Presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton used Rev. Al Sharpton's Martin Luther King Jr. birthday celebration to, as Professor Shelby Steele explains, "whistle for the black vote by pandering to the black sense of grievance." In response to a question from the audience:...
POLITICS
Publish or Perish: The Lessons of the Cartoon Jihad
The central issue of the "cartoon jihad"--the Muslim riots and death threats against a Danish newspaper that printed 12 cartoons depicting Mohammed--is obvious. The issue is freedom of speech: whether our freedom to think, write, and draw is to be subjugated to the...
What Can One Do About The Latest Islamic Attack on Western Values
Several friends have asked me what they can do in response to the latest Islamic attack on free speech and Western values. I have a few thoughts, but would very much welcome additional suggestions from readers. To begin, I note that the West already has all the...
Something for Nothing: Living Wage and Unemployment
The Economist magazine reports that the official unemployment rate in South Africa is 26 percent but that the real unemployment rate there may be even higher. The South African economy is growing. Why then this extremely high unemployment rate? What is going on? What...
For Society To Thrive, The Rich Must Be Left Alone: Krugman’s Hostility to Economic Inequality
Economic inequality that results from economic freedom is to the material self-interest of everyone. It is the foundation of rising real wages and a rising standard of living.
Something For Nothing: Unions
Government is not the only institution that promises something for nothing. The decline of General Motors is just one consequence of the idea that labor unions can get their members something for nothing. Workers themselves increasingly recognize the reality that...
Civil War in Iraq
The bombing on February 22 of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, Iraq, was a tragedy, but it was not an American or a coalition tragedy. The destruction of the Golden Dome, built in 1905 and one of the holiest shrines of Shiite Islam, represents an escalation of the...
Conflict: The Battle Hymn of the Democracy
High up on my list of annoyances are references to the United States as a democracy and the suggestion that Iraq should become a democracy. The word "democracy" appears in neither of our founding documents -- the Declaration of Independence nor the U.S. Constitution....
Something For Nothing: Social Security
Suppose someone left you an inheritance of a million dollars -- with the proviso that every cent of it had to be spent on tickets for you to go watch professional wrestling matches. If you happened to be a professional wrestling fan, you would be in hog heaven. But...
Measure 37: Oregon Supreme Court Gets One Right
The Oregon Supreme Court has unanimously upheld the constitutionality of Measure 37, the property rights initiative approved by the voters in 2004. It requires government to either compensate landowners for reductions of real property fair market value due to certain...
Who Will Defend Industry from Eco-Terrorism?
The good news: a federal grand jury in Eugene, Oregon, has indicted 11 people on charges that they committed acts of domestic terrorism on behalf of the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front. Moreover, now one of the FBI's "highest domestic terrorism...
Introducing The Objective Standard
It is widely believed today that our cultural and political alternatives are limited either to the ideas of the secular, relativistic left--or to those of the religious, absolutist right--or to some compromised mixture of the two. In other words, one's ideas are...
Another Academic Casuality: Harvard University Ex-President Lawrence Summers
The resignation of Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard University tells us a lot about what is wrong with academia today. When he took office in 2001, Summers seemed like an ideal president of Harvard. He had had a distinguished career in and out of the academic...
Addiction is a Choice
Most talk of addictions as something over which the individual is helpless. Yet how does this explain that so many end their addictions? People quit smoking all the time. People quit alcohol. They quit nail-biting. They even quit heroin and crack cocaine. These are...
Indoctrination of Our Youth
Let's start off with a few quotations, then a question. In reference to the president's State of the Union: "Sounds a lot like the things Adolf Hitler used to say." "Bush is threatening the whole planet." "[The] U.S. wants to keep the world divided." Then the speaker...
Postponing Reality
Let's face it: Reality can be stressful and can sometimes get very rough. Everyone has an incentive to postpone it. Most of us, however, learn the hard way that postponing reality only makes it far worse than facing it early on. The problem gets more complicated in...
Socialized Medicine Leads to the Prohibition of Private Medicine
Unfortunately, when medical care is made free, the quantity of it that people attempt to consume becomes virtually limitless.
An Open Letter to Liberals and Conservatives
Some of you reading this web site think of yourselves as either Liberal or Conservative. You have views of the world based on personal beliefs, and these beliefs lead you to certain political assumptions. I am neither Liberal nor Conservative and I have political...
Defending Colonel Gregory “Pappy” Boyington
According to the University of Washington student government, university alumnus Gregory "Pappy" Boyington is not a person university students should strive to emulate and he should not be honored with a memorial on campus because as a Marine Corps officer, he was a...
Liberal Hypocrisies
John Q. Liberal is a professor at a local college. On Monday he gives a speech in which he denounces capitalism and the profit motive, and praises environmentalism as the highest moral ideal. When his speech is over, he confronts the organizer of the talk. "Where's...
Socialized Medicine and Rationing
This rationale and its acceptance by a judge is an illustration of what Ayn Rand, with good reason, used to describe contemptuously as a “collectivist stewpot.”
America Needs a Leader Like George Washington
Where can Americans turn, to witness the spectacle of great leadership?
Spoiled Brat Media
The first revolt of the American colonists against their British rulers was immortalized by Ralph Waldo Emerson as "the shot heard round the world." Vice President Dick Cheney's hunting accident has now become the shot heard round the Beltway. The accidental shooting...
Modern Day Silly Talk
President Bush, during his State of the Union address, said, "America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world." I decided to check out "addiction" in Merriam-Webster's dictionary and found: "compulsive need for and use of a...
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