October 18, 2014

The Left Avows Its Ungodly Love of Filth

Since the beginning of time, the sentient, civilized person has strived to distance himself from filth, and for unarguably rational reasons.  Filth is parasites, dysentery, disease, decay, putrescence – all of which shorten lifespan and in...

October 1, 2014

When a Royal Invalid Comes to Town

The term “public servant” is an absurd juxtaposition of words. Any encounter with law enforcement, the DMV, a building inspector, animal control, code enforcement, school-board official, tax agent, or nearly every other government operati...

August 28, 2013

The Case against School Vouchers

Free-market conservatives are understandably desperate to break the government education monopoly that guarantees an endless cycle of liberal indoctrination and up-whirling mill levies.  To this effect, many see a savior in Milton Friedman and o...

August 26, 2012

Why Free Markets

To exchange for greater benefit is as natural to humans as any innate bodily function.  Exchange needn't be taught or explicated.  No inculcation need occur.  It just happens.  A kindergartener exchanges his juice box for another ...

August 18, 2012

Too Much Ado about China

No country raises more suspicion in America than China.  For one, it's big and it's far away; size and distance arouse suspicion, because size and distance stimulate our imagination to run amok.  Citizens in big, faraway lands inflate into ...

August 7, 2012

Obama's Tech Fallacy

President Obama embraces a philosophy that is the enemy of technological progress.  A simple example demonstrates his fallacy: would a perpetual motion machine be a boon or a bane to society?  Surely it would be a boon, right?  Here's ...

July 30, 2012

The Under-Appreciated Casualties of Aurora, Colorado

The appreciated casualties are manifest: 12 dead, 58 injured -- all shot.  This occurred 20 July 2012 at the Century 16 Theater, operated by Cinemark, at the Town Center at Aurora.  Thanks to the internet, we were kept abreast of every deta...

May 10, 2012

A Nation of Sorry Apologists

"I'm sorry" is one of the sorrier terms in the English language.  "I'm sorry" is repellent.  When uttered, the natural reaction is to flinch away from the one whose lips it passes.  If you want to show the world the degree to which you...

May 5, 2012

Aggregates and Averages, Individuality and Interventionists

John Cowperthwaite, financial secretary of Hong Kong from 1961 to 1971, was the rare bureaucrat: a free-market noninterventionist inured against the hubris of grand economic scheming. Cowperthwaite ventured into Hong Kong in 1941, joining the colonia...

May 4, 2011

The Uniform Reaction to a Thug's Death

It was all a little off-putting, really. Not so much Osama bin Laden's death, but the reaction to it. Of course, we saw the rote recital of "closure" coming a mile a way. Those whose stock in trade is voyeurism and contrived pathos -- journ...

April 13, 2011

Time for the Rich to Shut Up on Taxes

What commonality binds Haim Saban, Penny Pritzker, and Warren Buffett, aside from membership in the billionaire's club?  Guilt, and not the quotidian variety -- unfulfilled potential, disappointing behavior, lost love -- that afflicts most of us...

April 8, 2011

Would Federal Default Be So Bad?

Bill Gross, fixed-income cognoscente and Pacific Investment Management founder, is bearish on U.S. government bonds.  Gross revealed in a recent missive that his fund had dumped Treasury holdings greater than 12-months maturity in February becau...

March 29, 2011

An Unnatural Love Affair

Given the innumerable combinations of psychoses, fetishes, predilections, infatuations, and obsessions that can afflict earth's seven billion human inhabitants, it is within the realm of possibilities that at least one of the seven billion has anthro...

February 26, 2011

Piracy is Tragedy of the Commons

Piracy had at best been a romanticized curiosity to most Americans until two years.  On the rare instances any of us conjured a pirate, the image was mostly a swashbuckling Johnny Depp-type bedecked in tricorns, sporting multiple pistols and kni...

February 24, 2011

Pensioner's Dilemma

"What government touches, government ruins" stands as apodictic a law as any in nature.  To say "touch" is to be magnanimous, because government rarely touches, it inserts -- an iron fist mostly. And where intromission occurs...

February 13, 2011

Caring, Consequences, and the Commonweal

Few terms are more sentimentalized than "I care." When uttered by a charismatic rhetorician, audiences reflexively sigh and coo.  Of course, it's cloying drivel -- the utterance and the sentiment. The truth is "I care" is wor...

December 12, 2010

The Ramsayization of Society

Gordon Ramsay isn't really to blame; he's only the apotheosis in the profusion of the most socially accepted, if not most entertaining, emotion -- anger.  Mr. Ramsay has reproduced anger so many times that it borders on caricature: neck tendons ...

November 20, 2010

Fools and Their Money

"For the love of money is the root of all evil," declares the Bible in Timothy 6:10. It's unfashionable to quote the Bible these days, at least in intellectual circles, where belief in a supreme being has been reduced to Santa Claus and Too...

November 6, 2010

Blinded By Natural Science

For at least the past hundred years, economists have attempted to forge an alliance with the natural sciences. The goal: for economics to develop theories supported by and substantiated with mathematics. The attraction is alluring; mathematics ups th...

October 26, 2010

Yes, We Have Inflation

Deflationphobes rest assured; deflation remains a bluff. The September Producer Price Index showed no sign of price deflation. Over the past twelve months, the PPI has bubbled up a frothy 4 percent, while the Consumer Price Index has leavened its yea...

March 20, 2010

The Politically Correct Libertarian

To those who espouse, support, and promote the Austrian School of libertarianism, Utopia is a Rothbardian world of private property ownership, personal liberty, and exanimate government.  Unfortunately for them, and many others who list pro-libe...