The DVD player crashed last night. The disc wouldn’t load. Clearly, the player had gone the way of all flesh. With great reluctance, it was off to Wal-Mart to replace this appliance for the first time in perhaps 10 years. While I was there, I figured I would get a case for my iPhone. Much …

Do you know the amazing story of Lysander Spooner? He lived from 1808 to 1887. His first great battle was taking on the post office monopoly. In the 1840s, he was like most people at the time: fed up with the high prices and bad service. But as an intellectual and entrepreneur, he decided to do something about it. He started the American Letter Mail Company, and his letter business gave the government some serious competition.

The word “equality” is being rammed down our throats every day, with special focus on the so-called “income gap.” The presumption is that we should all denounce the gap, work to eliminate it and embrace perfect equality as an ideal. It’s true that inequality is growing, but the focus on that alone is sheer folly. …

There are occasions in American life – and they come too often these days – when you want to scream: “what the heck has happened to this country?!” Everyone encounters events that strike a particular nerve, some egregious violations of the norms for a free country that cut very deeply and personally. We wonder: do …

There was a brief moment of joy at the news that retailers hired 206,000 new people in November. But only one day later, the other shoe dropped: Jobless claims are, again, past the 400,000 mark — meaning that the unemployment problem is, overall, getting worse, not better. The broadest measure of unemployment exceeds 17%. It …

Capitalism is supposed to be a system of profit and loss, but in recent years, central bankers and central planners seem to have forgotten the part about losses. The push and pull every lever on the control board to try to make losses for the big players go away, which can be a bit like …

How much more ridiculous can the US Postal Service get? This you will not believe. It has embarked on a public relations campaign to get people to stop sending so much email and start licking more stamps. This is how it is dealing with its $10 billion loss last year. Meanwhile, rather than offering better …

There are occasions in American life – and they come too often these days – when you want to scream: “what the heck has happened to this country?!” Everyone encounters events that strike a particular nerve, some egregious violations of the norms for a free country that cut very deeply and personally. We wonder: do …

We’ve all visited Taco Bell a thousand times – 2 billion of us at least once every year – but now I’ve taken the time to examine why it is we love this place so much. Let’s just start with the obvious thing: the food. It is, of course, wonderful and full of varied textures: …

The Occupy protesters imagine that they stand in a great tradition of American radicalism, willing to stand up to the man and risk arrest in order to achieve their goals. The most obvious case of such a mass movement would be the anti-war protests of the 1960s. They started small and grew and grew until …

Do you want higher taxes? There is an easy answer. Pay more. No one is stopping you. You can overpay to the tax authorities. There is even a check box on the form, as I recall. Give to this charity you find worthy! No government in the history of the world has turned down money …