The National Organization for Marriage launched a bus tour earlier this summer to convince people that same-sex marriages are terrible. Problem is, around the world, courts and legislatures are finding the exact opposite.

Defying BBC and others’ severe pessimism, Argentina’s economy performed well from 2002 forward, after it decided to default on its debt in late 2001. So, Greece, why not just skip to the Argentina story from the default forward? Why go through your own version of the hell of Argentina’s 1999 to 2001, IMF-imposed austerity?

To paraphrase Shakespeare, things are indeed rotten in the State of Denmark (and Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, and almost everywhere else in the euro zone). An entire continent appears determined to commit collective hara kiri, whilst the rest of the world is encouraged to draw precisely the wrong kinds of lessons from Europe’s self-imposed economic meltdown. So-called respectable policy makers continue to legitimize the continent’s fully-fledged embrace of austerity on the allegedly respectable grounds of “fiscal sustainability”.

The latest to pronounce on this matter is the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King. This is a particularly sad, as the BOE – the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street – has actually played a uniquely constructive role amongst central banks in the area of financial services reform proposals. King, and his associate, Andrew Haldane, Executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, have been outspoken critics of “too big to fail” banks, and the asymmetric nature of banker compensation (“heads I win, tails the taxpayer loses”). This stands in marked contrast to America’s feckless triumvirate of Tim Geithner, Lawrence Summers, and Ben Bernanke, none of whom appears to have encountered a banker’s bonus that they didn’t like.