From Annie Lowrey’s excellent profile of Ron Paul’s monetary economics:

When I asked Paul about this, he maintained the Fed has set us up for a currency crisis down the road. “It won’t be as bad as Zimbabwe,” he says. “But perhaps something like 1979 or 1980.” He noted that geopolitical events often kick of economic ones. “The revolutions in the Middle East, that could end up being the precipitating event,” he said. “Tunisia, Egypt—they may well tumble.”

From David Leonhardt:

Even better than look at current core inflation, nowadays we can look at the TIPS spread and measure market expectations of inflation over the next ten years:

The market thinks Paul is really wrong. Lowrey quotes him complaining that the Fed “sticks it to the people who want to save and make money. It is so unfair.” But there’s nothing stopping Paul or any other inflation-averse savers from investing in inflation protected securities (TIPS) that pay a guaranteed interest rate over and above the inflation rate. Indeed, if Paul’s right he and his followers will be able to make a killing in this market.

I’m basically in agreement with Atrios on the question of intercity rail. One thing I do want to add to the conversation, however, is that better intercity rail connections could free up some valuable airport space.

The DC metro area, for example, is served by three airports. One of them, DCA, is much more centrally located than the other two but it’s also smaller and because it’s centrally located it can’t really be expanded. That airport features six daily flights to Pittsburgh, 245 miles away. There are also four flights per day from Dulles, and three flights per day from BWI. Clearly, there’s a lot of demand for going to Pittsburgh. Were there a high-quality DC-Pittsburg rail connection, many of these air trips would instead be done by train. And were that the case, then airport space—particularly the scarce space at DCA—would be reallocated to flights to destinations that really need a plane to get to. Portland or Los Angeles or Miami or what have you. This isn’t number one on my list of American problems, but it really isn’t ideal to have so much of our airport capacity sucked up by these relatively short trips. There are large classes of travel for which there’s no good alternative to an airplane and in an ideal world the vast majority of flights would be on routes like that.

What’s more, there’s a decent chance that jet fuel is going to become prohibitively expensive at some point in the future and then we’ll really be sorry if we’re stuck relying on planes for 200-400 miles trips.

I’m not usually a fan of “prisoner of the staff” type arguments, but reading this LA Times account of an Obama administration divided between advocates of pressing for change in Egypt (Ben Rhodes and Samantha Power) and those who prefer a more modest approach (Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates) I can’t help but notice something.

There were good reasons to keep Robert Gates on as Secretary of Defense. And there were good reasons to make Hillary Clinton Secretary of State. But an odd consequence of the move was to leave surprisingly little room on the team for people such as Rhodes and Power who were Obama suporters from the get-go. This is a strange state of affairs on the subject where the president has the most autonomy from congress and also where policy preferences are least determined by partisan coalitions. I was an Obama supporter from way back primarily because of his statements and records on foreign policy issues, and now here we are faced with a real split between that original vision and the views of the national security establishment. I think this is an issue where the perceived interests of the permanent security elite diverge from those of most Americans and Obama would do well to listen to the Obama-ists on his team.