Amidst all of the fear, panic, and growing stock market doom and gloom, I'd like to offer an important silver lining. It's a little piece of economic optimism. Look no further than the sharply rising U.S. dollar....For the moment, we are witnessing price stability. Not inflation, not deflation, but price stability. Would that it would last....the greenback's surge relative to other paper currencies is depressing energy and other commodity prices....Gasoline prices have dropped 2.4 percent, despite the fact that we're heading into the busy summer driving season. When was the last time gas prices fell heading into Memorial Day?

While what passes for the current crop of American political leadership deserves precisely zero credit for the dollar's resurgence, at least the Geithner-Summers-Obama hand on the wheel of economic state is held somewhat in check by the genius of the checks and balances built into our political system by the founding fathers. The American economic system still looks good compared to what's left in the bottom of the European shake-and-bake bag. Gerald Warner at the UK Telegraph, as usual, doesn't sugar coat it:

The European experiment has failed and is only artificially being kept alive on a life-support system of taxpayer-funded bailouts. The euro is now a zombie currency....We live in an age of mass communication: people have noticed that Europe has a few little local difficulties.

Everybody, that is, except the geniuses in the American Democrat party. One would think the lemmings at the back of the socialist stampede over the cliff would have an advantage over their European brethren who are already hurtling down the abyss. Yet, even in the face of strident voter opposition to their demented policies, Democrats continue to call for more spending, more debt and more government. Any fool can see where socialism has led Europe.

As Warner suggests, the establishment of the European Union and its currency was merely an attempt to establish an expensive ruling elite, regardless of its economic and political viability. Even in the face of ruin, the Euro-nannies resist taking the appropriate medicine:

The real-life solution to the crisis would have been to let Greece and the other PIG nations default on their debt and restructure it; to return to the drachma, peseta, etc and devalue. The euro was never a real currency: it has failed and the longer the Euro-fanatics delay in recognising that reality the more they will be punished.

...there is no "if" about it - Euroland is down the plughole. The question is: how much longer is Europe going to court economic collapse that could regress its living standards by a generation, to placate the power-mad fantasies of the Unholy Roman Emperors in Brussels? The fundamental, structural flaw in the euro from its inception was that it was a currency invented to give an appearance of substance to a political aspiration - it was Brussels Monopoly Money.

Hopefully the strength of the American dollar, based upon it being issued by the strongest and most stable political and economic machine the world has ever known, will survive the current assault on it by the power-mad fantasies of the Unholy American would-be emperors from Chicago and San Francisco. I suppose we will have to wait for the time to force California and New York to default and restructure their debt. At least until we can start throwing the bums out in November.

Ralph Alter blogs at Right on Target www.rightot.blogspot.com