Politics & Rights

Two new Christmas-themed videos promote (respectively) sound economics and the right to control one’s own wealth. Both videos justly and humorously condemn, through satire, instances of government force. “Deck the Halls with Macro Follies” from EconStories promotes a fake Christmas album with such “hits” as “Income Equals Expenditure,” by John…

Though usually known for his leftist op-eds, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on Sunday made a surprising admission of the failure of a government “antipoverty” program and praised a private charity organization. In his column, Kristof reported that U.S. Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a federal assistance program for low-income…

It felt like Christmas had come early when I got my package of Buckyballs in the mail a few days ago. Buckyballs are small, super-strong spherical magnets made of the rare earth metal neodymium. A set of 216 Buckyballs fits comfortably in the palm of your hand. I stared amazed…

Organ transplant pioneer Dr. Joseph E. Murray died November 26, 2012, in Boston. The New York Times reports that Murray, “who opened a new era of medicine [in 1954] with the first successful human organ transplant, . . . was awarded the [1990] Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.” As…

Fox Business’s Elizabeth MacDonald writes, “Starting January 1, medical-device makers must pay a new 2.3% excise tax on sales, regardless if they make a profit, to raise $30 billion over the next decade to pay for health reform”—that is, ObamaCare. Already, venture capital funding in the medical device industry in the…

Everyone is aware that America faces a financial crisis involving the $16.3 trillion national debt, the impending “fiscal cliff,” and the long-term insolvency of entitlement programs. But America also, and more fundamentally, faces a moral crisis—a crisis that underlies and gives rise to the financial crisis—and we cannot effectively act…

If Republicans cave to the Democrats’ demand to raise taxes on “the rich,” they will have conceded the left's immoral premise that the highest income earners—the so-called one percent—deserve to have their wealth confiscated because they are the wealthiest. [caption id="attachment_5662" align="alignright" width="300"] Image: DonkeyHotey[/caption] What will be the consequences…

I cannot stop the Federal Trade Commission’s persecution of Google, a government action stemming from the antitrust laws that violate the rights of businesses and their customers to act on their own judgment and associate voluntarily. But I can offer Google—and its CEO Larry Page and its employees—the justice of…

The President of the United States said in a public address: Taxes take from everyone a part of his earnings and force everyone to work for a certain part of his time for the government. . . . I want the people of America to be able to work less…

In my recent post “Don’t Regulate the Innocent, Punish the Guilty,” which concerned the proper role of government in a deadly tainted medication case, a correspondent raised the question of “where valid law ends and regulation begins.” It’s a good question. Very briefly: Valid laws are laws that are objectively…