LifeItself

...As sheep, that step from forth their fold, by one,
Or pairs, or three at once; meanwhile the rest
Stand fearfully, bending the eye and nose
To ground, and what the foremost does, that do
The others, gath'ring round her, if she stops...

Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, Canto 14

Most economists make it all too easy to bash them. When I think of how eerily detached from reality the main stream of economics is, I also recall the situation with corn ethanol in 2005.  Only two U.S. faculty, Dr. David Pimentel and I, went public against the nonsense that was being propagated throughout the society by the ill-informed greens, scientists, lobbyists, economists, venture-capitalists, lawmakers, and almost everyone in the media.  We were both savaged at the time and for a few more years.  Now everybody shrugs their arms and says pretty much what we were saying all along. 

Today, Chapter 2 of the same nonsense, or the "second generation biofuels," is being closed at a great cost to …

For most people the Big Recession of 2009 has never ended.  It has not ended as well for elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges, universities, museums, policemen, firefighters, municipalities, counties, states, and so on.

This recession has not ended, yet we see inflation in every aspect of the lives of ordinary people: fuels, food (even the food-like edible substances that masquerade as food in the U.S.), and clothing.

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There is a reason why food and fuels are excluded from the government measure of "core" inflation, which then becomes a game of controlling how fast we print and price new money relative to how fast we improve productivity.  Over the last several decades, the Federal Reserve has become quite good in playing that control game, and the rest seemed OK.  But not this time.

So what is different now? Why do the Left and the Right offer such dramatically different solutions to the same problem?  Are the…