Note the date of John McCrae's death. He died in the war. Read some more about war. Imagine yourself a German. Read 'All Quiet on the Western Front', or 'The Good Soldier Schweik', or 'Mother Courage and her Children'; read those with the sentiments of a German. There are wars that have to be fought. For example, the Irish had to fight for their independence from Britain. But there are successful tactics, and unsuccessful tactics and oftentimes wars that shouldn't be fought at all. The archetype of a war that shouldn't have been fought is America's fight in Vietnam. We need a lot more humility.

This column started off with a wrong-headed postulate. Understand, Hosni Mubarrak is mortal, 80 years old and has misgoverned for several years. He was going to leave office and replacing him was not going to be pretty. Obama-Clinton & co. don't deserve any especial blame for "throwing Mubarrak under the bus." He was going to get ejected from the driver's seat regardless. As for US monetary policy causing Egyptian food prices to skyrocket: maybe did it. But we have limited ability to keep their food prices low while they screw up their own economy.

Standard theory says that printing presses and easy money result in inflation; lots of it results in hyper-inflation. If we aren't getting inflation does that validate printing money as the solution to our problems? It printing money isn't the solution, then in what way will it bite us?

A lot of people are careless about the use of the words "capital" and "capitalization". What I read in the article is that Spain is recapitalizing the bank. They are taking more part-ownership of the bank, and paying for it with Spanish-government bonds. Those bonds have not much real-value, so Bankia is exchanging those bonds at the ECB for good money. We can see several people who are now stuck with bad paper. Who gets the good money? How long until the bad paper is proven to be really bad? and people realize that they have lost money?

About 170 years ago, c. 1840s, France invaded and annexed Algeria. They treated it like France, with elections and all, except that the elections held in Algeria resembled the elections once held in the American south, or South Africa, during the racism era; fraud and not representative. Algeria was the start of France colonizing almost the whole of west Africa. Algeria rose up in an independence fight in 1954 and kicked the French out in 1962. Leftover from France's era in Algeria are a lot of immigrants from Algeria and the rest of northwest and west Africa. Poetic justice: France tried to take over their countries. Now they will take over France.

Tatro: "If Obama had any shred of honesty in him, which in my opinion is a far reach, he would have simply announced that he was taking away the bank’s keys to the candy store by shutting off the money." From their actions Team Obama is already trying to do that. If they can build a better regulatory box and put a regulator on top of it then the banker will only be allowed to make "AAA" loans to the low-income subprime rated customers of the community. Supposedly good for society, but can money be made off of it?

In a corollary world the statists are correct: if you force some consumers out of the [energy] market then the price will go down for the consumers who are still in the market. There's a plan! To make the price of gasoline go down we all need to hop on our bicycles, starting today, Bicycle to Work day.

(Leaving aside that you have spelling problems...) Social Security was advertised "An Insurance Plan" when it was created. It immediately fudged on the concept. The very first recipient collected a few decades worth of benefits, even though she only paid in for a few years. Social insurance, not real insurance. The managers of SS did a serious mismatch of premiums (taxes) to promised benefits. Auditors tell us that SS is seriously underfunded and will go bankrupt. The left tells us that the fix for SS is to lift the earnings cap on taxes (w/o lifting the benefits cap). That tells us that SS has become a progressive welfare entitlement, and is no longer real insurance, if it ever was real insurance.

Progressives (Keynesians) speak often of the value of stimulus to get the economy going again. Consider history's "Mother of all government stimulus": c.1957 China embarked on the 'Great Leap Forward', to move their economy up to the ranks of major country economies. The results were the mother of all famines and one of the greatest losses of life in the 20th century, possibly exceeding what WWII had done. We would do better if the people in charge thought of themselves as gardeners, who make possible growth, instead of engineers who think they can build an economy.

You and I wish. But one of the truths of human finance is that "you can't get blood from a turnip." Having loaned out money to deadbeats, Germany will just have to eat the loss. But notice to the deadbeats: you can't repeat that stunt. No more loans for you!