The story of Koran abuse at the prisoner camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is perhaps the most ridiculous example of media idiocy I have seen in some time. The critique is not that we have codes of conduct for a book some crackpots have some mystical affinity for, but that...
POLITICS
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
How Your Government Wastes Your Money
This year, Washington will spend an eye-popping $22,039 per household. That is the highest inflation-adjusted total since World War II, and $5,000 per household more than Washington spent just four years ago. With difficult decisions ahead, government waste should be...
The Pros and Cons of Federalization
When the federal government was small, it thought big. Indeed, it focused exclusively on big issues. For example, when the Constitution was written, it listed only three federal crimes. Today there are more than 4,000.Where once our national government concerned...
Destroying Effective Policing
Police departments must use race and sex preferences in hiring as a result of federal court consent decrees and political pressures. To meet these demands, many police departments have lowered, and in some cases eliminated, established standards for personal character...
Skyrocketing Home Prices
"Who can afford to buy a house in this place?" my wife asked, when I read her the average prices of homes in various northern California communities. "We certainly can't," I said. Our home has more than doubled in value since we bought it 11 years ago. We couldn't...
San Mateo County and The Environmental Protection Racket
Only in California would a city that is less than 50 years old have a historical society. But, in California, anything more than a couple of decades old is considered historic and anything that is a century old is considered to be ancient history. Nevertheless, the...
The Purpose of Memorial Day: Honoring Virtue
The greatest soldiers of American history knew that freedom was sacred; no price paid on its behalf was a sacrifice.
Weaponization of Space: Designing a U.S. Military Policy Toward Space That Is Based on Reality
We are engaging in the debate over what arms control advocates refer to as the "weaponization of space." These advocates are arguing for a policy that would jettison a number of important U.S. military capabilities in space, including--but not limited to--...
Moral Values Without Religion: Does Morality Depend Upon Religion?
Does morality depend upon religion? Most people believe it does, which is a major reason behind the appeal of the religious right. People believe that without faith in a supernatural authority, we can have no moral values--no moral absolutes, no black-and-white...
Trade Deficit Demagoguery
I buy more from my grocer than he buys from me, and I bet it's the same with you and your grocer. That means we have a trade deficit with our grocers. Does our perpetual grocer trade deficit portend doom? If we heeded some pundits and politicians who are talking about...
Housing Bubbles
The blazing-hot topic at suburban cocktail parties this spring is whether there's a bubble in the residential housing market. No wonder. In 2004, existing home prices rose faster than in any year since the 1970s. Some markets are going bonkers. Alexandria, Va., is up...
Class in America: The New York Marxist
It looks like The New York Times thinks we've strayed too far from paying proper respects to the central tenets of Marxism. The whole ball game, as Karl Marx painted it, was nothing more than a class brawl between the rich and the poor. Or as Frederick Engels and Marx...
The Anti-Life Opposition to Embryonic Stem Cell Research
It is widely known that embryonic stem cell research has the potential to revolutionize medicine and save millions of lives. Yet many Congressmen are frantically working to defeat a measure that would expand federal financing of this research. Why are they (and so...
Filibusters and Big-Time Bigotry
Maybe the non-stop denunciations of judicial nominees by Senate Democrats will seem relevant to some people but it is in fact wholly beside the point. Senators who don't like any particular judicial nominee -- or any nominee for any other federal appointment -- have a...
The Bottomless Well: No Need To Curb Energy Consumption
There's no public-policy topic more prone to intellectual abuse than energy. Take conservation. Refrigerators, automobiles, houses, factories
The Quest to Live Off Others
How many times have we heard advertisements from law firms that specialize in elder law urging, "If you anticipate that you may have to enter a nursing home down the road, an elder care attorney may be able to help you create a plan that will both protect much of your...
Newsweek: “Too good to check”
It was perhaps appropriate that Dan Rather received the prestigious Peabody award in journalism at the same time when Newsweek magazine was finally backing away from its false story about Americans flushing the Koran down the toilet at the Guantanamo prison. At least...
Black Rednecks and White Liberals
Black identity has become a hot item in the movies, on television, and in the schools and colleges. But few people are aware of how much of what passes as black identity today, including "black English," has its roots in the history of those whites who were called...
The Republican Revolution is Dead
Back in 1994 when the famed Republican "Contract with America" captured control of Congress for the party, Newt Gingrich, one of its authors, noted that, "Washington is like a sponge. It absorbs waves of change, and it slows them down, and it softens them, and then...
Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat
I beg to move, That this House welcomes the formation of a Government representing the united and inflexible resolve of the nation to prosecute the war with Germany to a victorious conclusion. On Friday evening last I received His Majesty's commission to form a new...
Death Tax Returns In 2011
The clock is ticking. Unless Congress acts -- who knows? -- we could see a wave of suicides, patricides, matricides and rich-uncle killings in 2010. That's the year that the federal tax on estates -- also known as the "death tax," the most hated tax exacted by the...
Lost: Why Anarchism Does Not Work
"Visualize... what would happen if a man missed his wallet, concluded that he had been robbed, broke into every house in the neighborhood to search it, and shot the first man who gave him a dirty look, taking the look to be a proof of guilt." (Ayn Rand, "The Nature of...
How Not To Be Poor
Ministers Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Washington, D.C.'s Mayor Anthony Williams and others recently met to discuss plans to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the October 1995 Million Man March. Whilst reading about the plans, I thought of an excellent...
Rich Ideas
Recently a friend described a meeting with a nasty-tempered leftist who was from a rich family. Unfortunately, there are a lot of leftists who were born with a silver spoon in their mouth -- and, instead of being grateful, are venomous against American society....
The Crusade Against Walmart
The latest liberal crusade is against the Wal-Mart stores. A big headline on a long article in the New York Times asks "Can't A Retail Behemoth Pay More?" Of course they can pay more. The New York Times could pay its own employees more. We could all pay more for...
Bush and Russia
President Bush is in Russia to participate (wrongly) in Monday's Red Square celebration of the 60th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazis. The good news is that Bush just made an anti-Soviet speech in Latvia. As the NY Times reported on Sunday, Bush "had said only...
Social Security and Forced Government Health Care
When politicians proclaim that you have a "right" to health care, they actually mean many other things. First, that they want unlimited power to force others to provide you with health care--whatever the cost. They also mean that you have no right to manage and...
Time to Declare Our Independence From the United Nations
The United Nations is a mess. It now finds itself buried under scandals. It has Oil for Food scandals. Sex scandals. Power-abuse scandals. Smuggling scandals. Theft scandals. And unpaid traffic tickets. Rob, rape, and pillage seems to be the UN's modus operandi. Yet...
Only in America
Let's talk about the rich -- those people who, according to former Congressman Richard Gephardt, are "winners in life's lottery." Or the people whom director Michael Moore preaches, in his book "Dude, Where's my Country?" got rich off the backs of the poor. Farrah...
Draft Equals Moral Bankruptcy
Opinion surveys have indicated that a growing number of young people and their parents are wary of the Army's recruiting pitch at a time when soldiers in Iraq are killed and wounded virtually every day. Spring is typically one of the more difficult periods of the year...
“The Unregulated Offense”
There's already been a lot of chatter over GW Law school professor Jeffrey Rosen's portrayal of the "Constitution in Exile" movement in the New York Times, but here's what I consider to be the million dollar line: All restoration fantasies have a golden age, a lost...
Death Tax Should be Killed, Not Wounded
Small-business owners, farmers, investors and entrepreneurs face a good news-bad news quandary. The good news is that the death tax will disappear in 2010. If they die that year, their families will get their assets, not the IRS.The bad news is that this pernicious...