Economics

If you managed a business and noticed one of your five major competitors had changed its product design and was gaining market share against your firm and other competitors, what would you do? A decade ago, the world’s automobile manufacturers noticed firms with SUVs in their product line were gaining market share. Companies that produced no SUVs quickly added them Read More ›

If I told you the world is becoming both more and less democratic at the same time, you might reply, “how can that be?”. Follow along and you shall see. Do you believe “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed?” It is not just the overwhelming majority of Americans who believe in Read More ›

How do you think the sanctimonious people at TV’s “60 Minutes” would portray a company charged by the FCC with “serious indecency violations,” that made expensive settlements with employees and others because of injuries related to asbestos and other hazardous material exposures, underfunded its employee pension, is legally accused of securities violations, employs those who widely distributed forged documents in Read More ›

William Tucker is a Senior Fellow of Discovery Institute If there is a true difference of opinion in the current presidential race, it is over whether we can achieve independence from foreign oil, especially Persian Gulf oil. “I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation — not the Saudi royal family.” So said John Kerry at Read More ›

If the major departments of government were baseball teams, the Treasury Department would be the New York Yankees. Historically, from the time of Alexander Hamilton, most of the best and brightest in government were in Treasury. Treasury was viewed as the class act. Treasury officials were treated with the respect that officials of HUD (Housing and Urban Development) could only Read More ›

A major reason the liberal elites so hate President Bush is the policies he pushes will reduce their power and influence. Sens. John Kerry and Edward Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrats, claim they are the protectors of the little guy and the middle class. Yet their proposals are designed to protect the elite like themselves who inherited rather than created wealth. Much Read More ›

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 ›