Recent shocking Supreme Court decisions may at least wake up those people who have been saying glibly that the Senate has been spending too much time fighting over judicial nominees, instead of getting back to the "real" issues. What is more real than the Supreme...
Thomas Sowell
Property Rites
You may own your own home and expect to live there the rest of your life. But keep your bags packed, because the Supreme Court of the United States has decreed that local politicians can take your property away and turn it over to someone else, just by using the magic...
75 Years Old
Three-quarters of a century! It is hard to believe that I am that old but arithmetic is uncompromising. This means that I have lived through nearly one-third of the entire history of the United States. The changes in my life -- and still more so in the life of the...
Summer Reading
Summer vacations are used for many things. Some parents use the long summer vacation from schools and colleges to get their children to read books that are different from the steady diet of a liberal-left view of the world that they get during the school year. These...
We Are All Budweisers
Back in the days of the Hapsburg Empire, there was a town in Bohemia called Budweis. The people in that town were called Budweisers and the town had a brewery which produced beer with the same name -- but different from the American Budweiser. Like many communities in...
Judicial Activism, Marijuana and the Interstate Commerce Clause
The Supreme Court's recent decision saying that the federal government can prosecute those using marijuana for medical purposes, even when state laws permit such use, has been seen by many as an issue of being for or against marijuana. But the real significance of...
Unhappy Birthday Hawley-Smoot
Only a few economic historians are likely to notice that June 17th marks the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Hawley-Smoot tariff bill, and even economic historians are unlikely to be nostalgic about that disastrous legislation. Why not leave the bad news of the...
Liberals and Class, Part 3
Sometimes it seems as if liberals have a genius for producing an unending stream of ideas that are counterproductive for the poor, whom they claim to be helping. Few of these notions are more counterproductive than the idea of "menial work" or "dead-end jobs." Think...
Liberals and Class, Part 2
Someone once defined a social problem as a situation in which the real world differs from the theories of intellectuals. To the intelligentsia, it follows, as the night follows the day, that it is the real world that is wrong and which needs to change. Having imagined...
Liberals and Class, Part 1
The new trinity among liberal intellectuals is race, class and gender. Defining any of these terms is not easy, but it is also not difficult for liberals, because they seldom bother to define them at all. The oldest, and perhaps still the most compelling, of these...
Looking Back
We may look back on some eras as heroic -- that of the founding fathers or "the greatest generation" that fought World War II -- but some eras we look back on in disbelief at the utter stupidity with which people ruined their economies or blundered into wars in which...
Skyrocketing Home Prices
"Who can afford to buy a house in this place?" my wife asked, when I read her the average prices of homes in various northern California communities. "We certainly can't," I said. Our home has more than doubled in value since we bought it 11 years ago. We couldn't...
San Mateo County and The Environmental Protection Racket
Only in California would a city that is less than 50 years old have a historical society. But, in California, anything more than a couple of decades old is considered historic and anything that is a century old is considered to be ancient history. Nevertheless, the...
Filibusters and Big-Time Bigotry
Maybe the non-stop denunciations of judicial nominees by Senate Democrats will seem relevant to some people but it is in fact wholly beside the point. Senators who don't like any particular judicial nominee -- or any nominee for any other federal appointment -- have a...
Newsweek: “Too good to check”
It was perhaps appropriate that Dan Rather received the prestigious Peabody award in journalism at the same time when Newsweek magazine was finally backing away from its false story about Americans flushing the Koran down the toilet at the Guantanamo prison. At least...
Black Rednecks and White Liberals
Black identity has become a hot item in the movies, on television, and in the schools and colleges. But few people are aware of how much of what passes as black identity today, including "black English," has its roots in the history of those whites who were called...
Rich Ideas
Recently a friend described a meeting with a nasty-tempered leftist who was from a rich family. Unfortunately, there are a lot of leftists who were born with a silver spoon in their mouth -- and, instead of being grateful, are venomous against American society....
The Crusade Against Walmart
The latest liberal crusade is against the Wal-Mart stores. A big headline on a long article in the New York Times asks "Can't A Retail Behemoth Pay More?" Of course they can pay more. The New York Times could pay its own employees more. We could all pay more for...
Easy Money In California
Where can you make $2,000 a day, with no real effort? In San Mateo County, California. Before you start packing your bags to head there, you should know that the average homeowner in San Mateo County saw the value of his property increase by $2,000 a day over the past...
College Admissions Voodoo
Every year about this time, high school students get letters of admission -- or rejection -- from colleges around the country. The saddest part of this process is not their rejections but the assumption by some students that they were rejected because they just didn't...
The Hypocrisy of Modern Liberalism
Liberals may think of themselves as people who believe in certain principles but, if you observe their actual behavior, you are likely to discover that most liberals have a certain set of attitudes, rather than principles. Liberals may denounce "greed," for example,...
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