It has almost become something of a joke when some "global warming" conference has to be cancelled because of a snowstorm or bitterly cold weather. But stampedes and hysteria are no joke -- and creating stampedes and hysteria has become a major activity of those...
People on the left often use other countries as examples of things that we should do. If other countries have a government-run medical system, then we should have one too, they say. If other countries control prices, then we should control prices -- or so the...
The Berkeley city council has made national news by telling Marine Corps recruiters that they are unwelcome in that bastion of the academic left. It is a shame that Berkeley is not on some island in the South Pacific, because then they could be given their...
The front page of the New York Times has increasingly become the home of editorials disguised as "news" stories. Too often it has become the home of hoaxes. Going back some years, it was the Tawana Brawley hoax that she had been gang-raped by a bunch of white men....
Those who put a high value on words may recoil at the title of Jonah Goldberg's new book, "Liberal Fascism." As a result, they may refuse to read it, which will be their loss -- and a major loss.Those who value substance over words, however, will find in this book a...
Even before Mitt Romney bowed out -- with class, by the way -- supporters of John McCain, and Republican party pooh-bahs in general, were chastising those conservatives in the media who had criticized Senator McCain. Those who leveled their attacks at Rush Limbaugh,...
The other day, a reader e-mailed me to ask for an explanation of the gold standard. He had heard it advocated in one of the political speeches. Any responsible answer to his question would have taken more time than I could spare, but I looked through several...
The front-runners in both political parties -- that is, Hillary Clinton and John McCain -- are making "experience" their big talking point. But what kind of "experience"? Both have been around in politics for decades. But just what did they accomplish -- and how did...
Whatever one may think about Barack Obama as a candidate or as a potential President, his candidacy has brought something new to the American political scene. His stunning victory in the Iowa caucuses, in a state where more than 90 percent of the population is white,...
Both political parties seem determined that the federal government should create a "stimulus package" of things designed to cushion a downturn in the economy. That alone should be enough to make us remember that "the devil is always in the details," because things...
It was front-page news on the January 14th issue of the San Francisco Chronicle that blacks by the tens of thousands have left the San Francisco Bay area since the 1990 census. Since my book Applied Economics analyzed this situation a few years ago, it was nice to see...
This 40th anniversary of the turbulent year 1968 is already starting to spawn nostalgic accounts of that year. We can look for more during this year in articles, books, and TV specials, featuring aging 1960s radicals seeking to relive their youth.
It was not that long ago that the big political question was how Rudolph Giuliani would do against Hillary Clinton in the November election. The Iowa caucus votes have made that question sound like ancient history, if not science fiction. The results of the Iowa...
Among the interesting people encountered by my wife and me, during some recent vacation travel, were a small group of adolescent boys from a Navajo reservation. They were being led on a bicycle tour by a couple of white men, one of whom was apparently their teacher on...
Shoeless Joe Jackson was the only man to bat .382 in his last season in the major leagues. After that he was banned for life for his role in the "black sox scandal," the deliberate throwing of the 1919 World Series. It was to Jackson that a youngster was supposed to...
People for whom indignation is a way of life -- and there seem to be an increasing number of such people -- repeatedly have outbursts of outrage whenever the police fire a lot of shots at some criminal. People who have never fired a gun in their lives, and have never...
Random thoughts on the passing scene: Since electricity is generated mostly by burning coal, has anyone calculated how much pollution is created by electric cars, even though none of that pollution comes out of their tailpipes? You may scoff at the Tooth Fairy if you...
Stanford, Yale, and Princeton are all in the process of considering whether to increase the number of students they admit. Meanwhile, Professor Richard Vedder of Ohio University and director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity in Washington, says...
People who are in the top one percent in income receive far more than one percent of the attention in the media. Even aside from miscellaneous celebrity bimbos, the top one percent attract all sorts of hand-wringing and finger-pointing. A recent column by Anna...
When most of us look at income statistics, we are not just being numbers junkies. We want to find out something about actual flesh-and-blood human beings -- specifically what their standard of living is like. But you cannot always just take statistics at face value --...
Anyone who follows the media has probably heard many times that the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and incomes of the population in general are stagnating. Moreover, those who say such things can produce many statistics, including data from the...
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