On Tuesday (4/08), we learned that "crews searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 have failed to relocate the sounds previously heard deep in the Indian Ocean, raising fears that the batteries in the plane's black box may have died."

The tragic disappearance of all 239 people on board flight MH370 in the Indian Ocean has one really peculiar feature to it: none of the possible explanations is remotely plausible, yet one of them must be true.

The usual rule on these occasions - choose the simplest explanation or, as William of Ockham taught, make the fewest assumptions - simply does not work. There is no simple explanation. Whether the cause was an accidental decompression, a terrorist act or a suicide, all three require us to assume that an outlandish and bizarre sequence of events happened.

I don't know about you, but I have had conversations about MH370 with many people recently, some of whom were fairly confident that they knew what had happened. Yet every story they told was baroque in its contrivance to the point of implausibility, requiring a chain of events that stretched my credulity. Yet, as I say, one such story will turn out to be right.

Consider the sequence of events.

Every few years, at least from the time of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, there is a scandal involving abuse of power at the Internal Revenue Service. We are again in the midst of one of these periodic abuse scandals, with many solemn promises that the problems will be corrected and will not happen again.

As always, the rhetoric is far from the reality for two basic reasons. The first is the nature of the income tax, which, by definition, is subjective in its interpretation of the definition of "income" and thus subject to abuse. The second is the type of person that the IRS attracts as an employee.

In the former, the agency is corrupt in the Orwellian sense. When the federal government's General Services Administration or the IRS takes a number of its employees to Las Vegas for a conference, is this a taxable benefit (income) or not? The answer is this case is "no" because this is the type of benefit the political class enjoys.

In the latter, because the IRS is feared, loathed and resented, it attracts all too many workers who are insensitive to the needs and problems of others, and some even enjoy being bullies.

These flaws of the IRS cannot be mended -- thus the only real solution is to put an end to the IRS itself.

We’ve gotten a number of queries regarding the corporeal status of Osama Bin Laden, given that Michael Ledeen, in Who’s An Iraqi?, reported that OBL croaked in December, yet he came out with an audiotape in January.

Here’s the deal.

The eurozone debt crisis is deepening and threatens to re-erupt on a larger scale when the liquidity cycle turns, a leading panel of economists warned in a clash of views with German officials in Berlin.

"Debts above 130% of GDP for Italy and 170% for Greece are a recipe for disaster once we go into the next downturn," said Professor Charles Wyplosz, from Geneva University.

"Today's politicians believe the crisis is over and don't want to hear any more about it, but they have not tackled the core issues of fiscal union and public debt," he said, speaking at Euromoney's annual Germany conference.

Ludger Schuknecht, director-general of the German finance ministry, insisted that the debt-stricken states of the eurozone are well on the way to recovery, ending their EU-IMF rescue programs successfully one by one. There is no need for any major shift in policy. "The strategy has been right. We need to bring down debt and this is now consensus," he said.

This optimism is sharply at odds with the view of almost every foreign-based economist attending the event. Charles Dallara, former head of the International Institute for Finance and chief negotiator for global banks in Greece's debt-restructuring, said little has been done to put the eurozone on a viable footing, even if sovereign bond yields in southern Europe have fallen to record lows.

[Note from JW:  Dr. Rahn here presents an economic discussion of immigration - after all, he is an economist.  It is not a discussion of the national security threat of immigration, specifically that of illegal immigration from Mexico. A lively discussion of Dr. Rahn's arguments is expected on the TTP Forum!]

How many new immigrants should the United States allow each year? How many guest workers? These are not easy questions, which is why there is as much fierce debate within the two parties as between them.

The two main reasons given for restricting current immigration are the myths that immigrants take away American jobs and that immigrants are more likely to go on welfare, thus putting an additional burden on the taxpayers.

Rather than taking away American jobs, good economists understand that immigrants who work create wealth in America, which in turn creates more and higher paying jobs for everyone.

To explain the economics of this adequately would take more space than this entire commentary, but the truth of the assertion can be seen in the fact that high-wage countries with many immigrants such as Switzerland, Australia and Canada tend to have much higher labor force participation rates and lower unemployment rates than low-wage countries.