“Thank you for not warning me about smoking,” June 24).

True dat. But why not also require that graphic warning pictures be draped over government buildings? The Federal Reserve building, for example, might be covered with a huge picture of a graph showing that, since the Fed’s creation, the dollar has lost 96 percent of its value. Truth in advertising would be further promoted if the U.S. Capitol’s exterior featured a supersized photo of Rep. Barney Frank who, after applauding Fannie and Freddie for promoting more home-ownership than would be promoted by the market, proclaimed in 2003 'I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.'

And from the roof of the White House to its lawn, let's hang ginormous photographs of American troops returning home in body bags from Vietnam, Iraq, and other theaters of war in which Uncle Sam had no business acting.”

~ Donald Boudreaux

Quote of the Day: Mark Steyn

As to white-collar crime, what about the one type of white-collar crime that goes entirely unpunished? For an accounting fraud of $567 million, Enron's executives went to jail, and its head guy died there. For an accounting fraud ten times that size, the two Democrat hacks who headed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick, walked away with a combined taxpayer-funded payout of $116.4 million. Fannie and Freddie are two of the largest businesses in America, but they're exempt from SEC disclosure rules and Sarbanes-Oxley "corporate governance" burdens, and so in 2008, unlike Enron, WorldCom or any of the other reviled private-sector bogeymen, they came close to taking down the entire global economy.

~ Mark Steyn, from The Reincarceration of Conrad Black

Football Cops

Canada's New Banknotes

40 Years of Drug War Failure: LEAP's Neill Franklin

On June 17, 1971 President Richard Nixon launched the modern-day drug war, an effort perpetuated by every one of his successors.

As the reform group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) documents in a new comprehensive study, the drug war has destroyed lives and property, shredded the constitution, and distorted American education, health care, and even foreign policy. That's why, notes LEAP, fully 75 percent of Americans and 69 percent of police chiefs agree that the drug war has failed.

Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with LEAP's Executive Director Neill Franklin, a retired major in the Maryland State Police. As Franklin explains, he was one of the most bellicose drug warriors around until a comrade was killed during an undercover operation. The best way, argues Franklin, we can pay tribute to his fallen friend - and all the other people whose lives have been laid waste by a war on drugs that has caused far more bad than good - is to turn away from prohibition and embrace regulation and control similar to that used for alcohol.