Does the IRS always merit the harsh criticism it receives? No. Politicians deserve much of the blame for the way our tax system operates. Take, for instance, the Earned Income Tax Credit. It was Congress that created the EITC-essentially an income-redistribution...
POLITICS
What’s Good for Tom Daschle…
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle has seen the light. People -- specifically, people who live and vote in his home state of South Dakota -- must come before plant life. This sudden insight was illuminated by the glare of 50,000 forest fires, which have burned through...
Blood for Oil
Someone, finally, has stated the truth to the administration and to the world: Saudi Arabia is our enemy. According to the Washington Post, that was the message of a recent briefing to the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. The presentation, by Rand Corporation analyst...
The Threat Of The Paternalistic State
A precondition of freedom is the recognition of the individual's capacity to make decisions for himself. If man were viewed as congenitally incapable of making rational choices, there would be no basis for the very concept of rights. Yet that is increasingly how our...
No Conflict Between Liberty and Security
Most Americans, including our politicians, continue to believe the insidious proposition that we must "strike a balance" between liberty and security. Even though the House's new homeland security bill specifically prohibits the President's proposals for national IDs...
Race, Sex, Class & Tiger Woods
The ancient Scottish game has expanded in popularity steadily since the simultaneous rise of Arnold Palmer and television coverage of the PGA Tour in the 1950s; in recent years the game has seen increased participation at all professional and amateur levels, and much...
One Nation Founded Under Higher Taxes: Europe’s “Savings Tax Directive”
Two years ago, politicians and bureaucrats at the European Commission announced their intention to turn the 15 nations of the European Union into "the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010." This is a tall order. Smothered by oppressive tax...
Congress vs. the Stock Market
Even after its 489-point rally last Wednesday, the stock market's recent performance remains dismal. What's wrong? The economic news is good, if not great. Earnings have been better than expected, with positive surprises outnumbering negative by four to one. Interest...
Double Standard: Dead Jews vs. Dead Arabs
Does anyone seriously believe the Palestinians want peace? The Israelis retaliated against a man who had plotted the deaths of hundreds of their countrymen and, in return, his colleagues kill whom? University students. Young people among whom were four Americans. The...
At What Cost?
Now that we have all breathed a sigh of relief at the rescue of the miners trapped underground in Somerset, Pa., perhaps we might reconsider some of the things that send men down into such hazardous places to get us the fuel to power our economy. The cost of coal is...
The Wall Street Journal’s Immigration Foul
The Wall Street Journal editorial page is a reliable beacon of truth and common sense. Except when it comes to immigration. The open borders zealotry of the newspaper's editorial writers has led to positively Clintonian rationalizations for undermining the rule of law...
Loosing the ABM Handcuffs
The world just became a little safer. Such a statement may sound puzzling in an age of "dirty" bombs and other terrorist threats, but it's true. That's because this June the United States now has officially withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, a...
Protecting Squid Before Sailors
Osama bin Laden gets help from the strangest creatures. As America's military struggles to prepare its forces for the War on Terror, radical environmentalists are using marine life -- whales, dolphins, and even squid -- to try to block sea-based training exercises and...
Stock Crash Aftermath
What can be even worse than a stock market crash -- including the great crash of 1929 -- are politicians rushing in to fix things. At one time, it was widely assumed that the 1929 crash led directly to the Great Depression that lasted throughout the decade of the...
Can’t live without them
Q: What does it mean to love someone so much that you can't live without them? A: In most cases, such an emotion is not healthy. As profoundly traumatic as it is to lose a beloved romantic partner to illness, accident, or break-up, life must go on. Life should not go...
Un-bear-able Deals: When Bears Turn “Bullish”
For years, Grant's Interest Rate Observer was noteworthy for being both exceptionally witty and consistently wrong. Times have changed. The newsletter, edited by James Grant, who has written wonderful books on such topics as the life of Bernard Baruch and the history...
Two Trials — and Future Trials
While much attention has been focused on the trial of American Taliban John Walker Lindh, another trial halfway around the world may be more relevant to our own future. This was the trial in Pakistan of terrorists who killed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl....
Educational Vouchers
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Cleveland school voucher case, Zelman vs. Simmons-Harris, that taxpayer funds that go to parents who might use the money to enroll their children in religious schools was constitutional. One need not be a rocket scientist to...
Expanding Definitions and Suspicious Statistics
One of the latest in the seemingly endless rounds of alarming statistics is that one out of 12 American children has some form of disability. With all the things that are supposedly getting worse, you have to wonder how our life expectancy keeps increasing. A cynic...
Free Ride for Foreign Ship-Jumpers
While Washington buzzes over President Bush's homeland security plan to secure America's borders, untold numbers of foreigners continue to pour into our country illegally through limitless unsecured cracks and crevices. Joining the ranks of the estimated 9 million to...
Hauling CEOs Away in Manacles Makes Markets Soar!
Newsflash: Hauling CEOs Away in Manacles Makes Markets Soar! This is not a headline from The Onion, the satirical weekly newspaper that prints fake news stories. No, it is the story that was repeated last week by most of the nation's supposedly serious financial...
Capitalists vs. Crooks
Are American corporations being run by crooks in pinstripe suits? According to Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, "infectious greed" is to blame for the scandals engulfing firms like Enron, WorldCom and Global Crossing. On this view, which virtually all public...
Society Says vs. Thinking
You will often hear experts in the media -- particularly psychologists and the like -- use the phrase, "Society tells us ..." For example: "Society tells us that women should look perfect all the time." Or: "Society tells us that men can't be vulnerable." Or: "Society...
Indignation, Inc.
A recent front-page story in The New York Times was headlined: "In Ecuador's Banana Fields, Child Labor is Key to Profits." This is part of an ongoing orgy of indignation by the intelligentsia at low-paid labor in the Third World. The question they never ask is:...
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