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.

What are the ramifications if the Supreme Court finds the individual mandate provision of the healthcare reform law unconstitutional? This provision requires individuals to purchase government-defined health insurance or pay a fine.

I hope it will serve as a wakeup call to a nation that I believe is still sleeping through a crisis.

Liberal and open-ended interpretation of the Constitution has rendered it practically meaningless, opening the door to steady growth of the federal government and its inexorable encroachment in our lives over the last half century. The problems we are having today all originate here.

Our growing burden of taxes and government debt -- what now is breaking European countries and is about to break us -- stems from the growth of government programs, enabled by open-ended interpretation of the Constitution.

Our private economy, in which freedom and the creative spirit are still allowed to operate, is going great.

A miracle is taking place in energy, with new domestic production of oil and gas made possible by new drilling technologies.  New technologies abound, with more and more gadgets appearing all the time at lower and lower prices.

So why are we turning over more and more of our lives to the most unproductive, least efficient part of our country: government?

Let's start with a trio of quotes.

On Monday (8/15) in Decorah, Iowa, President Zero explained why he has been a total economic failure:

"We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again.  But over the last six months we've had a run of bad luck."

Which recalls the observation of Lazarus Long in Robert Heinlein's 1973 sci-fi classic Time Enough For Love:

"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded -- here and there, now and then -- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people.

"Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck'."

And on Wednesday (8/17) in Bedford, New Hampshire, Texas Gov. Rick Perry explained:

"America's crisis is not bad luck, it's bad policies from Washington DC...  Our economic plan shouldn't depend on luck, it should depend on sound economic fundamentals."

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.

Next to the Nobel, the richest and most prestigious economic award is the £250,000 ($400,000) Wolfson Economics Prize, awarded by the Wolfson Foundation, founded by British entrepreneur and philanthropist Sir Isaac Wolfson in 1955.  It currently has an endowment of $1.2 billion.

Unlike the Nobel, the final contenders for the Wolfson are known in advance.  This year, out of 425 entrants, five were chosen as finalists - and they all have a shared nightmare on how to "manage" a full or partial disintegration of monetary union. They agree on little else.

"The consequences of a completely unplanned 'Exit' are likely to be catastrophic," said Neil Record from Record Currency Management, one of the five qualifiers.

Catherine Dobbs, a former algorithms expert at Gartmore, said the global shock could be five to 10 times worse than the Lehman earthquake in 2008, given the scale of contracts and counter-party exposure.

The Lehman lesson is that authorities must have contingency plans in place to stop a seizure of the global credit system. The crucial point is exactly how a break-up occurs, not whether it does so.

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.

A few weeks ago the Obama administration put out a video extolling Obama's record on Israel. They took excerpts from speeches by Israeli leaders praising Obama and used them as proof that Israelis view Obama is a great friend of the Jewish state. 

On the whole it was an obscene production. What can Benjamin Netanyahu or any other Israeli official say other than that Obama is a great friend of Israel? We have to face the dismal fact that Obama may remain in the White House until 2017. No Israeli official can afford to say openly what they think of this man. 

While Israel's leaders cannot say the truth about Obama, American Jewish groups can say the truth. Unfortunately, since the majority of American Jewish leaders are more concerned about maintaining their liberal bonafides than defending Israel, the voices opposing Obama's hateful treatment of the US's most vital ally in the Middle East have emanated mainly from the underfunded margins of the American Jewish community.

Here's one voice that tells the truth.

Bagnoli, Naples, Italy.  Who knew Hell could be so beautiful?

I'm sitting in a flower garden overlooking the Mediterranean.  In front of me is the islet of Nisida, where at his villa, Marcus Junius Brutus (85-42 BC) and his conspirators planned the assassination of Julius Caesar.  Off to the left looms Mount Vesuvius, and in the distance is the Isle of Capri.

On the other side of the hill behind me lies The Solfatara, a volcanic crater filled with boiling mud pools and vents hissing and steaming with sulfuric gasses.  For the Romans, it was feared as the home of Vulcan, the god of fire.

Next to Solfatara lies a crater lake called Avernus, Lake Averno.  For thousands of years, from Homer in The Odyssey, to Virgil in The Aeneid, to Dante in The Divine Comedy, it was revered as the entrance to Hell.

My wife and I are not here to go to hell, but to visit our son who, as a USMC Captain, is stationed at the NATO Command nearby that is running the war in Libya.  Nonetheless, this seems a uniquely appropriate place from which to write this HFR as America is descending into economic and political purgatory.