Big Government

In addition to sobering tales of government malfeasance, a new work by Roberts and Stratton offers us a theory explaining why these abuses occur: review by Robert Murphy 

Strange how closely the outlines of Gore's plan track Carter's during the 1970s energy crisis, eschewing market prices for central dictate. 

Watching Joel Klein of the Antitrust Division on television, speaking about the dangers that Microsoft poses to the public, calls to mind a passage from Martin van Creveld's The Rise and Decline of the State: "Born in sin, the bastard offspring of declining autocracy and bureaucracy run amok, the state is a giant wielded by pygmies.

The sequencing of the human genome is yet another victory for private enterprise over central planning, writes Lew Rockwell.

Billions are dolled out to scholars every year, but only to those who are willing to accept--or least not contradict--the government's ideological assumptions.

Hate crimes on campus that turn out to be trumped up excuses for political crackdowns. 

E.O. Wilson of Harvard University is among the world's most esteemed biologists. An authority on ants, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes and coined the term "sociobiology," outraging his peers by suggesting that human behavior has some relation to human nature. Sadly, these triumphs seem to have inspired him to lay down the law on everything—a trend that culminated about a year ago in his book Consilience, which purports to unify all branches of science, religion, ethics, and art into a recipe for human happiness.

When one thinks of "death by government," either those killed by armed members of the state or the millions who have perished in the vast gulags and prisons run by governmental agents usually come to mind. However, government has demonstrated far more creativity in eliminating people than just by shooting or starving them to death. It also has successfully drowned them while destroying property to the tune of billions of dollars. Here are a couple of horror stories.

Like a man who douses a large pile of rags with gasoline and then warns of a fire hazard, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has begun issuing dire warnings of impending inflation after orchestrating several years of explosive monetary growth.