Robert Service’s new biography of Trotsky is reviewed in today’s Wall Street Journal. Having read Service’s excellent biography of Lenin a few years ago, this seems like a book worth reading. Joshua Rubenstein’s thoughtful review touches on some thoughts about socialism and socialists.
Socialism had three major failings. The first is what economists study most closely. It is the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism, because of the rejection of prices and money as a medium of exchange. Whether you support socialist ideals or…
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Some of the TSA’s critics say the agency its own reductio ad absurdum. TSA’s latest action does nothing to improve security, but much to prove its critics correct. Snow globes are now banned from carry-on luggage (hat tip: Radley Balko).
This means one of two things: either grandmothers with snow globes in their carry-ons are the biggest terrorist threat facing the country, or the TSA is doing something wrong.
The way to prevent terrorism is to make terrorism difficult. Banning snow globes doesn’t…
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In Japan, it is illegal for men to have a waist larger than 33.5 inches. The limit for women is 35.4 inches. Those in violation are forced to undergo counseling (Hat tip to CEI colleague Megan McLaughlin).
The law, passed last year, is part of an effort to keep obesity rates low and avoid related health problems.
One problem with using wasitlines as the primary metric is that results can vary among measurers. According to one article, “Satoru Yamada, a doctor at…
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With much of the health care reform debate still focused on the wisdom of including a government-run, “public” health insurance “option,” too many opponents are neglecting a far more insidious feature of the Democratic proposals: the mandatory purchase requirement. Under each of the bills moving through Congress, every person living in the United States would be required by law to have health insurance. And, if your employer doesn’t provide you with it, you’ve got to buy it yourself or pay…
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On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall (see CEI’s video celebrating that), it’s interesting to note that a pizza parlor in Shirlington, VA is promoting heroes of communism and Marxism. And the source of that information is none other than the Washington Post’s Reliable Source today, which records an email exchange between a customer objecting to posters of Vladimir Lenin and Che Guevara on the walls of Busboys and Poets restaurant and the owner’s response praising those…
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On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came crashing down. Today marks the twentieth anniversary of that great day – one of the greatest in the history of human freedom. Communism in Germany finally collapsed, setting off a domino effect that would reach Moscow within two years. Families torn apart for nearly three decades came together in tearful, happy reunions as the world watched. The Cold War was finally, mercifully, ending.
Many historians cite World War I as the twentieth century’s…
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Last Sunday’s Packers-Vikings game was a big one. Brett Favre beat his old team on its home turf. If you’re not sick of all the hype, check out my take on what the game means for Packer fans over at The American Spectator Online.
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Okay — it’s almost Halloween, so I should be forgiven for a non-policy posting on the Top Ten Scariest Movies. I’ve picked a sample of top ten listings to check out any unanimity in the selections. Not really, ‘though several films appear on almost every list - Psycho (1960), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Halloween (1978). Most of the scariest are horror or sci-fi films, with lots of gore and special effects, but a significant number of the top…
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A few years ago, environmental guru, Merry Prankster, and Whole Earth Catalog author Stewart Brand caused a minor stir with an article he wrote in the MIT publication, Technology Review. Brand, who was an early advocate of the “back to the land” movement of the 1960s and 1970s, had done some re-thinking, and concluded that environmentalist opposition to things like urbanization, population growth, biotechnology, and nuclear power generation, was wrong and needed to change.
Now, Brand has written a new book, called Whole Earth Discipline:…
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With Democratic support coalescing around Sen. Max Baucus’s (D-Mt.) health care reform proposal, passage of a comprehensive overhaul now appears more likely than ever. Opponents had their summer of protests. But, Democrats have shown a renewed sense of energy since discrediting Sarah Palin’s “death panels” and Sen. Charles Grassley’s claim that ObamaCare would “pull the plug on grandma.” Still, while those charges may have been a little overwrought, there is plenty to be concerned about with the Democratic health reform…
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Last week, after the industry association America’s Health Insurance Plans released a study showing that premiums would rise 18 percent under the Senate Finance Committee’s reform proposal, top Democrats took to the airwaves to condemn the industry for standing in the way of health care reform. President Obama used his Saturday radio address to accuse the industry of using “deceptive and dishonest” attacks to derail reform legislation. And Obama and congressional Democrats threatened to repeal the McCarran-Ferguson Act, which exempts insurers from most…
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A Scottish colleague brought this article by Richard Dawkins in the UK’s Guardian to my attention, and the title says it all: “Libel laws silence scientists.” I’m embarrassed to say that I hadn’t heard of this before now, but the physicist turned science journalist Simon Singh (author of such books as Fermat’s Last Theorem and The Code Book) has been sued in a UK court and, this past summer, found liable for libel for an April 2008 commentary piece in the Guardian…
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Earlier today, Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Me.) announced that she would vote in favor of the health care reform bill authored by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.). And, just about 30 minutes ago, the Finance Committee reported the bill out to the full Senate by a 14 to 9 vote, with all the Democrats and Snowe voting in favor.
As I wrote two weeks ago, however, Snowe may be getting more (or less) than she bargained for. Once a bill is…
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by Ivan Osorio
October 13, 2009 @ 11:38 am
In honor of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, it’s worth recalling a mention of Ostrom’s work by a previous Economics Nobel laureate, Vernon Smith, then at George Mason Univeristy, whom I interviewed for CEI’s newsletter, the Planet (then Monthly Planet). Here’s the 2002 Economics Nobel Prize winner, on the future 2009 winner:
One of the best pieces of work on public choice was done by Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University, Governing the Commons.…
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The Senate Finance Committee, by a 15 to 8 vote, rejected an amendment proposed by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) to Committee Chairman Max Baucus’s (D-Mt.) health care bill that would have added a government-run, or ”public,” health insurance option to the overhaul proposal. Joining all ten of the committee’s Republicans in voting “no” were five Democrats, including Baucus himself, Bill Nelson (Fla.), Kent Conrad (N.D.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), and Thomas Carper (Del.). A second, and slightly less bad ”public option” amendment, sponsored by Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.)…
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Tomorrow, 7-Eleven Inc. and other big retail chains will hit Capitol Hill to offer Congress members and their staffs a supersize serving of hypocrisy. Retailers, who rightly complain about costly government mandates in health care and other areas, are now calling for Congress slap price controls on the interchange fees they pay to banks and credit unions for services associated with the credit and debit cards of retail consumers.
7-Eleven has fine stores that offer many conveniences to their customers, but…
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The National Journal had an interesting article this week describing the difficulty Democrats have been having getting young adults interested in the health care debate. Two-thirds of voters 18 to 29 pulled the lever for Barack Obama last November, and over 40 percent of the uninsured are young adults age 18 to 34. So, the Dems assumed they would be big proponents of the Obama agenda, including his hallmark proposal on health reform. It turns out, though, that America’s youth were…
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The old saying that, “The problem with socialism is socialism; the problem with capitalism is capitalists” proves itself true time and again. So does Lenin’s claim that the capitalists would sell the Bolsheviks the rope with which to hang them. Thus, I’m not too surprised at The Los Angeles Times‘ brief profile of one capitalist doing just as Lenin expected:
He’s been called a bully and a monopolist. Al Gore once labeled him “Darth Vader.” The Wall Street Journal described him…
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Today in the Washington Examiner, James Jay Carafano of The Heritage Foundation makes a strange case for what he describes as the opening of a new American frontier — where it was once closed. The column is highly unconvincing for two main reasons.
First, and most importantly, Carafano seems to imply that there is some direct correlation between food production levels and the number of people working in agriculture:
A report prepared for the G8 in April concluded that global food production would…
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Much of the hullabaloo over President Obama’s health care speech to Congress last week focused on his endorsement of a “public option” — that is, a government-run, not merely government regulated health insurance plan for the non-elderly middle class. Throughout the August congressional recess, it appeared as though the White House was ready to abandon the public option, since that was a major source of contention among congressional Republicans, Blue Dog Democrats, and a sizeable portion of the American public. In…
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