Since 1997, the federal government's office space has expanded by 280 million square feet. The average American family homestead is 2,100 square feet. The massive Empire State building fills 2.1 million feet. Thus, in only five years the federal government's physical size has grown by 134,000 single family homes or 90 Empire State Buildings.
The socialist left of Britain has targeted the House of Lords for radical reform and reconstruction. Alberto Mingardi defends the institution which is, despite its problems, something of a check on government power--at least that's been its traditional role. Democratic reform can only make the House of Lords more docile.
Arthur Andersen's transgressions have opened the doors to unbridled regulatory madness, writes Karen De Coster. The effect of legislation (like CARTA) will be to replace the oversight bodies that currently watch over the accounting profession with regulators who will do an even worse job of it.
I had been waiting for the neocon reaction to the spectacular new Lucas film, Star Wars, Part 2: Attack of the Clones. Here we have an aggressive allegory of the current American problem (actually a problem that dates back, perhaps, two centuries): a once-free Republic has become an increasingly evil Empire. As the Empire grows it both inspires and foments rebellion, here and abroad, which provides a further excuse for consolidating power in the center.
In a recent article, New York Times writer Paul Krugman puts out a clever analysis of state demographics. He alleges that the pro-Bush states have more crime, divorce, single moms and net-tax eaters than the pro-Gore states. Krugman's analytic knife, however, doesn’t cut deeply enough to get to the truth of the matter.
The modern state, by its very nature, is incompetent, self-serving, mendacious, unresponsive, irresponsible, provocative, bellicose, and deadly. Above all, it is unaccountable. Just ask yourself what would happen to a private security firm that permitted a September 11 kind of disaster, even without foreknowledge. Let's just say it wouldn’t get a raise.
In the 1930s, the National Bureau of Economic Research introduced the economic-indicators approach as a way of capturing early warnings regarding upcoming recession or prosperity. The indicators approach is based on a view that it is possible to ascertain the state of an economic business cycle by monitoring economic data, regardless of what the nature of the causes of the business cycle are. Despite the simplicity of this approach, it does not always work, writes Frank Shostak.
It was only a matter of time before the Feds realized that political capital could be created from the Enron mess. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is now investigating all electricity sellers for evidence of pricing schemes employed during California’s energy crisis. In true Soviet-like fashion, the FERC has issued a deadline by which suspected firms must “admit or deny” their complicity in engaging in spurious pricing schemes during the time period.
Despite the global changes since the breakdown of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s leadership continues to bank on a centrally planned economy as a viable way into the future and to maintain that it is not the inefficiency of the socialist system but primarily the U.S.-American blockade that is the prime culprit in creating Cuba's economic problems.
Many consider Walt Whitman America's greatest poet, and his Leaves of Grass the most influential poetry volume in American literature. But Whitman's poetic celebration of individual freedom is not limited to his poetry. It is also reflected in the all-but-overlooked prose he penned during his extensive career as a journalist and editor.
