Nothing starts a fistfight like the health-care debate. The market for what is just a basic service has been contorted and mangled by government intervention for more than a century. The average person wouldn’t know a free-market health care system if they saw one. “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” must include health care, …

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 …

Those of us in our 50s grew up going to the movies. But only occasionally does Hollywood take its eye off the 2 to 24 age group to make movies about something other than vampires, superheroes and animated whatever. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is different. It is a sweet story acted by a stellar …

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 …

Fed Chair Ben Bernanke continues to stand on a stack of Lord Keynes’ General Theory and proclaim that the world needs low interest rates to fill the gap in aggregate demand and bring prosperity to our times. “The reason to keep rates low isn’t to accommodate congressional fiscal policy,” Bernanke responded during a recent congressional …

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, …

Many people these days openly express regret about the digital age. I find their complaints vacuous: They say we are losing the art of human contact, but most of us have never been more in touch with actual humans They say we are losing sight of the highest pursuits, yet the digital age has brought …

My link to my family past is a photograph taken in dusty, desolate West Texas, the one in which my grandmother on my father’s side is seated upfront in a child’s chair. She looks to be about 5 years old, which would date the image as 1920. Behind her are her mother and father, with …

The financial pages and popular culture are often strangely aligned. For example, many young people today are consumed with the seeming emergence of a zombie apocalypse. Evidence seems to be everywhere. I dare not present any of the details. Too gross. Plus, as a grown-up, I’m a skeptic of the whole zombie apocalypse theory. We …

I never tire of looking out the windows of airplanes. For all of human history until just about the day before yesterday, no living person saw the world like this. People could climb up to the top of mountains and see the valleys below. But to see that whole view looking straight down was the …

Economic trends today are a litany of awful: high personal debt, stratospheric government debt, persistent trade deficits, declining living standards, government out of control, cycles of bubbles, zero return on savings, unemployment, and the ever-higher cost of living. Everyone complains about these all the time. They make it hard to live a normal life. They …

There’s a national park close to my house that has a large lake and all the swimming accoutrements left over from the 1970s. It’s a nightmare for any “safety Nazi.” The water is very deep. A diving board is very high and slippery, even slightly broken. There is no lifeguard on duty. If you dive …

“I just joined the Club!” That’s the whole content of an email I received from a very old friend who is very special to me. He is speaking of the Spy Briefing Club, the startup digital literary city created by Spy Briefing Books. I credit this writer for (inadvertently) training me in an important aspect …

Someone asked me the other day if I believe in conspiracies. Well, sure. Here’s one. It is called the political system. It is nothing if not a giant conspiracy to rob, trick and subjugate the population. People participate in the hope of making our lives better, or at least curbing the damage government does. Yet …

What’s great about POM Wonderful? Sure, this pomegranate juice tastes great. POM is one of the few drinks that seems to have the same scrunch-up-your-mouth effect that you get with a bold dry red wine. When I was a kid, it didn’t exist. Like everything wonderful in this world, it comes to us because of …

The great recession continues in so many ways but online commerce is booming as never before, increasing in the last quarter of 2011 at the fastest rates in six years. Before you know it, the retail side alone will account for $300 billion in sales per year. We click and pay, and if it’s not …

You might have noticed that lots of people are really down on the so-called 1%. It drives many people, especially politicians, absolutely bonkers that there are lots of people out there sitting on millions, billions. Populists imagine that these people do nothing but hoard and count and let out menacing laughs about the advantages they …