Economics

Having just finished reading the report of the September 11 commission, I was shocked; shocked to learn major U.S. government bureaucracies are incompetent. Washington being Washington, most of the solutions proposed revolved around reorganizing and creating more bureaucracies. It seems not to have occurred to anyone there are market solutions for many information problems the intelligence community faces. Two examples Read More ›

Would you expand your stock market holdings if you knew taxes would be increased on businesses’ most valuable employees? Business depreciation allowances would be reduced? Tax disadvantages of U.S. multinational corporations would increase relative to their foreign competitors? And the tax rate on capital gains and dividends would rise? Well, this is exactly what John Kerry proposes, and that is Read More ›

There are a lady barber and a finance minister, both of whom, in very different ways, are making their homelands better, in part, because of their American experience. It has long been recognized the remittances foreign workers send to their homelands dwarf official foreign aid in both size and effectiveness. What is often not recognized is how foreign visitors and Read More ›

IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND trial lawyers like John Edwards, you have to recognize their one enduring fantasy. They are knights in shining armor rescuing damsels in distress. They’ll tell you they’re “standing up for the little guy” or “enforcing the Constitution” or “sending a message” or “teaching the big guys a lesson.” But at bottom there’s always that one Read More ›

Is it possible, within our children’s lifetimes, to have a world where war and state sponsored terrorism is very remote? The answer is not only yes, but we are much closer to that ideal than most people think. A truly peaceful world can only be and will be a world where virtually everyone lives under a regime reasonably close to Read More ›

In the last half-century, under which president did the economy perform the best? Most Americans would answer Ronald Reagan, while some Democratic commentators have argued it was Bill Clinton or John F. Kennedy. What is the truth? A president has a major influence on tax, spending, regulatory and trade policies that largely determine the rate of economic growth, but he Read More ›

IN LATE APRIL, a Beaumont, Texas, jury voted to award $1 billion to the family of a plaintiff who allegedly lost her life as a result of taking fen-phen, a drug combination popular among dieters in the 1990s before it was linked to heart-valve damage. The woman, who was morbidly obese and whose family had a history of heart problems, Read More ›

Did you know that the U.S. has the fastest-growing economy among all of the rich nations? During the past year, the U.S. has been growing threefold the rate of the average of the European Union countries and about 50 percent faster than Japan, and is now experiencing the fastest rate of GDP growth in 20 years. The unemployment rate is Read More ›

Imagine a club where members of the volleyball teams enjoy drinking and eating more than exercising and, as a result, are very fat and out of shape. The club decides to expand its membership to include a group of men who only recently gained their independence from abusive parents and now are working hard on bettering themselves. The newcomers wish Read More ›

Have you seen any of the photos of Jane Fonda and John Kerry together back when he was a war protester? Do you know which of the photos are real and which are phony? Digital technology has made it easy to create pictures that purport to show something that never was. The late-night television comedians and many Internet pranksters create Read More ›