Beauty pageants are not usually events fraught with geopolitical significance. But then again, they are not usually held in the middle of a battleground in the war between Islam and the West. The collapse of the Miss World pageant in Nigeria is an important case study...
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
Free Speech for Me, But Not For Thee
The financial media is in an uproar over proposed new New York Stock Exchange and National Association of Securities Dealers rules that would require stock analysts to stop talking to reporters who didn't include mandated disclosures when the analyst is quoted in...
Gun Control Myths: The Case of England
Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm of Bentley College deserves some sort of special prize for taking on the thankless task of talking sense on a subject where nonsense is deeply entrenched and fiercely dogmatic. In her recently published book, "Guns and Violence," Professor...
Phony Diversity
You've written a tuition check, carted your son or daughter off to college, given those last minute admonitions and made those tearful good byes. For those thousands of dollars, the anguish of seeing your 17- or 18-year-old pack up and leave home for the first time,...
Thankful to Be American
Before the Berlin Wall came down, I worked at a supermarket where a regular customer, a refugee from Communist Yugoslavia, once told me, "In my old country, we were lucky to have small shops that sold some food; in America, we have supermarkets for toys." Not a...
Senator Daschle vs. Rush Limbaugh: Who is Promoting Violence?
The change from Senate majority leader to Senate minority leader has apparently led Senator Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota, into more of the kind of wild and reckless rhetoric that may have contributed to the Democrats' defeat in the recent elections. According to...
Class sizes and Academic Achievement
Election Day brought some surprises, but the fact that voters in Florida passed an amendment that would reduce class sizes in their state isn't one of them. Naturally, most parents would rather see their children in classes with just 19 other kids and a qualified...
Quarter One 2000 Upside Down?
When an investment celebrity like Pimco's Bill Gross calls for Dow 5,000, we can't help but see it as a sign of extreme investor pessimism suggesting that we must be getting near a bottom. It reminds me of the kind of thing we heard at the top in 2000 -- in reverse....
Is Deflation Dead?
Ever since Alan Greenspan surprised the markets by lowering interest rates 50 basis points a week ago Wednesday, the financial media have been frantic with worry about deflation. Well, you heard it here first -- exactly a year and a day ago in this column, on November...
Does the Democratic Party Take Blacks for Granted?
In analyzing the recent Democratic bath in the off-year election, black Representative Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., defeated in her own primary, accused the Democratic Party of "taking black voters for granted." Tavis Smiley, black NPR commentator, made the same assertion...
Real Options: A Practitioner’s Guide
AN ANALOGY-GETTING FROM HERE TO THERE Suppose you are planning to drive from Boston to Los Angeles. If you are like us, you will get a map (online from the Internet), remember that over long distances the great circle route is actually the shortest distance between...
Norman Borlaug: Solving World Hunger Through Genetics
Not to take anything away from Jimmy Carter, the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize winner and a far better ex-president than president, but, when it comes to saving lives, no one can compete with Norman Borlaug. Norman who? Borlaug is one of the great humanitarians of the 20th...
The Legitimacy of Intellectual Property
Revolutionary technologies always disrupt society and one of America's biggest "digital age" disruptions is occurring in the area of intellectual property (IP). Indeed, the digital revolution has re-ignited a heated debate over whether intellectual property is even...
Social Security Reform: It’s Alive
Opponents of Social Security reform must feel like they're stuck in a bad horror film. Every time they think they've killed off personal retirement accounts, the campaign to create the accounts comes back, stronger than ever. The 2002 election was no exception. Social...
The Real Revolutionaries
For months, courageous protesters have braved riot police to oppose the depredations of a warlike and oppressive regime bent on world domination. No, I am not talking about the "anti-war" protesters who menace the cities of Europe and America--the creeps who scale the...
Dirty Secrets About “Affirmative Action”
"The dirty little secret about affirmative action is that it doesn't work." So concluded ABC network reporter Bob Zelnick in his excellent book on the subject, titled "Backfire."An even dirtier secret is that virtually no one really cares whether or not affirmative...
Government Mandated Benevolence
Q: I agree with you that there's too much emphasis on self-sacrifice in today's world. At the same time, people are often harsh and cruel to each other in everyday life. I don't just mean terrorists and snipers; I also refer to people who don't even do simple things...
American Academics Who Hate America
Americans broadly agree on two facts about the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq: its brutality and the danger it poses to themselves, especially the danger of nuclear attack. Disagreement arises primarily over what to do: Take out the regime now? Give Baghdad another...
Stock Picking Systems: Price to Sales and Discipline
A stock-picking system that can consistently beat the market has always been the Holy Grail of investors - desirable, tempting, but unobtainable. Investing just couldn't be that easy. But a few years ago, James P. O'Shaughnessy, a financial adviser and quantitative...
Bankruptcy
Many normal people -- not to mention politicians looking to exploit the latest headline -- talk about corporate bankruptcy as if it's some sort of financial scam, a gimmick perpetrated by malevolent corporations to avoid paying their bills. So it's not surprising to...
Ordeal by Slander
Wall Street Journal reporter John Gasparino has been on a rampage this week to be the first with every new bit of gossip leaked from NY attorney general Eliot Spitzer's office trying to connect Salomon Smith Barney telecom analyst Jack Grubman's upgrade of AT&T...
Race and Cant
Cant has become the norm in discussions of any issue involving race or ethnicity. However, a new book by Linda Chavez -- a memoir of her own remarkable life -- should make it inescapably clear what counterproductive and even vile things have been going on in the name...
Nancy Pelosi? The Dems Just Don’t Get It
Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., a 15-year member of the House of Representatives, appears poised to succeed Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., as the House minority leader. If one reads the recent Republican off-year victories as an endorsement of Bush's policies (or at least a rejection...
Whither Democrats?
Democrats have now lost two consecutive elections that, by all the usual standards, they should have won easily. Al Gore lost the 2000 election despite a usually unbeatable combination of peace, prosperity, a declining crime rate and the first budget surplus in...
Whither Republicans?
Even in defeat, Democrats can console themselves that they still have a lock on minority votes in general and black votes in particular. Moreover, given the demographic realities, minority voters are going to be a growing percentage of all voters in the years ahead....
Iraqi Dictator Saddam Hussein’s Shop of Horrors
As a boy, writes Kenneth Pollack in his masterful new book on Iraq, "The Threatening Storm," Saddam Hussein would heat an iron poker until it was white-hot, then use it to impale cats and dogs. Years later, when he had boys of his own, he would take them into prisons...
Gun Statistics for the Second-Amendment-challenged
Maryland Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (D) recently urged a ban on Saturday Night Specials and "assault weapons," while recommending a national ballistic fingerprint database. The interviewer, CNN's Judy Woodruff, asked no difficult follow-up...
Nancy Pelosi: A San Francisco Liberal
Now that Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi is becoming the Democrats' House minority leader, she is being celebrated as the first woman to hold such a high post. But she is also being described as a "San Francisco liberal" -- which she definitely is. What do San Francisco...
Child Sacrifice, Palestinian Style
Israel is criticized for alleged insensitivity to the risks of casualties among civilians, especially children, during counter-terrorist missions. But the tragedy of unintended casualties from justified military actions cannot be compared to a society's deliberate...
Scour the World for Stocks
In the good old days, foreign stocks provided balance. Typically, if U.S. stocks were having a bad year, non-U.S. stocks would be having a good year. One study found that for the 25 years between 1970 and 1995, foreign stocks beat U.S. by a wide margin in 12 years,...
Wins and Losses: Bush’s Dilemma
President Bush can count two unexpected victories in the past week: a broad mandate from the American people -- in the form of an unprecedented mid-term congressional sweep -- followed by a unanimous United Nations Security Council vote approving the administration's...
North Korea Building Nuclear Bombs? Perish the Thought
Our leaders express incredible shock that North Korea is building nuclear bombs. This emotion of shock betrays the reasons why we have the whole problem with terrorism in the first place. We are victims of terrorism because too many of us -- and all of our leaders --...
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