In fairness, this is called entrapment, and if you can successfully argue that you wouldn't have done the crime without the officer's inducement, then you can usually get off, though it's certainly not always the case.

The details have come out, and apparently it was unrelated to the Wolverine leak, which one might have thought was obvious. It deals with a case of massive fraud against AT&T and Verizon, potentially costing millions of dollars. I guess this is what happens when stories with rampant speculation hit /. .

Seriously, few of these listed will also, say, track your units for you. Especially important when the question involves the answer to life, the universe and everything.

Oh, certainly. I suppose I phrased my argument incorrectly, but I was thinking more from the point of view of the currently winning allied leaders. From their perspective, they wanted to eliminate every trace of having this sort of thing happen again, which not only included things like the Marshall Plan, but also the insistence on total surrender. While it may have been counterproductive in the end, it's certainly an understandable point of view to take without the benefit of 60 years of hindsight.

There's no denying that the Treaty of Versailles was extremely punishing to Germany, and that was obviously a factor. However, a huge point of Hitler's propaganda was that the Jews (among others) had sabotaged the war effort and thus caused Germany to lose. One thing that helped this was the fact that enemy troops never touched their soil, and so he was able to make the impression that Germany was strong enough to repel the invaders and continue the war had they been given the chance.

Obviously the Treaty of Versailles was a huge part of the rise of Nazism. However, considering only it to the point of ignoring all others is just silly; Hitler needed a scapegoat, and this mentality helped him to make one.

Regardless of the truth of this statement (I can't argue convincingly either way), there's a fundamental problem with being OK with those negotiations: it's exactly the mentality that allowed WWII to happen from WWI. The allies stopped just before the Rhine in WWI and allowed the Germans to surrender before they were properly invaded. This just helped fuel Hitler's rise to power, as he blamed people sabotaging the war effort on them losing, thus allowing for great scapegoating. Japanese culture is obviously different from German, but it seems like this very mentality could easily happen again in Japan. In this case, allowing them to say that they "hadn't really been totally defeated" may have been the worst option in the world, or at least seemed that way to the world leaders at the time.

I agree with most of what you say, except:

This is not the case for Pigovian taxes, which is exactly what a gas tax is. If you're trying to disincentivize a behavior but not outright ban it, then taxes can be an excellent way of doing that. They make people see the true cost of whatever it is they're doing. In this case, people have to pay for the carbon dioxide they put in the air, the wear on the road, and all sorts of other good stuff. So, there are some cases where taxes can and should be used to manipulate behavior.

You say that like there's something inherently wrong with a weaker dollar. First of all, bear in mind that the dollar still beats many other currencies in other countries. But beyond this, if the dollar weakens, then travel to the US and the purchase of US goods suddenly become more appealing to foreigners. Think about it if you're a European; your Euro now goes further than it ever did before. Maybe now would be a good time to travel to the US and use that money while it's good, and maybe buy an iPod or a laptop, or something else that, even with duty fees, is way cheaper now than it would be back in Europe (I know several people who have done this just this summer). Meanwhile, people in the US are less likely to buy imported goods, since they're more expensive. This increases the amount of money in the US economy, which is usually considered a good thing (since it comes from real value, and not just printing money).

Also, I'm fairly confident that there was fairly massive deflation during the Great Depression. So, that argument doesn't really hold up either (unless I'm misunderstanding it).

I'm not arguing the point that Bush has been a horrible President. But let's keep ourselves to important criticisms, and not get caught up in inflation arguments.