POLITICS

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 of anti-Americanism...

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 dictionary, we get...

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....

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 Clinton in...

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 year's most...

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...

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 civilians and...

'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 added that "there are...

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 injunctions...

"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 departments earned global fame -- and a...

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 with especially nasty...

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 kind of...

In declaring his own war on terrorism last week, Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made a surprising claim. He said that Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, "is responsible for everything that is happening here," a reference to the onslaught of four suicide...

I must say that one of the best things about the Clinton presidency was that he was not able to pass his health care plan. The proposed system was nothing more than a step toward complete socialization of health care in this country, and it overlooked one simple fact:...

[http://www.CapitalismMagazine.com] Politicians are considering tax relief to help a sputtering economy, but not all tax cuts are created equal. There is a vast difference between "supply-side" tax cuts and "Keynesian" tax cuts. Supply-side tax policy focuses on how...

You'd be surprised by the newly discovered requirements for national security revealed by the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. We discovered that a thriving airline industry is necessary for national security. Congress acknowledged this by bailing out airline stockholders...

Education in Philadelphia's public schools is so rotten that the state government is threatening a takeover. There are 176 out of 264 schools on the failing list. The primary victims of Philadelphia's public schools are black students whose chances for upward mobility...