There are few things more heartwarming than watching people rise out of poverty to a better life. When it is a whole nation in the process of doing so, it is especially inspiring. That is the theme of a marvelous new book titled "India Unbound: The Social and Economic...
It has become all too common for some innocuous remark by a public figure to be seized upon and twisted to make it seem "racist," setting off loud denunciations by those who are in the business of loud denunciations. Meanwhile, actions and policies that do very real...
The U.S. Department of Education and the National Institutes of Health have launched a campaign to get a government program created to "identify" children with autism at age two and then subject them to "intensive" early intervention for 25 hours a week or more. It...
Last month, a front-page story about minimum wages in The Wall Street Journal illustrates what is wrong with contemporary journalism as much as it illustrates anything about the minimum wage law. The first nine paragraphs deal with one individual who is wholly...
One of the clues in the Chandra Levy case that may have been dismissed too quickly was a call to the police on the morning of her disappearance, reporting a woman's scream heard in the building where she lived. This seems to have been disregarded as an unrelated event...
"Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled." Did you know that? It is just as well if you did not, because it is not true.It takes no research to prove that it is not true. If there had been just two children in America gunned down...
A new political dogma is being spun in the media. "Science," they say, has now "proved" that global warming is a real danger and that human beings are responsible for it, so that we need to take drastic steps to reduce greenhouse gases. This has been the widespread...
The execution of Timothy McVeigh has again raised the issue of capital punishment. Much of the case against capital punishment does not rise above the level of opaque pronouncements that it is "barbaric," by which those who say this presumably mean that it makes them...
Some people were surprised when California's Governor Gray Davis hired two Democratic Party operatives at $30,000 a month to serve as spinmeisters during the current electricity crisis. But all indications are that they are well worth their money. Think about it: Here...
The U.S. Postal Service has raised its rates twice this year and is already talking about raising rates again next year. It has also made noises about eliminating Saturday mail deliveries. But the big problem with the Postal Service is not any of these particular...
Over the years, the phrase "unintended consequences" has come up with increasing frequency, as more and more wonderful-sounding ideas have led to disastrous results. By now, you might think that people with wonderful-sounding ideas would start to question what the...
We have belatedly come to appreciate "the greatest generation" that fought and died in World War II to preserve the freedom that Americans enjoy today. But the disappearance of history from our schools, and its virtual disappearance as a requirement for graduation...
The obvious makes headlines in California. Maybe this shows that a sense of reality or common sense is not something that can be taken for granted among Californians. A recent headline stretching across the top of the front page announced that "Population dwarfs...
The red-legged frog is only the latest of many supposedly endangered species whose habitats may be kept off-limits to human beings, even if that means stopping the building of much-needed housing. We have grown so used to having the interests of millions of human...
MY FELLOW-ECONOMIST WALTER WILLIAMS has for years kept track of how much money it would take to lift every American man, woman and child in poverty above the official poverty level. That sum has consistently been some fraction of the money actually spent in...
In the years ahead, more violent criminals may be walking the street, some taking the lives of law-abiding citizens, because someone in the White House couldn't keep his big mouth shut about how they were going to retaliate against Republican Senator Jim Jeffords for...
A reader in Michigan says that he has been living in retirement on $15,000 a year -- about $5,000 from Social Security and about $10,000 from stocks he owns in Southern California Edison. But now that the California government has forced Southern California Edison to...
Recent fluctuations in the stock market have been used by some liberal politicians as a reason why Social Security should not be privatized. What if someone invests retirement money in the stock market, instead of in Social Security, and then retires at a point when...
Hats off to Jackson Toby, who wrote in the Weekly Standard what few have dared to say in the past three decades: "Let them drop out." He argues that too many students are finding nothing but frustration and resentment at being trapped for hours every day in high...
Since it has long been known that the best defense is a good offense, it should not be surprising that politicians who have created an economic mess should begin loudly denouncing somebody else as the cause of the public's problems. Last year, the problem was a sharp...
It was only a passing news item when the financial information service Standard & Poor's lowered the rating it gave to bonds issued by the state of California. But it has big implications and it also shows the big difference between economics and politics. At the...
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