The dangerously open-ended rationale for attacking Libya.
They say that records are made to be broken. President George W. Bush set a record by adding $3.2 trillion to the national debt over the course of his eight years in office. But Barack Obama has already beaten that record with $4.4 trillion in just his first three years in office. People who thoughtlessly give money to panhandlers on the street seem not to realize that this is making installment payments on the degeneration of America. ... MORE
Bucking a national trend of raising cigarette taxes, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Rhode Island have considered reducing theirs, hoping to draw smokers from other states and increase revenue. Supporters argue reducing the tax by a dime would make New Hampshire more competitive with Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts, while opponents say that even if the state experienced higher sales as a result it still would ... MORE
America's ignorance could pose huge problems.
Everyone knows that the unemployment situation is very bad, but the official figures (not surprisingly) understate the problem. In this article I'll outline the severity of the stalled labor market, and explain some of the major causes. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the official civilian unemployment rate in February was 8.9 percent. However, this figure (called U-3) is very misleading in the present ... MORE
I don’t mean to pick on David Brooks, the resident conservative op-ed scribe at the New York Times, and I have no reason to defend President Obama on any count, but I can’t keep silent when I read Brooks assailing Obama for being too “prudent.” "Prudence can sometimes look like weakness…. Prudence is important, but Americans do have an expectation that their president will be the one out front, dominating ... MORE
The gap continues to widen between what President Obama claims to be true about domestic energy production and what Louisianians know is true. With prices at the pump climbing toward $4 a gallon, the President is asking us to believe that his administration supports expanded drilling off the Gulf Coast. Those of us who live there know that nothing could be further from the truth. ... MORE
One key to getting past the race issue in America is to end the war on drugs. John McWhorter says it's the most important thing we could do. Cato's Letter features a lecture by McWhorter in which he calls for an end to the war on drugs. (It's really a war on certain people.) McWhorter, the former Berkeley linguistics professor and now senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, specifically indicts the war on drugs ... MORE
There's a relatively new front in the war against elephantine government and the Obama administration's socialist dreams. It's called The Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011, and it's gotten less attention than it deserves, even in the conservative press. If it becomes law, the bill, which the full House Committee on Energy and Commerce approved 34-19 on Tuesday, would prohibit the federal Environmental Protection Agency ... MORE
Can we avoid natural disasters? Probably not. Can we avoid disastrous economic ignorance? Yes. The disaster in Japan provides yet another tragic illustration of how fallacies permeate the public conversation. First, destruction is not production. It never is, and society isn’t better off because of it. To claim otherwise is to fall victim to the Broken Window Fallacy, a fallacy that was exploded by Frederic Bastiat ... MORE