EDITORIAL
Showing 2001 - 2050 of 2215
October 19, 2010
Inflation fears are heating up this week as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke gave a speech in Boston on Friday, causing further frantic flight into gold by those fearful of the coming "quantitative easing" the Fed is set to deliver in November. Others who view gold as ...
October 19, 2010
In a surprisingly sensible essay in The New York Times, on Sunday October 17, 2010, David Segal gives a pretty good explanation of why macroeconomics is so unsuccessful. It's human nature, stupid. People just aren't predictable – will they do this or that whe ...
October 16, 2010
Every once in a while I get sucked into defending the way the legal system aims to secure justice in the criminal law. In particular, why do the accused or suspected criminals get to be defended so vigorously, as if they were always victims of perpetuation rath ...
October 16, 2010
Gold reached a record high of $1,376 per ounce last Thursday morning but I'm writing about Fort Knox because of an unexpected conversation I had the day before with a distant friend. We have known each other for 35 years but have only seen each other once over ...
October 14, 2010
Individualism has had its foes over the centuries, mainly because it is a bulwark against some people making use of unwilling others. If one is indeed a sovereign individual, with rights to one's life, liberty, etc., others are morally and would in justice be a ...
October 13, 2010
Why did this view become so credible even while people, especially those in the business world, are routinely pursuing a course of conduct that advances not just their but everyone else's profit with whom they trade? Why will the silly zero sum game vision of h ...
October 12, 2010
The Fed has been wreaking havoc and devaluing our monetary unit steadily since 1913, and greatly accelerating it since the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement in the 1970s. This severing of the dollar's last tenuous link with gold allowed the Fed to create ...
October 09, 2010
In its October 6, 2010, editorial, "Lamentable Speech," The New York Times stood up for a hard line stance on the right to free speech. As the editors wrote, "To the American Nazi Party, Hustler Magazine, and other odious figures in Supreme Court history, add t ...
October 07, 2010
Over the last couple of days a bunch of announcements came from our government, including warning about travel to Europe where terror plans are said to be afoot by Al-Qaeda. Another warning came from the man convicted of trying to blow up Times Square - he said ...
October 06, 2010
In this struggling economy it is essential for politicians to take a step back and think about what government has been doing to business in this country. In less than 200 years, the free market, property rights, and respect for the rule of law took this nation ...
October 04, 2010
In a news report on October 2nd, 2010, titled "Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-Ago Texts," New York Times reporter Kate Zernike tells us that books like Frederick Bastiat's The Law, from 1850, and F. A Hayek's The Road to Serfdom from 1944, are selling lik ...
September 30, 2010
President Obama's friend and former colleague Cass Sunstein, now apparently on leave from Harvard Law School, would have us believe that our rights are granted to us by government. Sunstein and his co-author Stephen Holmes have argued in their book, The Cost of ...
September 29, 2010
This week marked six months since Congress passed the healthcare reform bill in what has become all-too-typical legislative chicanery. Those in power crafted a mammoth piece of legislation and rammed it through Congress under a dire sense of emergency. Insistin ...
September 29, 2010
When working out what should guide public institutions and policies in our lives and human communities, those who chime in from ancient to contemporary times have advanced various proposals and they have often been divided into two groups. Members of one of the ...
September 28, 2010
President Obama has just issued a blackmail to Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China: "You immediately revalue the yuan or else..." According to an article of David E. Senger in The New York Times dated September 23, 2010, the two leaders met at the United Nations ...
September 28, 2010
This fracas about letting the Bush tax cut expire for those making more than the arbitrary amount of $250K per year is bizarre. Never mind for now that the entire system of taxation in a bona fide free country is criminal - not different, in principle, from a s ...
September 25, 2010
An open letter to Paul Volcker, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, 1979-1987; Chairman of President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, presented to him, in person, last year. Dear Paul: In 35 years our paths have crossed for the s ...
September 25, 2010
True, the idea came to me after having read many of Paul Krugman's missives, both his columns in The New York Times and essays in such magazines as The New York Review of Books. In his often very polemical writings - for a Nobel Laureate he does seem to indulge ...
September 24, 2010
In our time, not entirely unlike in others, the main appeal politicians hold out for millions is that they join them in their resentful bashing of the rich. This is a successful ploy because in the past, of course, most riches came from conquest, from governmen ...
September 23, 2010
This past week the administration announced its choice for the first credit czar at the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This bureau was created as part of the supposed Wall Street reform bill recently passed by Congress. This new bureau, which represe ...
September 23, 2010
At times I have the impression that maybe there are practicing political allies out there somewhere, ones who are involved with current affairs, and at times it looks like these would be Republicans and especially conservative ones. That's because strictly spea ...
September 21, 2010
Some have been demeaning the right to private property - which is very closely linked to America's political tradition and if sufficiently discredited would also help destroy the country - because such a right is supposedly created by a legal system. If so, the ...
September 20, 2010
As a loyal though reluctant reader of The New York Review of Books – too masochistic an experience at times but in my line of work unavoidable – I have read a lot of essays by the recently deceased public intellectual and NYU professor Tony Judt. A skilled ...
September 18, 2010
Have you ever wondered what would happen if most of the claimed US gold reserves do not really exist? Can Washington continue to operate under its own questionable and often non-existent accounting rules if it doesn't have the gold reserves as promised? Should ...
September 17, 2010
Faced with continuing economic decline and an impending election, the administration, predictably, is entertaining the idea of another stimulus package. To explain why the last one didn't work, adherents to the Keynesian economic philosophy are claiming that th ...
September 15, 2010
Paul Krugman, writing in The New York Times on September 5 under the title "1938 in 2010", chastizes president Obama's economists once more for doing what they have promised not to do: to repeat the mistakes of president Roosevelt's economists in 1937 in pullin ...
September 14, 2010
Anyone in search of a short yet useful introduction to the life of Sir Winston Churchill will find it in Paul Johnson's biography. Johnson, a long-established historian of the modern age, has penned a readable and informative account of the life, personality, t ...
September 13, 2010
General Petraeus sadly got it wrong when he wants to shut down the Koran burning on the grounds that some will react to it irrationally. Sure, the burning should not happen because it is a needlessly provocative deed but no one should be forcibly stopped from u ...
September 11, 2010
At this time when most people are clamoring, or at least hoping for, economic revival, the major debate centers around how it could be achieved. One side, mainly the current administration and its supporters in the academy, believe in some variety of stimulus i ...
September 09, 2010
When various skeptics question the soundness of the American political system, one of their targets is the idea of human nature. After all, the founders took their political philosophy mainly from John Locke who thought human nature does exist and, based on wha ...
September 08, 2010
Last week, in the wake of another uptick in the official unemployment rate, the administration continued to claim that their economic policies were working, just not fast enough. This administration inherited an unemployment rate of 7.7% and promised a peak of ...
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 ...
