The Supreme Court will soon issue its decision in response to Obamacare litigation. It’s anyone’s guess how this will turn out, and that’s a tragedy. A plain reading of the Constitution gives no authority to the federal government to administer a vast enforcement apparatus that profoundly affects everyone’s life and economic well being of the …
Do you notice a pattern when dealing with any aspect of the government at nearly any level? We all have. There is a certain cast of mind at work here. This is my attempt to frame it up and identify its main features. Experience shows that if something is going to go really wrong, predictably …
Some writings have turned the world upside down. They toppled tyrannies. They sparked revolutions and ennobled humanity. The Magna Carta. Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” Thomas Jefferson’s “Declaration of Independence.” Great scholarship can do the same. In the 20th century, there was Ludwig von Mises’s “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.” This 1920 essay astonished the …
I was just reading about how the median wage is lower today than it was a decade ago. Ouch. The cause, says this article, is inflation. Inflation? That’s interesting. Hardly anyone talks about that anymore. I can’t remember the last time I read a mainstream article that so much as mentioned it as a problem. …
Digital technology is reinventing our whole world, in service of you and me. It’s free enterprise on steroids. It’s bypassing the gatekeepers and empowering each of us to invent our own civilization for ourselves, according to our own specifications. The promise of the future is nothing short of spectacular — provided that those who lack …
It’s fashionable to put down commercial culture, but, when you think about it, this makes no sense. Commerce is the driving force of human progress, in more ways that we often realize. Americans in the 19th century knew this and celebrated this. Our commercial culture was a source of pride and the envy of the …
Sorry, but I dreaded my visit to the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich. It had to be done, if only to see what thoughts it would inspire. As it turns out, I’m happy this institution exists. It is a real tribute to a great American who would have been …
Growing up in the Cold War, we tended to look at Russia as a nightmare slave society that was utterly and completely foreign to anything Americans knew or could possibly know absent some kind of invasion. If I were to summarize the propaganda message of the time it would be this: We are free, they …
“The private economy is doing fine.” Those were the words of President Obama that unleashed a torrent of political hysteria. The Romney campaign immediately blasted him for suggesting that things are just hunky-dory, and he was right to do so, given the terrible slog we’ve been through and given that there seems to be no …
Shanghai’s leading code slinger, David Veksler, who is also a good friend and long-time collaborator on all things digital, has come up with something wonderfully subversive. It is an encrypted messaging service that takes a giant step toward making cryptography available to the rest of us. It is called cryptabyte.com. It is the first, easy-to-use, …