Last week, Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, again came out against the pending trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama, claiming they would cost U.S. jobs.  Yet every respectable economist, from Adam Smith way back in 1776 until the present, has argued the virtues of free trade. Those in the Obama administration continue to waffle on these agreements by catering to the ignorance or deliberate know-nothing stance of their labor and other left-wing supporters. Many of the anti-free-trade types also argue for sourcing things locally. Does any of this make sense? Should we have protective tariffs on pencils? As simple as a pencil is, it contains materials from all over the world (special woods, paint, graphite, metal for the band and rubber for the eraser) and requires specialized machinery. How much would it cost you to make your own pencils or even grow your own food? Trade means lower costs and better products, and the more of it the better.

Soldiers know it is dangerous to attack a prepared position without reconnoitering it first, or softening it up with artillery. And soldiers know it is folly to abandon a flanking attack which is working for a banzai charge instead. These are bad things to do in politics, too.  Yet a group of kamikaze conservatives in Congress seems determined to do them anyway.

The day after Gov. Scott Walker signed into law a bill sharply limiting collective bargaining for public employee unions in Wisconsin, there was a massive protest.  Capitol police estimated the crowd at 50,000.  The Madison police department put it at 85,000. "Gov. Walker's overreaching has brought us to this moment to talk about jobs," said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.  "This is the debate we wanted to have...In your lifetime, have you ever seen this much solidarity, this much excitement, this much activism?" Wisconsin is shaping up to be the Republicans' Waterloo, said E.D. Kain, a liberal who blogs at Forbes magazine, referring to the famous battle in which Napoleon was defeated by the Duke of Wellington (June 18, 1815, just south of present-day Brussels in Belgium).  Maybe so, but who will be Wellington and who will be Napoleon?

If your accountant told your family that you are spending 40 percent more than you are earning, and that your borrowing limits have been reached, how would you cut your expenditures? Would you stop buying food and not pay your mortgage and utilities, or would you first cut out entertainment, such as movies, sports events, cultural performances, nice restaurants and vacation trips?  Rational people would do the latter, but government bureaucrats often do the equivalent of the former. This is known as the Washington Monument Ploy, which got its name when a national parks director shut down the Washington Monument and Grand Canyon for two weeks in 1969 to protest budget cuts, rather than cutting administrative costs, deferring maintenance and curtailing new projects. When faced with a need to cut budgets, the Washington Monument Ploy - or stunt - is the political tactic of shutting down the most visible, popular and/or valuable government service while leaving less important and less appreciated government activities untouched.  What needs to be shut down is this extortionist ploy.

LtCol. Ralph Peters, a retired Army intelligence officer, said on Fox News last week: "Obama loves the idea of being president, but he can't make a decision." "In the case of Libya, Obama has seemed almost Shakespearean in his public musings about whether to be or not to be," agrees military historian Victor Davis Hanson.  "Nobody in the United States is as intent on reminding his fellow citizens just how awesome he is than Barack Obama," political scientist Jay Cost writes in the Weekly Standard.  "But that seems to be about it.  The sense of awe he has cultivated has not been used for any great purpose... This is more of a clerkship presidency, with a commander in chief either unwilling or unable to take the lead on the most challenging issues of the day."

The country is falling off a fiscal cliff.  The world is on fire, and Zero’s dithering and incompetence is pouring gasoline on it. And I’ve still got the flu. But the hero governor of my home state has won a victory that will reverberate through the nation, and perhaps through the ages.  So this week my stein is filled to the brim with Leinenkugel’s Red, the sophisticated Wisconsinite’s choice to accompany bratwurst and cheese on celebratory occasions.

Imagine that you have a serious drinking problem, which has caused your job performance to decline. If your doctor said to you, "Don"t stop drinking now, because going sober may cause you discomfort and may not immediately improve your job performance" - while failing to tell you that if you keep drinking, you will become totally dysfunctional and may die - what would you think of your doctor? The U.S. government has a serious overspending problem. If the spending and the resulting deficits are not soon stopped, the U.S. economy will become dysfunctional, and our prosperity and freedoms will disappear. Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence that the government is headed for a debt crisis, there are still a few economists who are saying: "Spend more."  They have a serious economic drinking problem.