My February 2002 column, “They’re Coming After You,” warned that Americans who enthusiastically supported the anti-tobacco zealots’ attack on smokers were, like decent Germans did during the 1920s and ’30s, building the Trojan Horse that...
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
Economic Facts and Fallacies
The other day, a reader e-mailed me to ask for an explanation of the gold standard. He had heard it advocated in one of the political speeches. Any responsible answer to his question would have taken more time than I could spare, but I looked through several...
Silly Talk
It’s not easy being me. I’m disturbed by statements that many Americans accept or don’t question that are ludicrous, if not crazy. The terms “change,” “agents of change” and “change agents” are being bandied by...
Why Boycotting Berkeley is Important
I watched the video of the January 29th meeting of the Berkeley City Council where resolutions were passed telling the Marines that they are “unwanted and uninvited guests” with in city limits and applauding those who work to disrupt the Marines from their...
Free-Market Health Insurance Is Not the Enemy
Much of the current debate about health care is between those who want the government to wipe all insurance companies out of existence and those who instead want the government to force everyone to buy regulated private insurance. Both sides ignore the fundamental...
Hillary Clinton and John McCain: What Kind of “Experience”?
The front-runners in both political parties — that is, Hillary Clinton and John McCain — are making “experience” their big talking point. But what kind of “experience”? Both have been around in politics for decades. But just what...
Jesus in the Constitution?
A liberal friend phoned last week with his analysis of how the presidential race was shaping up. The news that morning was that both John Edwards and Rudy Giuliani had dropped out. “Same old,” he said, referring to the likelihood that our choice in...
The City of Berkeley Condemns The United States Marines
In resolutions passed January 29, 2008, the City Council of Berkeley, California has declared that United States Marine Corps recruiters are “uninvited and unwelcome intruders” within city limits and applauds those who choose to “impede” the...
Stimulus Package Nonsense
Some Democratic and Republican presidential hopefuls are preaching economic doom and gloom, disappearing middle class, and failing health care industry. What’s their solution? The short answer is give them more control over our lives. Baltimore’s political...
Election Bean Counting: “Billary” Versus Obama
Whatever one may think about Barack Obama as a candidate or as a potential President, his candidacy has brought something new to the American political scene. His stunning victory in the Iowa caucuses, in a state where more than 90 percent of the population is white,...
A “Stimulus Package”?
Both political parties seem determined that the federal government should create a “stimulus package” of things designed to cushion a downturn in the economy. That alone should be enough to make us remember that “the devil is always in the...
Barack Obama, Historian Joseph J. Ellis and The Founding Fathers
Historian Joseph J. Ellis has recently published a piece in the Los Angeles Times (‘The better angels’ side with Obama, 19 January 2008) which seeks to defend Democratic candidate Barack Obama (Senator from Illinois) from critics of his message to...
Tyranny Update: The California Energy Commission
Last December, President Bush signed an energy bill that will ban the sale of Edison’s incandescent bulb, starting with the 100-watt bulb in 2012 and ending with the 40-watt bulb by 2014. You say, “Hey, Williams, what’s wrong with saving energy,...
Green “Disparate Impact”
It was front-page news on the January 14th issue of the San Francisco Chronicle that blacks by the tens of thousands have left the San Francisco Bay area since the 1990 census. Since my book Applied Economics analyzed this situation a few years ago, it was nice to see...
Writers Guild of America on Strike
A peculiar spectacle in Hollywood and New York, and everywhere else TV shows and motion pictures are being made, is before us. The writers are on strike. At stake? Contracts with TV and motion picture producers over royalties from DVD and other “new”...
Abraham Lincoln and the Necessity of the Civil War
Was the Civil War was unnecessary and Lincoln “did this just to enhance and get rid of the original intent of the republic.”?
The Legacy of 1968: Vietnam, Martin Luther King, and Campus Riots
This 40th anniversary of the turbulent year 1968 is already starting to spawn nostalgic accounts of that year. We can look for more during this year in articles, books, and TV specials, featuring aging 1960s radicals seeking to relive their youth.
To Save Lives, Legalize Trade in Organs
If you were sick and needed a kidney transplant, you would soon find out that there is a waiting line–and that there are 70,000 people ahead of you, 4,000 of whom will die within a year. If you couldn’t find a willing and compatible donor among your...
The Iowa Caucus: What Does It Mean?
It was not that long ago that the big political question was how Rudolph Giuliani would do against Hillary Clinton in the November election. The Iowa caucus votes have made that question sound like ancient history, if not science fiction. The results of the Iowa...
Black Colleges
The Lincoln Review, a Washington-based black think tank, published an article titled “What Does the Future Hold for Historically Black Colleges?” in its September/October 2007 edition. It recalled the experiences of Bill Maxwell, a St. Petersburg Times...
No Culture Can Stand Still
Among the interesting people encountered by my wife and me, during some recent vacation travel, were a small group of adolescent boys from a Navajo reservation. They were being led on a bicycle tour by a couple of white men, one of whom was apparently their teacher on...
The Assasination of Benazir Bhutto and The Pakistan Crisis
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto has, we’re told, upended Washington’s foreign policy. “Our foreign policy has relied on her presence as a stabilizing force. . . . Without her, we will have to regroup,” explained Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.)...
Hiding Black Interracial Crimes
If you’re like I am, you’ve heard scores of media reports about the 2006 Duke University rape case, in which three white lacrosse players were falsely accused of raping a black stripper at a wild party at the home of one of the team members. These guys,...
Say It Ain’t So: Shoeless Joe Jackson, Michael Vick, and Barry Bonds
Shoeless Joe Jackson was the only man to bat .382 in his last season in the major leagues. After that he was banned for life for his role in the “black sox scandal,” the deliberate throwing of the 1919 World Series. It was to Jackson that a youngster was...
Racial Hoaxes and the NAACP
Last May, firefighters at a Baltimore, Md., fire station came under scrutiny for displaying a deer with an afro wig, gold tooth, gold chain and a cigarette hanging from its mouth. Marvin “Doc” Cheatham, president of the Baltimore chapter of the NAACP, went...
At Last!
People for whom indignation is a way of life — and there seem to be an increasing number of such people — repeatedly have outbursts of outrage whenever the police fire a lot of shots at some criminal. People who have never fired a gun in their lives, and...
National Grocery Reform
One of the great scandals of our age is the fact that America spends more on food than any other nation. Many political leaders are now calling for urgent reform to bring spending on food under control. Even worse, while the result of this uncontrolled spending...
What Mandatory Health Insurance Really Means
When talking about health insurance, “mandatory” is an increasingly popular term among politicians of both major parties, including presidential candidates. What do they really mean by it? Put simply, being uninsured would no longer be a misfortune or a...
Income Mobility
Listening to people like Lou Dobbs, John Edwards and Mike Huckabee lamenting the plight of America’s middle class and poor, you’d have to conclude that things are going to hell in a handbasket. According to them, there’s wage stagnation, while the...
Random Thoughts December 2007
Random thoughts on the passing scene: Since electricity is generated mostly by burning coal, has anyone calculated how much pollution is created by electric cars, even though none of that pollution comes out of their tailpipes? You may scoff at the Tooth Fairy if you...
Universal Health Scare
An increasingly popular argument in favor of socialized medicine goes like this: “If universal health care works for the elderly under Medicare, then why not for the rest of us?” If that’s true, then the Democratic nominee for President should...
Why Was Washington Surprised by the Pakistan Crisis?
Few reports about the Islamist threat are more alarming than the situation right now in Pakistan–a nuclear-armed country that Washington hails as a “major non-NATO ally.” Having supported Musharraf’s regime, Washington is now...
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