President Barack Obama’s signatures on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act do not end the national debate on federal control of health care. [1] The debate merely enters a new and perhaps...
The world is hardly becoming a safer place these days. Missile threats are proliferating at a disturbing rate in places such as North Korea the danger from the North’s nuclear program is now at an ‘alarming’ level,” The Washington Post recently...
Imagine being told that you use “mental gimmickry” and exhibit a “non-evidence-based mental process” when you’re expressing your political ideas. John J. Colby (“Robitaille doesn’t understand people,” Commentary, Sept....
First, Greece was in an uproar over government subsidies and entitlements. For the past seven days, France has also been rocked by nonstop violence caused by a slight change in government-controlled economic programs. The French have announced plans to raise the...
While the US economy continues to weaken (see my recent commentary: Don’t Doubt the Double-Dip), many foreign economies continue to experience solid — even spectacular — economic growth. When the global economic crisis began in 2008, many forecasters...
“The Muslim world is going through an unprecedented difficult and trying time,” said the Secretary General of the 56-state Organization of the Islamic Conference, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, on Friday. One might reasonably have thought that he was referring to...
The federal government’s Web site HealthCare.gov extols the trillion-dollar Patient Protection and (anything but) Affordable Care Act as only government propaganda can. It offers boldface contradictions and evasions in defiance of one’s very sanity. Its...
Pirates at the Helm Reason must rule and appetite and emotion obey (Cicero) What a fisherman sees A successful life is a well run boat. Reason is the helm; it is the vantage point from where you have vision all around and where you can reach the controls. The motor,...
Here are some Tweets I posted this past week: Posted 9-27-10 To establish capitalism, man’s need to be free, & therefore prosperous, must be recognized. We should demand de-regulation of our economy. We should declare the new health care law...
How imperiled is the freedom of speech? Take this passage from Slate magazine: “In 2004, filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered after making anti-Muslim remarks, as was the anti-immigrant politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002. Why is there so much anti-Muslim rhetoric in...
When the financial crisis hit the U.S. in late 2008, individuals realized that their savings—especially their stocks and their homes—were not as valuable as these individuals had thought. These individuals then acted rationally: they cut back on spending....
Paul Hsieh, MD, is a co-founder of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine or FIRM, a project which promotes and educates Americans about free market health care reforms. He is also a practicing physician in the Denver, Colorado area. His writings have appeared in...
Take a step back and look what’s going on. Last year, Rick Santelli, a Chicago trader who does reports for CNBC did “The Rant Heard Round the World,” in which he said, among many good things: “I’m thinking of having a...
Prohibition made it illegal for Americans to buy alcohol. It did not stop them from drinking.
With 15 million workers unemployed and another 11 million underemployed, President Obama recently decided that the answer was to hit the road and throw some anti-rich red meat to some friendly stadium audiences. At a Labor Day rally in Milwaukee, Mr. Obama declared...
At least for a few moments last week, we had the strange spectacle of President Obama sounding more like a collectivist than Fidel Castro. With the federal payroll in the United States up by 200,000 positions and the private sector down by 7.8 million jobs since the...
A few weeks ago Nouriel Roubini, widely regarded as one of the more pessimistic figures on Wall Street, made headlines by raising his forecasted likelihood of a “double dip recession” to a terrifying 40%. The vast majority of “mainstream”...
The prospect of another semi-free country falling to Islam is in danger of happening. In the Philippines a bill that would criminalize the use of words like “Muslim” and “Islamic” to describe criminals has been filed by Sen. Ramon...
Following is an Op-Ed I submitted to The Albuquerque Journal. It was rejected; so, I posted it to an on-line discussion group and to an activist group. I now post it here for the same reason that it was worth writing: it is a story that illustrates a particular...
In his weekly radio address this past Saturday, President Obama happily commemorated the 75th anniversary of Social Security. From my perspective, the milestone is nothing to celebrate. For although the president spoke earnestly about the “obligation to keep the...
Like every ethical code, egoism has definite political implications. Just as the morality of self-sacrifice lays the groundwork for a particular kind of political system–one in which the government forces people to sacrifice (e.g., socialism, communism,...
Now, despite its destructive nature, altruism is accepted to some extent by almost everyone today. Of course, no one upholds it consistently–at least not for long. Rather, most people accept it as true–and then cheat on it. All the major...
The following is an expanded version of a talk I’ve delivered on various college campuses over the past few years. –CB Because of its prophetic nature with respect to current events, Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged is receiving more...
Why Positive Rights Are Not Rights There presently exists a great delusion regarding the subject of rights. The great strides regarding natural rights that have been achieved by the likes of Locke have now been cast aside, in a modern era of entitlement; in an era,...
“Pakistan appears to be playing a double game of astonishing magnitude in Afghanistan” – so says a new report from the London School of Economics, which documents how Pakistani military intelligence is not only aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan, but...
With the 1957 publication of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand became the most remarkable of individuals: a moral revolutionary. For anyone interested in ideas, it’s a book which deserves to be read and re-read.
Our only hope for saving America from accelerating tyranny is freedom of speech. In the light of that, it was frightening to read an opinion piece in the July 14th edition of the Wall St. Journal. Its author is Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University, home...
There are a lot of developing countries who are looking for an answer to their woes. The biggest question on their mind is “How do we become a 1st world country?” A great first step for them would be; lower taxes. Lower it as much as possible. Almost all...
Several months ago, I paused to admire a lovely neighborhood. A man and his wife approached and asked if I was putting up flyers on the wall. “No,” I replied. “How about this one,” the man asked pointing at the shreds of a yellow flyer on a...
With job creation in the private sector basically dead and a growing number of jobless workers ceasing to even look for work any longer, the number of people officially counted as part of the U.S. labor force shrank by 652,000 in June. That was more than double...
We live in an age when the secretary of the Interior and the White House press secretary proudly and publicly proclaim that they will keep their “boot on the neck” of an oil company. This new manifestation of “hope” and “change” is...
Dr. Eric Daniels of Clemson University’s Institute for the Study of Capitalism has lectured internationally on the history of American ethics, American business, and entrepreneurship, as well as the American Enlightenment. He has also appeared on C-SPAN and is...
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