Book Review: The U.S. War Machine by Anthony Gregory September 1, 2012 The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril by Eugene Jarecki (New York: Free Press, 2008); 336 pages. Many supporters of Barack Obama are disappointed that he has not reversed the war policies of his predecessor. He did his best to continue the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The Afghanistan war rages far beyond what ...
Crisis Response by Tim Kelly August 30, 2012 The fiscal and monetary response by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve to the economic crisis has been to spend, to borrow, and to inflate the money supply. The result has been skyrocketing debt, continued economic stagnation, and monetary conditions conducive to hyperinflation. Congress passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in the fall of 2008, supposedly to avert ...
Prison Inservitude by Wendy McElroy August 29, 2012 The United States Constitution recognizes American prisons as forced-labor camps. The Thirteenth Amendment, enacted in 1865 to outlaw slavery and involuntary servitude, includes an exception. It reads, Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their ...
Social Insecurity by Laurence M. Vance August 28, 2012 The six-member Board of Trustees of Social Security has released its 72nd annual report on the state of Social Security: “The 2012 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Federal Disability Insurance Trust Funds.” The Social Security Act of 1935 requires that the board report annually to Congress on the ...
Don’t Call for an Ambulance by Laurence M. Vance August 21, 2012 The two recent high-profile and highly deadly shootings in the United States have been the occasion of much dialogue about “gun control.” Liberals, predictably, have generally called for more and stricter gun-control laws. Conservatives, to their credit, have generally argued to the contrary (even though they have accepted decades of various federal gun-control laws that make a mockery of the ...
The Paul Ryan Selection by Tim Kelly August 15, 2012 The mainstream media is abuzz with the news of Mitt Romney’s choice of Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate. Ryan is the chairman of the House Budget Committee and has earned a reputation as a “budget hawk” and advocate of limited government by being the architect of a highly touted plan that would supposedly slash federal ...
Paul Ryan: Would-Be Savior of the Welfare-Warfare State by Sheldon Richman August 15, 2012 Paul Ryan may be the conservative’s conservative, but understand what that means: He’s out to save the welfare/warfare state from its own intrinsic unsustainability. He’s no small-government man. Ryan’s budget blueprint, at best, wouldn’t balance the budget for three decades and meanwhile would add trillions in debt. He would only slow President Obama’s planned spending increases. If Ryan got his ...
Sick Economics by Laurence M. Vance August 14, 2012 Second only to their salary, all employees love and depend on their fringe benefits. Fringe benefits can take the form of paid time-off for breaks, vacations, jury duty, personal reasons, maternity leave, or illness. They can be in the form of discounted or fully paid insurance for health, life, or disability. Participation in a pension or retirement program is a ...
The MAD Myth by Tim Kelly August 10, 2012 Cold War dogma asserts that mutually assured destruction, however troubling, has worked in averting a nuclear war between the United States and Russia. Lending superficial credence to this idea is the fact the world has not yet been incinerated in a nuclear conflagration. This fact has been cited as vindication of the U.S. government's decision to amass a huge stockpile ...
Labor Outsourcing Is Not the Problem by Sheldon Richman August 10, 2012 President Obama thinks he can score points on Mitt Romney by pointing out that companies acquired by Bain Capital outsourced jobs to other countries. The implication is that there is something unpatriotic in contracting for foreign labor. That is a strange position in this era of globalization, which Obama claims to favor. Romney, a self-described champion of free enterprise, defended ...
Organ Donor Revolution — or Revolt? by Wendy McElroy August 9, 2012 On June 25, the Institute for Justice (IJ) announced a life-saving development. It is now legal to compensate people for supplying bone marrow to those with cancer or blood diseases. The impressive victory took close to three years of legal maneuvering, and yet some commentators expressed the immediate hope that organ donations might open up in a ...
The Lessons of Aurora by Benedict D. LaRosa August 8, 2012 In the wake of the July 20, 2012, massacre at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater, where a gunman killed 12 people and wounded most of the 58 injured, the debate over gun control flared up anew. The Aurora movie theater was a gun-free zone in that patrons were prohibited by local law and by theater policy from carrying concealed (or ...