Will Rogers' sense of humor can help keep our spirit of liberty alive by openly ridiculing what is in fact ridiculous about how government really operates. His humor gave free rein to his First Amendment freedom to criticize our government--using his wit, and the threat of public embarrassment that went with it--to keep politicians and bureaucrats in their place.
The U.S. Congress, divided almost evenly between the two political parties, is deadlocked on many issues, but the President and Congress surprisingly are in friendly accord in matters of government expenditures, writes Hans F. Sennholz. The boosts surpass even President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society spending initiatives some 30 years ago.
George Leef, in a review of Reassessing the Presidency, asks us to imagine the equivalent of the Academy Awards for American presidents. We have just gotten to the big moment. "And the Oscar for Greatest President goes to...Martin Van Buren?"
The fame of this book's author baffles me. Professor Robert Dahl, now retired, was long ensconced in the Political Science Department of Yale University.
What is essential for us today is to continue the research, the writing, the advocacy for sound money, for a dollar that is as good as gold, for a monetary system that is separate from the state. It is a beautiful vision indeed, writes Lew Rockwell, one in which the people and not the government and its connected interest groups maintain control of their money and its safe keeping.
The main victims at the World Trade Center were, after all, working for the private sector. They were traders and merchants, people dedicated to economic enterprise. In an ironic tribute to their value, these people were targeted because the terrorists hoped to cripple the US economy. It would appear that the terrorists understood something that even our own elites do not understand.
Newport, Rhode Island, is surely one of the most spectacular places in the United States, and, for what its amazing mansions of the Gilded Age represent, it should be considered the Mecca of American capitalist private wealth, suitable for pious pilgrimages of every sort.
American business, once held in high regard and master of all it surveyed during the frenzied booming 1990s, suddenly finds itself cast upon the rocks. The economic cycle of boom and bust is fascinating stuff. Its essential elements are repeated endlessly throughout the dusty pages of financial history. All of this makes Murray Rothbard’s book, The Panic of 1819, particularly interesting, timely, and enlightening.
