As we mark Osama bin Laden's death, what's striking is how much he cost our nation--and how little we've gained from our fight against him. By conservative estimates, bin Laden cost the United States at least $3 trillion over the past 15 years, counting the disruptions he wrought on the domestic economy, the wars and heightened security triggered by the terrorist attacks he engineered, and the direct efforts to hunt him down. – The Atlantic

Dominant Social Theme: Was it worth it? Not particularly? We need a more effective way to pursue the war on terror.

Free-Market Analysis: The Atlantic Magazine has published a remarkable article totaling up the cost of fighting bin Laden and pursuing the war on terror. Total dollars: US$3 trillion. Given the perilous state of Western finance, this amount of money reveals not the West's determination to fight for its rapidly vanishing "freedoms" but the utter contempt in which the Anglosphere's great banking families hold Western solvency.

It is far more important to pursue an illusory foe in an apparently made-up war than to create a prosperous civil society. The real war, evidently and obviously, is between the West's middle classes (now suffering through the agonies of austerity) and the Anglo-American banking elites. But lest we sound too extreme (is this a real danger?) let us hasten to explain one more time the genesis of the war on terror, the creation of bin Laden and why the US$3 trillion sums up in hard dollars the contempt of Anglosphere elites for the Western masses that they purport to lead.