Our own Greek tragedy
While President Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care "summit," thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split screen - because they're part of the same story. It's just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They're at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter 20 (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter 17 or 18. Read more...
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Polluting pets: the devastating impact of man's best friend
Man's best friend could be one of the environment's worst enemies, according to a new study which says the carbon pawprint of a pet dog is more than double that of a gas-guzzling sports utility vehicle. This is hilarious...
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Markets, Not Mandates
While congressional reform efforts screech and shudder along, let’s take a moment to dream about real health care reform. Imagine a system that is genuinely transparent, competitive, and driven by consumers. Read more...
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ClimateGate: The Fix is In
In early October, I covered a breaking story about evidence of corruption in the basic temperature records maintained by key scientific advocates of the theory of man-made global warming. Global warming "skeptics" had unearthed evidence that scientists at the Hadley Climatic Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia had cherry-picked data to manufacture a "hockey stick" graph showing a dramatic-but illusory-runaway warming trend in the late 20th century. Read more...
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Majority: Health Coverage Not Gov’t. Responsibility
More Americans now say it is not the federal government's responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage (50%) than say it is (47%). This is a first since Gallup began tracking this question, and a significant shift from as recently as three years ago, when two-thirds said ensuring healthcare coverage was the government's responsibility. Read more...
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The Ambiguity of "Utility"
The term plays an important role in both philosophy and economics. In philosophy, it is associated with Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism; in that context utility means, roughly, happiness. In Bentham's view, one ought to act so as to maximize the total of human utility, misleadingly described as "the greatest good for the greatest number." Read more...
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Everyone Out of the Water!
In last week's NEWSWEEK, the cover story was a hymn to "The Thinking Man's Thinking Man." Beneath the story's headline ("The Evolution of an Eco-Prophet") was this subhead: "Al Gore's views on climate change are advancing as rapidly as the phenomenon itself." Which was rather rude because, if true, his views have not advanced for 11 years. Read more...
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Do They Need the Public Option?
Much discussion of the House Democrats' health care bill has focused on its inclusion of the "public option," which most observers see as a Trojan Horse intended to serve, ultimately, as the vehicle for socialized medicine as private insurers are driven from the market--a process that President Obama has said may take ten to twenty years. Read more...
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Liberals Using Disclosure to Intimidate
SEATTLE -- Conservatives here, a droll minority, say that under this city's quota system, when a conservative enters the city, one already here is required to leave. They also say Washington is actually two states: There is what you can see from atop this city's Space Needle -- meaning, this liberal city -- and there is everything else, extending to the Oregon, Idaho and Canadian borders. Read more...
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Be Prepared for the Worst
The large-scale government intervention in the economy is going to end badly. Read the article...
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Gallup’s Conservatives and Libertarians
Gallup often asks people how they describe themselves. But sometimes they classify people according to the values they express. And when they do that, they find a healthy percentage of libertarians, as well as an unfortunate number of big-government “populists.” Read more...
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