The great thing about fiscal policy is that it has a direct impact and doesn't require you to bind the hands of future policymakers.

Debt is one person's liability, but another person's asset.

America's political landscape is infested with many zombie ideas - beliefs about policy that have been repeatedly refuted with evidence and analysis but refuse to die. The most prominent zombie is the insistence that low taxes on rich people are the key to prosperity.

...instead it seems that business - like weight loss - is a subject wherein hope and fear inspire limitless gullibility.

But Wall Street people are in fact very smart; they're funny, they're not company men who work their way up the chain.

[I]f one asks what substantive contributions [F. A. Hayek] made to our understanding of how the world works, one is left at something of a loss. Were it not for his politics, he would be virtually forgotten.

Where's that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let's not make a false pretense of balance: it's coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It's hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be "armed and dangerous" without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.