Question 1 on the Massachusetts ballot would abolish the state income tax. If enacted it will eliminate as much as $9 billion in government revenue and force a radical downsizing of the state’s budget and operations. That is exactly the purpose for which its...
POLITICS
The Rational Basis of Sex: Sexual Choices and Preferences (Part 3 of 4)
Your sexual choice reveals a lot about who you are and what you think of yourself. Some people shoot for a partner lower than themselves. For example, a intelligent guy may feel that he’s only able to hold some “dumb broad” he picks up at a bar. He...
Playing UN “Survivor”
If surviving in the world most fundamentally involves producing the values from nature that are needed to sustain human life, then the hit CBS series, Survivor, hardly lives up to its name. In the current season debut, one exceptional team member, John, found the...
End the Massachusetts State Income Tax
This month, American voters will head to the polls for midterm elections. Though the names on the ballots have changed since the last election, proponents of limited, accountable government will again be forced to choose between the same contenders: Candidate No Way...
Disgruntled Conservatives
“A Record Year for Academic Pork,” said the headline on the front page of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the leading trade publication of the academic world. Whether representatives of farmers, corporate welfare recipients, and other beneficiaries of...
Random Thoughts October 2002
Random thoughts on the passing scene: People who cannot be bothered to learn both sides of the issues should not bother to vote. Considering that we all enter the world the same way and leave in the same condition, we spend an awful lot of time in between trying to...
John Allen Muhammad: Hating America
When a Ukrainian immigrant murdered Ennis Cosby, the son of Bill and Camille Cosby, Ms. Cosby blamed America. She wrote, “I believe America taught our son’s killer to hate African-Americans.” Reeling from the pain of her loss, Cosby’s...
The Rush From Judgment
Like many people, it crossed my mind early in the Beltway Sniper case that this might be a terrorist attack. I reserved judgment, realizing — unlike the armchair experts who flocked to fill airtime on cable news channels — that I did not know all of the...
The Snipers: Crazy or Jihadis?
‘Why now? Why? Why? Why? Why? That’s the question I think everyone is asking.” So agonized the half-brother of Lee Malvo, the alleged 17-year-old sniper, baffled by the causes behind the Washington, D.C.-area shooting spree that left 10 people dead....
In That Voting Booth
One of the most common laments in letters from readers is a sense of helplessness to do anything about the negative trends in politics and society. Yet the people who make those laments have the ultimate power in the most powerful nation on earth. All they have to do...
The Investing Enigma
Investing is the most supremely arrogant thing that you can do. In effect, whenever you buy or sell an individual stock — or even if you trade an index fund with the intention of timing the market — you’re placing your judgment ahead of the judgment...
God Bless Our Assassins, Commandos and Bombs
In the past few weeks radical Muslims have attacked again, including a bombing of a French ship, a bombing that killed hundreds–mostly Australians–in Indonesia, bombings in the Philippines, and possibly a bombing of a Moscow McDonald’s restaurant....
Rights vs. Wishes
We hear so much about “rights” — a right to this and a right to that. People say they have a right to decent housing, a right to adequate health care, food and a decent job, and more recently, senior citizens have a right to prescription drugs. In a...
Explaining to the Grandkids
Those of us who are optimists believe that someday sanity will return to our society. Our media, our officials — perhaps even our schools and colleges — will begin to talk sense. Those of you who are young may live to see it. But there is a downside to...
Cognitive Child Abuse in Our Math Classrooms
The test results are in: America’s children are flunking math. In 1996 American high school seniors finished close to the bottom on an international mathematics test. At the end of last year, American eighth-graders ranked below those of Malaysia, Bulgaria, and...
Boring Sportscasters: Fans Want to Watch Sports, Not Hollywood Gimmicks
There are people who find sports exciting and people who find sports boring. Unfortunately, the latter seem to be the ones in charge of baseball telecasts. And they seem to be trying to make those telecasts boring for the rest of us. Somehow the people who televise...
Good Advertising is Salesmanship
Let us emphasize that point. The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales. It is not for general effect. It is not to keep your name before the people. It is not primarily to aid your other salesmen....
Hate is not a Crime
Last month, the Canadian government detained several newsletters from the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) defending “Israel’s moral right to exist” out of concern that “they may constitute obscenity or hate propaganda.” Although the government...
High Stakes Elections and Voter Turnout
During election years, people in the media seem to be forever lamenting the fact that millions of Americans who are eligible to vote do not in fact go to the polls. When speculating as to why those people don’t vote, the media often assume that there is...
More Gun Control, Please!
Gun-control proponents, predictably, in the wake of the Beltway sniper, urge still more gun-control laws. So, as news watchers sit through another round of softball interviews with gun-control advocates, we humbly offer Second Amendment-challenged hosts some...
Personal Health and Safety: Whose Business Is It?
My health and other aspects of my well-being are the business of whom? You say, “What’s it now, Williams?” I’m simply asking whose business is it if I don’t adequately plan for retirement or save money for my child’s education? If I...
The Foreign Policy of George Bush: A Grand Illusion
Somewhere, there is a warlike American administration obsessed with smashing an Axis of Evil, an administration itching to blow away any regime tainted by terrorism and willing to lash out preemptively and unilaterally, invading and occupying any country that resists....
Islam’s New Strongholds
The recent bombing of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia, killing at least 183 and injuring hundreds, fits into a larger pattern. Militant Islam used to be mostly confined to Middle Easterners, but in recent years it has spread to Muslims in other parts of the world. This...
COPS Makes for Crooked Cops
Martin Chavez has a problem, and it carries a substantial price tag. Chavez, the mayor of Albuquerque, N.M., may have to find up to $7.6 million for his police department in the coming year. The city could wind up repaying the federal government $4.1 million it...
Bombings in Bali, Indonesia: Self-Inflicted Wounds?
It seems an open-and-shut case to many Americans. Car bombs go off in an entertainment district, leaving 180 dead and many more missing or wounded. It occurs in Bali, Indonesia, a country that has allowed terror groups–some affiliated with al Qaeda–to take...
Paralyzing America’s Producers: The Government’s Crackdown on American Businessmen Is Devastating Our Economy
When it comes to what to do about our teetering economy, nearly everyone is out of ideas. Economic analysts and federal officials are mystified after repeatedly seeing their predictions of an economic recovery fall flat. Republicans ignore the economy and offer no...
Castigating America: How Jimmy Carter Won the Noble “Peace” Prize
As a patriot and a man of honor, Jimmy Carter should refuse the Nobel Peace Prize. Such an act of integrity would win him more respect and admiration from his countrymen than anything he has done since he left the White House in 1981. The Nobel Peace Prize committee...
The Irrationality of Treating Dictators as ‘Rational Actors’
This piece is occasioned by the “discovery” that North Korea has been violating the Agreed Framework and working on nuclear weapons. However, it could just as easily have been written after the collapse of the Oslo Accords, after the discovery of Saddam...
Appeasement Never Works
By definition, every dictatorship’s hands are drenched in blood, yet some people still think they can be placated by simply appeasing them. Consider the revelation that the Stalinist dictatorship of North Korea now has nuclear weapons, despite promises to the...
The Beltway Sniper: Can’t We All Just Get Along?
[HUMOR] If I have learned anything from world leaders over the past several decades, it is that the war-mongering methods of people like Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose just don’t work. Police and government officials should stop their oppressive,...
Capitalism Key to Ending Poverty
At about the same time a hodgepodge of protesters descended on Washington, D.C. last month to protest capitalism, globalization and free trade, the United Nations and the Institute for International Studies released a triad of studies declaring that humanity is, for...
INS In Denial
The very first line of defense for the U.S. homeland consists of those who issue visas (the consular division of the State Department) and those who control the borders (the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS). Trouble is, neither of those agencies has...
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