Highway Robbery

Why do Mitt and Barack want to hand over so much of your money to men with guns?

By Rosa Brooks

In August 2003, some colleagues and I were held up by armed bandits on the highway in Fallujah, Iraq. (Don't ask why I was dumb enough to be wandering around Fallujah.) My bandit -- there were quite a few of them, but I like to think of the guy who stuck a gun in my face as my bandit -- was straight out of central casting, complete with a red kerchief around his mouth and nose to disguise his facial features.

I doubt he knew much English, but he knew enough to say the magic words. "Money, money, money!" he demanded with a guttural, heavy accent, waggling his gun unnervingly around my head.

I handed him my wallet. He took out the cash and handed the empty wallet back to me.

"Shukrun," I said, using my sole word of Arabic. "Thank you."

"You are welcome," he said, and sprinted off to wherever bandits go when they're not robbing people. (This was in the good old days of 2003, when gunmen in Fallujah just robbed you.)

In some ways, this story is a reasonable metaphor for the current debate about the defense budget. Men with weapons intone, "Money, money, money"; we hand it over and say "thank you," even though much of the time we don't really know who they are or what they plan to do with our money.

What Do the Rise and Fall of Empires Suggest?

The Sin of Hubris

By DK_Matai

The summer respite is an interesting time to read history and to reflect on the lessons to be learned from empires long gone in preparation for empires yet to come. As the British Prime Minister William Pitt, the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine, and the Baron Acton said in different ways: "All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely!" The greatest mistake, oft repeated by those in power throughout history, has been the sin of "Hubris."

The Battle of Marathon

September 21, 2012 marks the 2,503rd anniversary of the Battle of Marathon.  During the recent Olympics in London, fine athletes from around the world commemorated that "Marathon" by running 26 mile Marathon races as billions watched on television.  The Marathon runners, knowingly or unknowingly, paid tribute to men who fought for freedom so many thousands of years ago.  Marathon is, in fact, a plain that lies 26 miles -- not far -- from Athens in Greece.  After their victory, the Athenian runner Pheidippides raced that distance back to Athens to tell his fellow citizens that their army was victorious and in the process gave birth to the legend of the "Marathon Run." After the Battle-of-Marathon, the entire Greek army marched those 26 miles, despite their exhaustion from conflict, in order to prevent the Persian fleet from making a surprise assault on Athens.  On that date in 490 BC, 10,000 men of Athens and their ally Plataea defeated a Persian army three times their size. 

Universal Mediocrity

Why do Britons like their sub-par health-care system so much?

BY THEODORE DALRYMPLE

In April, the British Medical Journal published “How the NHS Measures Up to Other Health Systems,” a report about two studies conducted by the New York–based Commonwealth Fund that compared the health-care systems of 14 advanced countries. On the 20 measures of comparison, Britain’s famous (or infamous) centralized system, the National Health Service, performed well in 13, indifferently in two, and badly in five. Was this a cause for national rejoicing?

If popular satisfaction is the aim of a health-care system, the answer must be yes. According to the report, the British were the most satisfied with their health care of all the populations surveyed; they were the most confident that in the event of illness, they would receive the best and most up-to-date treatment; and they were the least anxious that their personal finances would prevent them from receiving proper treatment. One could doubtless raise objections to these measures of comparison, but let us for the sake of argument take the results at face value. Subjective satisfaction and relief of anxiety are not minor achievements. Indeed, though the free market’s ability to satisfy more needs and desires than any other system is usually cited as one of its principal advantages, here was an apparent instance of the contrary: a nonmarket health-care system that yielded the most satisfaction.

At the end of the day it all comes down to liberty

Propaganda, Politics, and the Gold Standard

By Andy Sutton 

It wouldn’t be a normal day in the life of the 24-hour news cycle if there weren’t some type of campaign against gold and its proper role as money. True to form, The Financial Times stepped to the plate to launch a rather hilarious attack on gold in the context of an article which discusses the idea that one half of our Diet Coke/Diet Pepsi political system is contemplating adding what is the equivalent of a feasibility study on returning to the gold standard to its political platform.

Chief among the ‘journalistic’ arguments against the gold standard in FT’s article are that there a) is no inflation, and that b) a return to monetary discipline will prevent the federal reserve from properly dealing with demand shocks. This is nothing more than typical Keynesian tripe and both arguments are dogs that won’t hunt when it comes to even a cursory analysis of the issues involved.

Central Banks and Inflation – Inextricably Linked

I am quite sure that the issue of inflation doesn’t need to be proven once again. It is a monetary event. A quick look at the various monetary aggregates over time demonstrates the inflation. The concomitant loss of the dollar’s purchasing power over the same period demonstrates inflation well beyond that necessary to accommodate a growing economy (hint: fractional reserve banking and America’s debt explosion). It is a pretty simple logic chain. Inflation is a monetary event. Central banks are in charge of the world’s monetary policy. Therefore, inflation is the responsibility of central banks and is NOT the by-product of a healthy economy, nor is inflation necessary to have a healthy economy.

Urban Geopolitics in a Time of Chaos

A New Global Pattern is Emerging Which Will Dictate How Strategies Are Planned

By Gregory R. Copley

Oswald Spengler gave ample warning, in The Decline of the West (which he wrote mainly during World War I), that Western civilization was even then reaching some of its natural limits. He demonstrated that Roman and later Western civilization (which emerged from the classical era of Greek culture) had pursued — as civilizations do as they emerge from cultures — a process of expansionism and materialism. It is a process which has an organic lifespan. 

Those who thought that Spengler was defining the “decline of the West” in terms of the coming few years would have missed his historical perspective. However, the process he described took the path he predicted, in which continued expansionism in material and spatial (and therefore population) terms would occur alongside the evolutionary maturing of political structures.

So, then, is “the West” now in that process of “decline” which the title of his book suggested would occur? And if so, then what are the ramifications of that in strategic terms?

Render Unto Caesar

What the history of ancient gold coins says about Europe's kingless, faceless money today...

By Adrian Ash

So when Vespasian was proclaimed Emperor by the legions in Egypt in AD 69, he hurried to strike silver and gold coins at Antioch, Tacitus tells us.

Two hundred years later, the "insane despot" Commodus would only believe that his friend Perennius was plotting to overthrow him when he was shown coins already bearing his former favorite's image. And ancient Persian kings went further, says the later Armenian chronicler Moses of Chorene, each seeing to it that "all the money in the royal treasury was recoined with his effigy" as soon as he took power.

The face on a coin mattered, in short, and mattered a lot. Not least because, as head of state, the king or caesar was also head of the army. And with armies needing to be paid if you wanted to keep them on side, coins were the most common currency – a sort of "state gazette", in the words of a much later English writer – for spreading political news to pre-literate peoples.

In the ancient world, "Coins followed – indeed accompanied – the sword," says late-20th century historian Glyn Davies, pre-empting a point which this year's Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber takes pains to stress, albeit via the 'Cartalist' theory that early governments chose to create and foster monetized markets the better to tax them.

The Bubble and Beyond

The Road from Industrial Capitalism to Finance Capitalism and Debt Peonage

By Michael Hudson

This summary of my economic theory traces how industrial capitalism has turned into finance capitalism. The finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector has emerged to create “balance sheet wealth” not by new tangible investment and employment, but financially in the form of debt leveraging and rent-extraction. This rentier overhead is overpowering the economy’s ability to produce a large enough surplus to carry its debts. As in a radioactive decay process, we are passing through a short-lived and unstable phase of “casino capitalism,” which now threatens to settle into leaden austerity and debt deflation.

This situation confronts society with a choice either to write down debts to a level that can be paid (or indeed, to write them off altogether with a Clean Slate), or to permit creditors to foreclose, concentrating property in their own hands (including whatever assets are in the public domain to be privatized) and imposing a combination of financial and fiscal austerity on the population. This scenario will produce a shrinking debt-ridden and tax-ridden economy.

The latter is the path on which the Western nations are pursuing today. It is the opposite path that classical economists advocated and which Progressive Era writers expected to occur, given the inherent optimism of focusing on technological potential rather than on the political stratagems of the vested rentier interests fighting back against the classical idea of free markets and economic reforms to free industrial capitalism from the surviving carry-overs of medieval and even ancient privileges and essentially corrosive, anti-social behavior.

Whether you vote Republican or Democrat, the oligarchs will win

The Next Election: High Stake Outcomes Based on Non-issues

By Paul Craig Roberts

The election of the next puppet president of the “world’s only superpower” is about two and one-half months off, and what are the campaign issues? There aren’t any worthy of the name.

Romney won’t release his tax returns, despite the fact that release is a customary and expected act. Either the non-release is a strategy to suck in Democrats to make the election issue allegations that Romney is another mega-rich guy who doesn’t pay taxes, only to have the issue collapse with a late release that shows enormous taxes paid, or Romney’s tax returns, as a candidate who advocates lower taxes for the rich, don’t bear scrutiny.

What are Romney’s issues? The candidate says that his first act will be to repeal Obamacare, a program that Romney himself first enacted as governor of Massachusetts. This will cost Romney political contributions from the insurance industry, which is thankful for the 50 million new private insurance policies that Obamacare, written not by Obama but by the private insurance companies, provides at public expense. It is not to the insurance industry’s benefit to have a single payer system like other western countries.

Boomers Are Breaking the Deal

How Are You Going to Keep Them Down on the Farm?

By John Mauldin

There is something missing from this thing we are calling a recovery. For most in the US it does not feel like a recovery, and for good reason: the jobs aren’t there. But for some groups it is a recovery, and more. And that reveals an even bigger problem. Today, in a summer-shortened Thoughts from the Frontline, we look at the trends in employment as well as take note of a signpost we passed on the way to finding out that we can’t pay for all the future entitlements we have been promised. It’s a short letter but hopefully thought-provoking. At the end, I note a webinar and a few speeches I’ll be giving in the near future.

Last spring, I mentioned I was working on a book on employment with Bill Dunkelberg, the Chief Economist for the National Federation of Independent Businesses. We were hoping to get it out by this fall. In the process of researching the topic, I began to see some new patterns in the employment trends that suggest we may be going through a generational transformation, led by both demographics and technology. And while it is ultimately positive, the transition will be harder on some groups than others. In the next few months we will take some time to explore these new trends, but let me quickly lay out a few areas for discussion.

First, we may be going through a technological shift in employment not unlike that in the Industrial Revolution. My discussions recently with Dr. Woody Brock give us some insight. In 1850 the largest group of workers in the US were on farms. By 1900 the largest group was domestic workers. (Data suggest that Great Britain had twice as many domestic workers per household as the US in 1900, and Germany some 50% more.)

Understanding China's One-Child Policy

The rich can have as many babies as they want

By Massoud Hayoun 

Children in Beijing's Shunyi Orphanage.Chairman Mao Zedong famously opposed suggestions that Beijing restrict population growth, saying, “The more people there are, the stronger we are.”

Three years after Mao's death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping—the man behind China's economic development—enacted the one-child policy [3] against his predecessor's wishes. Today, more and more Chinese seem to agree with Mao.

Photos of a Chinese mother whom local officials forced to abort after seven months of pregnancy in June are still circulating widely on the Internet, fueling debate on the merits of the policy.

Feng Jianmei, age twenty-three, failed to pay a $6,300 fine to family-planning officials [4] in northwestern Shaanxi province in order to have a second child. Gruesome images of Feng lying beside her aborted fetus are still circulating widely on Chinese social-media site Sina Weibo [5].

A gang of moralizing cranks

Lance Armstrong doping campaign exposes USADA’s hypocrisy

By Sally Jenkins

First of all, Lance Armstrong is a good man. There’s nothing that I can learn about him short of murder that would alter my opinion on that. Second, I don’t know if he’s telling the truth when he insists he didn’t use performance-enhancing drugs in the Tour de France — never have known. I do know that he beat cancer fair and square, that he’s not the mastermind criminal the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency makes him out to be, and that the process of stripping him of his titles reeks.

A federal judge wrote last week, “USADA’s conduct raises serious questions about whether its real interest in charging Armstrong is to combat doping, or if it is acting according to less noble motives.” You don’t say. Then when is a judge, or better yet Congress, going to do something about it?

Quite independently of Lance, with whom I wrote two books, for a long, long time I’ve had serious doubts about the motives, efficiency and wisdom of these “doping” investigations. In the Balco affair, all the wrong people were prosecuted. It’s the only so-called drug investigation in which the manufacturers and the distributors were given plea deals in order to throw the book at the users. What that told us was that it was big-game hunting, not justice. It was careerist investigators trying to put athletes’ antlers on their walls. Meanwhile, the Fourth Amendment became a muddy, stomped-on, kicked-aside doormat.

The Crisis of Democracy Has Reached Act Two

We have forgotten that societies created government, not the other way around

By Gregory R. Copley

It would be a mistake to think that the Western economic crisis is being managed toward a successful conclusion; that perhaps it can escape from disaster. Rather, most Western societies have moved closer to the brink of economic — and therefore political and social — instability because they have forgotten the fundamentals of social reality which determine the value of currencies, property, and products. 

To be more precise, elected political leaders almost always choose to place short-term stability — frequent, stop-gap tactical fixes — ahead of structural solutions. Perhaps, indeed, even if they understood and desired enduring structural renovation, the complex mass of societies and now-ingrained political practices (what we call Western democracy) could not be persuaded to accept painful corrective moves by any measure short of societal collapse or conflict. 

It is inconceivable that economic recovery can occur in the absence of a recovery of productivity. Despite this, Western economies have not only failed to stimulate real productive growth, they have consistently discouraged investment in production. Western governments have also consistently, in recent decades, discouraged the development of any incentives for their populations to become actively engaged through individual initiative and freedom to act in the fight for economic recovery. Rather, at this juncture in Western “democracy”, all governmental efforts are directed at two principal endeavours: 

•     Providing bread and circuses to the base of the electorate as a  palliative, narcotic, soporific indulgence; and 
•     Extracting the means — the funds — to sustain the bread and circuses and the bloating governmental structures through punitive taxation and increasingly draconian tax collection regimes. 

Is India About to Alter the World's Energy Future?

The Sleeping Elephant is Awakening 

By Raymond Tham

Since 1951, the Indian government has somehow managed to fail in every single attempt to reach its annual target of increasing the nation’s electricity production capacity. But while the nation continues to struggle with crippling blackouts and power shortages till today, an energy plan, conceived during the 1950s, may fundamentally alter the nation’s, and quite possibly the world’s, energy future.

Thorium, like its Norse god and Marvel superhero namesake, is expected to change the world.

Late last month, India suffered two consecutive power grid failures, which crippled the nation’s social and economic infrastructure: On July 30th, nearly 300 million Indians were affected by a massive blackout; and on the very next day, more than half of the population had no access to electricity after three of the nation's five power grids failed at lunchtime.

As engineers struggled to fix the world’s worst blackout in history, many analysts questioned whether the Indian government could meet the nation's increasing appetite for energy.

“The turmoil caused by the back-to-back grid failures is almost at the scale of a national emergency,” wrote Times of India journalist Ranjan Roy in an op-ed piece.

“A power crisis has been staring us at the face . . . and successive governments have failed to prevent a disaster,” he later noted.

Asia’s simmering political tensions defy conventional wisdom

Where Nationalism Still Matters

by Guy Sorman

Too often, we see East Asia only from an economic perspective, marveling at the undeniable success of China, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and South Korea. Yet these nations have another story to tell, one that owes less to current economic performance than to much older instincts: nationalism and ethnic resentment, the forces that kindled World War I in Sarajevo. Today, those forces underlie disputes in places that we ignore or know nothing about, such as the Senkaku Islands, the Dokdo Islands, and the Spratly archipelago. And those disputes may spark military conflicts between rival Asian countries.

Such thinking goes against the theory that trade must soothe centuries-old enmities, that commerce annihilates even the temptation of war. Isn’t this the lesson of Jean Monnet’s brilliant vision, the European Union? Wars disappeared in Europe when replaced by trade. And Asian countries certainly cooperate with one another commercially; the products that we buy after they’re exported from one Asian country or another are actually composed of pieces that travel from factory to factory in China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

The Rise of Sauron

Socialism and Decivilization

by Jesus Huerta de Soto

On pages 33–35 of my book Socialism, Economic Calculation, and Entrepreneurship, I examine the process by which the division of practical entrepreneurial knowledge deepens "vertically" and expands "horizontally," a process that permits (and at the same time requires) an increase in population, fosters prosperity and general well-being, and brings about the advancement of civilization. As I indicate there, this process is based on

1.   the specialization of entrepreneurial creativity in increasingly narrow and more specific fields, and in increasing detail and depth;

2.   the recognition of the private-property rights of the creative entrepreneur to the fruits of his creative activity in each of these areas;

3.   the free, voluntary exchange of the fruits of each human being's specialization, an exchange that is always mutually beneficial for all who participate in the market process; and

4.   constant growth in the human population, which makes it possible to entrepreneurially "occupy" and cultivate a rising number of new fields of creative entrepreneurial knowledge, which enriches everyone.

War on women?

The real war is on children

By Mark Steyn

The Democratic Party, never inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth, does have a tendency to flog him to death. So it is with a fellow called Todd Akin, a GOP Senate candidate who unburdened himself of some ill-advised thoughts on abortion and "legitimate rape," and put Missouri back in play for the Democrats. Less-ambitious political parties would be content with that little windfall, but the Dems have decided to make – what's his name again? Oh, yeah – this guy Akin the face of the Republican Party. I mean, Mitt pretty much sees "venture capitalism" as a fancy term for legitimate rape, right?

California's Barbara Boxer opened the bidding this week in her familiar low-key style. "There is a war against women, and Romney and Ryan – if they are elected – would become its top generals," Sen. Boxer told a Planned Parenthood meeting. "There is a sickness out there in the Republican Party, and I'm not kidding. Maybe they don't like their moms or their first wives." Reichsmarschall Romney and Generalissimo Ryan are both still married to their first wives, so it must be the moms. No wonder Ryan wants to throw his off a cliff.

The Fantasy of Debt

No Trade-Offs, No Sacrifices

Easy, cheap credit has created a fantasy world where everyone "deserves" everything right now, and trade-offs and sacrifice have been banished as unnecessary.

by Charles Hugh-Smith

Debt offers a compelling fantasy: there is no need for difficult trade-offs or sacrifices, everything can be bought and enjoyed now. In the old days when credit was scarce and dear, buying a better auto required substituting 1,000 brown-bag lunches for restaurant meals: yes, four years of daily sacrifice.

Sending a child to college meant no meals out (or perhaps once or twice a year), driving an old car, no vacations other than camping, working overtime to make a few extra dollars, summer jobs for every teen in the family and a hundred other sacrifices and trade-offs. All too often, only the oldest got to go away to university; younger siblings had to sacrifice their education for the greater good of the family.

If the oldest sibling was fortunate enough to earn a decent salary after graduation, he or she sacrificed to pay for the education of younger siblings.

Trade-offs and sacrifices were the core of household finances for those families that sought to "get ahead" or purchase things that required substantial cash.

Abundant, cheap credit upended the incentives to make adult trade-offs and sacrifice consumption for future benefits. Why eat 1,000 brown-bag lunches when you can buy a new car for $500 down and "easy" monthly payments? Heck, you don't even need to pay for the lunches with cash; just charge them.

How the West created modernity

City, Empire, Church, Nation

By Pierre Manent

We have been modern for several centuries now. We are modern, and we want to be modern; it is a desire that guides the entire life of Western societies. That the will to be modern has been in force for centuries, though, suggests that we have not succeeded in being truly modern—that the end of the process that we thought we saw coming at various moments has always proved illusory, and that 1789, 1917, 1968, and 1989 were only disappointing steps along a road leading who knows where. The Israelites were lucky: they wandered for only 40 years in the desert. If the will to be modern has ceaselessly overturned the conditions of our common life and brought one revolution after another—without achieving satisfaction or reaching a point where we might rest and say, “Here at last is the end of our enterprise”—just what does that mean? How have we been able to will something for such a long time and accept being so often disappointed? Could it be that we aren’t sure what we want? Though the various signs of the modern are familiar, whether in architecture, art, science, or political organization, we do not know what these traits have in common and what justifies designating them with the same attribute. We find ourselves under the sway of something that seems evident yet defies explication.

Some are inclined to give up asking what we might call the question of the modern. They contend that we have left the modern age and entered the postmodern, renouncing all “grand narratives” of Western progress. I am not so sure, though, that we have renounced the grand modern narratives of science and democracy. We may be experiencing a certain fatigue with the modern after so many modern centuries, but the question of the modern remains, and its urgency does not depend on the disposition of the questioner. So long as self-understanding matters to us, the question must be raised anew. Even if we do not claim to provide a new answer, we should at least have the ambition to bring the question back to life.

Why Representative Government and the Rule of Law Require Nation States

Why the elite wants to obliterate borders

Politicians present their sniffiness about national sovereignty as something progressive and liberal. It is anything but.

by Angus Kennedy 

UK foreign secretary William Hague, in threatening recently to storm the Ecuadorian embassy in London and arrest Julian Assange, displays the same degree of contempt for national sovereignty that Western nations have shown repeatedly since the end of the Cold War. The examples of this contempt are legion, from invading countries to bring about regime change, to the unelected officials of the Troika (the European Commission, European Central Bank and the IMF) lecturing and threatening Greece into sacrificing itself on the altar of the interests of the European Union. And in each case, the core principles of national self-determination and of democratic sovereignty, once championed by Woodrow Wilson and Lenin alike, are more likely today to be attacked as the fig leaves of dictators.

Thierry Baudet’s The Significance of Borders is a rare counter to such views. A controversial Dutch columnist for NRC Handelsblad, a lawyer and historian at the University of Leiden, Baudet argues that representative government and the rule of law is impossible without the nation state. But today, he argues, the nation is under attack from two directions.

Making America safe for the Democratic Party

On the Road to Serfdom Again

By BRADLEY J. BIRZER

In 1944, Austrian economist Friedrich August von Hayek published a little polemic through the University of Chicago Press entitled The Road to Serfdom. No one, least of all Hayek himself, expected the book to explode in the manner it did, especially after Reader’s Digest chose to serialize it. Based in large part on observations first made by Alexis de Tocqueville, The Road to Serfdom did much to galvanize the Right, especially in America, giving it voice and, to a great extent, unity. Any power at war, Hayek noted in his book, should consider not only what the aim of the war is, but also what the postwar world should look like. Should the current Allied powers simply rehash the mistakes made by the Western powers after World War I, the efforts of World War II would amount to little good.

To begin to understand oneself, Hayek noted, one must understand the enemy as embodied in nationalism and socialism. Yet the so-called free Allied powers had only revealed “an inner insecurity and uncertainty of aim which can be explained only by confusion about their own ideals and the nature of the differences which separated them from the enemy,” Hayek lamented. Long before the current war, he continued, the Western powers had lost their understanding of liberty as “the basic individualism inherited by us from Erasmus and Montaigne, from Cicero and Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides, is progressively relinquished.”Individualism, Hayek argued, had called for respect for the uniqueness of each individual person, each able to make choices, and each able to use his talents for the betterment of himself and his community. Slowly discovered throughout the Western tradition, such individualism had led to true progress. Now, Hayek feared, not only had the West lost its purpose, but it did not even know how to return to its foundations. Echoing Tocqueville, Hayek concluded that the West crept toward socialism, toward a soft or democratic despotism.

The Electoral College and American Liberty

The abolition of the Electoral College would result in a severe tilting of the American political system to the left

By Gary Gregg   

It’s that time again when all eyes are drawn to the spectacle that is the American presidential campaign. We watch as Romney and Ryan bus from one end of Ohio to the other and observe Obama seeming to run the Administration from Air Force I on the way to fundraisers in California or small town rallies in Iowa and Colorado. As we watch the quadrennial drama unfold, the inevitable question arises: Is this any way to run an election?

There are many problems inherent in the way America elects its chief executives. Many of us have our pet ideas of ways we think it could be changed for the better, but no reform pops up with more regularity than the abolition of the Electoral College.  Before the heat of summer begins to slide away, the Op Eds and blogs appear and polls are reported showing a majority of the American people seeming to back the system’s demise.

Hundreds of proposed constitutional amendments which would have abolished or fundamentally altered the workings of the system have failed in Congress over the last century. Now the opponents have crafted a way around the constitutional impediments to reform and are as close to altering our electoral system as they have been since the 1970s.

Everything you need to know about where things stand in Europe

Summer fun in Europe is about to come to a screeching halt

By Cyrus Sanati

It may seem like the euro crisis is on hold at the moment as European lawmakers take their summer vacations. But upon their return in September, they will almost certainly find that their house is still very much on fire.

A number of policy decisions will be made in the next month that could alter the direction of the crisis, from establishing the European Central Bank's new role as "bond-buyer-in-chief" to figuring out how to bail out Greece yet again. There are a number of large hurdles the ECB will need to hop over before the markets accept that it is in control of the chaos.

But all eyes will be on Berlin for at least one day next month as the German constitutional court rules on the constitutionality of the nation's participation in Europe's new bailout fund. If the court rules against German participation, panic will almost surely sweep through the markets as the core of the rescue operation fizzles before it is even able to get off the ground.

Abortion and Rape

A society that prefers death to life not only cannot prosper; it cannot survive

by Andrew P. Napolitano

The criticisms of the recent absurd comments by Missouri Republican Congressman Todd Akin, who at this writing is his party's nominee to take on incumbent Missouri Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill in November in a contest he had been expected to win, have focused on his clearly erroneous understanding of the human female anatomy. In a now infamous statement, in which he used the bizarre and unheard-of phrase "legitimate rape," the congressman gave the impression that some rapes of women are not mentally or seriously resisted. This is an antediluvian and misogynistic myth for which there is no basis in fact and which has been soundly and justly condemned.

Akin also stated that the female anatomy can resist unwanted impregnation. This, too, is absurd, offensive and incorrect. Medical science has established conclusively that women cannot internally block an unwanted union of egg and sperm, no matter the relationship between male and female. I think even schoolchildren understand that.