A "rational optimist" like me thinks the world will go on getting better for most people at a record rate, not because I have a temperamental or ideological bent to good cheer but because of the data. Poverty, hunger, population growth rates, inequality, and mortality from violence, disease and weather -- all continue to plummet on a global scale.

But a global optimist can still be a regional pessimist. When asked what I am pessimistic about, I usually reply: bureaucracy and superstition. Using those two tools, we Europeans seem intent on making our future as bad as we can.

Like mandarins at the court of the Ming emperors or viziers at the court of Abbasid caliphs, our masters seem determined to turn relative into absolute decline. It is entirely possible that ten years from now the world as a whole will be 50 per cent richer, but Europeans will be 50 per cent poorer.

As the Ming empire found out, the more government you buy, the less economic activity you get. A Fujian travelling salesman in 1400 was enmeshed in such a tangled bureaucracy that he could neither travel nor sell without bribes and permits, and he had to submit a monthly inventory of his stocks to the emperor.

Sound familiar?

If only we had followed his recommendations, the United States and the rest of the world would not be in the present mess. On Oct. 26, the world lost one of its wisest, most competent and principled economists, William Niskanen.

Bill did his undergraduate work at Harvard and earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Milton Friedman. He then taught at a couple of leading universities, was a high-level official at the Office of Management and Budget and the Defense Department, served as chief economist of the Ford Motor Co., was a member and, ultimately, head of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers and finally, served for more than two decades as the chairman of the Cato Institute.

For four decades, Bill Niskanen worked for a tax-and-spending-limitation amendment to the Constitution. In January 1995, in only 125 words, he presented his proposed constitutional amendment to the House Budget Committee, "consistent with the crisp and majestic language of most of the Constitution."

Here is his amendment. After reading it, ask yourself how much better off the nation would be today if the body politic had passed what he proposed:

“Jack, what's wrong with W? It seems he has a serious deficit of energy and strength. Maybe it's just me, but he doesn't seem right, and hasn't for some months. I’m worried.”

This inquiry by TTPer Paul Rosenberg is typical of many I’ve been receiving. It’s obvious to Paul and lots of others that the Bush Presidency is running out of steam. The deficit in question is not, however, physical - as anyone who tries to keep up with W on a mountain bike at the Crawford Ranch can attest - it’s mental.

Which means neurochemical.

Peace, stability, and freedom of navigation in the Pacific Ocean are inseparable from peace, stability, and freedom of navigation in the Indian Ocean. Developments affecting each are more closely connected than ever. Japan, as one of the oldest sea-faring democracies in Asia, should play a greater role in preserving the common good in both regions.

Yet, increasingly, the South China Sea seems set to become a "Beijing Lake," which analysts say will be to China what the Sea of Okhotsk was to Soviet Russia: a sea deep enough for the People's Liberation Army's navy to base their nuclear-powered attack submarines, capable of launching missiles with nuclear warheads. Soon, the PLA Navy's newly built aircraft carrier will be a common sight - more than sufficient to scare China's neighbors.

That is why Japan must not yield to the Chinese government's daily exercises in coercion around the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea.  The ongoing disputes in the East China Sea and the South China Sea mean that Japan's top foreign-policy priority must be to expand the country's strategic horizons.

Japan is a mature maritime democracy, and its choice of close partners should reflect that fact. I envisage a strategy whereby Australia, India, Japan, and the US form a diamond to safeguard the maritime commons stretching from the Indian Ocean region to the western Pacific. I am prepared to invest, to the greatest possible extent, Japan's capabilities in this security diamond.

Should the Federal Reserve be abolished as Rep. Ron Paul and others have demanded?

The Republican presidential candidates have agreed that they would like to replace Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the Fed, and many have been equally critical of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.

The view that both Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Greenspan have done poor jobs is also shared by many economists and financial writers. But, if not Mr. Bernanke, who? And if not the Fed, what?

It turns out however that the basic problem is not a central bank like the Fed, or who in particular runs it.  The basic problem is that governments have insisted upon having a monopoly in money, an idea that has been supported by most economists. The Austrian school economists, most notably the late Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek, were skeptics of this view.

Jean Buridan (1300-1358) was a 14th century medieval French philosopher famous for his paradox known as Buridan’s Ass. If a perfectly rational ass or donkey were placed exactly equidistant between two bales of hay exactly the same, there would be no reason to choose one over the other - and given no reason to choose, the ass would be unable to do so and starve to death.

Buridan meant for his thought experiment to demonstrate the irrational barrenness of pure reason and the superiority of emotion to rationality. How medieval.

Yet it is just the position of Buridan’s Ass that the German electorate has placed itself in, exactly equidistant between the free market solutions required for their economic survival and the government subsidies to which they have become addicted.

It's a brave scientist who dares to announce the turning point of a trend, the top of a graph. A paper published this week does just that, persuasively arguing that a centuries long trend is about to reverse: the use of land for farming.

The authors write: "We are confident that we stand on the peak of cropland use, gazing at a wide expanse of land that will be spared for Nature."

Jesse Ausubel and Iddo Wernick of Rockefeller University, and Paul Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, have reached this conclusion by documenting the gradual "dematerialization" of agriculture.

Globally, the production of a given quantity of crop requires 65% less land than it did in 1961, thanks to fertilizers, tractors, pesticides, better varieties and other factors.

Even corrected for different kinds of crops, the acreage required is falling at 2% a year.  "Peak Oil" turned out to be 180 degrees wrong.  But Peak Farmland is now very real.

The real villains in our economic crisis are those in the political class who pandered to the voter by promising more in benefits to be paid for by others.  As more and more people lose their jobs, the demand for government payments grows, making the situation worse and worse. The U.S. government is spending roughly 40 percent more than it is taking in.

The simple fact is that the amount of explicit and implicit debt that the United States and other governments have incurred cannot and will not be paid back in full. The political class will try to cure the debt mess with inflation, price controls, tax increases and confiscation, but it will only make things worse.

As more and more jobs and homes are destroyed by the debt crisis, the ranks of the revolutionaries will grow until, finally, the new "peasants" realize that the rich are gone and it is the political class who is responsible for the mess.

As Mr. Obama and many liberal Democrats embrace the Wall Street protesters, I wonder if they have not only forgotten (or ever knew) good economics, but also the lessons of history. Maximilien Robespierre, a great orator, most certainly did not intend for himself to be guillotined as he and his colleagues unleashed the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution.

Two years ago, in Afghan Poppies: What The Bush White House Should Really Be Afraid Of, I told you about CIA collusion and incompetence regarding opium production in Afghanistan.

That was in 2003. Since then, Afghanistan’s poppy crop has exploded. According to Robert Charles, in his capacity as chief counternarcotics official at the State Department, the poppy crop went from 152,000 acres in 2003 to 515,000 acres in 2004 - producing $7 billion in opium and heroin money.

This money is financing Al Qaeda, Abu Musab al Zarqawi in Iraq, and international Moslem terrorism - yet the CIA is too impossibly incompetent to stop it, and the Pentagon simply refuses to.

Many in the American Jewish community are aghast to discover that President Obama is planning to appoint former Senator Chuck Hagel to serve as Defense Secretary. If you want the skinny on how Hagel has come to be known as one of the few ferociously anti-Israel senators in the past generation, Carl from Jerusalem at Israel Matzav provides it.

Meantime, all I can say is I don't understand how anyone can possibly be surprised. Shortly after word came out that Hagel is the frontrunner for the nomination, I read a quaint little blog post written by a conservative leaning commentator voicing her belief that Obama wouldn't want to risk his relations with Israel's supporters by appointing Hagel.

But as Powerline pointed out yesterday (12/17), this is the entire point of the nomination.

Obama wants to hurt Israel. He does not like Israel. He is appointing anti-Israel advisors and cabinet members not despite their anti-Israel positions, but because of them.