Self-Deception about Medical Care by Sheldon Richman February 15, 2006 Sloppy thinking can make intelligent people say stupid things. Take Christine Cassel. She has been a physician specializing in geriatric medicine for 30 years and recently published Medicare Matters, a brief against privatization of the huge, brittle government program. Interviewed recently on National Public Radio, she made this argument for public support of ...
Why They Hate Us by Jacob G. Hornberger February 13, 2006 When U.S. officials condemn the violence arising out of the anti-Mohammed cartoons published by the European press, they fail to recognize that the anger in the Middle East goes a lot deeper than the adverse reaction to the cartoons reflects. For example, read the transcript of the federal court sentencing ...
Bush Speaks Nonsense on Energy by Sheldon Richman February 10, 2006 Despite the bravado in his State of the Union address, President Bush actually admitted that his efforts in the Middle East are destined to fail. Here’s what he said: “America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.” He then unveiled billions of dollars in new ...
Where Are the Isolationists? by Sheldon Richman February 6, 2006 President Bush’s State of the Union address was one odd speech indeed. Besides his silly statement about our being “addicted to oil” and his messianic declarations in response to the “call of history,” he referred to isolationism four different times. Who favors isolationism? That of course depends on what it means. The ...
The Separation of Economy and State by Jacob G. Hornberger February 1, 2006 Hardly a week goes by without some free-market think tank or foundation’s publishing an analysis of some government program, pointing out its inevitable “waste, fraud, and abuse” and then issuing what has become a standard bromide: “The system needs reform.” This game is, of course, endless because all government ...
Is “the Environment” a Collectivist Idea? by Sheldon Richman February 1, 2006 No issue has been more prominent the last several decades than “the environment.” Almost every day a new environmental “threat” arises, spelling the end of life as we know it, if not literally. We are being poisoned by polluted water and air; man-made carcinogens hide in our food; our ozone protection from the sun is eroding. And then there’s ...
The Most Absurdities per Kilo by James Bovard February 1, 2006 The war on drugs has produced more absurdities per kilo than any other federal policy. Drug warriors have had high-profile belly flop after belly flop. Yet most of the media and the vast majority of American politicians continue to treat this war with deference, if not reverence. One of the biggest farces of the George W. Bush-era war on drugs ...
Democracy, Hypocrisy, and U.S. Foreign Policy by Jacob G. Hornberger February 1, 2006 After singing the praises of democracy all over the world, not to mention bombing, killing, and maiming people in the name of spreading it, the overwhelming win in Palestinian elections by Hamas, which U.S. officials have labeled a terrorist organization, is reminding U.S. officials that democracy sometimes produces results that are ...
The Progressive Era, Part 1: The Myth and the Reality by William L. Anderson February 1, 2006 Part 1 | Part 2 One of the most enduring set of myths from U.S. history comes from the political and social developments in what is called the “Progressive Era,” a period lasting from the late 1800s to the end of World War I. (Of course, one could argue, convincingly, that the Progressive Era never has ended.) ...
The Disastrous World of the New York Subway, Part 1 by Gregory Bresiger February 1, 2006 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 New York City just went through another egregious subway strike. Again. Yet this was a strike of public workers that was never supposed to occur. The workers are covered by the state’s Taylor law, which isn’t much of a law, since the workers repeatedly violate it. (There were ...
Mary Wollstonecraft by Wendy McElroy February 1, 2006 O, why was I born with a different face? Why was I not born like this envious race? Why did Heaven adorn me with bountiful hand, And then set me down in an envious land? William Blake’s poem “Mary” (1803) could have been an epitaph for Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) — a woman born with a “different face” in a society hostile to her ...
The Farcical Definition at the Heart of the War on Terrorism by James Bovard January 30, 2006 A recent denunciation of U.S. government foreign policy offers insights into a paradox of the war of terrorism. On January 24, 2006, the East Timor Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation denounced the U.S. government for backing the 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor. In the following decades, a quarter million East Timorese residents ...