The Democrat’s War of Women against Women by Wendy McElroy September 12, 2012 “I can’t understand why any woman would want to vote for Mitt Romney, except maybe Mrs. Romney.” The words came from Democrat and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. The words are part of a great lie being spun out in this election season: Democrats are pro-woman. Indeed, the lie has become a main theme of the Democratic ...
Share Our Wealth by Laurence M. Vance September 11, 2012 Flamboyant, controversial, and extremely popular, Louisiana politician Huey P. Long died 77 years ago this week. Many of his proposals, however, are alive and well today in both major parties. The seventh of nine children in a deeply religious home, Long was born in 1893 in the rural piney woods of north-central Louisiana. After working as a salesman and then ...
More Markets? More Government? Wrong Question! by Michael C. Munger September 10, 2012 Michael Munger is Professor of Political Science, and Director of the PPE Certificate Program. His primary research focus is on the functioning of markets and regulatory policies. His other work includes a variety of policy monographs and reports, for private organizations and government agencies at the federal, state, and local level. He has taught at Dartmouth College, University of ...
Eleven Years after 9/11, Guantánamo Is a Political Prison by Andy Worthington September 6, 2012 Eleven years since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the majority of the remaining 168 men in Guantánamo are held not because they constitute an active threat to the United States, but because of inertia, political opportunism, and an institutional desire to hide evidence of torture by U.S. forces, sanctioned at the highest levels of government. That they ...
The GOP’s Gold Plank by Tim Kelly September 6, 2012 The 2012 Republican Party platform contains a plank concerning a possible return to the gold or other metallic standard. The US dollar has been a fiat currency since President Richard Nixon suspended its convertibility to gold on August 15, 1971. The plank reads, Determined to crush the double-digit inflation that was part of the Carter Administration’s economic legacy, President Reagan, shortly ...
Republican Welfare State by Laurence M. Vance September 5, 2012 Republicans are upset with Barack Obama — again. This time it is about welfare. Not the constitutionality and legitimacy of federal welfare programs, but their structure and requirements. No one should think for a minute that Republicans are opposed to the welfare state. After all, it is their welfare state. The latest brouhaha erupted because the Department of Health and ...
Texas Inventories Children by Wendy McElroy September 4, 2012 Officials at Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas, apparently view George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four as an instruction manual rather than a cautionary tale. Over 6,000 students will be required to carry microchipped ID so that the district can track their movements in school and on school buses. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips will be embedded in ...
Medicare Is Doomed by Sheldon Richman September 3, 2012 When Democrats accuse Republicans of wanting to “end Medicare as we know it,” they are right. But Democrats do too. “Medicare as we know it” is no longer an option. Leaving aside Medicare’s fatal moral defect — that it’s coercively funded — the program is doomed. It has tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities. It threatens working generations ...
The Supreme Court’s Word Game Saves Obamacare by Sheldon Richman September 1, 2012 The Supreme Court decision upholding the health-insurance mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) had a distinct Alice-in-Wonderland feel to it. As Lewis Carroll wrote in Through the Looking-Glass, “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” Chief Justice ...
The Federal Wetlands War, Part 3 by James Bovard September 1, 2012 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 As the first two parts of this series revealed, federal bureaucrats have been using environmental pretexts to rampage against property owners since the late 1980s. Unfortunately, even after the Republicans took over Congress in 1994 and promised sweeping reforms, the outrages continued. A recent Supreme Court decision vivified that, despite ...
Is Social Security Welfare? by Laurence M. Vance September 1, 2012 Since the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare became the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services in 1979, the term “welfare” has fallen into disuse. “Income security,” “entitlement,” or “public assistance programs” are now the usual terms for what used to be called “welfare programs.” Even the food-stamp program has been renamed the Supplemental ...
Reflections on the Torture Debate by Joseph Margulies September 1, 2012 What remains to be said of the torture debate? I asked myself this question because March 28 was an anniversary of sorts. On that date 10 years ago the United States cast the first person into a CIA black site. In time, he was subjected to each and every one of the Bush administration’s “enhanced” techniques. Waterboarding, of which ...