The growing anti-free-trade movement really needs an understanding of basic economics. It's tariffs that take jobs away, not free trade.

They take away jobs for several reasons, but one powerful reason is because tariffs wastefully soak up government effort, and taxes. Let me explain.

All tariffs do is take government money (i.e. your taxes) and use it terribly inefficiently to prop up ailing industries that are a poor match for local skills and conditions. Plus, to ensure this money goes to the "right" companies in the "right" industries, a huge govt. bureaucracy is required -- which ends up getting it all wrong anyway. Then there is the business owner problem -- as business owners look at all that lovely free money and then fail to make the changes that would enable their businesses to, perhaps, survive without it. Or they make a few quiet changes and pocket the difference. Tariffs are often (very often!) government handouts to the rich.

Business owners in a high-tariff industry have no incentive to innovate. In fact they are rewarded for running inefficient businesses that look (to the bureaucracy) as if they are failing: not expanding; not putting on workers; not spawning secondary industries.

This is an appallingly wasteful use of taxes. Using the same money to seed new industries that are a better match to local skills and conditions would see exactly the same money go a long, long way farther. That and retraining for any workers that need it.

The mythical, magical "Forever Employment" beast -- this idea that a "good job" is a soul-crushing factory job that lasts your whole life -- needs to be slain, along with the tariffs that prop it up.

Workers in the era when this beast supposedly lived understood very clearly that it was a myth. My grandfather (born 1918, died 2007) understood that perfectly. He worked half a dozen jobs, for 4 different industries. He always set aside money to retrain when the "jobs moved on" -- and totally retrained himself three times.

So understand this: you WILL retrain; you WILL NOT have this job forever; you DO need to make plans to shift to a different industry/job/skillset.

So vote for a party that promises to put tax money into helping you do those things -- and not into free handouts for business owners in dying industries.

To borrow a phrase from Tim Harford, saying "but other countries have tariffs!" is like saying "they're silting up their harbors --- let's do it too!"

I was in the middle of heavily editing my previous posting -- a fact you might be able to detect from how it repeats itself and its abbreviated title -- when I hit "Publish" instead of "Preview".

Apologies to anyone who struggled through what is, in its current form, incoherent.

A timely and well-written article. Thank you Dr. Zaroff and Salon.

How to balance, then, that gently persuasive medical information with the bulk of comments here asserting that Ledger was an addict and that, therefore, he "must have known"?

Firstly: no drugs or paraphernalia were found at his house and no evidence of drug use on his body. Heroin addiction leaves, pardon the pun, tracks. Considering the impossibility of a police department anywhere keeping a secret like that, I'd say that proves there wasn't any addiction.

Secondly: what are the sources? Yes, you guessed it, third-hand innuendo printed in The Sun, and The Mirror, two British tabloids with -- how to say this politely -- less than stellar records for solid, non-sensational reportage.

Thirdly: consistency. What to make of the opinion of someone (to use one example from the comments) who believes every word printed in The Sun, but also claims that they read and differentially act on every pill-bottle onion-skin? That might be the one case in history where believing everything you read was actually of benefit to someone!

The CIA rotates most of its officers in the area every three to six months, giving them insufficient time to learn the contours of Pakistan's problems. Virtually no operational officers speak Pashtun, nor can they travel without an official Pakistani escort.

Is any additional evidence of complete and utter incompetence really needed to draw the obvious conclusions?

The CIA is obsolete.

Built for and tasked with the dirty tricks operations of the Cold War, the CIA did well whenever it focused on that task -- and that task only -- and bumbled and fumbled whenever it was tasked with anything else.

The Agency is manifestly incapable of the tasks it has been given post Berlin Wall: 9/11 should have proved that; the 9/11 Commission Report certainly did.

And so it's time to close it down. By all means build a (smaller, much smaller) multi-focus and agile intelligence agency with the resources to track multi-headed scourges like Al Qaeda. By all means include a brief to collate and interpret intelligence in this new, multi-lateral world.

But the slow, clumsy, career-bureaucrat ridden, "two superpowers" Cold War behemoth that is the CIA has got to go.

They don't have operational officers that speak Pashtun, and we're FIGHTING A WAR in Afghanistan, I mean that's just... words literally fail me...