Did lack of regulation create the subprime mortgage crisis? I am asked this all the time. The short answer: Of course not. Nowhere close. Not a chance. Here is the long answer. What regulations have we had? The mortgage originator (your local bank or mortgage broker)...
POLITICS
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
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 roots of Christian legends...
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 would you...
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 those in other...
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, whether at the office, in...
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 work of evil short-sellers. To hear these...
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
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 often...
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 normal state...
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
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...
An Open Letter to Members of Congress on the Financial Mess
Dear Members of Congress: On September 16 [2008] I sent a letter to my congressman, and to other senior US government officials, that consisted of three sentences: "I oppose all bailouts of financial institutions by the US government. Government regulation...
Key Points on a “Rescue” Plan From A Healthy Bank’s Perspective
Here is a letter by John Allison, President & CEO of BB&T, that was sent to every member of Congress. Dear Senator/Congressman/Representative: BB&T is a $136 billion multi-state banking company. We have 1,500 branches throughout the mid-Atlantic and southeast...
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 the risks that have now...
EPA Fascism versus America: The Descent into Dictatorship (7 of 7)
This is the last in a seven part series detailing our objections to plans by the United States Environmental Protection Agency to claim unlimited power over the life of every American. Those plans were laid out in an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR), dated...
Single-Payer Health Care: Immoral and Hazardous to Patients’ Health
In "Fact and Fiction: Debunking Myths in the US Healthcare System"[1], Sarpel et al presume "an obligation to provide healthcare to those who need it." This faulty moral premise underlies all forms of socialized medicine (including the single-payer system they...
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] only...
EPA Fascism versus America: The Failed Predictions of the Environmentalists (5 of 7)
This is the fifth in a seven part series detailing our objections to plans by the United States Environmental Protection Agency to claim unlimited power over the life of every American. Those plans were laid out in an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR),...
EPA Fascism versus America: There is No Natural Evidence for Man-made Global Warming (3 of 7)
This is the third in a seven part series detailing our objections to plans by the United States Environmental Protection Agency to claim unlimited power over the life of every American. Those plans were laid out in an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR),...
EPA Fascism versus America: The EPA Plans are Immoral (2 of 7)
This is the second in a seven part series detailing our objections to plans by the United States Environmental Protection Agency to claim unlimited power over the life of every American. Those plans were laid out in an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR),...
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 them...
EPA Fascism versus America (1 of 7)
This article details how the EPA intends to claim unlimited power over the life of every American.
A Political “Solution” to the Current Financial Crisis? (Part 2)
Estimates of how much money a government program will cost are notoriously unreliable. Estimates of the cost of the current bailout in the financial markets run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and some say it may reach or exceed a trillion. Many people have...
A Political “Solution” to the Current Financial Crisis? (Part 1)
Who was it who said, "crack-brained meddling by the authorities" can "aggravate an existing crisis"? Ronald Reagan? Milton Friedman? Adam Smith? Not even close. It was Karl Marx. Unlike most leftists today, Marx studied economics. Is the current financial crisis going...
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...
Stubborn Ignorance: The Financial Crisis is a Failure of Government Policy
Here's what the U.S. Constitution says: "All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills." How many times have we heard politicians, pundits and guardians of our news...
The High Cost of Racial Hype
Sometimes you don't know when you are lucky. Certainly I did not consider myself lucky when I left home at seventeen and discovered the hard way that there was no great demand for a black teenage dropout with no experience and no skill. In retrospect, however, those...
Idols of Crowds
To find anything comparable to crowds’ euphoric reactions to Obama, you would have to go back to old newsreels of German crowds in the 1930s, with their adulation of their fuehrer, Adolf Hitler.
Academic Mismatch II
Last week's column demonstrated the harm, suffered by black students, that results from law school race-based admission policies. The bottom line was that black students who might have done well at lower-tier law schools were recruited to more highly competitive law...
The Vision of the Left
Conservatives, as well as liberals, would undoubtedly be happier living in the kind of world envisioned by the left. Very few people have either a vested interest or an ideological preference for a world in which there are many inequalities. Even fewer would prefer a...
2008 Presidential Elections: McBama vs. America
As the 2008 presidential election nears, and while John McCain and Barack Obama struggle to distinguish themselves from each other in terms of particular promises and goals, it is instructive to observe that these candidates are indistinguishable in terms of...