LOOKING GLASS ECONOMICS....The Federal Reserve, we are told, is likely to be disturbed over the fact that average hourly wages are down this year:

Of concern to those watching the report for signs of inflation, the average hourly wages rose 0.5 percent to $16.70. That was more than the 0.3 percent increase forecast by economists.

....The wage gain also represents a 3.9 percent year-over-year rise, the biggest gain in that measure since June 2001. That could be seen as being inflationary, and could prompt the Federal Reserve to keep raising interest rates in an effort to cool the economy and keep prices in check.

Riddle me this: if the Fed tries to put the brakes on wages every time they creep up from negative to zero, what will hourly wages look like over the long term?

And — the point he stressed time and again, even in a bonus comment after the official program session had ended — the Western world, notably the United States, was doomed unless it reclaimed “the moral high ground.” By the end of the Cold War, he said, there was no dispute world wide about which side held the moral high ground. As a professional spy master, he said that reality made it so much easier for him to recruit operatives — they would volunteer to come to him, because they believed in the cause. Therefore, as a matter of pure strategic necessity, the United States needed to behave according to its best traditions, not the exigencies of an open-ended wartime emergency. (I’m paraphrasing a little, but not taking too many liberties.)