The AIDS activists have based their campaign on a socialist agenda that is focused on bashing the drugs industry.
POLITICS
The Prudent Speculator: Frank Investing Advice
Al Frank, who died of cancer April 25 at age 72 in Carmel, Calif., was one of the very best stock pickers in America. He never sought the spotlight and few investors recognize his name, but he deserves a place in the investing pantheon with gods like Warren Buffett,...
Intel: Doomed by Moore’s Law
A seasoned Silicon Valley businessman — an older man of the pre-dotcom generation who’s seen his fair share of booms and busts — once told me that he had discovered the fatal weakness of the technology industry. It is that semiconductors are the most...
Tough Questions: The Enemy Within
Hardly a week goes by without at least one reader asking a really tough question. The latest tough question dealt with a recent column [Homeland Security and the Enemies Within] which said that, in a war for survival, the government has not only the right but the duty...
Fuel Cell Follies
The national news media recently became all warm and fuzzy over the news that a DaimlerChrysler fuel-cell vehicle completed a cross-country trip from San Francisco to Washington, DC. The 3262 mile journey took a leisurely 15 days (contrasting with the coast-to-coast...
An Ancient Fallacy: Price Controls
When Hawaii recently passed a law controlling how high the price of gasoline can go in that state, it was the first law controlling the price of gasoline since 1981, when President Ronald Reagan ended federal control over oil prices. What was unusual about the...
Bush’s Vision For Peace for the Middle East: A Prelude To War
As Israel reenters the West Bank in another attempt to drive out the terrorists, President Bush offers his vision for peace in the Middle East. Israel, he says, should withdraw to its pre-1967 borders and the Palestinians (under “new leadership”) should be...
Don’t Be Seduced by the Beautiful Line in Investing
When you own a stock, you become a partner in a business. And the most important characteristic of a business — a good one, anyway — is that it grows. Over time its revenue and profits rise, and your stock becomes worth a lot more. The prospect of strong...
Death Sentences: An Arbitrary Reversal
Some more murderers may escape the death penalty as a result of the recent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, declaring it unconstitutional to execute those who are “mentally retarded.” The larger question, however, is whether a death sentence is being...
Individualism vs. Serfdom in Defense of Freedom
In his June 6th column, Ross Mackenzie reprints a salty speech by US Third Army General George Patton to his men prior to the invasion of D-Day in 1944. In his speech, Patton is reported to have made the following comments: “An Army is a team–lives,...
Limits on Taxation: It’s the Spending Stupid
It’s that time of year when the old tax limitation constitutional amendment bill gets dusted off before it receives its yearly summary defeat. An expansion of the 1994 “Contract with America” provision that modified House rules to require a...
Pedophile Priests: What should be condemned the Pedophile or the Priest?
The appalling story of the pedophile priests deserves all the negative press it has been getting. But is the press critical of them because they are pedophiles or because they are priests? After all, there are many other pedophiles, some of them with their own...
Microsoft’s Nose, Technology’s Face
When future policymakers want to understand the law and economics surrounding one of the most watched antitrust cases in history, they will look to “Microsoft, Antitrust and the New Economy,” a recent compilation of essays published by the Milken...
Public Relations vs. Reality: The “American” Muslim Council
FBI directors don’t make a habit of breaking bread with organizations their agents may soon be investigating, perhaps even closing. Robert S. Mueller III, however, is about to make precisely this blunder: On June 28, he is scheduled to deliver a lunch talk to...
Let’s Not Execute Capital Punishment
Every argument opposing capital punishment — e.g., it fails to deter would-be murderers, it’s administered according to racial/economic bias, it kills innocent people — evades the fundamental basis for why state execution, when used with discretion,...
Martha and the Tall Poppies
Why do so many people hate Martha Stewart? How does a home-decorating and entertaining expert with a sweet, wholesome public persona come to be portrayed as a major cultural villain? Consider the past week’s media frenzy over charges that Stewart engaged in...
A is Non-A: Barbara Boxer’s World of Development Restriction and “Affordable Housing”
Politics, according to an old adage, is “the art of the possible.” But, during election years especially, politics has increasingly become the art of the impossible. What politicians promise to all the various groups adds up to more than anyone can...
A World Without “F’s”
School’s out. What did your children learn this year? Across the country, one poisonous lesson was pumped into the systems of self-esteem-inflated students: There is no such thing as failure. Christine Pelton, a now-famous former biology teacher at Piper High...
The Forest Service Smokescreen
Terry Barton, a U.S. Forest Service worker, was charged this week with intentionally setting the largest wildfire in Colorado history. It is a black mark on the beleaguered federal agency. But it’s not the blackest mark. Last summer, four young firefighters died...
Do We Want Democracy?
What’s so good about democracy — generally understood as having trust in the general will of a democratic people, as expressed by a vote of the majority, to make all important decisions? If a majority of our 535 congressmen votes for one measure or...
Israel Needs a Border, not a Fence
IN ITS MOST RECENT IMPOTENT attempt to put an end to the suicidal butchery arriving from the Palestinian territories, the Israeli government has proposed a fence that would run from the Salem checkpoint in the north to Kafr Qasem in the south, while another stretch of...
After Enron: The Cure is Worse The the Disease
After any breakdown of a public institution, politicians feel the urge to “fix” things so it doesn’t happen again. Often, however, the cure is worse than the disease. That’s the case with the proposed remedies following the collapse of Enron....
An Old “New Vision” for “Affordable Housing”
Despite the fanfare of a televised speech at the National Press Club in Washington, a very old and hackneyed set of proposals was unveiled as a “new vision” for the creation of “affordable housing.” The speech was by Richard Ravitch,...
Accountable, Yet Not Accountable: A “Retarded” Supreme Court Decision
Yesterday the Supreme court released its decision in Atkins v. Virginia, regarding the propriety of executing the mentally retarded. The court reversed the death sentence of a retarded murderer, arguing that his diminished mental precluded him from acting with the...
Amtrak: The Perpetual Failure Machine
Today I watched a bizarre spectacle. Attending a hearing of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on transportation, I bore witness as, one-by-one, five United States senators of both political parties made the case for subsidizing perpetual failure. I saw them...
How to Fight Terrorism: Bush vs. Clinton
Like three blind mice, Dick Gephardt, Hillary Clinton and James Carville are running around saying they want their eyes opened about what’s going on in this country about terrorism. House Minority Leader Gebhardt wants an investigation into “what the White...
Making Gray Davis Accountable
California’s Governor Gray Davis is in hot water over his acceptance of $25,000 from Oracle Corporation following the state’s no-bid $95 million dollar e-government deal with the company. And while the governor probably wishes he had never heard of...
How Government Bureaucrats Helped Sink WorldCom
WorldCom has rallied as much as 53% in the two weeks since it was ignominiously ejected from the S&P 500 Index on May 14. Low-priced securities of distressed companies are often subject to such large moves in percentage terms. But WorldCom’s rally following...
Patterns of Untruthfulness: U.S. State Department “Patterns of Global Terrorism”
Each spring, the State Department issues “Patterns of Global Terrorism,” its major report on the problem it defines as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents,...
The Inversion Aversion: How Congress Robs Shareholders of American Corporations
Today, the Senate Committee on Finance will vote on a bill introduced by Sen, Charles Grassley of Iowa that would make it illegal for a US firms to re-incorporate overseas to avoid the tax bias against corporate overseas income. CMDC considers this and similar...
Why Economists Are Not Popular
One of the many reasons why economists are unpopular is that they keep reminding people that things have costs, that there is no free lunch. People already know that — but they like to forget it when there is something they have their hearts set on. Economists...
The Post-Colonialist Famine
Today, more than a million people in Zimbabwe are starving, and up to three million face the imminent prospect of starvation. This has not yet excited much attention in the West. Zimbabwe, after all, is far away from the centers of American interest; all of our top...
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