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10/22/10 Hong Kong, China - Austerity be damned, at this rate Mr. Bernanke will go down in the history books as one of the greatest money creators ever to have walked this planet! Never mind sky-high deficits and a crushing debt overhang, at its most recent FOMC meeting, the Federal Reserve all but guaranteed another round of quantitative easing. The truth is that the US is insolvent and its policymakers will stop at nothing in order to avoid sovereign default. So, it should come as no surprise that at its latest meeting, the Federal Reserve downplayed the risk of inflation, thereby setting the stage for another round of money creation.

Excellent review of Charles Murray's new book on Class Warfare, "Coming Apart".  Excellent libertarian commentary hits hard on solutions pouring out of the both the left and the right advocating the use of big government force and power to level the class divide.  Whatever happened to individual liberty and the Constitution? excerpt: This is what the debate is about. To the left, the answer about what to do is completely obvious. We need massive government programs to boost the lowers, and we need new taxes and punishments to whack the uppers good and hard. Never mind that the programs for the lowers don't work and the punishments on the rich end up only bolstering a new government elite that lords it over everyone. The right has a different solution. Well, not everyone on the right, but those neoconservatives who take it as a given that every coherent nation needs a unified national culture. To quote David Brooks: "We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement. If we could jam the tribes together, we'd have a better elite and a better mass." No thanks on this Stalinist plan. The right is just like the left in this sense: If there is a national problem, it needs a solution imposed by force. The left favors looting people, whereas the right favors Tasing people. Either way, it is all about increasing the police powers of the state. On the extremes, the left wants total expropriation to make everyone equally poor, whereas the right wants total war to unify us all in a grand project of killing and being killed. This is what worries me most about the Murray thesis. No matter where you look for answers, the solutions actually seem worse than the problem itself. More fundamentally, we have to ask: What is the problem we are actually tryin