The one indisputable benefit for Americans in the death last Thursday of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi/Gaddafy/Khadafy is that we'll fret no longer over the spelling of his name. Pundits left and right hailed the dictator's death as a triumph of President Barack Hussein Obama's policy of "leading from the rear" on Libya. Not everybody was fooled.  Mr. Obama conducts foreign policy with his political interests more in mind than our national interests, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, charged Sunday (10/23). Those political interests were foremost in the minds of many liberals.

Should the Federal Reserve be abolished as Rep. Ron Paul and others have demanded? The Republican presidential candidates have agreed that they would like to replace Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the Fed, and many have been equally critical of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. The view that both Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Greenspan have done poor jobs is also shared by many economists and financial writers. But, if not Mr. Bernanke, who? And if not the Fed, what? It turns out however that the basic problem is not a central bank like the Fed, or who in particular runs it.  The basic problem is that governments have insisted upon having a monopoly in money, an idea that has been supported by most economists. The Austrian school economists, most notably the late Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek, were skeptics of this view.

Rough justice.  You've all seen the phone camera pics and videos.  They are horrific, but you can't have much sympathy for a murderous monster like Gaddafi.  He got what he deserved - especially since he was given a plethora of opportunities to safely leave Libya and live out his days in comfortable exile.  The choice to end like this was his. So Bush got Saddam and Zero will claim he got Gaddafi - even though Marco Rubio was right in observing that it was the Brits and French.  The contrast in how they were "gotten" is, however, instructive in the extreme.  That contrast is between the humane calm professionalism of American soldiers pulling Saddam Hussein out of his spider hole, and the bloody frenzy of ragtag Libyan rebels pulling Moammar Gaddafi out of his drain pipe.  This is the difference between civilization and barbarism, between democracy and mobocracy.  It is tempting to say the difference is reflected in that between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.

Two of the most popular demands of the Occupy Wall Street protesters are for "free college education," and "debt forgiveness" for  student loans. College students are not among those whom Marxist revolutionary Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) called the "Wretched of the Earth."  These protesters demonstrate their "youthful idealism" by demanding free stuff for themselves. The collegians do have a beef.  Many are discovering that despite their very expensive educations, they are essentially unemployable.  (The unemployment rate among 2010 college grads is slightly higher than the national unemployment rate is now.) Perhaps this is because their very expensive educations taught them so little about the economic system they are protesting against.  New York Magazine discovered, when it polled 50 protesters in Zuccotti Park, that most have no clue what the rich pay in taxes, how the federal government spends its money, or what the SEC is supposed to do.

The real villains in our economic crisis are those in the political class who pandered to the voter by promising more in benefits to be paid for by others.  As more and more people lose their jobs, the demand for government payments grows, making the situation worse and worse. The U.S. government is spending roughly 40 percent more than it is taking in. The simple fact is that the amount of explicit and implicit debt that the United States and other governments have incurred cannot and will not be paid back in full. The political class will try to cure the debt mess with inflation, price controls, tax increases and confiscation, but it will only make things worse. As more and more jobs and homes are destroyed by the debt crisis, the ranks of the revolutionaries will grow until, finally, the new "peasants" realize that the rich are gone and it is the political class who is responsible for the mess. As Mr. Obama and many liberal Democrats embrace the Wall Street protesters, I wonder if they have not only forgotten (or ever knew) good economics, but also the lessons of history. Maximilien Robespierre, a great orator, most certainly did not intend for himself to be guillotined as he and his colleagues unleashed the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution.

A man half the country hadn't heard of a month ago is the leading Republican candidate for president, according to three opinion polls last week. Businessman Herman Cain led former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, 27 percent to 23 percent in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll published last Thursday (10/13).  Mr. Cain led Mr. Romney, 30-22, in a PPP survey that same day.  A Rasmussen poll showed Mr. Cain and Mr. Romney tied at 29 percent. This is remarkable, because only 51 percent of respondents in a Gallup poll Sept. 27 recognized Mr. Cain's name.  If these numbers hold, we'll witness something extraordinary in the history of politics. Are we seeing the emergence of the Black Reagan?

The next GOP presidential candidate debate is four days from now, Tuesday, October 18, in Vegas on CNN.  It will focus primarily albeit not exclusively on foreign policy. I've been asked by friends of a particular candidate to provide him with a private briefing on the most critical foreign policy issues America faces.  What follows is not the usual HFR but a condensed summary of that briefing, which contains much of my Map of the Future talk at Rendezvous XI last weekend. Russia.  Putin is an ersatz macho-man, all hat and no karovi.  Russia's navy is made of rust.  Russia's ill-trained army of drunkards couldn't conquer Romania.  Russian male life expectancy is lower than that of Bangladesh.  Russia is a mafiacracy with a doomed economy dependent on oil & gas exports that fracking in Europe & the US will make uncompetitive.  Do svidanya. China.  No wives, no water, no banks - and a hyper-dangerous military.  Much of China is uninhabited - deserts, mountains, and wastelands.  Habitable China is about the size of the US east of the Mississippi, with over a billion people squeezed into it. Northern China is turning into a waterless dust bowl.  Scores of millions of Chinese men will never get married due to the Chicom's idiotic one-child policy and resultant mass female infanticide.