EDITORIAL
Showing 1301 - 1350 of 1951
March 06, 2012
While the Fed has recently released an unprecedented amount of information on its activities, there is still much that remains unknown. Predictably, every push towards transparency has been fought tooth and nail. It took disclosure requirements enacted within t ...
March 05, 2012
Over the last several decades of American political life the idea of liberty has taken a back seat to that of democracy. Liberty involves human beings governing themselves, being sovereign citizens, while democracy is a method by which decisions are reached wit ...
March 03, 2012
So GM has halted Volt production and laid off 1,500 workers. Government Motors announced on Friday that it has temporarily suspended the production of GM Volts. Here's a report, courtesy of TheHill.com: General Motors has temporarily suspended production of its ...
March 01, 2012
When we discuss political economy, resting one's case on faith places one's ideas on wobbly foundations. By "faith" is meant a mode of belief based on the will to accept or commit, often despite systematic evidence to the contrary, or on belief not based on sup ...
March 01, 2012
Al Gore excoriates us on how we need to restrict our wasteful lifestyles and limit our "carbon footprint" while flying around the world in private jets, using orders of magnitude more energy than any of us little people. Barrack Obama attacks the "fat cats" and ...
February 28, 2012
Senator Jeff Sessions, ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, has pointed out that our per capita government debt is already larger than Greece's. Per person, our government owes over $49,000 compared to $38,937 per Greek citizen. Our debt has just reac ...
February 27, 2012
"See this room? Two-thirds of us laid off when Ron Paul is president." – A hot microphone picked up a reporter attacking Ron Paul recently before a Pentagon briefing began.
We are currently in the middle of the long war of the Internet Reformation, altho ...
February 27, 2012
Freedom Revived: Few can deny that human beings care about liberty. There are, of course, different senses in which the term "liberty" is used. One sense of it means being without obstacles in life; another, to be able to develop fully with as little hindrance ...
February 25, 2012
Here we go again. Global warming is suddenly back in the news and I think I know why. But before I discuss that, let's take a look at the latest grim findings. Once more we're reading about the terrible toll that global warming can take. In this case, we're bei ...
February 24, 2012
What if you are only allowed to vote because it doesn't make a difference? What if no matter how you vote, the elites get to have it their way? What if "one person, one vote" is just a fiction created by the government to induce your compliance? What if democra ...
February 22, 2012
However much one learns to squirm out of one's inconsistencies, logic usually bites one in the butt. Of course, strictly speaking logic is the formal system that's supposed to guide our reasoning process and on its own doesn't serve much more than that vital, i ...
February 21, 2012
The administration recently released its 2013 budget proposal, and conservatives are correctly alarmed that it calls for unprecedented spending and continued annual deficits exceeding $1 trillion. But the same conservatives complain that the budget does not dev ...
February 20, 2012
The modern institution of the presidency is the primary political evil Americans face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us any harm. It wrecks our families ...
February 20, 2012
By most accounts there is little good news about any progress toward a freer society; quite the contrary. Around the globe, of course, there are some regions that are making small moves away from tyranny but even in those few, human freedom doesn't appear to be ...
February 18, 2012
As this is apparently "Henry Makow Saturday" (see other article, this issue), I'm going to take the opportunity to comment on an article carried on the Makow website some five days ago entitled "Colonial Elite Rules China for the Illuminati." Written by St. Joh ...
February 17, 2012
One of my books is a collection of prominent essays by mostly contemporary libertarian political-economic thinkers. Its title, The Libertarian Reader (1982), was so well chosen that years later someone quite prominent, David Boaz of the Cato Institute, also use ...
February 15, 2012
"The best way to use your willpower is to stop screwing up!" – Roy Baumeister Willpower, the capacity to regulate your own behavior, is one of the changeable elements of personality. There are other qualities, like optimism, gratitude and positive emotions, a ...
February 14, 2012
Many religious conservatives understandably are upset with the latest Obamacare mandate, which will require religious employers (including Catholic employers) to provide birth control to workers receiving healthcare benefits. This mandate includes certain birth ...
February 13, 2012
Seeing that it looks like Mitt Romney may well win the Republican nomination – though it's too early to be sure about that – it has been a concern of freedom loving Americans whether the nod given to human individual liberty by the Tea Party back in 2010 wi ...
February 13, 2012
Feminist Carol Hanisch is famous for opposing the Miss America contest in the 1960s. She is also the person who in 1968 coined the phrase "the personal is the political." Her essay on the topic denounced the idea that women's liberation can come about through i ...
February 13, 2012
The long-established and noble rule of Law, one of the greatest products of the character and tradition of British history, has suffered a deadly blow. Blackmail has become respectable. ~ Robert G. Menzies. Switzerland and its banks have been in the news a lot ...
February 11, 2012
Robert Kagan has published an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled "Why the World Needs America." Kagan is a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and the article is adapted from The World America Made, published by Alfred A. Knopf ...
February 09, 2012
The dollar has been the world reserve currency since 1944 and the Keynesian Fabian socialist economic palaver in New Hampshire's White Mountains. They all should have paid more attention to the deviant Lord Keynes. The situation is now gradually getting despera ...
February 08, 2012
It's a familiar and effective marketing technique: You make an offer and then you add, "Hurry. Spaces are limited, so sign up now!" or "These models won't last, so act fast!" Of course, in most cases, spaces aren't really all that limited, and whether or not yo ...
February 07, 2012
While much has been made recently of the President's unconstitutional appointment of Richard Cordray to be director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), lost in the hubbub has been any discussion of the unconstitutionality of, or the need for, th ...
February 06, 2012
Since the Fall of 1966 (if memory serves me right) I have been a columnist at what was then The Santa Ana but is now the Orange County Register. I cannot count how many columns I produced, nearly all of them concerned with demonstrating the superiority of the f ...
February 04, 2012
From the Washington Post, we learn that "January job gains have economists rethinking outlooks." Oh, really? Last I looked, the bear leg of the larger business cycle was still in full effect. Nothing's changed in other words, since 2001 – or more pertinently ...
February 01, 2012
Living with integrity is a bedrock skill for living well that requires the use of reason and is always an ongoing work in progress. It is also the primary quality of character necessary for a free society. The best definition of reason that I've ever come acros ...
January 31, 2012
The Federal Reserve's interest rate price-setting board, the FOMC, met last week. They will continue to set the federal funds rate at well below 1%, and plan to keep it low until the end of 2014. That's a year and a half longer than they planned when they met j ...
January 31, 2012
While I enjoyed Jesse Ventura's article about Plum Island, "Government's Island of Horror," published over the weekend on LRC, I know from a close friend that Jesse only covered part of the treachery and conspiracy that is the Plum Island cover-up regarding Lym ...
January 30, 2012
Economic fairness is impossible: an oxymoron. Since economic activities are inherently varied and often competitive and since one size doesn't fit all and not everyone can win in a competition, no such thing as fairness is possible unless it simply means no one ...
January 25, 2012
Hockey is a game I know – rather well, actually. As a young person I excelled at the sport and even left home when I was 14 to live and play in a city that offered better coaching and a brighter road to the NHL. Yes, like many other young people growing up in ...
January 25, 2012
Why does the TSA annoy so many of us? Not having the resources to do a survey, I resort here to what might be called educated speculation. I suspect it is because free men and women consider it invasive for government agents to order them around - pat them down ...
January 24, 2012
Although Congress was back in session for scarcely more than a day last week, private citizens across the country managed to cause an uproar felt across Capitol Hill. The uproar took the form of hundreds of thousands of phone calls to both Senators and Represen ...
January 23, 2012
On the BBC website an interview was featured recently with the famous orthodox Marxist, Eric Hobsbawm, who promptly denounced capitalism as if he had established definitively its inferiority as a political economic system. Is the BBC such an irresponsible news ...
January 21, 2012
By now, people who use the Internet seriously, and even plenty who don't, are aware of the arrest of six-foot-seven, 300-pound Kim Dotcom, an outsize figure in the business of facilitating Internet downloads. The problem with his company, Megauploads, according ...
January 21, 2012
One of the basic truths of human psychological growth is this: If you want to change something about your life, you must first acknowledge and accept what's true about your life right now. The same principle applies to the improvement of human relationships and ...
January 18, 2012
It is open season for wild monetary prognostications. More premature obituaries on the dollar have been posted on the Internet. For example, see Jim Willie's "The US Dollar Paper Tiger" (Gold-Eagle, January 11) with epitaphs like "the US dollar rising to the ce ...
January 17, 2012
As I flew home across the country from NYC on January 16th, the holiday this year in honor of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I had the opportunity to watch several programs on television devoted to his legacy. I was especially struck by the fact t ...
January 14, 2012
Zero Hedge has published an article, "Are The Middle East Wars Really About Forcing the World Into Dollars and Private Central Banking?" that mentions my theory that Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown because he wanted to set up a private gold-currency in Africa. Y ...
January 14, 2012
In these, the early weeks of the New Year, the crystal ball game is in full swing. I'll refrain from going down that path today. First of all, to some degree, we already discussed our outlook for the New Year when we presented our BFI's Big Picture Scenarios fo ...
January 12, 2012
The great moral argument of the left is that the government policies they advocate create a fairer and more compassionate world. Everything they advocate flows from the overt assumption that if you want a fair and compassionate society, their policies of forced ...
January 10, 2012
This week, partisan games in Washington reached a fevered pitch as Congress acted to prevent recess appointments, yet the administration made them anyway. Congress has been gaveling into session for less than a minute every three days for the express purpose of ...
January 06, 2012
No one should attempt to treat Ayn Rand and Murray N. Rothbard as uncomplicated and rather similar defenders of the free society, although they have more in common than many believe. As just one example, neither was a hawk when it comes to deploying military p ...
January 05, 2012
Life's been pretty tough for most of humankind's existence. War, torture and genocide were much more common to primitive man than even during the severe bloodlettings of the twentieth century. (See Steven Pinker's War Before Civilization and his latest book, Th ...
January 04, 2012
Cuba's fate over the last half a century has been disastrous, although before that the island wasn't a Caribbean paradise, either. US government policies haven't made it easier for Cubans to escape their misery since instead of opening up the routes of free tra ...
January 03, 2012
Last week, as most Americans were celebrating the holidays with family and friends, the Obama Administration announced plans to seek yet another debt ceiling increase in the New Year. While some fiscal conservatives will try to block this increase, their effort ...
January 02, 2012
So there is now concern by some so-called journalists that "in his 1987 manifesto 'Freedom Under Siege: The U.S. Constitution after 200-Plus Years,' presidential hopeful Ron Paul wrote that AIDS patients were victims of their own lifestyle, questioned the right ...
January 02, 2012
New Year's resolutions are usually a list of things that you want to do differently, skills that you want to learn, bad habits that you want to stop, good habits that you want to establish. We make these lists and then come January 1st we try to implement them ...
December 31, 2011
First, allow me to wish all our readers and viewers a happy new year. This has been a year of growth for our modest publication, and we regularly receive upwards of 20-25 million hits a month. I hope your endeavors have achieved even greater success – however ...