As we saw last week in the “Girl Scout cookies” case out of Savannah, Georgia, government — which was supposed to provide a level playing field by providing courts of law and barring interstate tariffs but otherwise stay out of the way — is destroying our economy, largely to protect the jobs of all its [...]
I wouldn’t have nominated Jim Gibbons for “Mr. Charisma,” myself. He never seemed to take much joy in being governor of Nevada. Nor do I adhere to the doctrine that we should speak no ill of the politically departed. Not only were Lincoln and FDR tyrants, they didn’t even offer any attractive short-term inducements in [...]
There’s a back-handed compliment buried in there. If you’re a “think tank” dumping yet another new study on a jaded press and public, ranking cities from “best” to “worst” on some topic or other (and thus not-so-secretly lobbying for more government spending on your pet projects), there’s one sure way to make headlines. Highlight the [...]
Not so many decades ago, party “insiders” chose their nominees for various public offices in conventions. Some people complained this led to “cronyism.” Sometimes it did. But while the “party bosses” in those “smoke-filled rooms” might place loyalty to them and their party’s political philosophy (sometimes boiling down to little more than “more jobs for [...]
At the so-called “Tahoe Summit” last week, our own senior U.S. senator, Unpopular Harry Reid, in between cozying up to fellow moderate Dianne Feinstein (D-San Francisco) and ignoring a call to return the lake to the Washoe Indian tribe (which will probably be able to buy it soon, anyway, the way Indian gaming is going) [...]
As the White House gears up to let the biggest tax hike in American history go into effect on Jan. 1, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner — a millionaire banker appointed by Barack Obama despite the fact he cheated on his own income taxes — said July 25 that allowing big tax hikes targeted at wealthy [...]
“The heads of President Barack Obama’s national debt commission painted a gloomy picture Sunday as the United States struggles to get its spending under control,” The Associated Press reports. Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles told a meeting of the National Governors Association that everything needs to be considered — closing down the federal [...]
Back in 1996, Congress swore it was finally going to wean American farmers off taxpayer subsidies with the “Freedom to Farm” law. The law “allowed” farmers greater flexibility in their planting decisions and moved toward greater reliance on market supply and demand, further offering farmers big one-time payments in exchange for their promise to accept [...]
(No, unfortunately, this one is not an “April Fools” joke.) Some 35 years ago, Americans first became generally aware that there could be a “gasoline crisis” — that our dependence on imported oil could combine with taxation, price controls, and other “well-meaning” government interventions to create fuel shortages, lines, all kinds of chaos. Suddenly, those [...]
For decades, according to deathbed testimony, the IRS made engineer Andrew Stack’s life a living hell, repeatedly seizing so much of his accrued assets as to leave him with virtually nothing for his retirement. On Feb. 18, Stack, 53, set fire to his own house and then flew his single-engine plane into an office building [...]
