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Providence, Rhode Island, journalist Froma Harrop is as establishmentarian as they come, and her post-Christmas-Day-terrorist-bombing-attempt column does nothing to alleviate this impression. The title? “To Be Safe Flying, We’d Happily Perform This Strip Tease.” That failed attempt, you see, did not simply exhilarate those on the left and right,

It’s not always easy to catch a morning flight. You pack the night before, with an eye to preparing for the security and logistics hurdles you must go through to make it on the plane. Liquids and gels go in a one-quart Ziploc. But what liquids? Will someone nab my contact-lens cleaner for being in too big of a container? Then there are the bags

As someone who has long been critical of our healthcare system and who has argued for true reform, I was frustrated with the bill passed in February by simple majorities in the House and Senate. Change in itself is not reform, and chanting “yes we can” to yourself one thousand times cannot make it so. Yet I wonder, Why did efforts to centralize

[ Common Sense School Reform • by Frederick M. Hess • New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 • This review originally appeared in the Journal of School Choice , September 2008, 2(3), pp. 351–354]   In the socialist-calculation debates of the 1930s, when free-market and anti-market economists argued about the workability of socialism, socialists Oscar

Helping the poor is one of the most important things society does. But we do the poor no favors when we promote public policies that perpetuate poverty. This especially applies to the tax system. In this respect, the state of Alabama is often criticized. Take the news last fall that Alabama ranked 50th out of 50 states in terms of state tax rates.

Picture a group of friends sitting around a table at a barbecue restaurant in Birmingham, Alabama. It is small-talk time, with light-hearted joking and friendly inquisitions. So, where do you live? Where do you work? Do you like your job? One man mentions that he works at EWTN, and he says it with an air suggesting that most of the people at the

Confession time: I still read newspapers the old-fashioned way, meaning the way my father and grandfather did, on paper, frequently at the kitchen table, and to the smell of a hot, Honduran coffee. I have various reasons for not yet giving in completely to the digital delivery of news. The paper I read, the Birmingham News , is a good though not

If there is one issue that pops up again and again in my conversations about economics with interested noneconomists, it is manufacturing. There’s a genuine concern about the state of manufacturing in the United States, and I am not sure of the reason why. It could be that there is an inchoate sense that manufacturing is dying here, given that so

One aspect of the current economic crisis has been the comeuppance for certain firms, industries, and segments of the labor market that are overdue for correction, all made possible by their special relationships with the state. The result is a case study in how political favors can result in short-term gain, while in the long run economic laws

[ Politics, Murder, and Love in Stalin’s Kremlin: The Story of Nikolai Bukharin and Anna Larina • By Paul R. Gregory • Hoover Press, 2010 • 196 pages] A man and woman who have known each other for more than two decades realize that they are in love. They marry and quickly have a son. Soon thereafter, the man is arrested for treason based on false