Brazil, which is so blessed by nature and by an entrepreneurial population with one of the highest rates of self-employment in the world, has been kept down by a misleading ideology. Antony Mueller explains the political effects of embracing Auguste Comte, an embrace which no financial bailout can fix.
Let us repeat the following: Bill Clinton did not give us an era of permanent prosperity. Nor did his administration present the picture of "fiscal restraint." His administration created the economic boom that turned to bust, and now it is George Bush's turn to make a bad situation worse. William Anderson explains.
Terrorists killed nearly three thousand people on September 11, 2001, but more than three thousand died in the year 2001 waiting for a kidney transplant. Mark Thornton reports that these deaths are largely avoidable, via a market for organs.
In aiding drought-striken Canadian farmers, insurance providers can succeed where the state has failed. It is but a bit more evidence that private enterprise is more productive than the central planning of any government program, even those designed to create rain.
The show put on in Manhattan the other day was unnecessary, in fact or in law, says James Ostrowski. "Let John Rigas answer in court his actions, if he is convicted, but making a 78-year-old, ex-combat infantryman in World War II the scapegoat for a failing administration and failing economy leaves a bad taste in my mouth."
Special-interest-group pleading often tries to hide behind supposedly economic arguments. It is important to debunk such arguments as they arise so that the interest group politics can be seen for what it is. In the spirit of Bastiat's Economic Sophisms, Gene Callahan offers the following.
The same politicians who cannot remember the names of major corporations pretend to understand accounting while they are preening before the television cameras, writes James Sheehan. If these solons really knew how misleading corporate accounting was, surely they would have acted to correct the problem before now.
The combination of collapsed pensions and accounting scandal is operating like the collapse of a dam, unleashing a torrent, not of water, but of hatred--hatred of capitalism and its most visible and valuable representatives: big businessmen. George Reisman counters propaganda with analysis.
Don't want to press a claim to vindicate your own rights? Never mind, a bureaucrat will decide whether the "public interest" requires a claim to be brought on your behalf. David Dieteman examines the expanding power of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
