“Did we learn nothing from the Savings and Loan Crisis of the late 1980s? The accounting crises of 2000-01 or the bailout of the airlines in 2004? The current crisis may indeed be worse than any we have seen since the Great Depression, but the narrative is actually fairly common in the recent history of American capitalism.

The last 30 years are littered with examples of two dissonant themes: On the one hand, we have a corporate sector advocating deregulation, singing the praises of a laissez-faire market, and criticizing government interference as fundamentally inefficient. On the other hand, we have corporations—and the population—asking for bailouts when they can’t survive the realities of the free markets they have advocated.

“In teasing, we learn to use our voices, bodies and faces, and to read those of others — the raw materials of emotional intelligence and the moral imagination. In seeking to protect our children from bullying and aggression, we risk depriving them of a most remarkable form of social exchange.

“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process, and as a protector of property rights.

“Rising commodity prices are the most easily observed effect of inflation, but not inflation itself.

Inflation is not just consumer price inflation, but rather an increase in the supply of money that can inflate asset prices. When consumer prices like car prices, furniture, and oil increase, consumers are outraged and want something done about it. But when asset prices increase, many people are overjoyed.

“Bullying is a common response when people struggle to attain status. Backstabbing, rumor-mongering, and enticement aren’t unique to teenagers; just look in any corporate office or political campaign.

Bullying in schools hasn’t increased because of the Internet, but its visibility has. Adults think that this means that the Internet is the culprit, but stifling bullying online won’t make it go away; it’ll just send it back underground.

“The richest evolution in Earth’s history was associated with the transition from single-celled to multi-celled life. This transition generated most of the complex forms and processes that we know today: morphology, physiology, ecology, behavior, nervous systems, etc. The complexity of multi-celled organisms does not arise because many cells stick together, but rather because the many cells have differentiated into functionally different cell types which work together.

“In 1847, midway through the Great Irish Famine, a group of American Indian Choctaws collected $710 (over $1 million today) to help. It had been just 16 years since the Choctaw people had experienced starvation in the Trail of Tears. To mark the 150th anniversary, eight Irish people retraced the Trail of Tears in 1992.