Free Republic

The "costs" of government www.jewishworldreview.com -- Bill Clinton says that the budget surplus cannot be used to reduce taxes because it would "cost" too much. Just what does that mean? It certainly does not mean that the government would have to give up doing something that it is already doing. The very fact that there is a surplus means that tax revenues exceed what the government is spending on everything that it is doing. If what Clinton really means is that the government would like to expand what it is doing, instead of returning the surplus to the taxpayers, ...

FIGHTING BACK: Crime, Self-Defense, and the Right to Carry a Handgun Cato Policy Analysis No. 284             October 22, 1997 FIGHTING BACK Crime, Self-Defense, and the Right to Carry a Handgun by Jeffrey R. Snyder Jeffrey Snyder is an attorney in private practice in New York. He is working on a book called Ethical Blindness and Moral Vanity--What the Gun Control Debate Tells Us about the American Ethos. Executive Summary Ten years ago this month, a controversial "concealed- carry" law went into effect in the state of Florida. In a sharp break from the conventional wisdom of the time, that ...

We're Number 37 in Health Care! (Commentary) We're Number 37 in Health Care! by Julie Chan Julie Chan is a research assistant at the Cato Institute. Feeling ill? If so, you might consider catching the next plane out of here, because the World Health Organization (WHO) says your health is best served by countries like Andorra, Cyprus or even Colombia. Each outperforms the U.S. health care system on the WHO's recently issued World Health Report 2000. The WHO rankings of 191 health systems worldwide placed the United States 37th, trailing countries like Malta and Oman and barely edging out ...

Dear Mr. Hauer: Thank you for contacting me about Elian Gonzalez. I appreciate hearing from you and apologize for the delay in responding. The situation involving six-year old Elian has become a tense international custody battle, [Ah, you see, this is why I wrote to my congressman - to ask him if the situation involving Elian was becoming tense and/or international in nature.] pitting anti-Castro relatives residing in the United State against the child's father who resides in Cuba. On January 5, 2000, the Immigration and Naturalization Servic (INS) ruled that Elian must be returned to his father in Cuba. ...

Score one for George W. Bush. On Monday the Texas governor will take a major step forward in rallying the support of economic conservatives across the country with his bold proposal to partially privatize the Social Security system. By announcing his plan to allow workers to place a portion of payroll tax dollars in privately owned investment accounts, Mr. Bush will also starkly differentiate himself from Vice President Al Gore, who advocates no changes to the current system. On this crucial issue of pension reform, it is now George W. Bush who is boldly attempting to design a modern 21st ...

Patrick Dorismond is the latest casualty in the War on Drugs. The 26-year-old security guard and father of two rose to national prominence on March 16 when he and a friend stepped out of the Wakamba Bar on Manhattan's Eighth Avenue. Dorismond apparently felt insulted after a stranger asked him where he could find marijuana. A dispute reportedly erupted. When the would-be pot buyer yelled for help, one of his associates stepped forward and allegedly shot Dorismond fatally in the chest. Rest of article at Cato site

MOST HOUSEHOLDS HAVE NOT RETURNED CENSUS FORMS The Washington Post (Note: the linked page may be gone from the Post's site) reports today that the Census Bureau has received more than 40 percent of the census questionnaires it sent out two weeks ago. The Bureau refuses to characterize the figures as good or bad. Although the mail-in rate is slightly better than it was at a similar point in the 1990 census, officials discouraged comparison with 1990 in the pace of returns because different strategies were used. "Although 42 percent of the households have returned the form, that leaves 58 ...

... Coming nearly a year after the U.S. and its European allies intervened in the civil war between Serbia and Kosovo's ethnic Albanians, the current crisis illustrates: the illusory nature of the Clinton administration's goal of transforming Kosovo into a multiethnic democracy; the fact that the administration has naively allowed the U.S. to be manipulated by the KLA; and the fact that KLA is as much or more of a threat to Balkan stability than the regime of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. ... Click source for whole article.

The United Nations is being sued, for the first time in its history, for alleged complicity in the crime of genocide. Lawyers are instituting a case on behalf of two Rwandan women whose families died during the 1994 genocide in which 800,000, mostly Tutsi people, were slaughtered by Hutus. ... For rest of article go to the Independent News article