Military pay has been allowed to lag behind to the point where career enlisted men with families to feed have been forced to resort to food stamps.

Helping those who have been struck by unforeseeable misfortunes is fundamentally different from making dependency a way of life.

The dominant orthodoxy in development economics was that Third World countries were trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty that could be broken only by massive foreign aid from the more prosperous industrial nations of the world. This was in keeping with a more general vision on the Left that people were essentially divided into three categories - the heartless, the helpless, and wonderful people like themselves, who would rescue the helpless by playing Lady Bountiful with the taxpayers' money.

Against the background of the Obama administration' s negotiating what can turn out to be the most catastrophic international agreement in the nation's history, to complain about protocol is to put questions of etiquette above questions of annihilation.

Like a baseball game, wars are not over till they are over. Wars don't run on a clock like football. No previous generation was so hopelessly unrealistic that this had to be explained to them.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "Think things, not words." In words, many see a need for "social justice" to override "the dictates of the market." In reality, what is called "the market" consists of human beings making their own choices at their own cost. What is called "social justice" is government imposition of the notions of third parties, who pay no price for being wrong.

Subsidies are a shell game, not a net addition to national wealth.