I cringe with disgust when I hear politicians say, “We’re doing it for the children.” What’s worse is so many Americans mindlessly fall hook, line and sinker for the hype. Judging by our actions, Americans could not care less for future...
POLITICS
Civil Rites Rights
While giving my office at home an overdue cleaning up — “operation Augean stable,” as my wife and I call it — I uncovered in the paper jungle a 2005 calendar. Since there was not a lot of 2005 left, I was about to throw it out when I read its...
“Windfall Profits Tax ” Will Increase the Price of Oil
“An angry public wants quick relief from high prices” at the pump, says Business Week. That’s hardly a surprise. Over the past year, the Energy Department reports, a gallon of regular gasoline has gone from $1.86 to $2.96. But even at less than...
Lewis Libby: A Fishing License Indictment
We have been hearing for a long time what a terrible thing it is to reveal the name of a covert C.I.A. agent — and it is a terrible thing because that can be a life-and-death situation for the agent exposed and a devastating setback for this country’s...
Ammunition for Poverty Pimps
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans, President Bush gave America’s poverty pimps and race hustlers new ammunition. The president said, “As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this...
Ostracism
Earlier this year, when the Ward Churchill essay became news, my initial reaction was that he should be charged with a crime such as ‘treason’ or ‘aiding and abetting the enemy’. But through discussion with friends, I realized my reaction was wrong, and that his...
The Capitalist Manifesto: The Historic, Economic and Philosophic Case for Laissez-Faire
Did J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie really make their fortunes as “Robber Barons” exploiting the common man? Was the Great Depression really caused by greedy businessmen and investors? Did the socialist Soviet Union actually surpass...
Rosa Parks: Pursuit of Profit vs. Racism
The death of Rosa Parks has reminded us of her place in history, as the black woman whose refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, in accordance with the Jim Crow laws of Alabama, became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and...
Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It (Chapter 2, Part 3 of 3)
Adapted from Chapter 2 of Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It by Craig Biddle. According to Hume, if you see a man raping a woman, you cannot say that what you are witnessing is factually immoral; you cannot say that as a matter of...
Stocks Will Shine Again
Two weeks ago I suggested that investors sell Exxon Mobil and use the proceeds to buy Wal-Mart Stores. If you’d made the trade that day, then you’d be ahead 11% overall — Wal-Mart is up 3.6%, and Exxon Mobil is down 7.4%. I imagine most people...
Random Thoughts: October 2005
Random thoughts on the passing scene: Neither the depth of despondency nor the height of euphoria tells you how long either will last. We are so easily deceived that many people think that the Senate Judiciary Committee is acting nicely if the Senators wear a genial...
Spoiled Brat Politics, Part 2
The idea that what I want overrides what you want has increasingly become part of our thinking, our policies and even our laws. There is literally a federal case before the Supreme Court over the fact that many colleges and universities refuse to allow military...
A Nation of Sheeple
President Bush informed the nation, during a press conference, that he might seek to use the U.S. military to quarantine parts of the nation should there be a serious outbreak of the deadly avian flu that has killed millions of chickens and 60-some people in Southeast...
Spoiled Brat Politics, Part 1
An editorial in a recent issue of the National Geographic’s “Traveler” magazine complained that kayakers in Maine found “residential development” near national parks and urged its readers to use their “influence” to prevent...
On the U.S. Obligation in Iraq
Democrats and Republicans, liberal media as well as Fox News, all seem to take for granted the following position on Iraq, as (in this instance) reported today at MSNBC.com: “The constitution is a crucial step in Iraq’s transition to democracy after two...
Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It (Chapter 2, Part 1 of 3)
Adapted from Chapter 2 of Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It by Craig Biddle. As we have seen, subjectivism–whether “supernatural,” social, or personal–fails to provide proper guidance for human action,...
George W. Bush and Bill Clinton: Pragmatism over Principle
Back in the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton was running for re-election, he was given the “welfare reform” bill to sign. He was between a rock and a hard place because, as a liberal, he of course did not want to sign a bill that undercut the ability of...
Running Out of Gas
There aren’t many iron-clad rules in investing, but there’s one: Bet against anything that the vast majority of investors agree upon. Right now, based on conversations with my clients, who are some of the best and brightest investors on Wall Street,...
Proposed Iraqi Constitution Will Not Bring Freedom to Iraq or Security to America.
As the world eagerly watches the Iraqi constitutional referendum, the Bush administration and its intellectual supporters herald the occasion as a historic step toward freedom in the Middle East and security for America. This view betrays an appalling ignorance of the...
Personal Lie-ability
The Brady Center to Prevent “Gun Violence” was handed a victory on Monday when the Supreme Court ruled that its lawsuit against firearms manufactures could continue. Under Washington DC’s Assault Weapons Manufacturing Strict Liability Act of 1990,...
A Flood of Free Money from FEMA
If you think the government’s initial response to Hurricane Katrina was incompetent, at all levels, wait till you see the tidal wave of ineptitude, cronyism, irrationality, waste and thievery that’s guaranteed to be involved in the clean-up and rebuilding....
Letters to the Editor: October 2005
Oil Companies Have a Right To Their Profits Dear Editor, Why should we be angry at high profits of oil companies when it is these companies that make our very way of life possible. The high profits and the high prices of oil also act as a price signal to oil companies...
FEMA is Crazy!
Ex-FEMA Director Michael Brown recently told a congressional committee that he wasn’t an inexperienced manager who blew the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. Summing up the efforts of state and local officials in Louisiana as “dysfunctional,”...
Real Social Security Reform
The only really proper reform of Social Security is the gradual abolition of the whole system.
Kelo Revisited: Eminent Domain Should Not Be Used For Private Development
Below is the Testimony of Dana Berliner, Senior Attorney, Institute for Justice before the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the United States House Judiciary Committee given on September 22, 2005. Thank you for the opportunity to testify regarding eminent domain...
Global Capitalism: The Solution to World Oppression and Poverty (Part 3 of 3)
The freedom of the capitalist countries has created the most upwardly mobile societies of history, with hundreds of millions of human beings currently enjoying middle class comforts — people whose ancestors were poor just one or two centuries ago, or, in some...
Global Capitalism: The Solution to World Oppression and Poverty (Part 2 of 3)
To fully understand capitalism — its nature and genesis — it is necessary to know the source of its fundamental principles. Where did the ideals of individual rights and political-economic freedom originate?
Global Capitalism: The Solution to World Oppression and Poverty (Part 1 of 3)
A proper understanding of capitalism is sorely lacking today.
Hurrican Evacuation Lesssons: Government Created Shortages
Evacuations are not a benign process. Twenty-four people were killed when a bus carrying 38 Houston nursing home residents and six employees caught fire in a traffic jam. It’s thought that oxygen tanks used by elderly evacuees had a role in the fire. Given the...
When to Sell a Stock
My biggest mistake in 25 years of writing newspaper and magazine articles about the stock market started innocently. My intention, in a February 23, 2003, column for the Washington Post, was to show readers how to analyze a stock and decide whether to buy it. The...
“Windfall Profits” Tax on Oil Companies
“An angry public wants quick relief from high prices” at the pump, says Business Week. That’s hardly a surprise. Over the past year, the Energy Department reports, a gallon of regular gasoline has gone from $1.86 to $2.96. But even at less than...
Life Imitates Fiction at Amtrak: Shades of Atlas Shrugged’s Taggart Transcontinental Railroad
Millions of people have read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and marveled at her fictional portrayals of the badly run Taggart Transcontinental Railroad and a statist national government. Today, as Congress considers showering Amtrak with higher subsidies, it’s...
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