Free Republic

“Money is Fungible.” We may disagree about all sorts of things in economics, but not this one. It’s one of the fundamentals. If you have a thousand dollars, you can buy something that costs $1000, or you can buy a hundred things that cost $10 each, or a thousand things that cost $1 each — or you can put your $1000 together with other money you already have, to buy something that costs more. This is so obvious it doesn’t seem worth bothering to mention, right? But it is necessary to delve into this issue, much more seriously than we...

Now that Russia has invaded Ukraine, there is full-scale war in Europe. Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and possibly also Moldova are fully engaged, with other nearby countries on alert, involving themselves in a way that sometimes appears to push the envelope of neutrality. We all know what this means in terms of the human cost to people and geography. Shelling, bombing, firing on individuals, businesses, population centers, industrial centers, and other targets, both military and civilian. Thousands of people have already been killed, and many thousands more, most likely, will die in the weeks and months ahead. That is of course...

During the July 2018 NATO summit, elements of the USA newsmedia focused on President Trump’s accurate attacks on Western Europe’s contradictory actions and positions in the arenas of defense and commerce. What the USA newsmedia covered much less was how welcome those points were to NATO members from Eastern Europe, whose memories of Russian aggression are much more recent, perhaps, than those of Western Europe, making them as wary of these issues as Mr. Trump is. Delegates from Poland, Lithuania, and Romania, for example, appeared just as happy about Mr. Trump’s comments as delegates from England, France and especially Germany...

President Barack H. Obama has announced his administration's commitment to advancing American exports -- to double America's exports by 2014. Now, there's a daring position to take: advocating a goal easily supported by the entire country, regardless of politics or demographics. The question is how to advance exports. The United States is already a huge exporter; ships and planes depart daily, fully laden with millions of dollars' worth of export cargo. There could be more -- there can always be more -- but it's not like we're embarking on some great trip to the unknown. When John F. Kennedy called...

U.S. defense analysts now consider the Chinese air defense network to be the most dangerous system in the world. The Chinese system is considered more dangerous than the formidable Russian system. The reason for China's great leap forward into first place is due to the wholesale use of U.S. commercial products that make the Chinese air defense network flexible, easy to upgrade, and though to exploit. The Chinese investment into its air defense network is calculated to be one-tenth the cost of the U.S. expenditures. The low cost is attributed to what one analyst described as "Cisco in Chinese." Chinese...

You'd think that with all the talk lately from Washington about axes of evil, rogue states, weapons of mass destruction, and missile defense, the U.S. government would make sure that its export control system is state of the art. And you'd be flat wrong. Denying enemies the means to produce nukes, bugs, missiles, et al. clearly is America's first line of defense in the post-9/11 world. Yet U.S. export controls are in the process of breaking down completely. Anyone doubting this charge should look at the General Accounting Office's recent study on U.S. policy toward sending advanced computer chip-making capabilities...