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
Sex education abstinence programs do not work. Or so the government now tells us. For the last five years, the government spent $500 million on educational programs pushing sexual abstinence. With the program set to expire, Congress recently debated whether to extend...
Do you remember those $3.5 million government ads that ran during the Super Bowl -- the ones linking drug use with terrorism? "Timmy," a somber-looking teenager, stared at the camera and said: "I killed mothers. I killed fathers. I killed grandmas. I killed grandpas....
Reparations for descendents of slaves is picking up steam -- not among the 80 percent of the population who (according to polls) oppose it; but with big name politicians in one of our two major parties. (Guess which party?) The Governor of California, Gray Davis, has...
"You cannot support terrorists of one kind and be with us in the war on terrorism against Al Qaeda." -- Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's National Security Advisor, commenting on P.L.O. Chairman Yasser Arafat's known sponsorship of terrorism. Then how on earth do you...
Does sexism explain the "underrepresentation" of women in Hollywood? "If you look at the number of women working behind the scenes," said Martha Lauzen, a San Diego State University professor, "they're dramatically underrepresented (emphasis added)." Does sexism...
The Democrats have spent the past eight months looking for some way to gain political advantage over the Republicans without having to offer any actual leadership in the War on Terrorism. Their latest gambit is to blame President Bush for failing to act on vague CIA...
The Enron case made headlines because fraud and deception of such magnitude is fairly unusual in the corporate world. Washington fraud and deception of a much greater magnitude doesn't make the headlines because fraud and deception in government is standard practice....
Imagine if your child were being bullied on his school playground. You would do one of two things: either urge your child to fight back, if he can, or insist that the school authorities take responsibility for restraining if not expelling the bully. You would not...
University of California Regent Ward Connerly, who led the fight that ended group preferences in California state government, has moved on to promote an initiative that would forbid state agencies from identifying individuals by race. Decades ago, such a proposal was...
Most politicians and economists do not recognize capitalism's crucial characteristic. Given the state of the world today it's easy to see why. In his widely acclaimed speech of September 20, 2001, President Bush said, "Terrorists attacked a symbol of American...
Fidel Castro loathes anyone who champions freedom and democracy, but for Vladimiro Roca, who was freed this week after nearly five years in prison, he harbors a particular hatred. Roca is a scion of Cuba's communist elite. His father was Blas Roca, a founding father...
Eleven years ago, the Soviet Union was a communist dictatorship, an "evil empire," in the words of President Reagan. But today, the Cold War is a fading memory, and the nation that used to represent international socialism has junked its "progressive" income tax for a...
The best reasons for the current era of high equity valuations aren't very good. Just a few weeks before the great stock market crash of 1929, America's first celebrity economist, Irving Fisher, made one of history's worst market calls when he said, "Stock prices have...
Two major stories emerged last week regarding Cuba; one story you probably know -- Jimmy Carter was in Cuba -- and the other you probably do not. The contrast represents the complete inversion of what really matters. An American president in Cuba, current or former,...
For the past 10 months, the attorney general of New York, Eliot Spitzer, has been investigating Merrill Lynch & Co. Although he hasn't charged anyone with a crime, he has accused the firm of misleading customers by hyping stocks to win investment-banking business;...
The Associated Press ran a rare article explaining exactly who pays the federal income taxes. They state that the top 5 percent of income earners pay more than 55 percent of the total federal income taxes. (To be eligible for the top 5 percent, one must have an annual...
The Bush administration has fielded a great deal of criticism for its handling of the Middle East crisis. Many have focused on questions of timing and tone: Should White House officials have stepped in sooner? Should they have put pressure on Israel to pull back...
From Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, to Wile Coyote's Roadrunner-catching Acme ingenuity, Warner Brothers' hilarious Looney Tunes have filled generations of Americans with innocent childlike laughter. Unfortunately, political correctness run amok is depriving future...
Europe has been at peace for an unprecedented nearly six decades. Why? It surely is not because of peace treaties between enemy states, and it's surely not because of disarmament. All that was tried before and failed. The best explanation for Europe's unprecedented...
Attorney General John Ashcroft is making sense. This week, he ordered the deportation of a Haitian nanny who was convicted of second-degree manslaughter in the beating death of a 19-month-old boy in 1995. Ashcroft's decision reverses a bleeding-heart ruling by three...
Six months after the collapse of Enron, the left is still sputtering in violent outrage at the company, and with good reason. This display of wrath is the only way to keep people from noticing the real emotion underlying the Enron feeding frenzy: elation. The...
The Republican Party needs to hire Andrew Smith to help shape its message on immigration. At 18, this senior at Novato High School in Marin County, Calif., has more common sense and cojones than the hapless panderers in the GOP who have thrown their principles to the...
We live in the Age of Exhibitionism. Underwear is outerwear. Gauze is a coverup. "Bare midriff" is redundant. Earlier this spring, the red-carpet parade at the Academy Awards exposed more sagging flesh than an aging nudist colony. Did you see actresses Gwyneth Paltrow...
A riot is a strange thing to commemorate. But many in the media and in politics have commemorated the 10th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots that erupted after policemen who beat Rodney King were acquitted. The passage of time gives us all an opportunity to rethink...
What's the instinctive response to failure? Redouble your efforts, of course. Lost on the road? Don't admit it - you'd have to stop to figure out where you went wrong, maybe even suffer the humiliation of having to ask for directions. Instead, just step on the gas and...
In perusing through a recently published book on American politics, the following statement caught my eye: "[The spectre] our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face is that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and appeasement does not give you a choice...
The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations presents itself as just another civil-rights group. "We are similar to a Muslim NAACP," says spokesman Ibrahim Hooper. Its public language - about promoting "interest and understanding among the general public...
A visitor to Tokyo just can't believe that this is what a decade of stagnation looks like. Restaurants are full, shops are bustling, construction cranes are all over the place. Yet on Thursday, a government report showed that Japan's economy had "contracted by a real...
I spent my 21st birthday, in 1973, in Jerusalem, months before the Yom Kippur War. As part of the college junior semester abroad, I lived and traveled in Israel for nearly five weeks. In preparing a thesis called "U.N. Resolution 242 and the Viability of an...
Abercrombie & Fitch tried to sell some silly T-shirts with Asian caricatures a few weeks ago. One showed a pair of slant-eyed Chinese men with the phrase, "Wong Brothers Laundry Service: Two Wongs Can Make It White." Some very loud, wired and whiny Asian-American...
On Thursday, the Bush administration announced that it would join with the United Nations, the European Union and Russia to host an international peace conference to settle the conflict in the Middle East. No location was announced for this meeting, but I can suggest...
A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed Loyola University (Maryland) professor of economics Thomas DiLorenzo's "The Real Lincoln," a book that presented abundant evidence that most of the Founders took the right of state secession for granted. Despite that evidence, some...
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