A century ago, it was one of the seven richest nations on Earth. But that was long ago, well before it was racked by a lengthy recession and a climbing unemployment rate. Today, Argentina is a shell of its former self. The street riots that broke out just before...
POLITICS
The Medical Welfare State: Osama’s Medical Welcome Mat
If you were an ailing foreigner in need of sanctuary and free medical treatment, it’s obvious where you would turn: America. Where could Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind with bad kidneys and a shrinking bank account, be hiding? Well, if you were an...
Burying the ABM Treaty: What’s the Rush?
President Bush had barely finished announcing his intention to withdraw the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty when the cry went up among missile-defense foes: Why now? After all, they said, it’s not as if we’re about to deploy a...
Endgame in Afghanistan
Even before the amount of Taliban-controlled territory in Afghanistan had shrunk to virtually nothing and Osama bin Laden’s forces had beat a hasty retreat deep into the mountains, the question arose: Where should we carry the war on terrorism next? Iraq,...
Protecting Us Out of Our Rights
Worrying about bacteria, New Jersey banned restaurants from serving eggs sunny side up. The ban has since been lifted. Some New Jersey localities have a ban on people pumping their own gasoline. Policemen issue citations for driving without a seatbelt. By law, new...
Investing Strategies: Asset-Focused “Value” Stocks
In the next few days, the Wall Street Journal will announce the results of its Investment Dartboard contest for the second half of 2001. In the competition, Journal editors ask four market professionals each to choose a single stock for the six months ahead. Their...
Property Rights Are The Answer
Webster’s Dictionary defines harm as: to hurt, damage, injure. People who don’t or can’t think believe that government should step in to prevent one person from harming another, such as in the case of tobacco smoke. But harm is a two-way street, and...
From Marxism to the Market
How and why had I changed from a young leftist to someone with my present views, which are essentially in favor of free markets and traditional values? In a sense, it was not so much a change in underlying philosophy, as in my vision of how human beings operate. Back...
A New Year’s Gift from Bill Clinton: An IRS Poison Pill
Politicians in Washington have spent two months fighting over how best to stimulate the economy. Yet while they squabble over tiny tax cuts that might — at best — add $20 billion to the national output (a drop in the bucket for a $10 trillion economy), the...
Taxes: On Holiday
President Kennedy and President Reagan understood that the best way to put more money in people’s wallets is to leave it there in the first place. It may have taken a war and a recession to do it, but quite a few liberal politicians are jumping on the...
The FDA vs. Red Cross: Federal Vampire Hunters Living in Soviet-style Utopia
The Food and Drug Administration is currently spending its resources hunting the American Red Cross, a charitable non-profit organization that is responsible for many health advancements in America, by attempting to find ways in which the Red Cross has violated the...
Philosophy and Journalism: Intrinsicism in Reporting
The smartertimes.com [December 20, 2001] makes an interesting point which bears philosophical analysis. Smartertimes.com catches the New York Times labeling conservative groups, such as The Heritage Foundation, as being conservative, while liberal groups, such as...
A New Era: Cleaning up Clinton’s Anti-American Foreign Policy
This year marked not only the beginning of a new millennium, but of a truly new era as well. In one sense, that era began on September 11th but, in another sense, it began on January 20th, when George W. Bush became President of the United States. The new...
Was the Baseball Juiced?
When Mark McGwire had his incredible 70-home run season in 1998, nobody thought that his record would be broken just three years later. Babe Ruth’s record of 60 home runs lasted 34 years, until Roger Maris broke it by one home run in 1961 and then held the...
Stop Giving America a Bad Rap
Even if you have only a passing interest in today’s popular music, I urge you to pay attention to the loathsome record nominated this week by Washington Post staff writer David Segal as the “Best Album” of 2001. It’s a stomach-turning example...
“Democracy” in America
A student, for an assignment, looked up the word “democracy” in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Edition. The following definition appears: 1. a: government by the people; especially: rule of the majority b: a government in which the...
The Morality of War
Ayn Rand once said, “Wars are the second greatest evil that human societies can perpetrate.” Why only second? To understand, we must first do something that few have done since the peace ended on Sept. 11: We must ask what war is. From Webster’s...
Music “Sharing” and Music Piracy: End Intellectual Theft
I’ve held my mouth shut for some time concerning Napster and file-sharing in general. Mostly because I did not wish to offend people close to me that are participating in this activity. I realize that this has been a mistake. As a music-lover, I completely...
Parasite and Host Produce a Second-time Mom
Free-market economists frequently speak of what is seen and not seen when assessing the drivel of government interventionists. While short-term results may benefit some group, in the long run economic meddling invariably hurts everyone, the free-marketers tell us....
Arabs Have Never Accepted Israel
In June of this year, Palestinian television broadcast a sermon in a Gaza mosque in which the imam, Ibrahim Madi, made the following statement: “God willing, this unjust state [of] Israel, will be erased; this unjust state the United States will be erased; this...
The Free-Market’s Solution to Media Bias: FOXNews
Major media people have values unlike most other Americans. Former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg documents that in his best-seller, “ Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News .” Eighty-nine percent of Washington journalists voted for...
Why America’s Islamic Establishment Loves Cold Blooded Killer Jamil al-Amin
The man once known as H. Rap Brown, whose antics in the 1960s earned him a reputation as the violent left’s least-thoughtful firebrand, is now in the dock for murdering a policeman, with a trial scheduled to begin in January. It promises to be one the...
History Itself Is About to Become History
History is, generally, a subject that studies what happened in the past and determines why it happened. When historians begin to say that nobody can be certain of anything that happened and that anyone’s guess as to why it happened is as good–meaning as...
The Myth of the Arab Country of Palestine
A common misconception about Arab terrorism against Israel is that it is committed in an effort to derail the “peace process.” President Bush echoed that fiction on Sunday when he commented on a wave of ghastly attacks that had just killed 26 Israeli...
“We’re Going to Conquer America”
‘Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country,” said President Bush shortly after Sept. 11, noting that they are “doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads.” He later...
How Best to Improve School Productivity? School Choice!
Although it’s only seven years since Caroline Minter Hoxby received her Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the brilliance of her subsequent research at Harvard University into the effectiveness and cost of public education has...
Why Christmas Should be More Commercial
Christmas in America is an exuberant display of human ingenuity, capitalist productivity, and the enjoyment of life. Yet all of these are castigated as “materialistic”; the real meaning of the holiday, we are told, is assorted Nativity tales and altruist...
N.Y. Port Authority’s Forgotten Heroes
“Billy Blazes,” a New York firefighter action figure, is one of the biggest-selling items on the Christmas toy market this year. Also high on the holiday gift list: “FDNY” and “NYPD” caps, shirts and sweaters. The two city...
Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams: Grace Under Fire
Someday, many of their critics will apologize. Who am I talking about? Two economists, who happen to be black, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. For over 30 years, Thomas Sowell, currently with the Hoover Institution, and Walter Williams, chairman of the economics...
How John Walker Turned into a Taliban Terrorist
It isn’t the case that the parents of John Walker — the Marin County child of privilege turned Taliban terrorist — never drew the line with their son. True, they didn’t do so when he was 14 and his consuming passion was collecting hip-hop CDs...
Value Judgments, Ideology, and Writing Editorials
There’s an interesting methodological difference between Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) op-eds and the usual ones you read by non-Objectivists (and boy, there sure are a lot of non-Objectivists around, aren’t there?). I can best illustrate the difference by a...
A Lesson in U.S. Foreign Policy for India: With Friends Like Us …
India is beginning to learn what Israel has learned, brutally, over the past year: the U.S. State Department loves to betray our friends. It is now more than a week since Pakistan-backed Islamic terrorists shot up the Indian Parliament in New Delhi, killing 12 people...
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