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
Horrifying stories about the rapes and murders of children, and about judges who go easy on sex offenders who prey on the young, have prompted some state legislatures to tighten up the laws and restrict the sentencing discretion of judges. Few in the media or among...
It has been nearly five years since September 11, 2001--the day that Islamic terrorists incinerated thousands of innocent individuals in the freest, wealthiest, happiest, and most powerful nation on earth. On that day and in the weeks after, we all felt the same...
Here is a story out of Iraq that caught my eye: About a dozen Marines are being investigated for possible war crimes in connection with the deaths last year of 15 Iraqi civilians who were initially reported killed by a roadside bomb. The Navy has opened a criminal...
Student riots in Paris remind us that education at elite academic institutions is not enough to teach either higher morals or basic economics. Not on their side of the Atlantic or on ours. Why are students at the Sorbonne and other distinguished institutions out...
Several weeks ago, I wrote about Overland High School teacher Jay Bennish's indoctrination of his geography class. In commenting on President Bush's State of the Union address, he told his 10th-graders: "Sounds a lot like the things Adolf Hitler used to say." "Bush is...
Governor Bill Owens of Colorado has cut through the cant about "free speech" and come to the defense of a 16-year-old high school student who tape-recorded his geography teacher using class time to rant against President Bush and compare him to Hitler. The teacher's...
It's unfortunate for property owners that the battle for the right to own and control their land has fallen on the shrugging shoulders of Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA). The Senator is Chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, which will decide the fate of...
Suppose I knew that one man was a magistrate and another was a terrorist, but I had to pick out the terrorist on sight. If I chose the man in the powdered wig over the man in the kefiyah, you would think me daft. And yet our news media have been making a mistake of...
Remember ImClone? This was the company founded by physician Sam Waksal, an immunologist who worked for years to develop a drug to treat colon and other cancers. His company had one product--Erbitrux--and it promised to extend the lives of thousands of terminally ill...
The Supreme Court's recent 8 to 0 decision (Justice Alito not yet participating) shot down a claim that oil companies were colluding in setting prices. That claim was upheld by the far-left 9th Circuit Court of Appeals but neither liberals nor conservatives on the...
Presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton used Rev. Al Sharpton's Martin Luther King Jr. birthday celebration to, as Professor Shelby Steele explains, "whistle for the black vote by pandering to the black sense of grievance." In response to a question from the audience:...
The central issue of the "cartoon jihad"--the Muslim riots and death threats against a Danish newspaper that printed 12 cartoons depicting Mohammed--is obvious. The issue is freedom of speech: whether our freedom to think, write, and draw is to be subjugated to the...
Several friends have asked me what they can do in response to the latest Islamic attack on free speech and Western values. I have a few thoughts, but would very much welcome additional suggestions from readers. To begin, I note that the West already has all the...
The Economist magazine reports that the official unemployment rate in South Africa is 26 percent but that the real unemployment rate there may be even higher. The South African economy is growing. Why then this extremely high unemployment rate? What is going on? What...
Economic inequality that results from economic freedom is to the material self-interest of everyone. It is the foundation of rising real wages and a rising standard of living.
The bombing on February 22 of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, Iraq, was a tragedy, but it was not an American or a coalition tragedy. The destruction of the Golden Dome, built in 1905 and one of the holiest shrines of Shiite Islam, represents an escalation of the...
Government is not the only institution that promises something for nothing. The decline of General Motors is just one consequence of the idea that labor unions can get their members something for nothing. Workers themselves increasingly recognize the reality that...
Suppose someone left you an inheritance of a million dollars -- with the proviso that every cent of it had to be spent on tickets for you to go watch professional wrestling matches. If you happened to be a professional wrestling fan, you would be in hog heaven. But...
High up on my list of annoyances are references to the United States as a democracy and the suggestion that Iraq should become a democracy. The word "democracy" appears in neither of our founding documents -- the Declaration of Independence nor the U.S. Constitution....
The Oregon Supreme Court has unanimously upheld the constitutionality of Measure 37, the property rights initiative approved by the voters in 2004. It requires government to either compensate landowners for reductions of real property fair market value due to certain...
The good news: a federal grand jury in Eugene, Oregon, has indicted 11 people on charges that they committed acts of domestic terrorism on behalf of the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front. Moreover, now one of the FBI's "highest domestic terrorism...
It is widely believed today that our cultural and political alternatives are limited either to the ideas of the secular, relativistic left--or to those of the religious, absolutist right--or to some compromised mixture of the two. In other words, one's ideas are...
The resignation of Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard University tells us a lot about what is wrong with academia today. When he took office in 2001, Summers seemed like an ideal president of Harvard. He had had a distinguished career in and out of the academic...
Most talk of addictions as something over which the individual is helpless. Yet how does this explain that so many end their addictions? People quit smoking all the time. People quit alcohol. They quit nail-biting. They even quit heroin and crack cocaine. These are...
Let's start off with a few quotations, then a question. In reference to the president's State of the Union: "Sounds a lot like the things Adolf Hitler used to say." "Bush is threatening the whole planet." "[The] U.S. wants to keep the world divided." Then the speaker...
Let's face it: Reality can be stressful and can sometimes get very rough. Everyone has an incentive to postpone it. Most of us, however, learn the hard way that postponing reality only makes it far worse than facing it early on. The problem gets more complicated in...
Unfortunately, when medical care is made free, the quantity of it that people attempt to consume becomes virtually limitless.
Some of you reading this web site think of yourselves as either Liberal or Conservative. You have views of the world based on personal beliefs, and these beliefs lead you to certain political assumptions. I am neither Liberal nor Conservative and I have political...
According to the University of Washington student government, university alumnus Gregory "Pappy" Boyington is not a person university students should strive to emulate and he should not be honored with a memorial on campus because as a Marine Corps officer, he was a...
John Q. Liberal is a professor at a local college. On Monday he gives a speech in which he denounces capitalism and the profit motive, and praises environmentalism as the highest moral ideal. When his speech is over, he confronts the organizer of the talk. "Where's...
This rationale and its acceptance by a judge is an illustration of what Ayn Rand, with good reason, used to describe contemptuously as a “collectivist stewpot.”
Where can Americans turn, to witness the spectacle of great leadership?
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