I'm an unabashed supporter of free trade. I don't mince my words about it.

George Will apparently is too. In his WaPo Op-ed, Will has a few words for Obama on the matter of free trade.

Being someone who peruses the blogs of economists of all stripes from Mark Thoma, Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman to Tyler Cowen, Don Boudreux and Arnold Kling, I take a special interest when matters of general agreement and large importance like free trade arise in the media.

Bruce Bartlett writes in Forbes on what can and cannot be done about the deficit, who is serious and worth taking seriously and who is not.

My answer:

Bruce is right within the limited frame he presents.

But he provides an excellent reason for opposing many kinds of new spending in the first place:

Check this out:

Video

The first 3 minutes or so is the worth watching.

The rest is interesting. What a tirade. Ouch.

Hat tip to The Liberty Papers.

For a plethora of reasons, I'm generally sympathetic to and for the arguments of legalizing and/or decriminalizing drugs...especially marijuana. It's well covered territory on both sides of the argument but, in the end, the anti-legalization arguments fail to convince me that it's a better way to handle this issue. To me, it's not an issue of whether people can or will have access to these drugs because they do. So, "illegal" clearly does not mean "no access" or "diminished access" or "keeping us all drug free". Likewise, "legal" does not mean the opposite.

How to judge economic phenomena is often in the eye of the beholder. One man's problem is often another man's comfort. One country's helpful subsidies to a particular sector can be a bane to that same sector in another country.

With regard to the Cramer vs. Stewart affair, Will Wilkinson offers some commentary based on this great piece by Glenn Greenwald .

Greenwald's main point:

2
--

--

--

again, again and again.

Will it matter in the long run? Probably not. And that is most unfortunate. It's even more likely to happen because many who label themselves "economists" have made it a life's work to take every "sorta, maybe, kinda, perhaps in a theoretical kinda way" twist, footnote or asterisk on the basic bedrock of economic principles and believe more than they should, entertain more possibilities than they should and provide more alternative explanations than they should.

Hat tip Peter Boettke.

Hayek as a special on Meet the Press in 1975 discussing inflation, employment, stimulus, recessions and economic policy and monetary policy. A Gem. Well worth a listen. Much of the discussion is so very relevant to what we are seeing today. His answers with the benefit of hindsight only serve to make him more correct and more brilliant than he might have seemed live in 1975.