Last week, President Bush promised the nation that the federal government will pay for most of the costs of repairing hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, adding, "There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again." There's no...
POLITICS
Recycled “Racism Gap” in the Mortgage Market
One of the things that happens when you get old is that what seems like news to others can look like a re-run of something you have already seen before. It is like watching an old movie for the fifth or sixth time. A headline in the September 14th issue of the New...
Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It (Part 5 of 7)
Adapted from Chapter 1 of Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It by Craig Biddle. In case there are any doubts, history provides conclusive evidence of the sacrificial nature of all three forms of subjectivism. Let us look first at...
War on Terrorism: Why We Are Losing Hearts and Minds
Where have our leaders gone wrong? What kind of leadership failure can demoralize a whole nation of honest, productive citizens, while leaving suicide murderers stirred to righteous action?
Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It (Part 4 of 7)
Adapted from Chapter 1 of Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It by Craig Biddle. There are hundreds of religions. Each is vying for your allegiance. Each denies the validity of the others. Each claims to be based on the "true" word...
Rebuilding New Orleans
Hurricane Katrina was a disaster, not only for the obvious reasons but for the less obvious reasons: the aftermath. By aftermath, am I referring to the alleged ineptitude of the federal government? No way. By aftermath, I mean the spectacle of political and...
Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It (Part 2 of 7)
Adapted from Chapter 1 of Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It by Craig Biddle. Whereas religion holds that God creates truth and moral law, subjectivism holds that people do; it is the view that truth and morality are not...
Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It (Part 1 of 7)
If you want to live your life to the fullest, if you want to achieve the greatest happiness possible, this book is for you. It is about the essential means to that end: a proper code of values--a proper morality. Contrary to popular myth, morality does not come from...
FEMA vs Walmart: Why Governments are Not the Best Handlers of Emergencies
Whatever later investigation may turn up about the mistakes of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in New Orleans, it is unlikely to show the shrill charges of "racism" to be anything other than reckless political rhetoric. FEMA has bungled other...
Hurricanes and Global Warming: Interview with Dr. Roy Spencer
Dr. Roy Spencer is a principal research scientist for University of Alabama in Huntsville. In the past, he has served as Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where he directed research into the development...
The Role of Prices
The fallout from Hurricane Katrina has featured a lot of ignorance and demagoguery about prices. Let's look at some of it. One undeniable fact is that the hurricane disaster changed scarcity conditions. There are fewer stores, fewer units of housing, less gasoline and...
Smart “Problems”
During my first semester of teaching, many years ago, I was surprised to encounter the philosophy that the brightest students did not need much help from the teacher because "they can get it anyway" and that my efforts should be directed toward the slower or...
Your Home Is Not Your Castle
For many, the American Dream means buying a family home after years of saving or building a small business from the ground up. No one imagines the government will take that property only to hand it over to someone else so they can make more money off the land. But it...
Despair in Disaster
Why is there looting and raping in New Orleans? What does it say about the people there? What nobody wants to talk about is the psychology of helplessness. We all know that a large number of the victims in New Orleans are poor, black, and in many cases dependent on...
Keep the Death Tax Dead
In Washington, nothing's certain except death, taxes and special-interest lobbying groups. So it makes sense that the death tax has its own lobbyists.That's right. "Americans for a Fair Estate Tax" knows a Senate vote is coming soon, and they're hard at work. Their...
JobBay
As much of Europe struggles with double-digit unemployment this year, the United States has been creating an average of 200,000 new jobs a month. One of our great advantages is the relative ease with which Americans can start new businesses. Physical disability, the...
Our Gift to Iran
The most important effect of America's attack on Iraq has been the removal of Iran's strongest regional opponent, and an increase in the regional power of Iran. As I wrote in Capitalism Magazine in June of 2004: "[President Bush] threw down a secular dictator in Iraq...
Rebuilding New Orleans — and America
The physical devastation caused by hurricane Katrina has painfully revealed the moral devastation of our times that has led to mass looting in New Orleans, assaults on people in shelters, the raping of girls, and shots being fired at helicopters that are trying to...
How to Avoid Investing in Crooked Businesses
Reading Kurt Eichenwald's fascinating book on Enron Corp., "A Conspiracy of Fools," is enough to make an investor throw up his hands (or his lunch), sell all his stocks and buy a bundle of nice short-term U.S. Treasury bonds. Eichenwald shows, in vivid detail, how...
Developers are Not the Devil and Profit is Not a Sin
The ability of the human mind to rationalize is one of the mysteries -- and the marvels -- of the ages. A recent e-mail from a reader in Santa Barbara, California, was a classic example of a widespread rationalization of the severe home-building restrictions which...
“Muslim Opinion” Be Damned: Hatred of America is Irrational and Undeserved
To listen to most of our foreign-policy commentators, the biggest problem facing America today is the fact that many Muslims are mad at us. "Whatever one's views on the [Iraq] war," writes a New York Times columnist, "thoughtful Americans need to consider . . . the...
The Human Price of California’s Statist Housing Policies
They say time is money but a lot depends on whose time and whose money. For example, in California the San Mateo County Planning Commission has spent five years deciding what can and cannot be done with the site of an old racetrack that is no longer economically...
What To Do About Gasoline Prices
Nationally, the average per gallon price for regular gasoline is $2.50. Are gasoline prices high? That's not the best way to ask that question. It's akin to asking, "Is Williams tall?" The average height of U.S. women is 5'4", and for men, it's 5'10". Being 6'4", I'd...
The Lessons of Hiroshima
Those who claim that the use of atomic bombs in Japan was not necessary often point to Japan's weakened military condition, and the possibility that the war could have been ended without Japan's unconditional surrender. Such an attitude fails utterly to grasp the...
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