Mankind seems to be programmed not to remember the reasons for economic success and failure - and these lessons seem to need to be relearned every few years. The normal course of events is for free and prosperous economies (particularly under democracies) to move toward less freedom - more government spending, taxation and regulation - until the burden of government brings growth to a halt or near-halt.

In 1900, Australians enjoyed the highest per-capita income in the world. But then they retreated behind high tariff walls in a misguided attempt to protect manufacturing industries, created a judicial-based wage-determination system as a way to redistribute income in the name of fairness and engaged in excessive economic regulation. All of those measures slowed economic growth and reduced Australia's global per-capita income standing from No. 1 to No. 14.

Will Australians regain their economic footing before they allow themselves to fully re-embrace statism and end up with the disastrous policies of the Obama administration? The jury is out. But, President Obama is perhaps useful to the extent that his policies serve as a bad example for the rest of the world.

Rarely do you see a political party in the process of what appears to be a deliberate attempt to commit suicide while shooting a hostage. In this case, the hostage is the U.S. economy, and the political party is the Democrats.

For the first time, Congress has not even passed a budget. The open question remains: Is the current Congress the worst in American history?

The Republicans have the facts on their side about which party taxes and spends less. The Democrats have successfully been blaming Mr. Bush for the big spending increases and deficits of the last two years of his administration while conveniently forgetting they were in charge of Congress - taxing, spending and deficits. The Republicans need to make people aware that the last budget they were responsible for (2007) had a deficit of just 1.2 percent of GDP. The supersized deficits of the past few years - approaching 10 percent of GDP - happened only after the Democrats took control of Congress. The Democrats have a death wish - the Republicans should help them along in their desire for defeat by making the American people aware of the real deficit facts.

Last Sunday (10/09) in Cairo, some two dozen Coptic Christians were murdered by the Egyptian military egged on by a Moslem street mob.

It is but the latest atrocity perpetrated upon Christians in Moslem countries, where they have been systematically persecuted for decades.  Sadly for the Christians of the Islamic world, their cause is not being championed either by Western governments or by Western Christians.

Aside from Evangelical Protestants, most Western churches are uninterested in defending the rights of their co-religionists in the East.

Instead, these churches and their related international bodies make repeated efforts to attack the only country in the Middle East in which the Christian population has increased in the past 60 years -- Israel.

What is the most corrupting institution in society? Quite simply, it is government, because it controls and distributes more money to more people and institutions than any other single entity and it has the power to coerce and punish or reward that dwarfs what any private party might be capable of doing.

The political class and the media decry the growth of lobbyists in Washington. Yet why is it so hard to understand that as government increasingly gives away more money and dispenses more favors, it attracts greater numbers looking for those benefits?

The Obama administration, despite claims of caring about the poor, has initiated a series of policies — higher taxes and more regulation — that guarantee a huge increase in those dependent on government. Who has a vested interest in more people being dependent? As the old saying goes, any politician who promises to tax Peter to give to Paul will always have the support of Paul.

I wouldn't think it would be worthwhile to draw attention to the Occupy Wall Street "movement," or its list of demands that wouldn't pass muster in an average kindergarten class.

But President Obama sees these demonstrations against corporate America as reasonable protest toward "the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to crack down on abusive practices that got us into this situation to begin with."

This should provide perspective to what our most fundamental problem is today.

We have an endangered species in America whose loss threatens our future. That species is...

On Friday evening, a tall, bespectacled 30-ish Englishman, Matthew Elliott, escorted Lady Margaret Thatcher into a reception at London's 800-year-old Guild Hall. Despite the fact that England is going through its worst economic crisis since Mrs. Thatcher became prime minister more than three decades ago, she was of good cheer as she conversed with those of us who had come to pay our respects. Perhaps a reason for her upbeat manner was that the ideas she (and Ronald Reagan in the United States) championed are once again gaining currency.

If a Republican wins in 2012, and if the economy doesn't markedly improve by 2016, a Democrat (quite possibly Hillary) will almost certainly win in 2016.

What would it take for the economy to markedly improve by 2016? To understand that, one needs to understand elementary classical (Austrian) economics. The fundamental problem is that governments, both in the US and around the world, have politically misallocated tens of trillions of dollars of capital to economically lower valued uses because these uses were of higher political value.

Wasting so much seed corn year after year, decade after decade, has inevitably resulted in progressively leaner harvests.

Unfortunately, this extensive capital misallocation is being done by many different methods and the misallocated capital is going to many politically favored groups, so there is no one silver bullet that will fix the mess. A partial list: