Hewlett Packard buying Compaq isn’t exactly going to save the world. If that’s the best thing this market can come up with as a catalyst, we’re in a heap of trouble. About the only good thing you can say about the market right now is that the major...
POLITICS
The United Nations Conference of Racists
The UN World Conference Against Racism has met and taken up its primary agenda: the praise and protection of racists. The tone was set on the first day of the conference, when that paragon of progressive politics, Yasser Arafat, took the podium to condemn Israel as a...
India Unbound
There are few things more heartwarming than watching people rise out of poverty to a better life. When it is a whole nation in the process of doing so, it is especially inspiring. That is the theme of a marvelous new book titled “ India Unbound: The Social and...
Riot Ideology and De-Policing in Cincinnati
A Seattle policeman explained de-policing as: “Parking under a shady tree to work on a crossword puzzle is a great alternative to being labeled a racist and being dragged through an inquest, a review board, an FBI and U.S. attorney investigation, and a...
Greenspan, Recessions, & “Market Bubbles”
When Ronald Reagan accepted his party’s nomination for president in 1980 he said, “When your friend is out of a job, that’s a recession. When you are out of a job, that’s a depression. And when Jimmy Carter is out of a job, that’s a...
Reflections of a Former Intern
Twenty years from now, when my baby daughter is on the brink of full adulthood, I will tell her about my experience as a 20-year-old intern in Washington, D.C. A decade ago, I headed to the District for a month-long stint in a Senate office. Like most dreamy-eyed and...
Envirobambaloozed
Time magazine: “Scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible.” U.S. News & World Report chimed in, referring to the United Nation’s Intergovernmental...
The Real Winner of the Powerball Lottery
Four lucky ticketholders struck it rich last weekend, but here’s the real winner of the $295 million Powerball binge: the government. Powerball is a multi-state numbers racket that would be quashed by the U.S. Department of Justice if it were privately run....
The Social Security Debate: A War of Lies
The battle over restructuring America’s Social Security system into individual, privately managed accounts is heating up again. So the winds of change keep blowing, foreshadowing what may be the most profound economic transformation since the Reagan tax cuts of...
“Racism” In Word and Deed: California Democrat Policies Hurt Blacks (and Whites) Where It Really Matters
It has become all too common for some innocuous remark by a public figure to be seized upon and twisted to make it seem “racist,” setting off loud denunciations by those who are in the business of loud denunciations. Meanwhile, actions and policies that do...
Brazil’s War on Profit and Lives
Imagine that you are suffering from an incurable disease, which slowly wastes away your body and leads inevitably to death. One day, a scientist working with a pharmaceutical company discovers a drug that vastly increases your chance of survival. Do you: A) offer him...
The 2008 Olympics: How Communists Compete
Now that the rulers of Red China have clinched the 2008 Olympics, expect them to do everything in their authoritarian power to ensure that their athletes live up to the motto of the Games: “Faster, higher, stronger.” How will they accomplish this goal and...
Citizens Tethered to a Democratic Leash Called Tyranny
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “No one is as hopelessly enslaved as the person who thinks he’s free.” That captures the essence of “Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State,” written by Sheldon Richman, a senior fellow at the...
The Multi-User Consumer Broadband Mega-Market Opportunity
In one of my past columns, I discussed the challenges facing the deployment of broadband for the masses. I wish to re-visit that subject today. As my readers know, I recently switched from cable modem to BellSouth FastAccess DSL. In doing so, I learned that BellSouth...
Shades of 1936: An Olympic Carrot Without a Stick for China
Last month, the capital of an oppressive dictatorship has just been selected as the host city of a symbol of peace and civilization: the Olympic games. If you want to know how this happened, remember that it was done, not over the objections of civilized governments,...
The Book Burners Against Mark Twain
Mark Twain once observed that “We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking.” That’s precisely why the muddle-headed movement to ban Twain and his greatest work, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” persists like gangrene....
Goodbye to the Greenspan Index
Earlier this year, I wrote a column in which I argued that the only index that mattered was the Greenspan Index , that is, Alan Greenspan’s personal unannounced targets for the Dow, S&P, and Nasdaq indexes. Today I’m here to tell you that the...
“Handicapped” In The People’s Republic of Santa Monica
You own a busy restaurant. Agile waiters and waitresses carrying hot food and coffee deftly avoid colliding with each other as they scurry from table to table. Good hostesses, you find, don’t grow on trees, and dang gummit, your experienced one just quit. You...
Peacnik-Enviro-Guru Finally Faces Justice for Murder
A beautiful young woman vanishes. For months, her family searches in vain. They suspect her boyfriend, a secretive and arrogant older man who is active in public life. But his friends, including many famous members of the political and cultural elite, refuse to...
A Recession-Proof Tech Stock?
My favorite stock in The Luskin Report’s model portfolios is Numerical Technologies. Now that I’m not running Other People’s Money in a mutual fund anymore, I’m free to buy individual stocks in my account for the first time in almost two years....
Bush Rightfully “Disses” the Collectivist NAACP
“I was surprised, President Clinton came every year but one, and then he sent Al Gore in his place,” says an official with the NAACP upon learning that President George W. Bush declined to speak at the organization’s annual meeting. Hold the phone....
The U.S. Economy is in a “Recession”
My hopes that the markets had reached a secondary bottom last week were completely dashed Wednesday and yesterday, as the bad news came pouring out like blood from an open wound. The charts of all the broad indices have completely ruptured. Yesterday’s cavalcade...
Say No to Federal Funding for Stem-Cell Research
President George W. Bush just approved funding for limited embryonic stem-cell research. And he recently praised the 11-year-old Americans with Disabilities Act. Bad calls. Bush banned federal funds for cloning or for embryonic stem cells created solely for the...
The Upside- Down War
For 10 months, Yasser Arafat and his legions of rioters and terrorists have been waging a war against Israel. Now it looks as if Israel will finally choose to fight that war. Faced with a new wave of terror attacks, Israel is now weighing whether to invade the West...
Extend Tax-Free Holidays to the Rest of the Year
My daughter’s still in diapers, but I’m taking her “back-to-school” shopping this week. Here in Maryland, politicians have established a tax-free, retail holiday to pander to the soccer-mom crowd. The trend was started in New York and copied in...
The Autism Dragnet: Department of Education Rule 51
The U.S. Department of Education and the National Institutes of Health have launched a campaign to get a government program created to “identify” children with autism at age two and then subject them to “intensive” early intervention for 25...
Due Process vs. Mob-Rule: The McVeigh Execution is not a Lynching, But an Act Of Justice
Like many other people, Bud Welch lost a member of his family — his daughter Julie — when Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. Unlike most of the others, Welch opposes the death penalty, even for McVeigh, and is willing to say so...
Anti-Capitalist Politically Correct Journalism at The Wall Street Journal
Last month, a front-page story about minimum wages in The Wall Street Journal illustrates what is wrong with contemporary journalism as much as it illustrates anything about the minimum wage law. The first nine paragraphs deal with one individual who is wholly...
Deflation In the Spotlight At Last
Comments and questions continue to flood in about deflation. After months of writing about it the subject is finally getting real traction. You read about it in the mainstream financial press and hear about it on CNBC almost every day now. So let’s get to some...
The FED, Alan Greenspan, and Ayn Rand
I’ve written a lot about deflation over the last three or four months. But yesterday’s column on it, published here, got me an especially big flood of responses. One especially interesting one came by email, and I’m going to reproduce it here, and...
The New Language
Language is never static because in the process of progress, new words emerge for new tools and concepts. Some of today’s new language, like cosmetics, conceal and confuse. Since I’ve been on earth a sufficient interval of time to see some of this,...
Made in Japan
Remember all those books in the 1980s about “kaizen,” “kanban,” “keiretsu” and all the other secrets of Japanese management that were supposed to save American industry? Well, it must have worked — and perhaps too well....
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