Politics

Keep Politics Away from Money

by Sheldon Richman December 22, 2003

The supporters of campaign-finance regulation, and now a bare majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, are trying to square the circle. They want a vast distributive state in which politicians dispense favors at the expense of others without the appearance of corruption. An inherently corrupt system with no appearance of corruption is about as likely as, well, a square ...

Were the Feds Capable of Killing JFK?

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 24, 2003

Forty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the debate over whether there was a conspiracy to kill him rages on, and the History Channels series suggesting that U.S. officials were involved in such a conspiracy certainly raises disturbing questions regarding the issue. What seems somewhat amusing, however, is the long-held position of the mainstream ...

Bad Medicine

by Sheldon Richman November 1, 2003

Those who have been hungering for a real political debate in this country can’t help but be deliriously overcome with the news that CBS’s 60 Minutes will feature 10 face-offs between former Democratic President Bill Clinton and former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole. The history of political thought will ...

Ballot-Access Laws: A High Cost of Running for Office

by Bart Frazier September 12, 2003

The field of economics has had an interesting history in that the principles developed during its evolution have been widely applied to many other fields, one of them being politics. Nowhere today does the economic principle of transaction costs reveal more about politics than in California.

Congressional Complicity in WMD Duplicity

by Jacob G. Hornberger August 22, 2003

Why has Congress been relatively quiet on the executive branch’s deception about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction? The answer is easy: By abrogating its constitutional responsibility regarding its constitutional power to declare war, Congress made itself a silent partner in the president’s wrongdoing. Keep in mind that our system of government is different from others ...

A President Lies about War? Shocking!

by Sheldon Richman August 13, 2003

It is regarded as beyond the pale to suggest that a president of the United States would lie or otherwise play politics to win support for a war. Even President Bushs biggest critics in the Democratic Party shrink from using the L-word when they talk about the famous 16 words or the presidents other unequivocal pre-war claims about Saddam ...

The Greatest Ignorance of the Greatest Number

by James Bovard August 1, 2003

The specter of an ignorant or indifferent populace has long haunted democracy. Montesquieu wrote in 1748, The tyranny of a principal in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy. James Madison warned, A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue ...

Is Fraud a High Crime or Misdemeanor?

by Jacob G. Hornberger July 16, 2003

In claiming that 16 controversial words in his State of the Union address last January were technically correct, the president is implying that he didn’t actually deceive — or intend to deceive — the American people. Nothing could be further from the truth. While the president wants people to focus only on the technical wording ...

False in One, False in All

by Sheldon Richman July 14, 2003

When I was a newspaper reporter covering the criminal courts in Pennsylvania, lawyers always told juries they were entitled to apply this old legal principle to any witness: falsis in unum, falsis in omnibus — false in one thing, false in all things. This means that if jurors determined that ...

Presidential Sophists on the Loose

by Sheldon Richman July 1, 2003

The controversy over President Bushs State of the Union allegation about President Saddam Hussein of Iraq and African uranium is a lesson in how to distinguish a PR flack from an honest commentator. The latter tries to ground his statements in evidence and logic. The flack performs embarrassing mental contortions that have no bearing on the matter. For example, to ...

Short-Sighted Bush

by Sheldon Richman May 9, 2003

Advocates of big government sometimes say that politicians are superior to business people because the latter are shortsighted: they only care about the next quarter’s balance sheet. This was always nonsense, because while business has strong incentives to look farther up the road, politicians have little incentive to look beyond the next election. It turns out that ...

Don’t Look for Sense Where There Is None

by Sheldon Richman December 18, 2002

Presidents, their cabinet officials, and their press secretaries show how much they respect the American people by how they use the English language. To be more precise, they indicate how much they disrespect the American people by how they abuse the language. All presidents lie. We know that. But when ...