There are three articles out today

that more people need to read:

Productivity and the Ice Man: Understanding Outsourcing
by Anthony B. Bradley

Hysteria about job losses caused by overseas outsourcing ignores a crucial fact: Americans lose jobs primarily because people develop innovative ways to do things faster, better, and cheaper. In other words, human creativity is a double-edged sword, bringing productivity improvements and, very often, widespread job loss. The good news is that the net result is not fewer jobs, but more jobs—and more productive ones.

...Was the layoff caused by the introduction of a more productive technology, a smarter way to manufacture, or a shift in consumer preferences?

While the outsourcing issue has generated headlines, it is not the chief cause of job losses. Of the 2.7 million jobs lost over the past three years, only 300,000 have resulted from outsourcing, according to Forrester Research Inc., a technology research firm. Business Week Magazine reports that one percentage point of productivity growth can eliminate up to 1.3 million jobs a year.

Europe's new oppressors
By Richard W. Rahn

After the end of World War II, most European countries experienced rapid economic growth until the 1980s. Germany was considered an economical miracle because it went from wartime ruin to the highest per capita income in Europe.
The miracle came by abolishing price controls, instituting sound money, avoiding repressive taxes and regulations, and instituting the rule of law. Having achieved prosperity, the French, Germans and some of their neighbors began increasing taxes to redistribute income, and evolved into stultifying regulatory states.

Neocon Collapse in Washington and Baghdad
by Jim Lobe

While they were still riding high as U.S. troops consolidated their control of Iraq, the neocons' star began to wane already last August when it became clear that their and Chalabi's predictions about a grateful Iraqi populace were about as well-founded as their certainties about Hussein's ties to al-Qaeda and his WMD stockpiles.

Sensing trouble ahead, Rice asked former ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, to return to the White House, where he had been her boss during the presidency of George HW Bush, the current leader's father (1989-93). By October, she and he had formed an inter-agency Iraq Stabilisation Group (ISG) that gradually wrested control of Iraq policy from the Pentagon.

It was a process in which Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chief Paul Bremer, who had come to detest Chalabi and his neocon backers in Baghdad and Washington, was an enthusiastic participant and which was effectively completed with the announcement late last month that the State Department was taking over the $14 billion in reconstruction money for Iraq that the Pentagon has not yet spent.

Thanks to the RATIONAL REVIEW NEWS DIGEST.