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Noteworthy news and views from the week ending April 28, 2012 Washington’s Spending Problem The Institute for Humane Studies has published a series of short videos on free-market economics (and other subjects) at LearnLiberty.org. The latest is titled, “Does Government Have a Revenue or Spending Problem?” The narrator of the…

Texas chemical maker Celanese has developed a technology to make ethanol from natural gas and coal, both plentiful in America, and is building plants in Texas and China to manufacture it. “If it works,” notes Forbes columnist Christopher Helman, it “will revolutionize the fuel industry.” Great news? Yes—but maybe only for…

Al Armendariz, a regional administrator of the EPA, described his “philosophy of enforcement” as follows: It was kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they would…

Now through May 11, save 20% on all gift subscriptions to The Objective Standard. This is a great time to buy graduation and birthday gifts for your active-minded friends and relatives, as we deliver gift notifications on the day of your choice. And because subscriptions are available in Print, E-Book,…

Where has all the innovation gone? Although Facebook now has nearly a billion users, and most of us now have pocket computers with instant access to a world of information, in the last few decades innovation has, in significant ways, slowed to a crawl. In a recent talk, “On Getting…

The Democrats, having made so-called “fairness” a key campaign issue in this year’s election, engineered a symbolic Senate vote on the so-called “Buffet Rule”—a special, higher income tax rate on the “rich.” As expected, it was defeated. But the Democrats’ assault on the rich is not mere political gamesmanship. It is…

Yesterday the environmentalists “celebrated” Earth Day, a day devoted to curbing human production and consumption, which means curbing human life. Those of us who love our lives, on the other hand, celebrate using the Earth to live and prosper, for we as humans live fundamentally by using our rational minds…

Marxism is “good in theory but not in practice,” many claim. Or, it was “misapplied” by the murderous regimes that slaughtered some 100 million people, others say. Neither claim is correct, argues historian C. Bradley Thompson in a recent talk delivered at the Foundation for Economic Education. Rather, Thompson shows,…

Noteworthy news and views from the week ending April 21, 2011 The Antritrust Assault on Apple Discussing the government’s antitrust action against Apple, an attorney for the company said, “We believe that this is not an appropriate case against us and we would like to validate that.” Calling the government’s…

An informative video from the Foundation for Economic Education features Scott Beaulier discussing economic freedom in Africa. Beaulier focuses on two countries, Botswana and Zimbabwe. “Botswana since 1965 has been one of the most rapidly growing countries in the world averaging more than 7 percent growth per year,” and the…

In 1984, then-Colorado Governor Dick Lamm infamously said, “We've got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts and everything else like that and let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.” Though Lamm has long claimed that he…

How many executive agencies does it take to “regulate” hydraulic fracturing, the revolutionary process of harvesting natural gas (as well as oil) largely responsible for saving America’s economy? According to Barack Obama’s new executive order, it takes fourteen—plus a potentially unlimited number of “such other agencies or offices as the…

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) is calling for the FDA to impose new regulations that would limit caffeine levels of energy drinks, on the grounds that consuming large quantities of caffeine has “health consequences.” What food or beverage consumed in excess would not cause “health consequences”? Tuna contains mercury, eating…

I will never forget a lesson I learned years ago interning in Washington, DC as a young, naive student. One of my jobs was to evaluate the transportation budget. I was shocked to discover that the Senators on the committee managed to add a variety of spending projects for their…

One perversity of modern American culture is the propensity of some to treat totalitarian mass murderers as “cool” kitsch. Consider, for example, the love affair of many leftist college students with the totalitarian and mass-murderer Che Guevara. Recently, when I attended the conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education,…