EDITORIAL
Showing 1451 - 1500 of 2140
April 20, 2012
I know my editorial credibility and reader confidence will suddenly collapse when this goes to print but I have some good news out of Washington and Congress. Yes, I know what you are getting ready to do but don't hit the delete button just yet! The JOBS Act is ...
April 19, 2012
Whether this is deliberate I don't know, but many movies made for children these days have strong moralistic messages that say: "We human beings are the scourge of the universe!" The very popular production of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park onto the big scree ...
April 17, 2012
Last week President Obama made some rather shocking comments at a press conference regarding the Supreme Court's deliberation on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. His comments belie a grasp of constitutional ...
April 16, 2012
A while back The New York Times Magazine ran what amounts to a puff piece about Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, President Obama's long-time friend, former colleague and one of America's regulation czars. It was penned by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, who is iden ...
April 16, 2012
Panic: 'of Pan,' the god of woods and fields who was the source of mysterious sounds that caused contagious, groundless fear in herds and crowds, or in people in lonely spots (World English Dictionary). At the famous Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, the outnumbere ...
April 15, 2012
Hey, men! Looking for a way to ruin your sex life and become infertile? Try Propecia or Proscar, two drugs from the vaccine giant Merck, whose top vaccine scientist Dr. Maurice Hilleman already admitted that Merck's vaccines contained "stealth viruses" that cau ...
April 14, 2012
What do Kobe Beef and the Titanic have in common? They both are the subjects of articles this week that deal with regulation. Regulatory democracy is surely a meme of the 20th century, a dominant social theme of what we call the power elite, a small group of dy ...
April 12, 2012
So What is the Future for Liberty in Our Closed Political Monopoly? Let's take over the GOP from the inside rather than fight them in a rigged election process where third-party candidates are hidden by a news blackout enforced by both parties and the main stre ...
April 12, 2012
Actually, I didn't encounter such an explanation at the time, nor since then, after the role the hoodie had in the Florida fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, the African-American teen, a shooting that has unleashed much controversy about hoodies, starting with F ...
April 11, 2012
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." – Albert Einstein Recently, Justin Raimondo wrote a thoughtful editorial, "Ron, Don't Let Your Heroic Effort End In Tampa." I agree with Justin about how the GOP is actually ...
April 10, 2012
One of the great fallacies of our time is that if government doesn't do something, no one will. Its corollary is that if you are opposed to the government doing something, you are opposed to anyone performing that function at all. These disastrous fallacies col ...
April 09, 2012
Did you read that on March 27th Congress passed the JOBS act, which stands for "Jumpstart Our Business Start-ups." There have been several write-ups of this bill now, including a lengthy one in the Economist magazine. Is this the beginning of a reversal of the ...
April 09, 2012
I have argued before why zoning laws are inconsistent with a free society's principles, in particular with the principle of private property rights. Basically they amount to impositions by some people on others of conditions for using property that the owner is ...
April 07, 2012
The United States Congress is steadily headed to a place where those who owe money to the US government shall be treated criminally. The first shot in this latest campaign took place in 2010 when US President Barack Obama signed into law The Foreign Account Tax ...
April 05, 2012
The philosophical school I consider most sensible sees ideas as the means by which human beings gain understanding of reality. Ideas are what help us navigate reality so we can live successfully, which is why so much effort has been spent on developing, critici ...
April 04, 2012
Hobbits, as you know, are the adorable and heroic creatures of J.R.R. Tolkien's books, and "The Lord of the Rings" movie trilogy. When it comes to sleep, we may be more like hobbits than even Tolkien imagined. Getting a good night's sleep is one of the fundamen ...
April 03, 2012
Last week the Supreme Court heard arguments concerning the constitutionality of the Obamacare law, focusing on the mandate requiring every American to buy health insurance or pay fines enforced by the IRS. Hopefully the Court will strike down this abomination, ...
April 02, 2012
Although most libertarians and classical liberals are champions of human (individual) liberty, the reasons they give vary. Some are utilitarians and hold, along with John Stuart Mill, that when free, men and women are most likely to advance the cause of the gre ...
March 31, 2012
The UK Telegraph is reporting that "Al-Qaeda fighters have returned to Afghanistan and will use the country as a base to launch September 11-style attacks on Western cities." This gem has been launched – like a lead balloon – by the American ambassador to K ...
March 30, 2012
An influential idea in contemporary political philosophy is positive rights (or liberty). It has been advanced by political thinkers on both the Right and the Left. In contrast to the theory of basic natural rights that John Locke developed, in terms of which e ...
March 29, 2012
As much as one may object to Iran's government's efforts to build atomic weapons, the American government isn't supposed to be some kind of meta-police that embarks upon restraining such governments! Certainly spending American taxpayers' funds on conducting mi ...
March 28, 2012
"A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave." – Captain Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds, in "Serenity" The Progressive Movement is based on a mistaken vi ...
March 27, 2012
This week, my congressional committee will hold a hearing to examine how the Federal Reserve bails out European banks, propping up spendthrift European governments in the process. Unfortunately, this bailout comes at the expense of American citizens, in the for ...
March 26, 2012
In the book Reading Obama (Princeton, 2010), James T. Kloppenberg makes a case for how the kind of approach President Obama takes to public policy is now widely preferred, to put it paradoxically, on principle at the most prestigious universities. Obama's rejec ...
March 26, 2012
"A great wave of oppressive tyranny isn´t going to strike, but rather a slow seepage of oppressive laws and regulations from within will sink the American dream of liberty." ~ George Baumler (Libertarian, Blogger 'Baumler's Rant') Across the world, but particu ...
March 24, 2012
The Empire is most definitely striking back. Between the huge and secretive data center being built in Utah to intercept and analyze the world's communications, Barack Obama's newly signed executive order that allows him "emergency" powers and the near-passage ...
March 24, 2012
When I was a boy, I was very impressed by an old 1936 movie based on an H.G. Wells short story called "The Man Who Could Work Miracles." I am about to spoil the movie for you. George McWhirter Fotheringay is given the power to perform miracles. He stumbles abou ...
March 22, 2012
Most people mean by greed an "excessive or rapacious desire, especially for wealth or possessions." As to prudence, it is the quality of being cautious with regard to practical matters and especially in regard for one's own economic interests, being careful in ...
March 20, 2012
It is ironic but perhaps sadly appropriate that Attorney General Eric Holder would choose a law school, Northwestern University, to deliver a speech earlier this month in which he demolished what was left of the rule of law in America. In what history likely wi ...
March 19, 2012
Jon Gertner, author of the forthcoming The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation,* writes for The New York Times (in an excerpt from his book), about innovation in America. I spotted the piece and immediately suspected there was a hid ...
March 17, 2012
We track dominant social themes here at The Daily Bell, and the spectacular implosion of the "Stop Kony 2012" campaign is a further example of how these memes are disintegrating under the pressure of what we call the Internet Reformation. We commented on this i ...
March 15, 2012
In 1972 I bought a Volvo P1800 off the Chevy used car lot in Santa Barbara, California. I owned that car for 20 years and am still sad to have had to sell it in 1992, after putting 250,000 miles on it and driving it back and forth over the USA about 17 times. I ...
March 15, 2012
"For those who would joyously march in rank and file, they have already earned my contempt, for they were given a large brain by accident when a spinal cord would have sufficed." ~ Albert Einstein In order to keep up with what is going on in the world, and in o ...
March 13, 2012
Have certain parts of the Constitution become irrelevant, as a former Republican leader once told me at a Foreign Affairs Committee hearing? At the time, I was told that demanding a congressional declaration of war before invading Iraq, as Article I Section 8 o ...
March 12, 2012
At the outset I am talking about what someone considers immoral, not what is objectively immoral. Nonetheless, millions are coerced by governments, backed by other millions, to work and pay for what they consider morally wrong. Is that right? Is it avoidable in ...
March 10, 2012
With the attacks on Internet websites Megaupload and Bodog we find what we call the Internet Reformation is providing us with a good look at the evolving face of Western-style civil and criminal justice. Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, a file-sharing fac ...
March 10, 2012
I would also say of Ron Paul – he doesn't need to win. In his view he is winning already. This is an ideological point he is making. But here's why it's electorally significant – a lot of people, I mean 41 percent in Virginia, only two people on the ballot, ...
March 08, 2012
I assume that writers like me want to be read, not ignored. But, alas, there isn't much we can do about this except perhaps fine-tune our craft. Even that merely improves the odds. No one can make others read one's works. Thousands are simply left unread. (Do t ...
March 07, 2012
We have a genuine problem. Envy, fear of envy and deflecting envy may be the most dangerous and difficult aspects of human nature for us to wrestle with as we seek to progress toward greater freedom. As formerly poor and unfree countries open up and allow the p ...
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 ...
