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
President George W. Bush -- despite his post-Sept. 11 performance -- remains dumb, says "West Wing" producer Aaron Sorkin. Bush's stratospheric popularity, claims Sorkin, results from our collective refusal to admit Bush's stupidity: "That illusion (of a fully-engaged...
The never-ending battle of the left to keep people from being held responsible for the consequences of their own actions is now in the Supreme Court of the United States, where the justices are being urged to exempt murderers from the death penalty if they score below...
Given the warmth that's emanating from the North Pacific as George W. Bush visits Beijing this week, it's hard to believe that the United States' leading foreign-policy concerns before Sept. 11 were China's downing of a U.S. military surveillance plane, its opposition...
If even half the things that Enron is charged with are true, then some of the company's top brass should get a few decades behind bars to think over what a dirty thing they have done to so many other people, who trusted them and depended on them. But that is something...
Patrick J. Buchanan calls it La Reconquista -- the steady takeover of the American Southwest by the Mexican culture from which it was wrested in the first place. He marshalls his argument at length in a new book, *The Death of the West,* and in the the March issue of...
In 1996, California's voters passed Proposition 209, which outlawed racial quotas for college admission. That didn't mean the end of the quest for racial quotas and the euphemisms for it: affirmative action, diversity and multiculturalism. The diversity lobby has...
Could the typical small investor have discovered a year ago that Enron Corp. was on the brink of disaster? It's highly unlikely. Still, if you looked for the right thing, you never would have bought Enron stock in the first place. The right thing is cash. The earnings...
To many investors, the lesson of the Enron scandal is never to trust a company's earnings reports and balance sheets again. But that's nonsense. Yes, there are unscrupulous corporate managers and auditors out there, but the best way to protect yourself is not to dump...
Since the 1960s, academic achievement scores have plummeted, but student grade point averages (GPAs) have skyrocketed. The Academy of Arts and Sciences reports that at Harvard, for instance, A's were awarded to 46 percent of students in 1996 (versus 22 percent in...
The Enron scandal was welcomed like an unexpected Christmas present by Democrats who, together with much of the media, have tried to tie the scandal to the Bush administration. However, as more and more information has come out about Enron, it has become clear that...
The six-month anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is upon us. Here are a half-dozen unsolved mysteries still on my mind: What really happened on United Airlines Flight 93? As the Philadelphia Daily News reported back in November, many folks in Shanksville,...
The American press seems to have contracted Black Hawk Down Syndrome, a malady in which reporters and editorialists, whose military experience consists largely of watching Hollywood war movies, project a hand-wringing fear of American military failure. These reactions...
There's a word for people like Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, who got caught last week cutting in line at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. The word is buttinski. Beltway buttinskis can't wait around like everybody else. Long lines are...
I can't seem to get away from this subject. And it's so darn important, I'm not sure I want to. My earlier column, Back Up Blues, triggered some interesting responses. One reader inquired as to whether I had considered or tried another drive imaging product,...
President Bush last week showed Clintonesque skill in the art of political triangulation. An alleged champion of free markets and free trade, the Bush White House last week announced plans to impose tariffs as high as 30% on steel imports to the U.S. next year. The...
In a previous article, I discussed the importance of backing up your entire hard drive (not just your data) periodically as protection against computer viruses. Of course, there are other equally important reasons to back up your entire hard drive. You can have a hard...
Newsflash: The woman who helped launder Al Gore's Buddhist temple money has not served a single day in jail. And she probably never will. The hidden story of how funny money honey Maria Hsia escaped any meaningful punishment for corrupting our election system shows...
It was Ronald Reagan who said that "economists are people who see something work in practice and wonder if it would work in theory." I think this is a wonderful quote. And what is working in practice -- or has been working for the last two decades -- has been the U.S....
Racial preferences, quotas and affirmative action in university admission practices have lost political and, increasingly, legal support. As a result, states such as California, Texas and Florida have implemented a substitute practice called "percentage plans" as a...
"Battered woman syndrome" -- the politically correct legal rationalization for letting cold-blooded female killers off the hook -- is now an issue in the California governor's race. Are both Democrats and Republicans really so desperate to close the gender gap that...
The spirits are up at the White House these days: everybody's busy congratulating themselves for a war well fought and deservedly won. That we deserve to win the War on Terror is beyond respectable dispute (although, evidently, not beyond dispute altogether). But did...
How to make better decisions -- big and small? Here are some tips. 1. Assume certainty is possible. You're certain the sky is blue. You're certain where you're standing or sitting right now is where you're standing or sitting. You can therefore be certain of many...
In The New York Times of October 11th , right next to the article on the latest Nobel Prize winners in economics, is another titled Expansive Role for Greenspan Brings Out Critics of Fed's Chief. The article recounts how Alan Greenspan has been called upon (and has...
A reader writes in: I respectfully disagree with your "shooting-from-the-hip" and "un-objective-like" quick analysis of the Yates killings (see Daily Dose column 2/28/02--"Why the Insanity Defense is Insane" ). I haven't had time to fully analyze the issue, but my...
The economic and foreign policies of governments -- for good or ill -- exert a dramatic influence on investors' portfolios. If that isn't obvious by now, given the policies of the past two years, it will never be so. In economic policy we've seen Fed rate hikes...
One of the conditions associated with neurosis is a weakened sense of personal identity. Nations, too, sometimes suffer from not knowing the values they live for and defend. Our rallying cry is "freedom," but what exactly does that mean? If we turn back to the...
My readers know that customer service (or customer no-service) is a running theme throughout my articles. I am constantly aghast at the number of companies who don't understand that their real business is to provide customer service. You may gain a few customers with...
To: 9/11 victims and their families From: Daniel Pipes Subject: Compensation You have been engaged in an unfortunate spat with the U.S. government over the money you deserve for your losses on 9/11, prompting anger all around. Here's a solution: Forget Washington and...
The unacknowledged principle behind the recently passed House of Representatives "campaign finance reform" bill: Established media giants (CBS, ABC, New York Times) have a constitutional right to be free of restrictions on what they air or publish. (This of course is...
With unremitting ferocity, Arab terrorists this weekend again attacked Israelis through suicide bombing and sniper fire--brutally killing 22. Despite such carnage, despite Yasser Arafat's hollow promises to quell such violence, despite his record of flouting the terms...
Andrea Yates, charged with killing her five young children, is attempting to prove that she was insane at the time and is therefore not responsible. "Insane" in this context is defined by our legal theorists simply as "not knowing right from wrong." How can "not...
Could it be that an important textbook is proselytizing American 12-year-olds to convert to Islam? The book in question is "Across the Centuries" (Houghton Mifflin, 2nd edition, 1999), a 558-page history that covers the millennium and a half between the fall of Rome...
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