Impeachment Reminder of Our Toxic Foreign Aid by James Bovard April 1, 2020 Foreign aid to Ukraine helped spur the Democrats’ effort to impeach and remove President Trump earlier this year. Ukraine was supposed to be on the verge of great progress until Trump pulled the rug out from under the heroic salvation effort by U.S. government bureaucrats. Unfortunately, Congress has devoted a hundred times more attention to the timing of aid ...
Religion and Education in a Free Society by Laurence M. Vance April 1, 2020 Montgomery County, Maryland, which lies just outside of Washington, D.C., is one of America’s richest and most populous counties. It is also home to the largest school system in Maryland and fourteenth-largest in the United States. For the current school year (2019-2020), the Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) system has 208 schools, more than 165,000 students, more than 24,000 ...
Fifty Years of Statist Policies and Economic Fallacies by Richard M. Ebeling April 1, 2020 It is about fifty years since, as an undergraduate, I took my first economics classes in college. Virtually all my professors were adamant that unrestrained market capitalism was unworkable, and on the way out. Planning, many of them said, was the future for complex societies and economic development. Like “deva vu, all over again,” the same claims are being ...
The Tortured Legacy of the Mexican-American War, Part 1 by Danny Sjursen April 1, 2020 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 I had a horror of the Mexican War ... only I had not the moral courage enough to resign. — Ulysses S. Grant (1879) The phrase “regime change wars” has, of late, taken on profound meaning and stoked massive controversy. ...
Preventing Liberty from Becoming a Coronavirus Fatality by Ted Galen Carpenter March 30, 2020 Public attitudes about the coronavirus outbreak increasingly exhibit features of a collective panic. That development creates the danger that government measures designed to deal with a very real public health problem may lead to enormous collateral damage both to the economy and the freedoms that Americans take for granted. Governments at all levels have taken ever more extreme (even outrageous) ...
The Wrong Solution to Welfare Marriage Penalties by Laurence M. Vance March 27, 2020 The typical wedding ceremony, reception, and honeymoon can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Although all of it may be paid for up front, soon afterward, or during the first year of marriage, some couples continue to pay throughout their married life because of the marriage penalty in the tax code. A marriage penalty or bonus results when the combined ...
Leaving People Alone Is the Best Way to Beat the Coronavirus by Richard M. Ebeling March 24, 2020 The world has rapidly moved into a seemingly aggressive paternalistic planning mode in the face of the Coronavirus crisis. Many voices are heard to say that personal and economic liberties must be restricted or even temporarily banned. At the same time, many of those same voices are saying that at a moment like this government spending, for all intents ...
How the Police State Will Deal with a Coronavirus Outbreak by John W. Whitehead March 20, 2020 “Fear is a primitive impulse, brainless as hunger, and because the aim of horror fiction is the production of the deepest kinds of fears, the genre tends to reinforce some remarkably uncivilized ideas about self-protection. In the current crop of zombie stories, the prevailing value for the beleaguered survivors is a sort of siege mentality, ...
To Kill Markets Is the Worst Possible Plan by Richard M. Ebeling March 19, 2020 Momentous events usually leave strong memories on those who have lived through them, and those memories often become passed on to later generations in the form of historical interpretations of why and what had happened in the past. This has certainly been so in the cases of the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Civil Rights Movement, the ...
The Money-Printing Gods Have Failed by David Stockman March 17, 2020 Hooray! Finally even the robo-machines and day traders are puking, not BTFDing. Today’s 3,000 Dow Point Dump says even they have had enough of the craven dolts who occupy the Eccles Building. You do not need an PhD in economics—or even a night school survey course—to see that COVID-19 is temporary supply side shock which 0.05% money market rates are powerless ...
Tradition and Why the Russians are Who They Are by Richard M. Ebeling March 13, 2020 It is often said to be misplaced and inappropriate to use stereotypes when talking about people or entire nations. To do so is unfair to the wide diversity that exists among the individual citizens of any country over time or during any particular period of time. And this is no doubt true, but, nonetheless, there are such things as ...
Closing Time by Laurence M. Vance March 12, 2020 The Democratic National Convention — where delegates of the Democratic Party choose their party’s nominees for president and vice president — will be held July 13-16 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at the Fiserv Forum (where the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks play). This will be the first time that a major political party convention has been held in Milwaukee, which was among ...