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...
POLITICS
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...
The Real Injustice in New Orleans: The Welfare State’s Assault on the Productive Individual
Former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, now head of the National Urban League, complained on NBC’s Today Show on September 1 that the U.S. Government had refused to give funding for upgrading the city’s flood defenses. Numerous city and Louisiana State...
Random Thoughts: September 2005
Random thoughts on the passing scene: Different people have different ideas about humility. One man said: “I don’t think I’m half as good as I know I really am.” What can we be certain of from history? That human beings have been wrong...
The UN’s “Virtue” Is Its Vice: How The United Nation’s Neutrality Props Up Evil Regimes
More than 170 political leaders from around the world recently met at the United Nations to consider what the New York Times called “the most sweeping institutional changes” in the organization’s history. But this exercise was, predictably, hopeless....
Letters to the Editor: September 2005
United Nation Reforms Worse Than Doing Nothing September 21, 2005 To the editor; Mr. Journo’s cogent article (The UN’s “Virtue” Is Its Vice) hit the nail right on the head: what is wrong with the UN is not economic corruption, improperly...
Charity Is No Function of the Federal Government
Last week, President Bush promised the nation that the federal government will pay for most of the costs of repairing hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, adding, “There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again.”...
Recycled “Racism Gap” in the Mortgage Market
One of the things that happens when you get old is that what seems like news to others can look like a re-run of something you have already seen before. It is like watching an old movie for the fifth or sixth time. A headline in the September 14th issue of the New...
Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It (Part 5 of 7)
Adapted from Chapter 1 of Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It by Craig Biddle. In case there are any doubts, history provides conclusive evidence of the sacrificial nature of all three forms of subjectivism. Let us look first at...
War on Terrorism: Why We Are Losing Hearts and Minds
Where have our leaders gone wrong? What kind of leadership failure can demoralize a whole nation of honest, productive citizens, while leaving suicide murderers stirred to righteous action?
Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It (Part 4 of 7)
Adapted from Chapter 1 of Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It by Craig Biddle. There are hundreds of religions. Each is vying for your allegiance. Each denies the validity of the others. Each claims to be based on the...
Rebuilding New Orleans
Hurricane Katrina was a disaster, not only for the obvious reasons but for the less obvious reasons: the aftermath. By aftermath, am I referring to the alleged ineptitude of the federal government? No way. By aftermath, I mean the spectacle of political and...
Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It (Part 2 of 7)
Adapted from Chapter 1 of Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It by Craig Biddle. Whereas religion holds that God creates truth and moral law, subjectivism holds that people do; it is the view that truth and morality are not...
Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It (Part 1 of 7)
If you want to live your life to the fullest, if you want to achieve the greatest happiness possible, this book is for you. It is about the essential means to that end: a proper code of values–a proper morality. Contrary to popular myth, morality does not come...
FEMA vs Walmart: Why Governments are Not the Best Handlers of Emergencies
Whatever later investigation may turn up about the mistakes of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in New Orleans, it is unlikely to show the shrill charges of “racism” to be anything other than reckless political rhetoric. FEMA has bungled...
Hurricanes and Global Warming: Interview with Dr. Roy Spencer
Dr. Roy Spencer is a principal research scientist for University of Alabama in Huntsville. In the past, he has served as Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where he directed research into the...
The Role of Prices
The fallout from Hurricane Katrina has featured a lot of ignorance and demagoguery about prices. Let’s look at some of it. One undeniable fact is that the hurricane disaster changed scarcity conditions. There are fewer stores, fewer units of housing, less...
Smart “Problems”
During my first semester of teaching, many years ago, I was surprised to encounter the philosophy that the brightest students did not need much help from the teacher because “they can get it anyway” and that my efforts should be directed toward the slower...
Your Home Is Not Your Castle
For many, the American Dream means buying a family home after years of saving or building a small business from the ground up. No one imagines the government will take that property only to hand it over to someone else so they can make more money off the land. But it...
Despair in Disaster
Why is there looting and raping in New Orleans? What does it say about the people there? What nobody wants to talk about is the psychology of helplessness. We all know that a large number of the victims in New Orleans are poor, black, and in many cases dependent on...
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