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In the spring of each leap year, we have a predictable—if tiresome—dog-and-pony show: the candidates for President of the United States denounce the newest gasoline price increases. We lived through this political purgatory four years ago, and it looks as though we will experience it again. Recently, the soon-to-be Democratic nominee for

The latest political fallout of the current “outsourcing” debate came recently when the Bush Administration’s designated “manufacturing czar” turned out to be Anthony F. Raimondo, whose “crime” was to be the head of a firm that recently opened a factory in China . The embarrassed Bushies quickly urged Raimondo to withdraw his nomination, as the

Ken Lay, Martha Stewart, and now  Frank P. Quattrone  must have been the culprits who caused the recession of 2001 and are also responsible for the relatively poor performance of the economy since then. We can think of no other reason as to why the U.S. Government has embarked upon numerous criminal investigations of business firms and their

With gasoline prices rising above $2 a gallon for unleaded regular, it was only a matter of time before the politicians would start “connecting the dots” as to why prices are where they are today, or at least why they believe the current situation exists. In a recent pronouncement, John Kerry’s campaign declared that consumers are being gouged

In a recent poll on the CNN website, viewers were asked the “poll” question of whether or not they believed that Wal-Mart stores were “good” for the “community.” Perhaps it is not surprising that a large majority answered “no.”  Now, this by itself does not mean much, since these online “polls” are not scientific and reflect only the views of the

In the fall of 1990, I flew from Atlanta to San Diego, with our flight hugging the border of the United States and Mexico as we moved across the southwest deserts of New Mexico annd Arizona.  The farther west we flew, the more I saw some strange sights, those being great, circular fields of green crops located next to desert sands. Then I saw the

Murray Rothbard once observed the seasonal discovery of “some brand-new category of the pitiable.” The “homeless” fell into this class and he also wondered what the new category would be. The unclothed? The ill-shod? The thirsty? The candy-deprived? “How many more millions are standing in line, waiting to be trotted out for consideration,” he

The recent federal indictment of former Enron Chairman Ken Lay seems to be quite popular with the political classes and the public at large, following the trend in prosecutions of “white collar crime” over the past few years. Attorney General John Ashcroft might be unpopular among Democrats and the mainstream media for many things, but the press

Most of our present governmental institutions (and many private ones) are a creation of that era which lasted from the late 19 th into the first quarter of the 20 th centuries. Progressivism could not have made the strides it did, however, had it not been for the advent of what we would call modern journalism. From the “muckrakers” of the turn of

The recent announcement that Edward C. Prescott and Finn Kydland had received the 2004 Nobel Prize in economics has put business cycle theory front-and-center again in economic discussion. Whether or not one agrees with all of what Prescott and Kydland have said—and Austrian economists do not—does not cloud the larger importance of this subject