Comments by kwegibow

The reason Americans have the freedom to buy, own and carry firearms is philosophical. America was the only nation in history to be founded on the abstract Enlightenment principle of rights. The four rights of life, liberty, private property and the pursuit of one's own happiness shape (or used to shape) American culture.

The right to firearms springs from the right of every individual to their own life. To live one must, among other things, be able to defend oneself and one's family. That is not the job of the police. The police conduct retrospective investigations after a rights violation has occurred. The free man possesses firearms to defend himself in an emergency ("when seconds count the police are just minutes away"...or in Norway half a day away).

If life is priceless, what is the implication of denying a man his right to defend it?

Similarly, if you believe that it is wrong to possess the means and will to use deadly force in defense of a criminal assault, how can you call upon another to do so for you? How can you rightfully ask another human being to risk his life to protect yours when you take no responsibility yourself? Your life is precious, but the life of the police officer is only worth the $70,000 we pay him? The very idea is immoral.

Weapons have and always will be misused. The question is not what to do about weapons, but what to do about crime. The totalitarians among us have reversed the question.

The ideas of the Enlightenment have long faded and as America slides into fascism (the collective control of the means of production) I am amused and heartened that the basic right to life still has some legs.

The entire tone of the article implies that the only moral choice in the weapons market is that it should be a monopoly among governments. I would argue that this is the font of corruption.

I suggest the radical and unpopular notion that freedom would be the proper course. Whether the product being "trafficked" is arms, rice, or televisions, government regulation is the problem.

Now what if a sovereign entity or other group behaves badly with their purchased weapons? Ah, now a government can justifiably take action against another government or group.

I never heard of "negative effects of globalization"!

The Civic Economic Study merely repeated the Mercantilist Fallacy debunked by Adam Smith over two centuries ago. Money is the medium of exchange, a representation of wealth, not the wealth itself. The real wealth is the books to be sold.

I am dumbfounded by how such fraud continues. No one in Austin pointed out this fallacy in the discussions before the protectionist minded City Council? No editor at The Economist noticed such a glaring error while vetting the article?

There is only one function for government in a free society; to protect the rights of its citizens. That makes torture a moral imperative against a foreign enemy. Squemish about torture? Good, you should be. The answer is to destroy those that are an existential threat, something the U.S. government has refused to do since the end of World War II.

Sirs,

I find it odd that a newspaper calling itself The Economist would shrilly ask, "What went wrong?" Classical theory was of course ignored, especially by those who wished reality could be bent.

Over regulation, wrought by the exponential growth of special interests, once again distorted "the market" into something unsustainable. More regulation, that is more of the same poison that caused the problem, will not help as we will soon see.

Until the unpenetrable wall between State and economics is built and left unbreached there can be no long term, wide spread financial security or prosperity.

For the past decades The Economist has been more enthrall with the ideas of Marx and Dahrendorf that those of Smith and Hayek. That is, what one wishes versus reality; Postmodernism versus The Enlightenment. This is a shame and a disservice to your readers and humanity. I do not think Mr. Bagehot would approve.