One of the secrets about Western trade with enemy states like Iran is that the Western companies trading with them may also wittingly or unwittingly serve as espionage assets for their home country or for other Western countries.

The boycott drive against states like Iran uses a legalistic framework to deal with complex military challenges. And since the nail doesn't exactly fit the hole, it stands to reason that the damage sanctions can do to military or intelligence operations may in certain circumstances outweigh the benefit they bring to diplomatic operations.

Late last month (5/24), the State Department announced that it was sanctioning the shipping company of Israel's richest family, the Ofer Brothers, for reportedly violating US law by trading with Iran.  Ever since, there has been a deluge of news reports alleging that the Ofer Brother's ships were used by the Mossad and perhaps the IDF to infiltrate and exfiltrate agents into and out of Iran. 

There are number of troubling aspects to this story.

A century ago, if you had told typical citizens of Argentina (which at that time was enjoying the fourth-highest per capita income in the world) that it would decline to become just the 76th richest nation on a per capita basis in 2010, they probably would not have found it believable.

They might have responded, "This could not happen; we are a nation rich in natural resources, with a great climate for agriculture. Our people are well educated and largely descended from European stock. We have property rights, the rule of law and an open free-market economy."

But the fact is, Argentina has been going downhill for eight decades, and it now has one of worst sovereign credit ratings in the entire world - on a par with Pakistan and lower than Bangladesh. Argentina, despite its natural resources and human capital, has managed to throw it all away.

Argentina did not become relatively poor because of having been involved in destructive conflicts. It became poor because it has had a series of both democratically elected leaders and non-elected dictators who never missed an opportunity to make the wrong economic decisions.

No one who broke our laws to enter this country should ever decide who becomes our president, a member of Congress, a governor or mayor, or a member of the local school board. This is the non-negotiable “die line” those who love our country must defend: We cannot permit a huge criminal voting block to determine our future.

And every person who entered this country without our government’s formal permission is a criminal. Period.

Democrat Party operatives embed their public arguments for amnesty for eleven-million illegals in terms of human dignity and decency.  The reality?  Democrat Party support for amnesty for illegals comes down to one word: “Votes.”  For Dems, it's all about a permanent electoral majority - not human dignity.

It is, of course, true that no one loves the tax collector and that taxes are the price we pay for a civil society. But, as with anything else, there are proper and improper taxes and tax collection procedures and methods.

According to news accounts, attacks and threats against IRS personnel are rising, and unfortunately, this trend is likely to continue until there is a fundamental change in our tax laws and collection methods.

People who do not have access to the media and cannot afford expensive tax lawyers sometimes reach such a level of frustration with the IRS that they resort to violent or irrational behavior. IRS officials and workers will say the tax code is not their fault - it is the fault of Congress - and they are only doing their jobs.

It is unambiguously true that the tax code and IRS are creatures of Congress, with all of its self-dealing, corruption, ignorance and incompetence. But this also is true: as was made explicit at the Nuremberg trials, those who carry out orders that they know to be wrong or should know to be wrong are not absolved of personal responsibility.

As I noted on Judge Jeanine Pirro's show this weekend, I reject President Obama's idea that Israel must cede back its territories to the 1967 line.  

Will we now be in the habit of telling our allies what their borders should be? Should Prime Minister Netanyahu suggest we return to our 1845 borders before the annexation of the southwest of the United States during the Mexican-American War? Should we give back parts of Texas, New Mexico, and California?

But the problem is even deeper. In both his State Department speech last Thursday (5/19) and his speech Sunday (5/22) at AIPAC, President Obama made some seemingly specific comments about the Palestinian state that he wants to see created.  He either misspoke or he has even more dangerous plans for our friends in Israel than he is publicly admitting.

Zurich, Switzerland.  Economists, political scientists, reporters and pundits spend too much of their time looking at dysfunctional societies and trying to explain why there are poverty, joblessness and hopelessness. In many ways, Haiti is easy to explain - no rule of law and 200 years of corrupt and incompetent governments. Switzerland is the polar opposite.

It has almost no corruption and has the rule of law with honest, competent judges and government administrators. The question should be, "What can we learn from the Switzerlands of the world about how to do things right" rather than, "What is wrong with the Haitis of the world?"

Switzerland manages to run a smaller government as a share of gross domestic product than the United States and most other countries while providing a higher level of service, security, prosperity and freedom. How does it do that?

Both the United States and Switzerland are federal republics. If one reads the Federalist Papers and the oworks of the American Founding Fathers, it is clear they envisioned a nation that operates much more like Switzerland than one with the large central government the U.S. now has.

I've become accustomed to dealing with folks who claim to have done things they haven't done and to be people they aren't.  In a near-perfect world, one would just write these people off as nutcases who don't deserve second thoughts.

Let me explain.  I was a Navy SEAL for 27 years, and one of my hobbies in retirement is exposing those cretins who falsely claim to have been SEALs.  You can see how we do this at our website, stolenvalor.com.

In fact, just day before yesterday (5/15), newspapers across the country ran an AP story about us, Sleuths Who Expose Pretend SEALs.

What really gets my dander up though, is when these sad sacks use fabricated military histories, complete with made-up war stories about how they got PTSD or bad backs or trick knees, to justify receipt of Veterans Administration disability benefits.

I could cite example after example of stories these phonies tell their friends and VA counselors (who are sometimes one and the same), but the critical point is how VA fraud is predictive of what will happen when Obamacare wraps its tentacles around the health industry. 

The expression "Failure is not an option" may be a motivator for very high-risk situations, but failure must always be an option for players in a properly functioning market economy.

If you had a choice between buying a bond issued by a company considered "too big to fail" - which is an implicit government guarantee of its debt - would you buy that bond or one issued by a company without a government guarantee? Companies with government guarantees will be able to borrow at less cost, and, ultimately, their unfair competitive advantage will drive the companies without guarantees out of business.

You may believe that the housing bubble and the subsequent financial meltdown were caused primarily by the Fed or Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the two multitrillion-dollar government-sponsored secondary mortgage buyers), or by the very largest commercial and investment banks.

But whichever theory you choose, note that it was either the government or those heavily regulated by the government that were the source of the problem - and all were considered "too big to fail."