Articles

Two years ago today, President Obama signed into law the rights-violating “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” also known as ObamaCare. This is a good time to visit and share the various articles from the The Objective Standard’s Health Care page, where you’ll find vital essays such as Moral Health…

The Supreme Court helped protect property rights yesterday by deciding unanimously that Mike and Chantell Sackett can legally challenge the EPA’s demand that they cease work on building their new home. The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), which represented the Sacketts, announced the victory. A Reason TV video summarizes the case.…

The Philippine government has announced that peace talks with the Islamist separatist group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), is nearing a stalemate, as the MILF is demanding its own autonomous Islamic state within the Philippines. The problem here is not the stalemate, but the negotiations. The MILF is a…

In a recent blog post, I lauded Greg Smith’s op-ed chastising Goldman Sachs for losing its focus on the long-range goal of making money with its clients and shifting its focus to a shortsighted approach of making money off its clients. I also said that I thought the media had…

Here’s the problem: Sending people through warehouses to retrieve goods consumes a lot of time and resources. Here’s the solution: Build robots that bring the shelves to the people. That’s what Kiva Systems did. As one of the company’s videos explains, its “robots deliver shelves of inventory to ‘pick’ stations,”…

The online edition of the Spring issue of TOS has been posted to our website; the print edition will be mailed in the first week of April; and the e-book and audio versions will be accessible to subscribers beginning March 25 and 30 respectively. The contents of the Spring issue…

The state of Georgia “paid at least $355 million in subsidies over the past four years” to “subpar” day care centers, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports. In what ways are these centers subpar? Among other things, staffers hit children with rulers, encourage children to hit one another, and fail to notify parents…

Surprise, surprise: “A new study has failed to find evidence that psychic ability is real,” reports Live Science. But we didn’t need a “new study” to figure that out. The background is that, last year, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published Daryl Bem’s article purporting to show “retroactive…

In her paper "The Teacher Accountability Debate," Diane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University, took critical aim at a new Chetty-Friedman-Rockoff public school study. The study, she says, purports to prove a direct correlation between teacher quality and the likelihood of student personal and financial success in…

To Americans, it is almost unimaginable that a country still exists where hundreds of thousands of people are slaves. Yet in the impoverished western African nation of Mauritania, slavery is widespread, CNN reports in an extraordinary set of articles. Americans rightly express outrage over such injustice. Slavery—aka involuntary servitude—violates the…

In a recent interview with Book Page, novelist Adam Johnson offered observations of North Korea that capture the consequences of collectivist ideals taken seriously. Johnson travelled to the dictatorship while writing his latest book and was struck by the stark conformity and fear he found there: There are four shoe styles…

Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs suffered its latest in a series of public relations problems on Wednesday when executive Greg Smith quit the firm and published his grievances against it in the New York Times. Smith accused the firm of abandoning its client-focused culture—a culture of trust, of long-term…

For one thing, both advocate censorship. Fonda wants to use the power of the federal government to shut down Rush Limbaugh’s radio broadcasts (as I’ve discussed); Santorum wants to use the same power to shut down internet pornography. Both Fonda and Santorum are enemies of freedom of speech. As Steven…

The Encyclopaedia Britannica is dead. Long live the Encyclopaedia Britannica! The encyclopedia’s publisher has announced that, in response to the ongoing digital revolution, it will discontinue its printed version and provide exclusively digital content. The publisher’s decision marks a new era for the encyclopedia, and more broadly it marks a…

Two U.S. senators a few weeks ago went to Cuba to discuss the release of jailed American, Alan Gross, with Cuban dictator Raul Castro. Gross “is serving a 15-year jail term for spiriting satellite and other communications equipment onto the island while on a USAID-funded democracy-building program. Cuba considers the…