The end is near — depending on how you define “near” and where you live.

A couple of weeks ago, hedge fund legend Stanley Druckenmiller gave an important talk arguing that the crisis is about to hit and investors should liquidate their equity holdings. He and others who have similar views have been the subject of much debate among economists — more of it about the timing of the next global and U.S. downturn and not so much about whether it will come.

The crisis has already hit many — depending on where you live and what assets you hold — and will eventually spread to billions of others, including a very large segment of the U.S. population.

The fundamental problem is most countries are experiencing little or no growth as a result of excessive government spending (particularly on transfer payments), and destructive regulations and tax policies.

The unwillingness of the politicians (and their voters) to cut back on spending and regulation has led to an explosion of government debt, which is not sustainable at current levels of economic growth. This, in turn, is fueling a demand for more government spending (more free stuff) and thus more debt.

How long do you think this can go on?

Well brought-up individuals are taught not to take things from other people’s pockets: “Thou shall not steal.” There are those who never learned the lesson — criminals, and many in the global political class.

The latest targets of the global looters are multinational corporations.  During the last few years, there has been an effort by high-tax countries (many of which are rich) to establish global minimum corporate taxes and for international tax bureaucrats to determine how taxes on a company should be allocated among the jurisdictions in which it operates.

Even though the effort is cloaked as an issue of "tax fairness," it is really an effort of more powerful countries and their political classes to take away more from those who earned it and spend it on themselves and their friends.

This effort to tax companies more raises a series of questions.

First, is it wrong for corporate officers to try legally to minimize their company's tax bills? No, in fact, corporate officers have a fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders, employees and even their customers to minimize costs, including taxes.

Second, should corporations be taxed at all? Again, the answer is No.  Here’s why.

This past month, I received an email from a European friend (who has a doctorate in chemistry) saying: “Dear Richard: Now you are a member of this illustrious club! I am beginning to be afraid! What is going on?” It seems my name had been put on a “Global Warming Disinformation Database.”

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has invited more than a dozen state attorneys general to join him in investigating fossil fuel companies and their donations, because they raised questions about some of the “science” used by the global warming lobby. Al Gore joined him at the press conference.

What is going on is nothing more than modern-day Lysenkoism, named after Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko, who had rejected Mendelian inheritance and the evolutionary theory of natural selection.

Lysenkoism is now used in a metaphorical way “to describe the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives.”  This is precisely the case with Climate Alarmism.