Sparking a thirst for liberty? Though the liberal media and leftist Hollywood are wrapping themselves in The Hunger Games, the book series' pro-individualism, anti-socialist/communist/totalitarianism message has thus far eluded them -- but the legions of children reading the books are getting the message. When I learned that my teenage sons -- macho young lads ... MOREFriday, March 30, 2012
William Ward: The Unseen Message Of The Hunger Games
Sparking a thirst for liberty? Though the liberal media and leftist Hollywood are wrapping themselves in The Hunger Games, the book series' pro-individualism, anti-socialist/communist/totalitarianism message has thus far eluded them -- but the legions of children reading the books are getting the message. When I learned that my teenage sons -- macho young lads ... MORE
Shikha Dalmia: Forget About Income Inequality
It's economic opportunities that will help the poor. Reading David Grusky’s essay is a strange experience: with the wrong diagnosis, he gets half of the right cure. Grusky maintains that the central problem confronting America is income inequality. He argues that the root cause of this malady lies in how rich people acquire their pre-tax income—by rigging the ... MORES.F. GATE: Cops Pose As Bunnies To Write Seat Belt Tickets
And you thought bunnies were not in the rodent family? Officers in West Palm Beach, Fla., have come up with a diabolical new use for a giant bunny costume. According to the Palm Beach Post, a cop dressed in the costume Wednesday stood in a median with a sign that read “Have a safe, hoppy holiday. Buckle up!” While bemused motorists waved ... MORE & VIDEOJacob Laksin: Obama's World Bank Pick Hates Capitalism
The president shows his true colors. Imagine if President Obama appointed radical Noam Chomsky, who has denounced capitalism as a “murderously destructive catastrophe,” to head up a committee on economic growth. That’s less of a stretch than it may seem, considering Obama’s nominee to head the World Bank, current Dartmouth College ... MORESteve Chapman: Toward The Conquest Of World Poverty
Even communist eventually have to make peace with reality. Progress can often be defined as the stuff that happens while humanity is preoccupied with everything that is going wrong. On the surface, the first decade of the 21st century looks like an ugly parade of terrorism, war and economic convulsion. But in one important sense it stands as ... MORESteven Greenhut: Californians Love Taxes
But they don't like government reform. A funny thing happened after California officials announced the shutdown of 70 state parks in the face of an estimated $33 million in budget cutbacks: Private companies, wealthy donors, nonprofit organizations and local governments came up with ways to keep many parks open. Eleven parks have already been ... MORE
Thursday, March 29, 2012
George F. Will: Economic Liberty Needs Protection
Using regulations as a weapon. Ali Bokhari, now 39, emigrated from Pakistan in 2000 and eventually settled in Nashville, Tenn., as a taxi driver, and soon experienced a quintessentially American itch, a nagging sense that “I cannot grow.” But he had an idea: “I can build a better business model for something Nashville has been missing.” He built it, and now knows ... MOREJohn Stossel: Big Government Makes Us Small
Know-it-all politicians are job killers. Politicians say they "create jobs." In fact, only the private sector generates the information needed to create real, productive jobs. Since this current post-recession job recovery is the slowest in 80 years, you'd think that even know-it-all politicians would want to sweep away the labyrinth of government regulations that ... MOREAndrew Napolitano: Is The CIA In Your Kitchen?
The right to be left alone under relentless assault. If this question had been asked by a fictional character in a spy thriller, it might intrigue you, but you wouldn't imagine that it could be true in reality. If the Constitution means what it says, you wouldn't even consider the plausibility of an affirmative answer. After all, the Fourth Amendment to the ... MOREThomas Sowell: Back To The Future?
What lies at the bottom of slippery slopes. When a 1942 Supreme Court decision that most people never heard of makes the front page of the New York Times in 2012, you know that something unusual is going on. What makes that 1942 case -- Wickard v. Filburn -- important today is that it stretched the federal government's power so far that the Obama ... MOREChristopher Chantrill: The Science Of Half-Baked Ideas
Saving the planet from second-rate scientists. The more we learn about climate science, the more we learn what a shabby, back-of-the-envelope business it is. Dr. Michael Mann, the climate science poster boy who simplified the global climate of the last millennium into a hockey stick, just came out with a book to remind us how anyone who disagrees with ... MOREDanielle Sullivan: Political Correctness Runs Amok In N.Y.
Words banned as protection from "unpleasant emotions." In an extreme case of political correctness, New York City has recently created a list of words that will be banned from New York State tests. You might be thinking that perhaps the words might be slanderous or even elude to atrocities, like slavery, and while words pertaining to slavery have ... MOREWednesday, March 28, 2012
Everybody's A Target In The American Surveillance State
by John W. Whitehead. In the small town of Bluffdale, Utah, not far from bustling Salt Lake City, the federal government is quietly erecting what will be the crown jewel of its surveillance empire. Rising up out of the desert landscape, the Utah Data Center (UDC)—a $2 billion behemoth designed to house a network of computers, satellites, and phone lines that ... MOREGene Healy: Busybodies Of The World, Unite!
Nannies seeking to deny you pleasure for your own good. A smoke, a drink, and maybe a bag of chips in the privacy of your own home—they're the guilty pleasures of life for many of us. But it's increasingly hard to escape those who want to deny them to you—for your own good. To take one small but irritating example, this Wednesday, the city council of ... MOREBrian Phillips: Steve Jobs Versus Barney Frank
Steve Jobs and Barney Frank are very different men: Jobs is a tech-savvy entrepreneur; Frank is a stodgy politician. Jobs is West coast; Frank is East coast. Jobs is easy to like; Frank is easy to loathe. But the differences go beyond the obvious. Steve Jobs creates delightful products that consumers willingly and eagerly buy. Barney Frank issues edicts... MOREKatie Kieffer: Gays, Females And Equals
Gays are not merely bodies desiring homosexual action. Women are not walking uteruses. Gays and women are dignified human beings with reason, spirit and individuality. The Constitution considers Americans with respect to our humanity and citizenship, not our sexuality. So when politicians and sexual minority activists lobby for gay and female ... MORERobert Knight: Taming The EPA Monster
Supreme Court ruling strikes a blow in ongoing battle. Slowly, inexorably, the monster is being driven back to its lair. Its days of terrorizing villagers may soon be over. I wish I were talking about the federal government, but it’s the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), better known as the Environmental Protection-or-else Agency. ... MOREJohn Stossel: Everyone Out Of The Pool
More money for lawyers! Every year, federal government bureaucrats work hard to come up with some 80,000 pages of new and proposed regulations. That's a lot of pages -- 23 feet high if you stack them in one pile. One rule that just went effect, which you can find by flipping to page 56,236 of the 2010 regulations, will require all hotels with a pool ... MORE
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Mark Steyn: The Sun Also Sets
National debt to enter its "sudden" phase. I was in Australia earlier this month and there, as elsewhere on my recent travels, the consensus among the politicians I met (at least in private) was that Washington lacked the will for meaningful course correction, and that, therefore, the trick was to ensure that, when the behemoth goes over the cliff, you’re not ... MOREWalter E Williams: Why Racial Profiling Exists
Human beings do not have god-like insight. Right now, there isn't enough known about the circumstances surrounding the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a black, by George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old part-Hispanic, during his neighborhood watch tour in an Orlando, Fla., suburb. If evidence emerges that Zimmerman's actions were not ... MOREDoug Hornig: What If You Could Put On A Thinking Cap?
Could a nine-volt battery be better than coffee? "Flow." Although it can be annoying difficult to define with any precision and virtually impossible to measure objectively, everyone intuitively knows what it is, and most people have experienced some form of it at one time or another. It's that state of effortless concentration that leads to superior performance, either ... MOREAnthony W. Hager: Pity The Poor Working Chump
50 years worth of war on poverty has produced little benefit, save for a few valuable lessons. For instance, we've learned about the valiant struggle the disadvantaged wage against capitalist oppression. The homeless, the hungry, and the downtrodden are victims of free-market greed. But there's one participant in Washington's war on poverty who's routinely ignored... MOREStar Parker: ObamaCare Undermines Founding Principles
When we lose freedom, we lose everything. As the Supreme Court starts its three day marathon to hear arguments on the constitutionality of Obamacare, let’s be clear about their challenge, and ours. The challenge before the Court, a challenge it has often not lived up to, is to keep perspective that applying our constitution is not about splitting ... MOREJacob Sullum: The Freakin' FCC
The incomprehensible ban on broadcast indecency. My daughters, who range in age from 5 to 18, watch TV programs and movies on DVDs, on smart phones, streaming from Netflix through our Wii, on video websites, on our DVR, and on demand from AT&T U-verse. They do not know or care what “broadcast television” is, and they ... MOREMonday, March 26, 2012
Robert Goldberg: Drugs Of Choice
Some balk at FDA flirtation with medical freedom. Next week, the FDA will be holding a hearing about letting consumers buy commonly used prescription drugs without a prescription, signaling FDA recognition that empowering consumers to make health care choices is the key to better health at a lower cost. The agency’s proposal is a refreshing ... MORE
Paul Venezia: Your Privacy Is A Sci-Fi Fantasy
Welcome to the twilight zone. The assault on personal privacy has ramped up significantly in the past few years. From warrantless GPS tracking to ISP packet inspection, it seems that everyone wants to get in on the booming business of clandestine snooping -- even blatant prying, if you consider reports of employers demanding Facebook passwords ... MOREEmily Dolhansky: Young & Disillusioned With Government
Government too involved in citizen's life. The years between adolescence and adulthood can be among the most confusing. Plagued with conflicting ideas, rebellious tendencies, and peer pressure, some teenagers turn inward and develop anti-government attitudes turning to radical groups such as skinheads and anarchists. For years, these groups have ... MOREKaren Harned: Top 5 Freedoms Threatened By ObamaCare
Among many others. The U.S. Supreme Court will begin hearing arguments in NFIB vs. Sebelius, the cardinal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare, on Monday, March 26th. As an indication of its importance, the Justices have allotted six hours for arguments ... MORE
VIDEO: The Student Loan Crisis
Be afraid. Be very afraid. Because you see, another financial crisis looms. Just as there were millions of people given mortgages they couldn't afford, a million graduates are about to discover they have a useless degree they couldn't afford.
Brian Koenig: HUD Awards Millions To Leftist Groups
Racist group La Raza among recipients. The Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) is doling out $42 million in federal funding for housing counseling grants to 468 local, regional, and national organizations. Intended to prevent foreclosures and assist new home buyers, the grants will offer free assistance on foreclosure avoidance as well as educate ... MOREAnthony Randazzo: No, This Is Not A Housing Recovery
Those saying we're in a housing recovery are wrong. We have not reached the bottom of the housing market. I hate to say it. I really do hate to always be the pessimist. And I don’t say this because I’ve been steeped in a couple decades' worth of bitterness as a Red Sox fan. The numbers are just not adding up to recovery. It is all the rage these ... MORE
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