POLITICS

The basic and crucial political issue of our age is: capitalism versus socialism, or freedom versus statism. For decades, this issue has been silenced, suppressed, evaded, and hidden under the foggy, undefined rubber-terms of “conservatism” and “liberalism” which had lost their original meaning and could be stretched to mean all things to all men. – AYN RAND

How To Make Medical Care Affordable

Rather than create more government subsidies, policymakers should eliminate supply-side regulations that reduce price competition and affordability.

Monetary Policy and the Return to Sound Money

Monetary Policy and the Return to Sound Money

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Excerpted from Chapter 23, Part IV of Mises classic The Theory of Money and Credit (1912).The people of all countries agree that the present state of monetary affairs is unsatisfactory and that a change is highly desirable. However, ideas about the kind of reform...

Government Bailout Crack

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Every few days we hear that another leading financial institution has written down billions more on subprime investments gone bad. Nearly every major financial institution, it turns out, had a hand in loans to low-credit borrowers--borrowers whose ability to pay often...

Destroying Liberty

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Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned, "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding." The freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never was, and is not now, the normal state...

Economic Freedom in America: What is Economic Freedom?

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All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred,...

Penny-Wise Politics: Class Envy and CEO Pay

Penny-Wise Politics: Class Envy and CEO Pay

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Congress is never more ridiculous than when it tries to look like it is serious. In the midst of a major national financial crisis, what was one of the first things Congress zeroed in on? The pay of Chief Executive Officers of financial institutions. If all those CEOs...

Congress and the Politics of Bailouts

Congress and the Politics of Bailouts

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Nothing could more painfully demonstrate what is wrong with Congress than the current financial crisis. Among the Congressional "leaders" invited to the White House to devise a bailout "solution" are the very people who have for years created the risks that have now...

Who Buried Capitalism?

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A journalist wrote me the following: "I always say both Democrats and Republicans want to transfer wealth. Democrats want to take from the rich and give to the poor. Republicans want to take from the poor and give to the rich. This [proposed government bailout] only...

Scaring Us to Death

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There is a H.L. Mencken quotation that captures the essence of this year's politics: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them...

Dealing with Russia

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On Aug. 8, Russia decided to rewrite the rules of post-World War II European security. It repudiated the Helsinki Pact of 1975, which recognized the sanctity of borders in Europe, and violated the sovereignty and territorial integrity of NATO aspirant Georgia, whose...

The High Cost of Racial Hype

The High Cost of Racial Hype

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Sometimes you don't know when you are lucky. Certainly I did not consider myself lucky when I left home at seventeen and discovered the hard way that there was no great demand for a black teenage dropout with no experience and no skill. In retrospect, however, those...

Idols of Crowds

Idols of Crowds

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To find anything comparable to crowds’ euphoric reactions to Obama, you would have to go back to old newsreels of German crowds in the 1930s, with their adulation of their fuehrer, Adolf Hitler.

Academic Mismatch II

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Last week's column demonstrated the harm, suffered by black students, that results from law school race-based admission policies. The bottom line was that black students who might have done well at lower-tier law schools were recruited to more highly competitive law...

The Vision of the Left

The Vision of the Left

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Conservatives, as well as liberals, would undoubtedly be happier living in the kind of world envisioned by the left. Very few people have either a vested interest or an ideological preference for a world in which there are many inequalities. Even fewer would prefer a...

2008 Presidential Elections: McBama vs. America

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As the 2008 presidential election nears, and while John McCain and Barack Obama struggle to distinguish themselves from each other in terms of particular promises and goals, it is instructive to observe that these candidates are indistinguishable in terms of...

Academic Mismatch I

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Which serves the interests of the black community better: a black student admitted to a top-tier law school, such as Harvard, Stanford or Yale, and winds up in the bottom 10 percent of his class, flunks out, or cannot pass the bar examination, or a black student...

Foreign Policy “Experience”

Foreign Policy “Experience”

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Now that the Democrats have recovered from the shock of Governor Sarah Palin's nomination as the Republican's candidate for vice president, they have suddenly discovered that her lack of experience in general-- and foreign policy experience in particular-- is a...

Anarchy on the Internet

Anarchy on the Internet

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The Internet provides vast amounts of information but it can also spread vast amounts of misinformation, or even deliberately misleading disinformation. For more than two weeks, scarcely a day has gone by without e-mails pouring in to me, asking about columns that...

Is College Worth It?

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As parents pack their youngsters off to college, they might ask themselves whether it's worth both the money they will spend and their children's time. Dr. Marty Nemko has researched that question in an article aptly titled "America's Most Over-rated Product: Higher...

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