POLITICS

London’s Times Online recently reported that, according to Vatican sources, Pope Benedict XVI is working on his second encyclical, a doctrinal pronouncement that will condemn tax evasion as “socially unjust.” (See...

The Bush administration’s plan to declare Iran‘s Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization is worse than a waste of time: It is an outright evasion of the Iranian assault on America . There is a good reason why the New York City Police Department...

Back to school nowadays means back to classrooms, lessons and textbooks permeated by multiculturalism and its championing of “diversity.” Many parents and teachers regard multiculturalism as an indispensable educational supplement, a salutary influence...

Readers of The New York Times got a front-page example recently of what F.A. Hayek called “the fatal conceit” — the idea that some great mind or committee can do a better job than the private market in organizing and directing an economy. Hayek...

Democrat and Republican candidates for President are debating one another on nearly every issue–but nearly all are united on one thing: America faces a crisis of “income inequality.” The rich are getting richer, the refrain goes, while the poor and...

Global warming has become a big-ticket item in the eyes of its supporters. At stake are research funds, jobs and the ability to control lives all over the globe. Most climatologists agree that over the last century, the Earth’s average temperature has risen...

Historical costs, sometimes called sunk costs, are irrelevant to decision-making because they are costs that have already been incurred. That’s something that’s not intuitively obvious, even for some trained economists. On a couple of occasions, I’ve...

Sometimes the advocates of socialized medicine claim that health care is too important to be left to the market. That’s why some politicians are calling for us to adopt health care systems such as those in Canada, the United Kingdom and other European nations....

On July 11, New York Times reporter Patricia Cohen wrote an article titled, “In Economics Departments, a Growing Will to Debate Fundamental Assumptions.” The article begins with, “For many economists, questioning free-market orthodoxy is akin to...

Just about the most difficult lesson for first-year economics students, and sometimes graduate students, is that economic theory, and for that matter any scientific theory, is positive or non-normative. You might ask, “What’s this business about positive...

Back in the late 1960s, during graduate study at UCLA, I had a casual conversation with Professor Armen Alchian, one of my tenacious mentors. Professor Alchian is among the top 20th-century contributors to economic knowledge. During our graduate student/faculty coffee...

Should the federal government require everyone to buy health insurance? If the goal is “universal coverage,” then obviously the answer is yes. But that isn’t the point. The point is that it isn’t the duty or right of the government to force...

Suppose a person is raped and we arrest the rapist. Should his status, whether he’s a senator, professor or an ordinary man, play a role in the adjudication of the crime and subsequent punishment? I’m betting that the average person would answer that the...