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Pollsters tell us that potential American voters see Al Gore as being “better” on the healthcare issue. I’m not sure what “better” means, but I think that voters believe that the Stiff Who Wants to be President will “give” us a better healthcare system than what currently exists. Al promises to provide less costly medical care. I have serious

Paul Krugman was the featured speaker at a special session of the 2004 Southern Economic Association meetings, held the weekend before Thanksgiving, and a number of economists listened intently as the most famous man at the conference spoke religiously about the glories of Keynesian economics. Professor Joseph Salerno and I were in the audience

In what its supporters have claimed is “visionary,” the congressional media darling, Alexandria Occasio-Cortez (AOC) has released her short-awaited Green New Deal , and she has called for nothing short of destruction of life as we have known it: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she has no qualms about acknowledging a so-called “Green New Deal”

The recent arrests of actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman for allegedly using fraudulent means for getting their daughters into prestigious private universities has exposed a dark underbelly in college admissions, something that will reverberate for a long time. (Huffman already has agreed to plead guilty, which almost certainly will mean

In September 1972, the late John Kenneth Galbraith, who served as his generation’s Paul Krugman, visited China for a few weeks and wrote a book, “A China Passage,” effusively praising the communist state for its alleged economic achievements. That Mao’s China at the time was gripped in the destructive Cultural Revolution apparently did not

In a Manhattan federal courtroom this past week, justice was done . The judge said so. The prosecutors said so. The media said so. Thus, it must be so. As always, heroic federal prosecutors stepped in to rescue someone, this time being Oklahoma State University, which former assistant basketball coach Lamont Evans allegedly defrauded through his

[Adapted from “Protected Lying: How the Legal Doctrine of ‘Absolute Immunity’ Has Created a ‘Lemons Problem’ in American Criminal Courts” in the Spring 2018 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics .] In his famous speech to a gathering of federal prosecutors in 1940, Attorney General Robert Jackson reminded his audience that their job

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Paul Krugman declared that the Bush administration failed in its response to the flooding of New Orleans because the administration consisted of people, according to Krugman, who didn’t “believe in government.” One cannot say that about progressives who truly believe in government, and believe in unlimited

What started as a relatively obscure trial covered only by alternative conservative media has exploded into a Big Story, a modern David-defeats-Goliath tale in which a small business has won a victory in court against a well-heeled college whose leftist activist administrators and students tried to destroy it for no good reason. Not surprisingly,

One of the first lessons I give my economics students in the principles courses I teach or in my MBA classes is the famous Diamond-Water Paradox, or what economists historically have called the Paradox of Value. Why are diamonds more expensive than water? Why are professional athletes paid better than teachers or soldiers? When I present these