EDITORIAL
Showing 1901 - 1950 of 2084
September 08, 2010
Innumerable arguments and research have been produced showing that government stimulus is useless. Despite what President Obama and his cheerleaders in the academy, like Princeton's Paul Krugman, seem to believe (or at least say), there is no evidence that gove ...
September 04, 2010
More and more Americans today are coming to understand the terrible truth about our Federal Government -- that it seeks to dominate us as citizens, to mold us into a society of dutiful Stepford Wives totally beholden to the wishes of elite politicians, bureaucr ...
September 03, 2010
It is time to bring this ruse to an end. Those people's scam should be shut down. Their phony authority to take from everyone so they can use it as they see fit - in the name that they are the nice guys who redistribute wealth while we the greedy bunch intent o ...
September 01, 2010
For most of human history it used to be standard practice for parents to insist that their children not only live by principles the parents have found to be sound but also to adopt all sorts of practices of dress, play, work, taste and so forth that they approv ...
August 31, 2010
Amid much fanfare last week, the last supposed "combat" troops left Iraq as the administration touted the beginning of the end of the Iraq War and a change in the role of the United States in that country. Considering the continued public frustration with the w ...
August 31, 2010
Karl Marx was famous for, among other things, claiming that everyone always promotes his or her economic interest. This is something he actually had in common with non-Marxists classical economists. Most economists, in fact, believe that we are all motivated by ...
August 30, 2010
It bothers me to no end that millions of Americans simply don't get just how dangerous this current administration's views are, especially about the nature of our basic rights. I suppose I should not be surprised, given the utterly perverted primary and seconda ...
August 28, 2010
This special report links Switzerland's sometimes regrettable World War Ii activities with specific evidence suggesting a possible revenue trail from the Nazi gold sales to the Bank for International Settlements, located in Basel, Switzerland. This "bankers ban ...
August 25, 2010
In olden days people were forced to labor for the king and his minions in return for being allowed to live within the realm. This kind of extortion finally got tossed over and people's basic right to their lives became acknowledged - in the political philosophy ...
August 24, 2010
Recently there have been some encouraging signs that Congress is finally willing to admit what should have been evident two years ago. Even after a $150 billion bailout, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still bankrupt and should be abolished. Indeed Rep. Barney F ...
August 24, 2010
In this era when major political figures denounce ideological – by which they of course have in mind principled – thinking, why should one be consistent, show integrity? Those are not the virtues of sophisticates. Those are pedestrian ideals. As our preside ...
August 23, 2010
If it is true that men and women in human communities ought not to intrude on their fellow citizens' liberties, then that idea would come in full strength just when it is most tempting to butt in. So, given how strongly millions of Americans feel that those pla ...
August 20, 2010
In response to an essay in which I discuss the difference between Amartya Sen's and the late Peter Bauer's recommendation for how countries can achieve economic development, one in which I touch on the topic of natural rights, someone sent the magazine where my ...
August 19, 2010
Ironically, pragmatism, the quintessentially unprincipled philosophical movement, was born in America, the one country in human history and around the globe most explicitly tied to certain basic principles of community life – e.g., the existence of unalienabl ...
August 18, 2010
As life rolls on for me, with many pluses and some minuses along the way, an issue that keeps propping up in my more academic studies is whether people have instincts like non-human animals supposedly do. Or are we born with what some refer to as a blank slate, ...
August 17, 2010
The truth comes out eventually, however. Much like the recently discovered exemption from Freedom of Information Act requirements for the SEC that was slipped into the equally massive and "urgent" financial reform bill, we are finally seeing what other insidiou ...
August 17, 2010
For once I agree with something that President Obama said, if I understood him right: Muslims do have the basic right, one that is legally protected in a free country, to build a mosque anywhere they choose if they own the land (or are leasing it with permissi ...
August 11, 2010
Last week the National Bureau of Economic Research published a report on the effect of civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq that confirmed what critics of our foreign policy have been saying for years: the killing of civilians, although unintentional, an ...
August 11, 2010
My current reason for deciding to celebrate Mose is a bit odd. He is one of the oldest jazz musicians still making the circuit regularly, having just recently returned from recording live two CDs in London, just as a sample. He is in his early 80s and sings and ...
August 10, 2010
Recently I have been recalling when University of Michigan Professor of Law, Catherine McKinnon used to advocate censoring pornography because she believed it is an assault upon women. She lays out her case in her very prestigiously published slim and readable ...
August 05, 2010
On a recent visit to Portugal, near Lisbon and right off the Atlantic Coast, I rediscovered that country after having been away from it for 40 years. And it comes across very different now from what it was back then. Most surprisingly it comes across to me like ...
August 04, 2010
Our foreign policy was in the spotlight last week, which is exactly where it should be. Almost two years ago many voters elected someone they thought would lead us to a more peaceful, rational co-existence with other countries. However, while attention has been ...
August 04, 2010
Tradition says when Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown back in 1781 the British played this tune as they marched out of the fortifications in surrender to the American army. Whether this actually happened is open to debate but the loss suffered by the grea ...
August 01, 2010
An Open Opportunity IRA, however, can be used to control the potential tax bill on your estate, since it easily accommodates what has become a conventional estate planning strategy. With the Open Opportunity structure, your IRA holds just one asset – a limite ...
July 31, 2010
An ordinary IRA requires you to be passive. You're not driving the bus, you're a passenger. An Open Opportunity IRA, on the other hand, lets you act. The IRA owns just one asset-a limited liability company (LLC). All the investing and earning happens inside the ...
July 30, 2010
When you withdraw the money, the deductible contributions you made to a traditional IRA and the income that's been earned inside the IRA will be taxed, as ordinary income. But there is an alternative that you can elect. New rules (effective starting in 2010) ma ...
July 29, 2010
And investment freedom has not-so-obvious implications for safety. Open Opportunity IRAs make up less than 1% of the IRA universe. So if and when a team of Congressional staffers or a group of Treasury Department bureaucrats get busy drafting up new rules aimed ...
July 29, 2010
There are other metrics beside the gold basis that the market has developed in the meantime. One such is GOFO = $ LIBOR – GLR (the gold lease rate). On the face of it, GOFO cannot ever go negative. If it did, it would mean that the risk in borrowing gold is g ...
July 28, 2010
The president of the AAUP - American Association of University Professors - issued a lengthy declaration warning the membership against getting involved with BP, the giant oil company whose operations have gone awry in the Gulf of Mexico and whose management is ...
July 28, 2010
There is now a robust political constituency supporting the generous tax treatment given to IRAs. One element is the 40 million people who have an IRA. A second element is the retail financial industry – banks, brokerage houses, mutual funds and insurance com ...
July 27, 2010
Recently the Washington Post ran an extensive report by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin on the bloated intelligence community. They found that an estimated 854,000 people hold top-secret security clearances. Just what are all these people up to? By my calculat ...
July 27, 2010
We, who were raised in pre-nihilist America, find most of today's movies, TV programs and literary works hideous and depressing. We cringe at the obsessive sexuality of Hollywood's cinematic pretensions, at its love affair with anti-heroes, and the reprehensibl ...
July 26, 2010
A real bill, as its name suggests, is just a notice of payment due that typically the wholesale merchant sends to the retail merchant along with his shipment of goods demanded most urgently by the consumers. It is useful to think of the bill as a security in th ...
July 24, 2010
How would you like to begin a peaceful, legitimate political action which could roll back the last 100 years of government growth and national debt along with the hated federal income tax and the Fed? What if you could force Washington to return to a strong dol ...
July 24, 2010
Prime Minister Ference Gyurcsany, identified by some as "the golden boy" of Hungary's Socialist Party, got himself into serious trouble with many Hungarians for having admitted, in a leaked closed-door party conference speech, that during his two years term as ...
July 21, 2010
Don't believe it for a moment. The American Left, as a whole, does not support civil liberties. All that protestation of about Bush and Cheney's allegedly unconstitutional expansion of presidential powers was just a bunch of empty hand-waiving. The New York Tim ...
July 20, 2010
Last week ended with some promising news on finally stopping the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Unfortunately, the administration still seems to believe that shutting down working oil wells is a higher priority than effectively dealing with the broken one. Th ...
July 17, 2010
Of course our era has its problems but these folks are really bonkers with their pessimism. What's more, they aren't upset with some of the real horrors of our time, such as the tyrannies and wars and oppression that go on in parts of the globe but with the goo ...
July 15, 2010
We in America now we have a head of state who actually appears to accept this reactionary philosophy, judging by his eager embrace of the judicial philosophy of his former colleague from the University of Chicago Law School, now Harvard law professor Cass Sunst ...
July 13, 2010
Last week, GOP chairman Michael Steele came under fire for daring to say what a lot of Americans already know - that our involvement in Afghanistan is an ill-advised quagmire with no end in sight. After nearly 10 years and approaching $1 trillion spent, the con ...
July 10, 2010
A new study prepared by the Dutch financial institution, ING, called "Quantifying the Unthinkable," has warned that a collapse of the Euro as the European single currency would lead to a global economy cataclysm. The worldwide banking system would face a new an ...
July 08, 2010
The Federal Reserve Transparency Act would eliminate restrictions on GAO audits of the Federal Reserve and open Fed operations to Congressional oversight. Additionally, audits could include discount window operations, open market operations, and agreements with ...
July 08, 2010
Two powerful intellectual developments are ruining America. One is egalitarianism, the other pragmatism. The former is an effort at the highest levels of American education, at institutions such as Harvard University and the University of Chicago, for example, ...
July 06, 2010
In 2003, while the United States was at the end of another boom and bust cycle following the bursting of the "dot.com" bubble and the Y2K scare, there were many monetary central planners at the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank who were expressing f ...
July 06, 2010
In putting pressure on China to follow Japan's example to revalue the yuan, the American money doctors fail to point out that they are in effect asking China to take a loss, similar to those of Japan amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars, on her holdings ...
July 05, 2010
I just finished reading Richard Russell´s 'Latest Remarks´. He sums things up with the following comment: "The bear keeps torturing the majority. If only the authorities could straighten out the oil problem, the housing problem and the unemployment proble ...
July 04, 2010
Too many countries and governments in the world today expect that people are supposed to conform to manmade "laws" rather than the other way around. But when laws do not respect human nature, then nothing but trouble can result. The founders of America understo ...
July 04, 2010
What is usually not recalled is the long list of enumerated grievances that make up most of the text of the Declaration of Independence. The Founding Fathers explained how intolerable an absolutist and highly centralized government in faraway London had become. ...
July 03, 2010
In my political circles quite a few people, both now and in the past, defend the right to private property, to individual ownership, based on the idea that whatever one earns – or creates, or makes, or produces – surely is one's own property and others have ...
June 30, 2010
This past week various news events once again made it abundantly clear that our foreign policy is an abject failure. Unfortunately, in spite of this the administration is determined to stay on this destructive course, despite any past promises to change it. For ...
