POLITICS

Memorial Day: What We Owe Our Soldiers

To send soldiers into war without a clear self-defense purpose, and without providing them every possible protection, is a betrayal of their valor and a violation of their rights.

Prescription for Less Wealth

Maytag recently announced that it’s moving its Galesburg, Ill., production facility to Mexico. A group called Americans Against NAFTA has protested Maytag’s decision. Spokesman Russ Anderson said, “We want to spread the word of what we believe Maytag...

God, Buggery, and Mister Rogers

Here’s what George Bernard Shaw said about religious fundamentalists: “There are scores of human insects who are ready at a moment’s notice to reveal the will of God on every possible subject.” A few carloads of those insects were swarming...

Court Gives Bryco/Jennings the Finger

Once again, someone has managed to blame a few pounds of metal for the demonstrated ineptitude of a few pounds of gray matter. Last week, jurors in a California civil court ruled that gun manufacturer Bryco/Jennings must pay over $50 million to a 16-year-old who...

Liberalism vs. Individual Rights

Most Americans think slavery ended with the 13th Amendment in 1865. It did, in the United States. But it is alive and well today in the Sudan and Mauritania. In these African countries, blacks suffer at the hands of Arabs, who ransack villages, kill the men and sell...

Fidel Castro’s Dupes

Fidel Castro worked miracles after leading the Revolution that liberated Cuba from the dictator, Batista. The statistics are there, for any fool to see. Soon after Castro came to power in 1959, he decided to eliminate illiteracy in the island nation. As he stated in...

Liberty, Not Democracy, In Iraq

The bromide, often quoted today, that we have won the war but now we have to “win the peace,” is meant to remind us that we have to turn from achieving our military goals to achieving our political goals in Iraq. But what if our political goals were such...

“Sweatshops,” Boycotts, and the Road to Poverty

Two reporters relay this anecdote from Thailand: One of the half-dozen men and women sitting on a bench eating was a sinewy, bare-chested laborer in his late 30’s named Mongkol Latlakorn. It was a hot, lazy day, and so we started chatting idly about the food...

War as Social Work?

When President Bill Clinton deployed American troops in places like Bosnia and Haiti, he was criticized for turning foreign policy into “social work” (as Michael Mandelbaum pungently put it). By what authority, many asked in the 1990s, did the president...

Spring Cleaning Your Investment Portfolio

The war is over, the hummingbirds are back, the dogwood’s blooming white and pink. It’s spring, and, after a long, hard winter, it’s a refreshing and comforting change. So it’s time to give your investment portfolio a thorough spring cleaning....

The Failed Education “Reforms”

Sometimes a single incident can reveal the widespread rot that has affected the nation’s school systems as they strive to indoctrinate the children entrusted to their care while neglecting to teach them the Three R’s. In Inverness, Florida, a 12-year-old...

CNN Should Scale Back Chumminess with Cuba

Mohammed Al-Douri, Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations, left the United States on April 11. After planned stops in Paris and Damascus, he said, “I will be the first to enter my country as a free country.” Before heading out for what may be the...

Business Magazines Go Left-Wing

“Have They No Shame?” screamed the headline of the cover story of one of the magazines, adorned with a picture of five ravenous pigs eating cake amid piles of money. The subhead: “Their performance stank last year, yet most CEOs got paid more than...

Business Magazines Go Left-Wing

“Have They No Shame?” screamed the headline of the cover story of one of the magazines, adorned with a picture of five ravenous pigs eating cake amid piles of money. The subhead: “Their performance stank last year, yet most CEOs got paid more than...

Economic Stupidity

Imagine that you and I are in a rowboat. I commit the stupid act of shooting a hole in my end of the boat. Would it be intelligent for you to respond by shooting a hole in your end of the boat? Or, imagine I were a politician and told you that the Russian, Chinese,...

Portrait of the Greenspan Era

With today’s meeting of the FOMC not likely to generate a lot of surprises, let’s take a moment to look at a chart that offers a remarkable perspective on monetary history. One wants to be careful about taking this kind of analysis too literally, but it is...

Let’s Be Honest About Cuba

Around this time in 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell took it on the chin for opining, “Castro has done some good things for his people.” Last month Powell spoke about the Castro regime much more honestly, stating that the recent crackdown, sham trials...

In Defense of Enemies

There are plenty of otherwise rational individuals in the world who avoid confrontation at all costs, as if getting labeled a “Capitalist” was somehow worse than actually being one. This article is dedicated to them. Sometimes, even I receive hate mail....

The Great Deficit Mystery and Cutting Taxes

Can we afford a big tax cut right now? That’s what the arguments against the president’s $726 billion proposal boil down to, really. The fact that we’ve been at war, that the economy remains sluggish, that we’ve returned to deficit spending...

A Constitutional Republic for Iraq

As the statue of Saddam Hussein came crashing down, President Bush told the Iraqi people, “You deserve better than tyranny and corruption and torture chambers. You deserve to live as free people. And I assure every citizen of Iraq: your nation will soon be...

The Right Kind of Tax Cut

Listening to Washington policy-makers haggle over the size of President Bush’s proposed tax cut — $350 billion over the next decade? $550 billion? $726 billion? — you would think nothing matters much beyond the price tag. Just as important, though,...

Income Facts: Work Pays

Income Facts: Work Pays

Those for whom indignation is a way of life often inform us of the fact that families or households in the top 10 or 20 percent in income make far more money than people in the bottom 10 or 20 percent in income. What they almost never inform us of are how much money...

Ending the Double Taxation of Dividends

If President Bush and his team want a great argument to support their proposed elimination of the unfair double taxation of dividends and retained earnings, they should look to an excellent column in the “Week In Review” section of last month’s New...

Why Our Education System Is Failing

Why Our Education System Is Failing

Two unrelated events last week provide some clues as to why our education system is failing. First, Canada College in San Mateo, California, held a job fair — for kindergartners! Apparently there is nothing too silly to spend the taxpayers’ money on, even...

A Tax Plan Worse Than Nothing

The Bush administration is rapidly losing control of the tax legislative process. Its unwillingness to acknowledge that its plan needed to be totally rethought once a $350 billion revenue loss cap was imposed in the Senate has created an anarchic situation in...

It’s a Gas

Although he’s in Houston and I’m in Washington without one of those phone cams that the Iraq war made famous, I can see Marshall Adkins jumping up and down with enthusiasm. “Rigs are going to go berserk for the next five or six years!”...

It’s the Iraqi Economy, Stupid!

For years, we have heard about Saddam’s brutal suppression of political freedoms in Iraq where free elections, free speech, and a free press were non-existent. But we have heard little about the absence in Iraq of economic freedom and opportunity. As leader of...

On May Day Celebrate Capitalism

On May Day Celebrate Capitalism

May Day will once again be celebrated by left-wing and environmentalist protestors united by a single emotion: a virulent hatred of capitalism, especially global capitalism.

Punish France by Enlarging American Freedom

Yes, folks, it finally happened. French President Jacques Chirac swallowed his pride and placed a let’s-be-friends-again phone call to President Bush. As well he should have. France’s behavior regarding Iraq has been despicable. In addition to providing...

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