David McElroy

It’s been 17 years since cartoonist Gary Larson ended his comic strip, “The Far Side,” but it’s still one of the funniest comics ever drawn, as far as I’m concerned. We’re taking a look this week at a few of the many laughs from a man with a bizarrely wonderful sense of twisted humor.

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When a five-star general warns you about the dangers of a growing military, it’s probably a good idea to listen. In President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation more than 50 years ago, he gave a stark warning. After all these years, it’s clear that few people paid attention.

We have a military that’s far too big for what’s needed to defend the United States. We have  military personnel spread all over the world. We make commitments to defend other countries and base our military in them. All of this comes at a tremendous cost to the American taxpayer. What’s just as bad is that having a powerful military creates the urge to use it, so it leads us into wars that are costly in dollars and in the lives of people around the world.

If Democrats and Republicans don’t come to a budget deal, the military is going to face $600 billion in cuts over the next 10 years. (It’s important to remember that it’s not all at once. Frankly, those cuts will almost certainly never happen.)

But the leaders of the military are in a panic. For instance, on Wednesday, the Army’s chief of staff said those threatened cuts “would cause a hollowness — a significant hollowness in the force.” Military leaders have been lobbying Congress to do pretty much anything to stop those cuts. They’re united in telling us that they don’t have enough money and that they can’t spare a nickel.

At the same time the military is saying it can’t afford to cut its spending, I observed something that suggests otherwise. It’s just a small example, but it’s indicative of a culture in which spending money isn’t a big deal — because there’s always more where that came from.

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Are you a subject, a citizen or a sovereign? Your answer to that question says a lot about who you think owns you, at least in the earthly sense.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Eduardo Saverin giving up U.S. citizenship as Facebook goes public. He’s one of the founders of Facebook, so he’s becoming incredibly wealthy because of Facebook’s initial public offering. By living in Singapore and giving up his U.S. citizenship, Saverin is going to save millions of dollars now and save his heirs possibly billions of dollars by avoiding U.S. estate taxes later.

Saverin told the New York Times, though, that his move isn’t about saving money.

“This had nothing to do with taxes,” Saverin told the Times. “I was born in Brazil, I was an American citizen for about 10 years. I thought of myself as a global citizen.”

In 1215, King John of England signed what came to be called the Magna Carta. (The full name in English was “The Great Charter of the Liberties of England, and of the Liberties of the Forest.”) The English lords accepted that they were subject to the king, but they tried — sometimes unsuccessfully — to get kings to limit their absolute power over them.

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