POLITICS

How Certificate-of-Need (CON) Laws Hurt Rural Communities

Certificate-of-need (CON) laws result in fewer hospitals, fewer service providers, and fewer choices for consumers, then would occur in a free-market.

Point of No Return?

Point of No Return?

It is hard to think of a time when a nation — and a whole civilization — has drifted more futilely toward a bigger catastrophe than that looming over the United States and western civilization today. Nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran and North Korea...

A Land Fit for Criminals, Part II

A Land Fit for Criminals, Part II

Do higher rates of imprisonment reduce crime? Is crime a result of poverty, unemployment, and the like? Are alternatives to incarceration more effective in preventing criminals from repeating their crimes? Some people would hesitate to try to answer any of these...

A Land Fit for Criminals, Part I

A Land Fit for Criminals, Part I

The general mindset of the political left is similar from country to country and even from century to century. The softness toward dangerous criminals found in such 18th century writers as William Godwin and Condorcet has its echo today among those who hold protest...

Are Academic Elites Communists?

Grove City College publishes an excellent newsletter titled “Visions and Values.” Its July 2006 edition features an interview with Dr. Richard Pipes, acclaimed Russian historian and Harvard University professor of Sovietology. The interview was conducted...

Will Cease-Fires Never Cease?

Will Cease-Fires Never Cease?

How many cease-fires have there been in the Middle East — or is the number too large to remember? Over the past half century, there must have been more cease-fires in the Middle East than in the rest of the world combined. What will this latest cease-fire do? It...

Israel’s Government Deserves Moral Condemnation

The Government of Israel deserves moral condemnation for its overall response to Hezbollah. The primary purpose and moral obligation of any legitimate government is to protect the lives and rights of its own citizens. Hezbollah, a military wing of the Islamic...

Studies Prove: Part II

Studies Prove: Part II

My late mentor, Nobel Prize-winning economist George Stigler, used to say that it could be very instructive to spend a few hours in a library checking up on studies that had been cited. When I began doing that, I found it not only instructive but disillusioning. A...

The Minimum Wage Vision

The Minimum Wage Vision

There are decent people, without a selfish hidden agenda, who support increases in minimum wages as a means to help low-skilled workers, and there are other decent people, with the identical goal, who strongly oppose increases in the minimum wage. So the question is:...

Studies Prove: Part I

Studies Prove: Part I

Whenever I hear the phrase “studies prove” this or that, it makes me think back to the beginning of my career as an economist at the Labor Department in Washington. Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg was scheduled to appear before Congress to argue in...

Israel’s “Obligation” to the U.N.

Secretary of State Rice has stated that Israel has an “obligation” to respond to the U.N.’s demand for a cease-fire in Lebanon. Since when does any sovereign government have an obligation to reply or have anything at all to do with the U.N.? Keep in...

Letters to the Editor: August 2006

Lebanese Government Has No Legitimacy Dear Editor: President Bush is urging Israel to preserve the fragile government of Lebanon, which was recently chosen in democratic elections supported by Bush himself. But Israel should do exactly the opposite. Hezbollah, the...

Blame Hezbollah and Iran for Death of Qana Children

Blame Hezbollah and Iran for Death of Qana Children

Responsibility for the tragic deaths of scores of Lebanese women and children in Qana, Lebanon falls primarily on Hezbollah and its backers, Syria and Iran, not on Israel. To initiate a war against Israel and then use children as shields is so evil and disgusting that...

Mandatory Health Insurance: Health Care by Force

Mandatory Health Insurance: Health Care by Force

When the United States of America got its start, the general idea was that individuals should be left free to carve out their own lives free of government interference, based on the principles of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Gradually...

Israel at War: Problems and Fallacies

Now that Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinian people (who elected Hamas), the people of southern Lebanon (who sit idly by as a group of armed thugs turn their country into a base of operations), Syria, and Iran have showed their hands and begun a shooting war with Israel...

United Nations is Guilty for the Death of its Observers

Responsibility for the death of four United Nations observers in Lebanon falls primarily on Kofi Annan and the UN–not Israel. Leaving aside the obvious question as to why these observers remained in the middle of a battle area, a totally irresponsible decision,...

Creating Unemployment

Her’s a fantastic idea that will make everybody richer. Let’s pass a law setting a minimum price on used cars. How about, say, $15,000? If you’ve got an old beater you want to sell, and you were worried that you’d only get a couple thousand...

Then and Now

Then and Now

Those of us old enough to remember World War II face many painful reminders of how things have changed in Americans’ behavior during a war. Back then, the president’s defeated opponent in the 1940 election — Wendell Wilkie — not only supported...

Pacifists versus Peace

Pacifists versus Peace

One of the many failings of our educational system is that it sends out into the world people who cannot tell rhetoric from reality. They have learned no systematic way to analyze ideas, derive their implications and test those implications against hard facts....

Hands Off My Net

The S&P 500 has more than doubled over the last 10 years — a decade in which the Internet came out of nowhere, and established itself as the technology platform of the new global economy. The Internet has been the greatest engine of economic growth the...

Western Leaders Provide Comedy to Iran’s Dictators

When the mullahs of the Islamic dictatorship of Iran are not chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” or not issuing money, weapons and orders to their global terrorist networks, or not monitoring the progress of their nuclear weapons...

The Indispensable Condition of Peace in the Middle East

As Israeli soldiers reenter Gaza and bomb Lebanon, and Israeli citizens seek shelter from Hezbollah’s missiles, the world despairingly wonders whether peace between Israel and its neighbors can ever take root. It can–but only if America reverses course. To...

Appeasing a Mortal Enemy: The U.S.-Israeli Suicide Pact

The Iran-Hamas-Hezbollah axis is fully responsible for initiating the war on Israel, but the Islamists’ aggression is the logical product of U.S.-Israeli policy. The longstanding commitment of Israel and America to “diplomatic engagement” with...

A “Cycle” of Nonsense

A “Cycle” of Nonsense

Now that Israel has responded to rocket attacks and the abduction of its soldiers by terrorists by making military strikes into areas controlled by those terrorists, much of our media are deploring another “cycle of violence” in the Middle East. For...

Israel: No Longer a Paper Tiger?

The blame for the current fighting falls entirely on Israel’s enemies, who deploy inhuman methods in the service of barbaric goals. While I wish the armed forces of Israel every success against the terrorists in Gaza and Lebanon and hope they inflict a maximum...

“Saving” What From Whom?

“Saving” What From Whom?

When conservationists talk about “saving” this and “protecting” that, a logical question might be: Saving it from whom? Protecting it from whom? And why should the government force what you want on someone else who obviously wants something...

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