Hundreds of years ago, banks and insurance companies — the businesses are related; both need to quantify risk — went belly-up fairly often. Folks could be left in the lurch. Most consumers probably assume that can’t happen today because of government regulation. Indeed, regulatory standards may have helped. Though it could be argued a consumer […]
A reader writes in: In response to a recent editorial, entitled ‘Higher gasoline taxes?’ that stated that because ‘family paychecks barely cover basics, the money [needed to repair our country’s crumbing infrastructure should come from] somewhere else.’ What could this ‘somewhere else’ be? … Is the Review-Journal advocating higher Federal income taxes, or a new […]
Three years ago, Mary Jo Pletz of Walnutport, Pennsylvania — about 70 miles north of Philadelphia — learned her 6-month-old daughter had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. To care for her child, Mrs. Pletz, 33, had to give up her job as a dental hygienist and look for some kind of home-based employment that […]
A letter-writer recently objected that I used great libertarian Rose Wilder Lane as a “sole source” for the fact that American schooling was taken over, in the late 19th century, by statists enamored of the Prussian compulsion model, aiming to create a docile peasant class by crippling the American intellect — making reading seem real […]
In Washington Tuesday, a special commission appointed to study the need to repair the nation’s aging bridges and roads said the answer is to more than triple federal gasoline tax — increasing it by 40 cents per gallon over the next five years. The two-year study by the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study […]
Isn’t it interesting the way Iraq news gets reported in our media. A Jan. 10 Associated Press story begins: “Nine American soldiers were killed in the first two days of a new offensive to root out al-Qaida-in-Iraq fighters holed up in districts north of he capital. … “The losses came as many enemy militants fled […]
The Treasury Department on Jan. 3 updated 1974 regulations — issued before the age of electronic filing — that require “tax professionals” to get informed consent from their clients before disclosing tax information to third parties or using it for non-return purposes. The IRS also announced it was considering a ban on tax preparers using […]
They drink from the same water supply as regular Las Vegans. They attend schools administered by the same district. So it’s unlikely the folks who live inside the boundaries of the landlocked city of North Las Vegas — the “mean/scag ghetto” north of town that Hunter Thompson famously called “Nevada’s answer to East St. Louis […]
Defenders of the government compulsion schools were out in force over the holidays. “Dear Vin,” writes one earnest parent, “I dropped my ‘terrified’ six-year-old off today at Xxx Elementary government-funded School. Wait. Was she terrified? No; She hugged her first grade teacher Mrs. Y. When we went to the book fair at the school gym […]
In the early Woody Allen comedy “Bananas,” our hapless hero helps a bearded revolutionary curiously reminiscent of Fidel Castro fight his way to victory in a revolution against his banana republic’s ruthless dictator. The triumphant freedom fighter strides out onto the palace balcony to accept the adulation of the cheering crowd, declares himself dictator for […]