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
“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....
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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....
The “Disadvantaged Business Enterprise” program, run by the U.S. Department of Transportation and adopted by states and cities across the country, is one of the most atrociously corrupt government endeavors in existence. Opportunists of all colors have...
I saw a bumpersticker the other day which said, “Creativity Is More Important Than Knowledge.” What an excellent example of utterly wrong thinking! You can’t separate creativity from knowledge. The two are intertwined. Generally speaking, greater...
[CAPITALISM MAGAZINE.COM] President George W. Bush is his father’s son. In place of principle — right or wrong — we see waffling. His recent approach to the stem-cell research debate illustrates this fact eloquently. The President came up with a...
I find that my expertise as a supply chain management consultant helps me a great deal with my investing strategy. These days, a lot of brokerages — Morgan Stanley, Salamon Smith Barney, and Prudential to name a few — are getting excited about the...
As Congress debates “fixing” the Ponzi scheme we call Social Security, consider a few things: Congress established Social Security with a little-known loophole, allowing states and municipalities to exempt their public employees from Social Security. In...
One of the clues in the Chandra Levy case that may have been dismissed too quickly was a call to the police on the morning of her disappearance, reporting a woman’s scream heard in the building where she lived. This seems to have been disregarded as an unrelated...
When the Bush administration lands on the same side of an issue as The New York Times editorial board, Sen. Hillary Clinton and the Sierra Club, it’s time to clear out the cockpit. The administration’s latest junk science decision should cause Bush...
The president’s recent decision on embryonic stem cell research has been described in most reports as a compromise that balances the views of scientists, who want to move forward unrestrictedly, against the views of the religious right, who call for a total ban...
The latest political spin is that we should shift our focus away from Congressman Gary Condit and concentrate on finding Chandra Levy. But what we really need to do — and urgently — is begin to shift our focus away from Chandra Levy and look much more...
In the spring of 1994, the last full year of welfare as we knew it, 112,000 Massachusetts families were on the dole. In the spring of 2001, the caseload stands at 41,500 — a reduction of 63 percent. So spectacular has the success of welfare reform been that it...
The leaders of the world’s most advanced nations, plus Russia, met recently at the G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, to discuss ways to increase trade and international cooperation — about the most peaceful and civilized thing that the world’s leaders could...
She told him he was the little girl’s father, and he believed her. When the state asked him to acknowledge his paternity, he went in and signed the paper they put before him. Though scarcely more than a child himself, he understood that good men don’t walk...
Nothing breeds sophomoric resentment like academic success. So it’s no surprise that home schoolers and their children are the target of a spiteful T-shirt sold in retail stores and online. The short-sleeved shirt is white with red trim. A red silhouette of a...
Last week, an article in the Wall Street Journal reported that Oracle had overstated the number of customers that it had for its most recent release (release 11i) of its applications. The article also implied that customers were not buying 11i or were not migrating...
Fraud is so inherent to the operation of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that “HUD Scandal” might as well be one word. The latest hudscandal involves a feel-good program (what else?) for cops and teachers. Since 1997, police officers...
I’ve been saying for weeks that the markets would be waiting for Cisco’s earnings report — which was released yesterday after the bell — to set the tone for the post-earnings season world. That’s because Cisco was a winner of “the...
Earlier this year in April (2001), Secretary of State Colin Powell rebuked Israel for sending tanks and bulldozers into Gaza following Palestinian mortar attacks on the Israeli town of Sederot. “The Israeli response,” he said, “was excessive and...
The United Nations will open its “World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance” (let’s call it WCAR) on Aug 31 in Durban, South Africa. Already there are threats to pull out by the United States unless...
Every night, I roll up my sleeves, take off my socks, and climb into the bathtub with my 11-month-old daughter, her two rubber duckies, a Mickey Mouse sponge, and a pile of floating toy debris. She splashes and squirms incessantly, but I have at least one hand on her...
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran an extraordinary op-ed piece by George Gilder, called Tumbling into the Telechasm. In it, the celebrated author of Telecosm and the publisher of the Gilder Technology Report lists all the federal government’s catastrophic...
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