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There are roughly 35 million cattle slaughtered each year in the United States. This means that, in 2003, one in 35 million U.S. cattle were confirmed to have mad cow disease. Infected cattle comprised three millionths of one percent of all cattle, or 0.000003%. So why the mad cow scare? In one sense, the scare is legitimate. It reflects an

So the Martha Stewart trial has come to this. Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum ruled that the government cannot introduce testimony about how Stewart’s statements to the press asserting her innocence of violating insider trading law affected investors of her firm, Martha Stewart Living. As a result, the government has effectively lost. The New York

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the Bush Administration is the great chasm between its rhetoric and its actions. There is much difference between the faith in civic virtue declared in George W. Bush’s inaugural address and the attacks on civil liberties found in the Patriot Act. Similarly, Candidate Bush’s campaign speeches on a humble

Frank Quattrone sent a 22-word e-mail to his employees reminding them of an existing policy. Now he is going to jail for it. In this latest surreal ordeal of one of the prominent private sector players of the investment boom of the 1990s, the feds successfully brought criminal charges against a man for actions that were clearly of a civil nature,

Perhaps you have heard that the bureaucrats running the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District recently dumped 4.6 billion gallons of raw sewage into Lake Michigan along the Wisconsin coast. What’s more, they did it as a matter of policy. That you probably haven’t heard about this scandal says much about the sycophantic relationship between the

Recently, when walking home from work, I was passed by one of those red monster pick-up trucks with an oversized bumper sticker on the back window that announced: FORMER MARINE. It made me wonder why it is that Marines are the only federal employees who feel the urge to proclaim that they once were paid with taxpayer loot. You never

A recent article of mine on a public sector scandal, this one in Milwaukee, brought several e-mails from friends and strangers telling me that it was read and discussed on WTMJ-AM in that city by its weekday morning host, Charles Sykes.  WTMJ is Milwaukee ’s highest rated talk station, and while I appreciated the plug, I was not sure if that is

Last year, the governor of Alabama proposed and then overwhelmingly lost a bitter referendum to increase taxes and boost revenue. Voters rightly saw the campaign as a slick attempt to expand the public sector’s power, prestige, and wealth transfers by increasing the degree of legal plunder in Alabama’s tax system. It spoke highly of the voters in

It happens to everyone who gets married, at least, it seems, everyone in my generation. You get Corningware—never enough.  You get advice—always too much. You save a piece of wedding cake and see it survives a year in your freezer—it rarely does. And you get at least one copy of that silly book about the boy and the tree. At last count, my wife

Call it the mystery of the red and the blue.  After the presidential election, many have noticed the irony of how some of the more conservative, culturally red states seem to receive more in federal spending than they pay in federal taxes.  Meanwhile, some of the more liberal, culturally blue states seem to receive less in federal spending than