Quotes of the day

... over the past two generations China has been emerging not from aMarxist, but from a feudal state. Indeed, if one were to take Marx'sview, China could only arrive at communism through capitalism, andonly arrive at capitalism through feudalism.--Rick Brookstaber

A new report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) claims that defense spending in Asia this year is set to overtake that of Europe for the first time in centuries.--Walter Russell Mead

Providing “for the common defense” is one of the primary reasons our Founding Fathers ordained and established the Constitution. Moreover, they clearly wanted the defense imperative to be unmistakable, so they put it in the Constitution’s very first sentence, the Preamble. Later, in Article I, Section 8, they gave Congress the power “to lay and collect taxes” and “to borrow money on the credit of the United States” in order to fulfill the imperatives.
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In short, the Constitution first tells us what to do (defend the country), and then tells us how to pay for it (tax, and borrow on credit). Could the founders have made it any clearer? Maybe, just maybe, if they’d said it something like this: “The president and the Congress must defend this country; to do that properly, Congress must maintain the country’s good credit, and must tax and borrow as necessary.”
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Notably, the Constitution does not say, “Defend this country, unless it would require Congress to borrow money.” No, our founders wrote it to say precisely the opposite—a point that should be obvious to everyone, not just Constitutional originalists.--Steve Conover