ARTICLE: Let's Put Down the Pitchforks, By Steven Pearlstein, March 20, 2009; Page D01

I like Pearlstein a lot. He is always illuminating, never hyperbolic, and full of common sense. This is a great piece about tempering our current populist anger, the key point being, the more we let our government indulge our popular rage, the more inconsistent and untrustworthy it's going to seem to the very private sector players it's trying to lure back on the playing field. I could expand that same argument to the Obama administration and foreign economies: reversing Bush-era free-trade policies and suddenly calling into question long-negotiated free-trade agreements with old friends like South Korea will only make us look scared, desperate, and untrustworthy. And that will backfire in our faces.