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.
Any manager of a private trust fund who would dare to spend the funds entrusted to him and replace them with his IOUs would face criminal charges, writes Hans Sennholz. When the U.S. Treasury does it, it is called "creative financing." But there is a price to be paid.
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.
This is how government works: If you can be really egregious at what you do--say you run Amtrak, the Defense or Education departments or, better yet, the SEC--you scream out that there is a dire national need. Then it will be easy to find legislators to turn on the money spigot for you and give you “whatever” you need.
Jefferson’s goal was the preservation of men’s natural rights, but he believed that the best way to reach that was through a strict territorial division of power.
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 burdens imposed upon producers by easy money and their consequent lack of profitability are among the main reasons why there is no significant capital expenditure. The overhang from the 2000 capital-spending boom only partly exacerbates this, since much of the outlay undertaken then was wastefully misallocated and is not germane to the needs of the current economy anyway.
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.
Pity the businessman who hires someone just out of school! Most graduating seniors have lived a lush life in college, after living a lazy life in high school, and a goof-off life before that.
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.
