POLITICS

The Arson of Excellence: The California Wealth Tax

The motivation of the California Wealth tax is darkly malevolent. This isn’t even a normal looting. It’s intended to destroy.

True Believers in Obama

True Believers in Obama

Telling a friend that the love of his life is a phony and dangerous is not likely to get him to change his mind. But it may cost you a friend. It is much the same story with true believers in Barack Obama. They have made up their minds and not only don’t want to...

Faith-Based Politics Costs Colorado Republicans

Faith-Based Politics Costs Colorado Republicans

Colorado is known for its Western values of independence and economic liberty. So why do Republicans, the supposed champions of those values, keep getting trounced? Republicans can blame wealthy Democratic donors, but in large part Republicans have beaten themselves...

Political Monopoly Power

The Federalist Papers, written by James Madison, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, is the document most frequently referred to when trying to get a feel for the original intent of the framers of the Constitution. One such intention is found in Federalist 56 where...

Negative Advertising

Negative Advertising

One of the oldest phenomena of American elections– criticism of one’s opponent– has in recent times been stigmatized by much of the media as “negative advertising.” Is this because the criticism has gotten more vicious or more personal?...

Bill Maher’s Movie Religulous

“Religulous” is a funny, sometimes serious, skeptic’s tale of religion. And I mean the true meaning of “skeptic.” Bill Maher does a good job of slicing and dicing religion. He travels to the Vatican, Utah, and Israel. Maher identifies the...

Lessons From the Bailout

In my more cynical moments, I think that we Americans deserve what we get from our politicians, many of whom can be generally described as nothing less than loathsome. You say, “Williams, that’s a pretty heavy putdown.” My question to you is how else...

The Real Obama on Education

The Real Obama on Education

What about those “real issues” that Barack Obama’s supporters in the media say we should get back to, whenever some new unsavory fact about his past comes out? Surely education is a real issue, with American school children consistently scoring below...

The Real Obama

The Real Obama

Critics of Senator Barack Obama make a strategic mistake when they talk about his “past associations.” That just gives his many defenders in the media an opportunity to counter-attack against “guilt by association.” We all have associations,...

In Defense of Speculators and Short-Sellers

Everywhere today government bureaucrats and media pundits blame unwanted price movements on speculators and short-sellers. If prices are “too high”–it’s the fault of greedy speculators; if prices are “too low”–it’s the...

The Financial Panic and the Only Proper Answer to It

One fact is absolutely clear: most of the blame for the current financial panic is utterly misdirected. Rather than hold accountable the irrational government policies that encouraged irresponsible lending and mountains of homeowner debt (and those who supported these...

Monetary Policy and the Return to Sound Money

Monetary Policy and the Return to Sound Money

Excerpted from Chapter 23, Part IV of Mises classic The Theory of Money and Credit (1912). The people of all countries agree that the present state of monetary affairs is unsatisfactory and that a change is highly desirable. However, ideas about the kind of reform...

Government Bailout Crack

Every few days we hear that another leading financial institution has written down billions more on subprime investments gone bad. Nearly every major financial institution, it turns out, had a hand in loans to low-credit borrowers–borrowers whose ability to pay...

Destroying Liberty

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned, “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.” The freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never was, and is not now, the...

Economic Freedom in America: What is Economic Freedom?

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred,...

Penny-Wise Politics: Class Envy and CEO Pay

Penny-Wise Politics: Class Envy and CEO Pay

Congress is never more ridiculous than when it tries to look like it is serious. In the midst of a major national financial crisis, what was one of the first things Congress zeroed in on? The pay of Chief Executive Officers of financial institutions. If all those CEOs...

Congress and the Politics of Bailouts

Congress and the Politics of Bailouts

Nothing could more painfully demonstrate what is wrong with Congress than the current financial crisis. Among the Congressional “leaders” invited to the White House to devise a bailout “solution” are the very people who have for years created...

Who Buried Capitalism?

A journalist wrote me the following: “I always say both Democrats and Republicans want to transfer wealth. Democrats want to take from the rich and give to the poor. Republicans want to take from the poor and give to the rich. This [proposed government bailout]...

Scaring Us to Death

There is a H.L. Mencken quotation that captures the essence of this year’s politics: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of...

Dealing with Russia

On Aug. 8, Russia decided to rewrite the rules of post-World War II European security. It repudiated the Helsinki Pact of 1975, which recognized the sanctity of borders in Europe, and violated the sovereignty and territorial integrity of NATO aspirant Georgia, whose...

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