As millions of Americans watch the New England Patriots take on the Philadelphia Eagles, every minute of the game will be scrutinized, with slow-motion replays and a torrent of statistics. But, amid the cheers and groans, don’t expect to hear complaints from...
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
The New Right
The evidence of the past two decades is unimpeachable: the political right in America no longer stands for individual rights, limited government and capitalism. The “rightists” now advocate expanding the welfare state, increasing government intrusion into...
Anti-Intellectualism Among the Academic Elite
Dr. Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, has been excoriated for suggesting that innate differences between men and women might be one of the reasons fewer women succeed in the higher reaches of science and math. Adding insult to injury, he also...
Bush’s Betrayal of America: The Iraqi Elections
President Bush claims that holding elections on January 30 will bring Iraq a step closer to freedom, an outcome allegedly vital to America’s security. But the Iraqi election will bring neither freedom to Iraq nor security to America. Consider the beliefs of the...
Ayn Rand: Hero
Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand is the author of the famous novels “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged.” Ayn Rand is, to me, more than merely the author of those great books. She is the one who gave me the...
Free Elections in Iraq: Victory and Defeat
The defeatists have been defeated. Remember all the political outcries that the Iraqi elections should be postponed because it would be impossible to hold elections with terrorism rampant throughout the country? Fortunately, most Iraqis do not see the American media,...
President Bush’s Inaugural Address: A Betrayal of the Concept of Freedom
This may be old news by now, but the President’s inaugural address was essentially a betrayal of the concept of freedom. The speech re-confirmed Ayn Rand’s analysis of conservatives–that they are bankrupt and fated to lose, because they base their...
Conflict of Interests In The Volcker Oil-for-Food Investigation
The Independent Inquiry Committee into the United Nations Oil-for-Food Program (IIC), headed by Paul Volcker, is due to release its interim report at the end of January. The Volcker report undoubtedly has the potential to bring about the downfall of U.N....
The Mealy Mouthed Media
The enraged speeches and street disorders across the country that accompanied the inauguration of President Bush may tell us more than we want to know about what is happening to this country. The media dignify these outbursts by calling them “protests” but...
Should We “Save Jobs”?
Now that the elections are over, there’s little political gain for demagoguery about jobs, but let’s prepare ourselves for the next time. Losing a job means a financial crunch and readjustment regardless of the source of job loss. If it’s not from an...
Western Media: Fourth Estate or Fifth Column?
There are still people in the mainstream media who profess bewilderment that they are accused of being biased. But you need to look no further than reporting on the war in Iraq to see the bias staring you in the face, day after day, on the front page of the New York...
The Survivial of American Liberty Demands a Foreign Policy of Self-Interest
If Mr. Bush is asking Americans to fight and die to bring welfare statism to the Arab world, they should stay home.
Weaker Than We Think
“On Sept. 11, one in 3,000 New Yorkers perished, but in the same year, over one in 1,000 urbanites were murdered in three major cities in the Western Hemisphere alone,” according to Russell Seitz in his article “Weaker Than We Think” in The...
Social Insecurity
The latest liberal spin on Social Security is that there is no problem. Of course, there is no problem with any obligation if you are willing to welsh when it comes time to pay it. Politically, the bottom line of this approach is that President Bush’s plan is...
Medical Lawsuits
When a friend told me recently that he was going to undergo a painful medical procedure to see if he has cancer, it reminded me of a time years ago when I faced a similar prospect. The testing procedure in my case would have been both painful and with some risk of...
America’s Compassion in Iraq Is Self-Destructive
The horrific suicide bombing in December of a U.S. mess tent near Mosul and the assassination on Jan. 10 of the deputy chief of Baghdad police–the second Iraqi official murdered in five days–are further indications that the war in Iraq is worsening. Things...
End Social Security
Throughout the nation, a fierce debate rages over Social Security. One side, led by President Bush, says the system is in crisis and must be saved via “partial privatization.” The other side says the system is basically sound and can be saved with a little...
AFCM Interviews HSA Bank President Kirk Hoewisch
The year was 1901 and someone in Howards Grove, Wisconsin, observed that the first automobile to appear in town was driven by a man from nearby Sheboygan. A century later, the town is making its mark on another new vehicle–which has the potential to...
Rational Disagreement
My assistant sorts the incoming mail into various categories, such as “critical mail,” “fan mail,” etc. But the so-called critical mail is seldom critical. It may be bombastic or vituperative or full of pop psychology, but it seldom presents a...
“Transition Costs” of Partially Privatizing Social Security
There’s a lot of discussion in the media about the “transition costs” of partially privatizing Social Security. These “transition costs” are estimated to be $1 trillion to $2 trillion. The specter of this amount of expenditure...
The Race Card — 2005
The Democratic Party continues to play the race card for political gain. The Reverend Jesse Jackson steamed into Ohio, the so-called battleground state that went for Bush, claiming that Ohioans’ votes failed to count. “The playing field is uneven,”...
New Year For Choosing a Health Plan
For many workers, the new year initiates a process called open enrollment–when many employees designate a health plan through their employer–that’s as comprehensible as the tax code. During the annual cattle call, employees are pummeled with...
Greedy or Ignorant
“The Dog and His Bone” is one of Aesop’s many instructive fables. It’s about a dog carrying a bone in his mouth. As he was crossing a footbridge over a stream and happened to glance into the water, he saw his own reflection. Thinking it was...
Soccer Moms Could Teach Indian Ocean Nations Something About Communication
It has been said that lack of communication lies at the bottom of most human problems. This is certainly true of what will likely become [one of] the largest human tragedies in recorded history, the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. The U.S. Geological Survey and its 120...
U.S. Government Should Not Help Tsunami Victims (Updated)
As the death toll mounts in the areas hit by Sunday’s tsunami in southern Asia, private organizations and individuals are scrambling to send out money and goods to help the victims. Such help may be entirely proper, especially considering that most of those...
Susan Sontag: Not So Judicious
Writer Susan Sontag, one of America ‘s most “celebrated” intellectuals, died a few days after Christmas of leukemia. She was 71. “In my view,” she once explained, “the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical,...
America The Stingy
“It is beyond me . . . why are we so stingy, really,” said U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland, after the tsunami in southern Asia. ” . . . Christmastime should remind many Western countries at least, [of] how rich we...
A Wave of Criticism
The catastrophic tsunami wave that has devastated so much of southern Asia has even killed more than a hundred people on the east coast of Africa, more than 4,000 miles away. Two questions: First, what country has done the most to help the victims of this natural...
A Half-Century-Old Attack on Ayn Rand Reminds Us of the Dark Side of Conservatism
TIA Daily frequently links to articles posted at National Review Online, the online companion to National Review, the prominent conservative magazine. I link to it because NRO publishes works by many good authors with important things to say (e.g., Victor Davis Hanson...
Faith and Force: America’s War on Terrorism is Undercut by the Bush Administrations’s Injection of Religion into Politics
America’s war on terrorism is being undercut–by the administration’s efforts to inject religion into politics. Our enemy in that war is the ideology of Islamic totalitarianism–an ideology which holds that one’s life is to be lived...
Get Ready for Another Strong Year
So what’s not to love about 2004? I admit that it wasn’t easy going, but at this writing it looks like the S&P 500 is going to close out the year at better than three-year highs, with something like an 11% total return. The Russell 2000 Index of...
Property Rites: Part 2
When I was house-hunting, one of the things that struck me about the house that I eventually settled on was the fact that there were no curtains or shades on the bathroom window in the back. The reason was that there was no one living on the steep hillside in back,...
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