Richard E. Ralston

We live in an age when the secretary of the Interior and the White House press secretary proudly and publicly proclaim that they will keep their “boot on the neck” of an oil company. This new manifestation of “hope” and “change” is...

Does American history move in only one direction—toward government domination of every detail of our daily lives? Did we reach a high-water mark of government power when ObamaCare was signed into law? Or was that just the crest of a wave that will sweep away the...

Forbidding profit in medical care replaces life with death, liberty with force, and the pursuit of happiness with self-sacrifice. Let’s not kill health care and our freedom at the same time.

Those who advocate for government controls in medicine cry, “People, not profits.” They say profits are unacceptable in medicine because our health is so important. But it is precisely because our health is so important that profits must be vigorously...

What passes for “reform” in Congress would eliminate health insurance firms. Why? Because, we are told, it is immoral for anyone to make a profit providing health insurance. Virtue, in this view, is restricted to those who impose government insurance on...

The most effective means of destroying the rights of individual Americans is by replacing those rights with new powers for the government. Then, instead of the right to the pursuit of happiness, the political class declares that everyone has a right to be supplied...

The President’s summit on health care revealed major schisms between public policy and reality. Those who feel that they must keep repeating to Americans that their health care is “broken” overlook a more fundamental problem. Most Americans, based on...

There is now a pause in the inept debate on health care in Congress. After a year of struggle, some comfort might be taken from the fact that neither of the monstrosities passed by the House or the Senate has become law. However, truer than ever is the 200-year-old...

What passes for “reform” in Congress would eliminate health insurance firms. Why? Because, we are told, it is immoral for anyone to make a profit providing health insurance. Virtue, in this view, is restricted to those who impose government insurance on...

Health care legislation now being debated in the Senate will do nothing to make health care more affordable but quite a lot to make it more expensive. It serves the purpose of a massive and permanent expansion of the size and power of government and the political...

    The most effective means of destroying the rights of individual Americans is by replacing those rights with new powers for the government. Then, instead of the right to the pursuit of happiness, the political class declares that everyone has the right to...

Nearly a century ago, the Federal Reserve Board was created to eliminate the supposed economic problems of a free market. A century of inflation, recessions, one or two depressions, huge expansion in government debt, and wild swings in unemployment tells us the system...

The debate on health care reform is starting to turn ugly. Those who want to increase government power to rule American medicine are adding physicians to their list of “enemies of the people.” We hear frequently that insurance companies and drug companies...

Many years ago America started down a path that has gradually limited the free practice of medicine and the relationship between physicians and patients. You can never really have a private meeting with your doctor anymore, because the government is always in the room...

George Orwell is alive and writing new fiction about Congress legislating expanded government control of health care. Or at least it seems that way. A growing and ominous trend lately is the inversion of language to couch further government intervention in the name of...

Before I developed a detailed interest in government management of health care, I was unwillingly introduced to the subject after I was badly injured in a head-on collision in a taxi to LaGuardia Airport in New York City in 1993. To my everlasting regret, the...

Public health authorities in California have for years spent many millions of dollars on television commercials that are supposed to help people quit smoking. Perhaps that is better than spending income from tobacco settlements and taxes intended for that purpose on...

One of the great scandals of our age is the fact that America spends more on food than any other nation. Many political leaders are now calling for urgent reform to bring spending on food under control. While food spending is rapidly increasing and many Americans are...

When you file your taxes this year, consider this certainty: As an ever-increasing amount of our taxes are appropriated for government spending on health care, tax policy ultimately has little to do with attempting to improve the quality and affordability of health...

Nearly a century ago, the United States Federal Reserve Bank was established. The stated purpose was to eliminate boom and bust and other fluctuations in the U.S. economy. Federal government control of banking and the money supply was declared to be absolutely...

Sometimes drugs developed to treat a specific condition can have unanticipated results for the treatment of other conditions. Sometimes this is discovered by patients and their physicians as an accidental byproduct of monitoring the effectiveness of the medication....

Americans did not invent democracy. What America rightly did, for the first time in history, was institutionalize the concept of limited government–based not on majority rule, but on individual rights. Sadly, this foundation is not properly recognized and is...

It took the Food and Drug Administration more than a century to grow into a massive, expensive, wasteful, inflexible, ineffective, distant and indifferent bureaucracy. It now violates a founding principle of the practice of medicine: “First, do no harm.”...

There are some noteworthy differences between the health care policies advocated by Senators McCain and Obama. Both candidates, however, share fundamental flaws that make either set of proposals largely undesirable and impossible to implement. Both Obama and McCain...