Criminalizing Business

The recent conviction of Martha Stewart for lying to federal investigators looking into “insider trading” is one of the sad signs of our times. If you create enough laws, everyone will be a criminal. Perjury should of course be a crime, even when it is...

Racial Profiling

What is racial profiling, and is it racist? We can think of profiling as using cheap-to-observe characteristics as indicators or proxies for more-costly-to-observe characteristics. A person’s physical characteristics, such as race, sex and height, are cheap to...

Government by Emotion

Q: As you argue, the only proper role of government is to protect our individual rights against fraud and brutality, foreign and domestic. At what point does government intervention “cross the line”? One is not allowed to commit slander (or libel), but...

The Future of Work

A front page article in the WSJ (“The Future of Jobs”, 4/2/04) made a very interesting point: “‘If you can describe a job precisely, or write rules for doing it, it’s unlikely to survive. Either we’ll program a computer to do it, or...

Thrill of the Hunt

Q: What do you think of hunting and killing animals? And should it be legal? A: Frankly, I find it rather depraved to hunt and kill animals for the sake of sport.Don’t misunderstand. Animals don’t have human rights and human beings have a right to kill...

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