Good Advice for the People of Egypt

From the ever-intrepid Rafael Yglesias:

"You don't want to suffer from premature democracy. You might create the Senate."

More here, here, and here.

what goes around comes around

Alan Blinder is up in arms at the audacity of foreign leaders calling QE2 "currency manipulation". So is President Obama, Paul Krugman, and a host of other luminaries.

Here's Blinder in today's WSJ: "But calling QE2 "currency manipulation" is a grotesque abuse of language".

His (correct) argument is that QE2 is basic everyday expansionary monetary policy just applied to a different portion of the yield curve. Sure it may have the side effect of lowering the dollar, but.....

People, the foreign reaction is a predictable consequence of our insistence in labeling China's fixed exchange rate as "currency manipulation".

A fixed exchange rate is a basic everyday policy regime. Bretton Woods was a system of fixed exchange rates, so the US has had a fixed exchange rate in the not so distant past. The countries of Western Europe continued to struggle to achieve a system of fixed exchange rates post Bretton Woods, culminating in the creation of the Euro which is a system of fixed exchange rates between all the participating countries.

Here's another gem from Blinder: "the US is sovereign nation with a right to its own monetary policy".

And China isn't???

Our administration and elite pundits have been blaming other countries for our problems for a while now, so it's not surprising that many other countries are enjoying their chance to throw it back into our faces.

Best bedroom ever?

We are all criminals

From the comments on the Freedom Update post:

"Saying illegal immigrants have less freedom is like saying people in jail have less freedom. Of course they do, they're criminals for cryin' out loud!"

People, we are all criminals! All of us have broken the speed limit or maybe smoked a reefer, or hired a worker that we didn't pay taxes for, or bought something on the internet without forwarding a sales tax payment to our state of residence, or brought Cuban cigars back from Europe, or didn't declare everything we bought abroad on our customs form.

Saying someone is a criminal is kind of meaningless. There is a big difference between being a criminal and actively doing harm to others.

Sorry for this rant, but I get really tired of this selective labeling and at times demonizing of groups that some people don't like. I am not accusing the commenter of demonizing, but many people do, with a label that could just as well be applied to themselves.

So maybe we should all look in the miror and say, "Hi, my name is (state your name), and I am a criminal".