Free Republic

The US and Iran have failed to reach an agreement after 21 hours of talks in Pakistan. I can’t say I’m surprised. After all, we didn’t have to wait for the negotiations to finish to make an informed guess of the outcome. We needed merely to consider the shape of things beforehand to know that Donald Trump’s hoped-for new world order would fall into new world chaos. America and Iran agreed on a ceasefire conditional on the Islamic Republic’s complete opening of the Strait of Hormuz. It has so far refused to honour that condition. Earlier this week, President Trump...

Ninety years ago the Chicago White Sox intentionally lost--dumped, to you sports fans--the World Series. Legend has it that a young fan implored the team's star, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, as he emerged from the court house, "Say it ain't so, Joe." The Shoeless one allegedly responded, "Yes, I'm afraid it is, kid." Let's hope that chief White House economic adviser Larry Summers wouldn't respond similarly if someone were to charge that he sat silently when the administration's political types decided it would be just fine to submit a budget that will take the ratio of debt-to-GDP from around 40 percent...

... Longer-term, there is little doubt that we will be paying more for energy. On Wednesday Democrats in the House agreed on a cap-and-trade system that will put a price on CO2 emissions, a cost that will be passed on to consumers in the prices of electricity and other energy sources. Agreement was reached when the bill's enthusiasts bribed recalcitrant congressmen with free pollution permits for important constituents in the utility, oil and other industries. Which is too bad: cap-and-trade is a woefully inefficient way of imposing emissions costs on polluters. Experience in Europe shows that the price of permits...

Barack Obama is unhappy with much that preceded his occupation of the White House, and not only his predecessors conduct of foreign policy, for which he is a serial apologizer. Pre-Obama domestic policy also displeases him: any prosperity the nation enjoyed, he says, was built on a foundation of sand. That won't happen again: the trillions of debt he is loading on the nation's books will enable us to erect our post-recession house on solid rock, he says. Our world will never be the same again. Of course, it never has been: the march of technology has enabled us to...