Yes, the world is a mess -- but there is a long-run solution. Most countries, including those with the biggest economies, are plagued with slow growth and rising, unsustainable debt burdens. The slow growth is in large part a result of excessively large government sectors -- with taxes, regulations and spending far beyond the optimal. And the rise in debt increases the pressure for more taxes, which slows growth even further and thus fuels the demand for even more government spending to take care of the growing numbers of those "left behind" (because of the lack of growth). This is an economic death spiral. Citizens in many countries, including the United States, feel they have lost control of their own governments -- because they have. They no longer think they are masters of their destinies. Large centralized government, by its nature, becomes uncaring at best, and brutal and oppressive at worst. The movement for secession in Scotland was a cry to regain control. There are secession moments all through Europe, as well as the rest of the world. A few examples:

If you were a campaign manager for Republicans running for the Senate or House in November, what policy positions would you advise them to take? The Republican Party has been under a lot of criticism for running a campaign of "Not Obama" rather than presenting a positive agenda -- and much of this criticism is valid. That being said, it is far easier for those of us who are with policy organizations to give advice about what a candidate ought to say -- because we don't take the direct hit if our policy ideas don't resonate with a majority of voters. As a result, too many candidates resort to the banal -- "I am in favor of a strong national defense, lower government spending, and tax reform." Years ago, I occasionally advised political candidates from the congressional to the presidential level, and so I have some understanding of why candidates are less policy-pure and specific than we would like them to be. So here's how GOP candidates can run a positive issues-oriented campaign that a majority of voters can agree with, yet can substantially advance freedom and prosperity.

Hong Kong.  Why is Hong Kong succeeding while New York City is receding? They are both world-class cities with about the same per-capita income and great natural harbors. New York is about 15 percent larger in population, while Hong Kong is about one-third larger in area (but unbuildable because of the steep terrain). Both have large immigrant populations who are seeking better lives. Last week, I explained how much of Hong Kong's success was a result of it having the freest economy in the world, with low levels of government spending, low tax rates, a minimum of government regulation and the rule of law. There is more. Hong Kong, like Singapore, South Korea, Chile and Switzerland are aspirational societies, rather than societies consumed with envy, like France. Work, saving and investment are not punished in aspirational societies, and there tend to be less social conflict and a higher level of civility. (It was U.S. venture capitalist Terry Anker who first used the term "aspirational society" to describe Hong Kong during our meetings in this glorious city this past week. It is a more inclusive term than "opportunity society" that Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp frequently used to describe their vision for the United States.) The United States used to be an aspirational society, but has increasingly become an envious society.

Do you think people in government are more or less honest than those in the private sector? A major function of most regulatory agencies is to keep those in the private sector honest and from abusing power. Yet we know that those in government often abuse the power that has been entrusted to them. The American Founders were well aware of the problem. As Thomas Jefferson warned: "The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first." As the size of government has grown, and particularly the bureaucratic state, the chains of the Constitution have been loosened, and predictably the abuse of power has also grown -- the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) being Exhibit A. Exhibit B is the ways bureaucrats and politicians enrich themselves and their cronies with insider trading -- a criminal offense for anyone outside of government but not within.

Geneva. Switzerland is not perfect, but as countries go, it is hard to find one that is much better. The more people know about Switzerland, the higher regard they tend to have for it. By almost any measure of human accomplishment, and particularly in creating a most successful country governance model, the Swiss are clearly No. 1 in the world. Switzerland is a small, landlocked nation without much in the way of natural resources. It has managed to stay out of wars for two centuries and developed a long-term multilingual and multireligious democracy without strife. There is a rule of law with competent and unbiased judges and strong protections for private property. Switzerland also ranks higher than average among the OECD countries (the 35 most-developed economies in the world) in levels of education and student test scores, and has lower levels of air and water pollution. Civil liberties are strongly protected, including freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and even the right to own guns. It does not get much better than this.

Jersey, Channel Islands.  Americans know of the state of New Jersey, but few know that it was named after the island of Jersey, which is located in the English Channel about 14 miles off the coast of France. This small island, about two-thirds the size of Washington, D.C. with only 100,000 people, is today home to one of the world's largest financial centers. Jersey has a higher per-capita income than America, and roughly twice the per-capita income of Britain and France. The globe is dotted with relatively small, prosperous places that have become rich without the benefit of natural resources. What have they -- Jersey and the island next door, Guernsey, along with Bermuda, Cayman, Singapore, Hong Kong, and even larger places like Switzerland --  done right, leaving many of their larger and more richly endowed neighbors plodding along in their economic dust?

Do you want the Obama administration sharing all of your financial information with the Russian, Chinese and Saudi Arabian governments? You may be thinking, not even President Obama would go that far. Not so, read on. This past week, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released its full proposal for a global standard for the automatic exchange of financial information. The rationale behind this despicable idea is to more effectively enable governments, such as that of France and the United States, to identify tax evaders. This might sound like a good idea until one realizes that every individual and business will be stripped of all of their financial privacy if this becomes the law of the land - and it is very close to being just that. Under the OECD proposal, all of the information that financial institutions now report to the U.S. government to try to ensure income-tax compliance, including your account balances, interest, dividends, proceeds from the sale of financial assets - would be shared with foreign governments. The United States and other governments will, of course, claim that your sensitive financial information will remain confidential - and that you can trust the governments. It is bad enough when American officials leak or misuse sensitive financial information about U.S. citizens and businesses, but just think what is going to happen when all of those corrupt officials in foreign governments get ahold of it.

The Obama administration is arguably the most corrupt administration in U.S. history. Corruption destroys civil society and economic growth by undermining the rule of law and protection of private property. Corruption takes many forms, from the simple payment to a government official for a favor, to the failure of government employees to do what they are paid to do, to gross abuse of power. Eric Holder's  "Justice" Department is involved in a $100 billion shakedown racket against the big banks. It has been able to greatly expand its budget outside the legislative process by obtaining financial "settlements" from the private sector, through threats, intimidation and asset forfeiture. This is corruption on a massive scale. The real question should be: Why is Mr. Holder not in jail? If regulatory agency officials are not doing what they are legally required to do, why are they not in jail? Those in government who waste or misspend funds for which they have a fiduciary responsibility are stealing from their employer - the American taxpayer. Why are they not in jail?

Did you know that the portion of the federal budget that Congress actually votes on (the discretionary budget) has been falling for years? The so-called "entitlements," such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and Obamacare, take a larger and larger portion of the total federal budget each year. Former U.S. Treasury economist Eugene Steuerle, now at the Urban Institute, has created a Fiscal Democracy Index, which measures "the extent to which past and future projected revenues are already claimed by the permanent programs that are now in place." In 1965, these programs claimed about 35 percent of the federal budget; now they claim about 85 percent of the budget, and they will soon claim more than 100 percent of total tax revenue. Mr. Steuerle is now out with a new book, "Dead Men Ruling," which explains how we got into the budget mess and the consequences of it. He writes:

July 1 might go down in history as the beginning of the end of the comprehensive, progressive income tax. A progressive income tax, in which the government attempts to tax all labor income and capital income, such as interest, dividends and capital gains more than once, cannot help becoming so complex that it eventually dies of its own weight. This is particularly true when the government attempts to tax the worldwide income of its "tax persons" rather than the income located in its own territory. The complexity is caused by the never-ending attempt to define what income is and what should be exempt (loopholes). Press reports now state that the U.S. tax code is more than 77,000 pages and growing at a rapid rate. Obviously, no one individual or even teams of lawyers and accountants can fully understand all of this, including people at the Internal Revenue Service. When laws are too complex and increasingly subjective in their interpretation, it inevitably leads to corruption. All but the willfully blind now understand that the IRS has both become corrupt and incompetent.  It's time to end it, not mend it.

Do you know why the U.S. economy shrank almost 3 percent in the first quarter of this year? When the news of the dreadful gross domestic product (GDP) number came out last week, many were surprised, but none were more surprised than the folks in the Obama administration. Many of their supporters had been saying this was the year of a real economic recovery. The quick reaction was to blame the bad GDP numbers on the cold weather.  It is rather ironic that the president blames the bad economy on the cold weather, while at the same time he is running around the country saying we have to spend many more tax dollars to prevent warmer weather a hundred years from now. But get ready for much worse economic weather.  Today, July 1, the administration implements perhaps the most stupid and destructive piece of tax regulation ever devised - the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). This one regulation by itself may well cause another drop in GDP during the third quarter of this year.  The Disaster of FATCA has begun.

The gullible give in to the government's global-warming myth {youtube}tiO68V45bjY{/youtube} "Wasting Resources on a potential threat ignores problems at hand." Much of the media treat those who are skeptics about man-made global warming with the pejorative term "global-warming deniers," as if they were Holocaust deniers. Yet many of those in the media who watched presidential spokesperson Jay Carney engage in what can only politely be called "reality denial" day after day were-all-too silent about his obvious misstatements. Reality deniers get away with many of their fibs because...

You may have noticed gasoline prices are rising. If the Middle East situation gets much worse, gasoline prices will rise even more. The good news is that we are likely to avoid long gas lines as we had in the late 1970s under President Carter, because fracking and other new technologies have lessened our dependence on foreign oil and gas. The bad news is that a major rise in oil prices could easily tilt Europe and other places back into a recession, which could kill the little growth the United States is now experiencing. The tragedy is all of this was unnecessary, but brought about by the Obama administration, letting short-term political considerations and ideology override good economics and global security.

Would you have traded five terrorists for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl? The decision may have been wrong or right, but what is striking is that President Obama seems to have made this decision, and all too many others, in an ad hoc way, rather than using decision theory. Decision theory is an orderly way of thinking and choosing among alternatives when there is a number of variables for which the probabilities of each may or may not be known to the decision-maker. It's the opposite of Mr. Obama's thought process. Politicians and criminals both have a tendency to underestimate the probability of getting caught in bad acts. Is it because few studied decision theory or because there is a certain recklessness in the nature of those who follow such pursuits? Obviously it's the latter in Mr. Obama's case, who suffers from what is known as The Fatal Conceit.

Without fracking of oil and gas deposits, there would have been no economic growth in the U.S. over the past five years. Yet the oil and gas industry has been a favorite whipping boy of the environmental zealots both inside and outside of the administration. Without those brilliant entrepreneurs and engineers in the private sector who developed the new techniques to unlock massive amounts of oil and gas at reasonable cost, it is unlikely that President Obama would have been re-elected - for it is they who have kept his economy afloat. Mr. Obama owes his renewed presidency to the very people he gives his back of the hand to.  Is there no end to the irony of this president?

If you were a political leader who wanted to control the population, but wanted to do it without using brute force, how would you do it? The answer: control how individuals and businesses spend their money by controlling their bank and other financial accounts. The Obama administration has set up a program to do just that, called "Operation Choke Point." If the government can prevent you from spending your money on legal products and information services it does not like, it soon has control over much of your life. You might be thinking this could not happen in America, but it is. Increasingly, businesses and individuals engaged in legal activities are having their banking relationships severed because people within the Obama administration and some politicians do not like the particular activity. The Justice Dept.'s "Operation Choke Point" should be renamed Operation Choke Freedom, for that does seem to be its very purpose.

What is the Republican Party's vision for America? You may have a hard time answering other than "not President Obama and his policies." Most Republicans plan to run their fall campaigns focusing on the Obama scandals -- admittedly a target-rich area -- with scandals involving Obamacare, Benghazi, the Internal Revenue Service and Veterans Affairs. All of this is not a vision of the future, though. It is hard to build a consensus -- but smart, strong-minded individuals in the past have been able to articulate a vision that attracted not only the public but other politicians. Ronald Reagan accomplished this, and he was fortunate to have a visionary economic evangelist by his side who helped shape much of the Reagan program and became its principal salesman. The GOP needs this man's vision and passion to end the Malaise of Obama.

Most wars result from at least one side overestimating its chances of success and one or more of the sides not having a clear "endgame." Russian President Vladimir Putin has a clear goal, which can be discerned from his own statements and actions, and from discussions with those who know him well. It is to leave as his legacy the re-establishment of the Russian Empire. The Russian Empire existed from 1721, when Peter the Great proclaimed it, until its collapse in 1917. At its high point in 1866, the Russian Empire included all of modern-day Russia plus Alaska, Finland, the Baltic nations, much of present-day Poland, parts of other Eastern European countries, the Central Asia "Stans," part of Mongolia, and the shores of the Caspian Sea. Mr. Putin, a master of strategy and timing, sees that he has a 2-year window of opportunity to grab or control much of the former Russian Empire. He correctly sees President Obama as weak and indecisive, and hence unwilling to stand in his way -- giving him a window before Americans likely elect a stronger president. And he must start in Ukraine.  Here is why.

Have you noticed that many political candidates, when running for office, claim they are going to make government less corrupt, irrational, incompetent and burdensome? Yet after they are elected, it only gets more so. Politicians like to speak in broad, general terms rather than lay out specific things that they can and will do. If voters demand more specifics, though, they will get them. The following are four specific measures that most members of Congress should be able to support because, once explained, the benefits are obvious. *Let's start by asking:  Do you think you should be able rely on Internal Revenue Service guidance when preparing your taxes? This would seem to be a no-brainer - an obvious "yes."  However...

When do you think the Associated Press reported this? "The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer, and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters, and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable." The Washington Post published this AP report on Nov. 2, 1922. You may have noticed that the predicted disaster 92 years ago did not happen, nor have other predicted catastrophes from the global-warming crowd.  Yet the warmists' apocalyptic predictions continue unabated.  Why?

Do you think the Internal Revenue Service and other government agencies should have the right to seize your assets, including your bank accounts, when you have not been convicted of wrongdoing? The fact is, the IRS and other government agencies do this all the time, and often without even a formal accusation of wrongdoing. Thus, in criminal cases, the government has to convince a judge and jury beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime has been committed. Under civil asset-forfeiture laws, no such proof is required -- and, as a result, many innocent people have had their property taken by agents of the federal government. Anyone who is awake knows that the IRS has been politicized -- and thus critics of the administration live in fear that their property will be taken for the mere act of speaking out against the government.  There is only one solution.

Paper currency is dirty and is a major transmitter of disease as it goes from unwashed hand to unwashed hand. It is easily lost and stolen, and can be easily destroyed by getting wet or burned. It physically wears out in a short time and is costly and troublesome to replace. So why do we still use the filthy stuff in the electronic age? When given a choice, people find credit cards, debit cards and bank account electronic payments more convenient than cash. In many parts of the world, payments can be made from cellphone to cellphone, with the phone companies serving many of the functions of traditional banks. Money can be stored and transmitted from and to almost any form of computer. Some 15 years ago, I wrote a book forecasting the demise of paper currency. I expected paper currency to gradually disappear like paper checks have. However, I was wrong. Rather than disappearing, the demand for paper currency is rising faster than inflation or population, albeit not by much, but the total quantity of paper U.S. dollars in circulation is roughly double what it was a dozen years ago. The question is: Why?

Athens, Greece.  How far can a modern economy sink? The Greek economy is entering its fifth year of decline. Nominal gross domestic product is about 28 percent lower than it was four years ago. The official unemployment rate is 27.5 percent (as though the decimal point matters, given the poor quality of the data). The unemployment rate for young people is about 60 percent. Nonperforming loans continue to rise. The privatization program continues to fail, in part because of an absence of bidders. In a paper posted earlier this month, leading Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis of the University of Athens and the University of Texas at Austin argues Greece is "a failed social economy." The following are several of his examples:

To whom would you be willing to trust with all of your financial and tax information: 1) close family members; or 2) the U.S. government and foreign governments, including Russia? For the last several decades, global liberty-haters have dreamt that all financial privacy would be eliminated. They have sought out a variety of excuses to act as Peeping Toms peering into your bank accounts. In the 1980s, their big push was to enact "anti-money laundering" legislation, with the claim that it would make catching drug dealers and other assorted criminals easier. The United States passed its first anti-money laundering law in 1986 -- despite the fact that no one could objectively define "money laundering", because it is not an action but an "intent" to act unlawfully. As a result of all the global anti-money laundering regulations, total compliance costs for financial institutions are now in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Basic banking and other financial services have been reduced and even eliminated for tens of millions of people around the world. Have all of these regulatory costs done any good?

The Russian economy is highly dependent on oil and gas exports, and reducing Russian oil and gas exports would be the most direct way to cause pain to the Russian leadership. However, Europe is heavily dependent on Russian gas and oil, particularly gas. The countries in the EU did not need to be in this position, because the EU has plenty of gas reserves that could be economically tapped using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Because of the environmental lobby, though, the EU has allowed itself to become dependent on foreign energy sources -- particularly Russian. Perhaps Peter Foster said it best in Canada's Financial Post on March 8: "Europe's alternative-energy policy is in a shambles. The EU would be even more vulnerable but for a typically unanticipated example of free-market ingenuity: hydraulic fracturing and the boom in oil shale gas. But guess what: Greens are everywhere resolutely opposed to fracking, and nowhere more than in Europe. [L]ike their peace march colleagues half a century ago, they are ultimately dupes for an authoritarian agenda."

If a politician or government official takes a direct monetary bribe for granting a favor or sweetheart contract, do you think he should be sent to prison? Such an illegal activity is despicable, but it is usually far less costly to society than the legal forms of corruption, which undermine the integrity and respect for government that is necessary for a civil and prosperous society. Most legal corruption is all about increasing power for those in government. This past Friday (2/28), the following amendment offered by Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, was defeated in the Senate Judiciary Committee.  It was to prevent "Intentional discrimination by employee of the Internal Revenue Service." It is hard to imagine anyone interested in good government being against such an amendment, because it is clearly designed to help prevent those in the IRS from abusing their power -- which many have done. Yet 10 senators, all Democrats, voted against it. They were:

Few express opinions different from what they are paid to say, and such is equally true for those who work for government. On an almost daily basis, the world is treated to presidential spokespeople denying what most people understand to be true. Last week, Jason Furman, President Obama's chief economic adviser, who used to have a reputation as a competent economist, embarrassed himself by trying to deny - in response to a Congressional Budget Office report - that the president's proposal to increase the minimum wage would cost jobs. All too many professionals are willing to ignore empirical evidence when it conflicts with their beliefs or those of their employers. Perhaps in no place do we see greater evidence of this than in the field of climate science. If the climate scientists who produced their grossly defective, predictive models had been employed by private companies that depended on the accuracy of their predictions, they would have been fired. Private economic forecasters who are consistently wrong tend to lose their credibility and at least some of their income.  There is one group of economic forecasters, though, who suffer very little loss of prestige or income, even though they may often be wrong. They are those who work for the Federal Reserve and other government agencies.

Among the general public, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and their lesser known younger sibling, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), have reputations far exceeding their actual achievements. The OECD was originally set up as an organization to promote trade among the developed countries and to build statistical databases. It has now morphed into an organization whose principal goal appears to be the collection of more taxes for its member governments. Last week, Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the OECD, said it was the "duty" of international companies to stop employing tax-reduction strategies -- aiming some of his comments directly at Apple and Google. Mr. Gurria seems to think the purpose of business is to pay taxes. Not so. The purpose of a business is...

How would most Americans and Congress react if a foreign government passed laws regulating U.S. businesses and people in the United States? Probably with justified outrage. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act or FATCA is U.S. financial imperialism at its worst.  It's causing great resentment in much of the world, which is hurting U.S. interests. The administration and many in Congress seem to have learned nothing from the Obamacare disaster. Now that they have destroyed the world's best health care system, they are in the process of further destroying what was at one time a very functional global financial system. In its place, they would erect a tax law whose costs were far higher than its benefit, that may drive hundreds of billions of dollars of job-creating foreign capital out of the United States, and that could trigger a global financial crisis.  Only the Democrats could do something so sinister and masochistic -- and try to stymie any Republican effort to repeal it.

Without the rule of law, a civil and prosperous society cannot long endure. The annual reports of The Economic Freedom of the World and The Index of Economic Freedom show very large declines in the international ranking of the United States in the rule of law over the past decade. The Obama administration is becoming increasingly arbitrary concerning what laws it chooses to enforce or not enforce, while, at the same time, through executive orders and administrative decisions, just making up "law" outside of the constitutional process. Perhaps the clearest examples of this abuse can be found at the IRS, which increasingly acts as a rogue agency with the support of its masters at the Treasury and Justice Departments.  The IRS has a long record of ignoring the Constitution and the rule of law.  Now it's become much worse.

Are business people more corrupt than those in government? Hollywood loves to portray those in business as the baddies and those in government as the good guys. Exhibit A is the new movie, The Wolf of Wall Street, the largely true story of con man Jordan Belfort. Belfort and his cronies formed a firm to sell stock in startup and small companies they knew little or nothing about. In order to sell the stock, they would make claims about the companies that they thought the potential buyers wanted to hear, whether the statements were true or not. If a company had been called "Obamacare, Inc.," they probably would have said it will give you "better health insurance" at "lower cost" and "you will be able to keep your doctor." Belfort and some of his cronies quite properly went to prison and had to pay large fines for fraud and misrepresentation.  Don't the wolves of Washington -- such as Mr. Obama, others in the administration and members of the House and Senate who are guilty of equally false claims about Obamacare. -- deserve the same?

The struggle between the productive and the destructive never ends. The productive are those who add more value and wealth than they consume, and the destructive are those who destroy more value and wealth than they create. Will 2014 be a year of production or destruction? Those private individuals, firms or institutions such as the Federal Reserve and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that make economic forecasts for the United States or the global economy are actually making judgments about the outcomes of the struggles between the productive and the destructive. The good news is that most people will work hard and honestly to create more wealth for their families in 2014 -- whether they are creating a new business or product, or just doing a really good job. The bad news is that in the United States, individuals and businesses now face $54 billion more in new federal taxes and a torrent of new regulations and rules that, for the most part, make life harder.

New Year's resolutions are difficult to keep. That is why I find it easier to make them for others, rather than myself, as part of my other-people improvement program. The country would not be on the road to ruin if those in government would follow the New Year's resolutions I propose for them, starting with President Obama (as part of my fantasy world). Resolution #1:  The President should start telling the truth. As is well known, the president has difficulty telling the truth, which, as most children learn at an early age, can lead to many troubles.  He must have a review committee to verify the truth of his statements and speeches before he makes them.  This would also have the side benefit of causing the president to say far less. Resolution #2:...