What Makes the Super Bowl “Super”

Hours before the Green Bay Packers defeated the New England Patriots 35-21 in Super Bowl XXXI on January 26, 1997, I overheard a supermarket cashier greet a coworker with a salutation I’d not heard before: “Happy Super Bowl Sunday.” That incident had...

Senator John Edward’s “Special Interests”

This election year we are sure to hear a lot about “special interests.” Candidates of both major parties, as well as candidates of third or fourth parties, are sure to denounce special interests both hotly and repeatedly. The secret of these verbal...

T.S. Ashton on The Industrial Revolution

Despite more than a hundred years of condemnations and the harshest ridicule men like Friedrich Engels could hurl at the time period known in Great Britain as the Industrial Revolution (1760-1830) Dr. T.S. Ashton took up the task of restoring, or at least attempting...

Love Thy Enemy

I quote from a bumpersticker I recently saw on a car covered (or I should say, littered) with anti-Iraq-war/pro-Howard Dean stickers: “When Jesus said love your enemies, he probably meant: don’t kill them.” This is undoubtedly true. Loving your...

History Refutes Rubinomics

Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, is back — and he’s everywhere. He’s written a book. He’s delivered a paper before the prestigious American Economic Association. He’s giving loads of TV interviews. Among Democratic...

The Government’s Accounting Shell Game

Americans shell out more than $2 trillion each year to keep our federal government running. The least we should expect in return is honesty. Alas, Washington officials aren’t telling the truth about how much they’ve spent, are currently spending or plan to...

Expensing Options Revisited

Paul Atkins this month became the first SEC commissioner to criticize openly a proposal to require companies to treat employee stock options as current expenses. Atkins began by questioning whether the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which has aggressively...