Free Republic

Abraham Lincoln said, "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time." Unfortunately, the future of this country, as well as the fate of the Western world, depends on how many people can be fooled on election day, just a few weeks from now. Right now, the polls indicate that a whole lot of the people are being fooled a whole lot of the time. The current financial bailout crisis has propelled Barack Obama back into a substantial lead over John...

Abraham Lincoln said, "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time." Unfortunately, the future of this country, as well as the fate of the Western world, depends on how many people can be fooled on election day, just a few weeks from now. Right now, the polls indicate that a whole lot of the people are being fooled a whole lot of the time. The current financial bailout crisis has propelled Barack Obama back into a substantial lead over John...

Congress is never more ridiculous than when it tries to look like it is serious. In the midst of a major national financial crisis, what was one of the first things Congress zeroed in on? The pay of Chief Executive Officers of financial institutions. If all those CEOs agreed to work for nothing, that would not be enough to lower the bailout money by one percent. Anyone who was really serious would start with the 99 percent and let the one percent come later, if at all. But however insignificant the pay of CEOs is economically, it is big stuff...

Nothing could more painfully demonstrate what is wrong with Congress than the current financial crisis. Among the Congressional "leaders" invited to the White House to devise a bailout "solution" are the very people who have for years created the risks that have now come home to roost. Five years ago, Barney Frank vouched for the "soundness" of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and said "I do not see" any "possibility of serious financial losses to the treasury." Moreover, he said that the federal government has "probably done too little rather than too much to push them to meet the goals...

Estimates of how much money a government program will cost are notoriously unreliable. Estimates of the cost of the current bailout in the financial markets run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and some say it may reach or exceed a trillion. Many people have trouble even forming some notion of what such numbers as billion and trillion mean. One way to get some idea of the magnitude of a trillion is to ask: How long ago was a trillion seconds? A trillion seconds ago, no one on this planet could read and write. Neither the Roman Empire nor...

Who was it who said, "crack-brained meddling by the authorities" can "aggravate an existing crisis"? Ronald Reagan? Milton Friedman? Adam Smith? Not even close. It was Karl Marx. Unlike most leftists today, Marx studied economics. Is the current financial crisis going to lead to crack-brained meddling or to some rational actions? Predicting what politicians are going to do is risky business. We will have to wait and see. Saints are no more common on Capitol Hill than they are on Wall Street. We can only hope that the political "solution" does not turn out to be worse than the problem....

Sometimes you don't know when you are lucky. Certainly I did not consider myself lucky when I left home at seventeen and discovered the hard way that there was no great demand for a black teenage dropout with no experience and no skill. In retrospect, however, those days of struggling to earn money to pay the room rent and buy food left little time or energy for navel-gazing over things like "identity." All this came back to me recently when I saw a font-page story about middle-class blacks worrying about their racial identity. There, on the front page of the...

"A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence." Jean-François Revel was not referring to the United States when he wrote those words, nor to his own France, but to human beings in general. He was certainly not referring to Barack Obama, whom he probably never heard of, since Revel died last year. To find anything comparable to crowds'...

Conservatives, as well as liberals, would undoubtedly be happier living in the kind of world envisioned by the left. Very few people have either a vested interest or an ideological preference for a world in which there are many inequalities. Even fewer would prefer a world in which vast sums of money have to be devoted to military defense, when so much benefit could be produced if those resources were directed into medical research instead. It is hardly surprising that young people prefer the political left. The only reason for rejecting the left's vision is that the real world in...

The fact that Sen. Joe Biden has for years listened to all sorts of people testify on all sorts of foreign policy issues tells us nothing about how well he understood the issues. Out of the four presidential and vice-presidential candidates this year, only Mrs. Palin has had to make executive decisions and live with the consequences. As for Mr. Obama, his various pronouncements on foreign policy have been as immature as they have been presumptuous.

Now that the Democrats have recovered from the shock of Governor Sarah Palin's nomination as the Republican's candidate for vice president, they have suddenly discovered that her lack of experience in general— and foreign policy experience in particular— is a terrible danger in someone just a heartbeat away from being President of the United States. For those who are satisfied with talking points, there is no need to go any further. But, for those who still consider substance relevant, this is an incredible argument coming from those whose presidential candidate has even less experience in public office than Sarah Palin,...

Since Governor Sarah Palin's daughter is not running for election this year, it is amazing how much the media has suddenly become obsessed with her. Her pregnancy not only made the front page of the New York Times, a printed announcement of her pregnancy stayed at the bottom of the television screen on CNN for what seemed to me to be about an hour or more. Investigative reporters have obviously been burning a lot of midnight oil, digging deep into the history of Governor Palin's family, for they also found a drunk driving incident involving her husband decades ago— before...

One of the few political cliches that makes sense is that "In politics, overnight is a lifetime." Less than a year ago, the big question was whether Rudolph Giuliani could beat Hillary Clinton in this year's presidential election. Less than two months ago, Barack Obama had a huge lead over John McCain in the polls. Less than a week ago, the smart money was saying that Mitt Romney would be McCain's choice for vice president. We don't need Barack Obama to create "change." Things change in politics, in the economy, and elsewhere in American society, without waiting for a political...

The Internet provides vast amounts of information but it can also spread vast amounts of misinformation, or even deliberately misleading disinformation. For more than two weeks, scarcely a day has gone by without e-mails pouring in to me, asking about columns that someone has written and brazenly spread around the Internet with my name on them. Most of these e-mails have come from regular readers who are savvy enough to recognize columns that have a different style and substance from my own columns. We usually think of "identity theft" as involving using someone else's name for economic fraud. But identity...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: If you took all the fraud out of politics, there might not be a lot left. The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer-- and they don't want explanations that do not give them that. Has anyone noticed Yankee pitcher Joba Chamberlain's facial resemblance to Babe Ruth? If he can be anywhere near as good a pitcher as Ruth was,...

When amateurs outperform professionals, there is something wrong with that profession. If ordinary people, with no medical training, could perform surgery in their kitchens with steak knives, and get results that were better than those of surgeons in hospital operating rooms, the whole medical profession would be discredited. Yet it is common for ordinary parents, with no training in education, to homeschool their children and consistently produce better academic results than those of children educated by teachers with Master's degrees and in schools spending upwards of $10,000 a year per student— which is to say, more than a million dollars...

What is happening in the republic of Georgia is all too reminiscent of what happened back in 1956, when Russian tanks rolled into Hungary— and the West did nothing. An argument might well be made that, realistically, there was nothing the West could have done— then or now— that would have forced the Russians out. But there was bitterness, then as now, that the West may have encouraged people to risk their lives, relying on us, when we knew from the outset that we were not about to risk armed conflict with a nuclear superpower over Hungary then or Georgia...

Many years ago, when I was a college student, I took a course from John Kenneth Galbraith. On the first day of class, Professor Galbraith gave a brilliant opening lecture, after which the students gave him a standing ovation. Galbraith kept on giving brilliant opening lectures the whole semester. But, instead of standing ovations, there were now dwindling numbers of students and some of them got up and walked out in the middle of his lectures. (SNIP) The overwhelming votes for Obama in some virtually all-white states show that many Americans are ready to move beyond race. But Obama himself...

Many years ago, when I was a college student, I took a course from John Kenneth Galbraith. On the first day of class, professor Galbraith gave a brilliant opening lecture, after which the students gave him a standing ovation. Galbraith kept on giving brilliant opening lectures the whole semester. But instead of standing ovations, there were now dwindling numbers of students, and some of them got up and walked out in the middle of his lectures. Galbraith never got beyond the glittering generalities that marked his first lecture. After a while, the students got tired of not getting any real...

We take it for granted that a vote means a secret ballot but it was not always that way. Moreover, it will not remain that way for workers who vote on whether or not they want a labor union, if legislation sponsored by Congressional Democrats and endorsed by Senator Barack Obama becomes law. Before there were secret ballots, voters dared not express their true preferences if those who watched them vote could retaliate— whether by firing them, beating them up or in other ways. Anyone who is serious about people being free to express themselves with their votes wants a...

Many years ago, when I was a college student, I took a course from John Kenneth Galbraith. On the first day of class, Professor Galbraith gave a brilliant opening lecture, after which the students gave him a standing ovation. Galbraith kept on giving brilliant opening lectures the whole semester. But, instead of standing ovations, there were now dwindling numbers of students and some of them got up and walked out in the middle of his lectures. Galbraith never got beyond the glittering generalities that marked his first lecture. After a while, the students got tired of not getting any real...

If our era could have its own coat of arms, it would be a yak against a background of mush. This must be the golden age of endless and pointless talk. Every sports events seems to be preceded by all kinds of talk — whether by athletes repeating cliches that we have heard a thousand times, announcers making pseudo-profound sociological observations, or fans rambling on incoherently. Then after the contest come the childish celebrations, the second-guessing and still more cliches. Even when the action is going on at grand slam tennis matches, there are interviews with celebrities who happen to...

We have forgotten so much about the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that many people may not remember the deadly anthrax spores that were mailed to various prominent people in politics and in the media during that time. None of the intended victims was killed by the anthrax but five other people were, including two postal workers, who apparently became victims because they handled the mail containing anthrax spores. In the instant search for someone to blame, biologist Steven J. Hatfill was publicly named as "a person of interest" in the case by government officials. He...

Random thoughts on the passing scene: Government bailouts are like potato chips: You can't stop with just one. Anyone who is honest with himself and with others knows that there is not a snow ball's chance in hell to have an honest dialogue about race. I wonder what radical feminists make of the fact that it was men who created the rule of "women and children first" when it came to rescuing people from life-threatening emergencies. Barack Obama's motto "Change you can believe in" has acquired a new meaning-- changing his positions is the only thing you can believe in....

Here are some questions that Katie Couric, Brian Williams and Charles Gibson should be asking Barack Obama as they follow him on his trip: Q: Before your trip to Iraq, you said that you intend to give the military a "new mission" — all of the combat troops withdrawn within 16 months. Why bother traveling to Iraq and consulting with commanders on the ground, if you've already decided on a new mission? Q: In 2004, you called it unwise to announce a timetable. By 2008, however, you announce a 16-month timetable. Only a few days ago, your top campaign strategist...

Those who put a high value on words may recoil at the title of Jonah Goldberg's new book, "Liberal Fascism." As a result, they may refuse to read it, which will be their loss -- and a major loss. Those who value substance over words, however, will find in this book a wealth of challenging insights, backed up by thorough research and brilliant analysis. This is the sort of book that challenges the fundamental assumptions of its time -- and which, for that reason, is likely to be shunned rather than criticized.

We don't look to arsonists to help put out fires but we do look to politicians to help solve financial crises that they played a major role in creating. How did the government help create the current financial mess? Let me count the ways. In addition to federal laws that pressure lenders to lend to people they would not otherwise lend to, and in places where they would otherwise not invest, state and local governments have in various parts of the country so severely restricted building as to lead to skyrocketing housing prices, which in turn have led many people...

In one of those front-page editorials disguised as "news" stories, the New York Times blames "the lucrative lending practices" of banks and other financial institutions for helping create the current financial crisis of millions of borrowers and of the financial system in general. It must take either a willful determination to believe whatever they want to believe or a cynical desire to propagandize their readers for the New York Times to call "lucrative" the lending practices that have caused many lenders to lose millions of dollars, some to lose billions and some to go bankrupt themselves. Blaming the lenders is...

"New Ways to Diagnose Autism Earlier" read a recent headline in the Wall Street Journal. There is no question that you can diagnose anything as early as you want. The real question is whether the diagnosis will turn out to be correct. My own awareness of how easy it is to make false diagnoses of autism grew out of experiences with a group of parents of late-talking children that I formed back in 1993. A number of those children were diagnosed as autistic. But the passing years have shown most of the diagnoses to have been false, as most of...

In an election campaign in which not only young liberals, but also some people who are neither young nor liberals, seem absolutely mesmerized by the skilled rhetoric of Barack Obama, facts have receded even further into the background than usual. As the hypnotic mantra of "change" is repeated endlessly, few people even raise the question of whether what few specifics we hear represent any real change, much less a change for the better. Raising taxes, increasing government spending and demonizing business? That is straight out of the New Deal of the 1930s. The New Deal was new then but it...

Over the years, many statements have been falsely attributed to me, but this is the first year in which a whole column has been made up and circulated in a chain letter on the Internet, claiming that I wrote it. Letters, phone calls and e-mails from readers around the country have asked me if I wrote a column saying that Barack Obama is not an American citizen. The answer is "No." Many of my readers have been savvy enough to tell that the style of the phony column is not mine, but checked with me just to be sure. What...

A number of friends of mine have commented on an odd phenomenon that they have observed-- conservative Republicans they know who are saying that they are going to vote for Barack Obama. It seemed at first to be an isolated fluke, perhaps signifying only that my friends know some strange conservatives. But apparently columnist Robert Novak has encountered the same phenomenon and has coined the term "Obamacons" to describe the conservatives for Senator Obama. Now the San Francisco Chronicle has run a feature article, titled "Some Influential Conservatives Spurn GOP and Endorse Obama." In it they quote various conservatives on...

A number of friends of mine have commented on an odd phenomenon that they have observed — conservative Republicans they know who are saying that they are going to vote for Barack Obama. It seemed at first to be an isolated fluke, perhaps signifying only that my friends know some strange conservatives. But apparently columnist Robert Novak has encountered the same phenomenon and has coined the term "Obamacons" to describe the conservatives for Senator Obama. Now the San Francisco Chronicle has run a feature article, titled "Some Influential Conservatives Spurn GOP and Endorse Obama." In it they quote various conservatives...

The Fourth of July is a patriotic holiday but patriotism has long been viewed with suspicion or disdain by many of the intelligentsia. As far back as 1793, prominent British writer William Godwin called patriotism "high-sounding nonsense." Internationalism has long been a competitor with patriotism, especially among the intelligentsia. H.G. Wells advocated replacing the idea of duty to one's country with "the idea of cosmopolitan duty." Perhaps nowhere was patriotism so downplayed or deplored than among intellectuals in the Western democracies in the two decades after the horrors of the First World War, fought under various nations' banners of patriotism....

Recent landmark court decisions are reminders that elections are not just about putting candidates in office for a few years. The judges that elected officials put on the bench can remake the legal landscape, change fundamental social policies and even affect the way wars are fought, long after those who appointed them have served their terms and passed from the scene. The Supreme Court recently created a new "right" out of thin air for captured enemy soldiers and terrorists— the right to seek release in the federal courts, something that neither the Constitution nor the Geneva Convention provided. The High...

Some of the people who are most adamant against outsourcing economic activity from the United States to other countries often seem to think we should outsource our foreign policy to "world opinion" or act only in conjunction "with our NATO allies." Like so many things that are said when it comes to public policy, there is very little attention paid to the actual track record of "world opinion" or of "our NATO allies." Often there is a blanket assumption that European countries are just so much more sophisticated than American "cowboys." But there is incredibly little interest in the track...

It must be a bitter disappointment to those in the media and in politics who have been dying to use the word "recession" that, for the second quarter in a row, there has been no downturn in the economy, though growth has been slow. Alarmists have been reduced to quoting other alarmists on the supposedly impending recession but that is still not the real thing. The definition of a "recession" is very clear and straightforward: Two consecutive quarters of negative growth. We have not yet had one consecutive quarter of negative growth. The fault-finding brigades of critics of the American...

If anyone suggested that Tiger Woods should try to be more like other golfers, people would question the sanity of whoever made that suggestion. Why should Tiger Woods try to be more like Phil Mickelson? If Tiger turned around and tried to golf left-handed, like Mickelson, he probably wouldn't be as good as Mickelson, much less as good as he is golfing the way he does right-handed. Yet there are those who think that the United States should follow policies more like those in Europe, often with no stronger reason than the fact that Europeans follow such policies. For some...

Only with Tim Russert's sudden death at the age of 58 has his true stature as a landmark journalist become as widely recognized as it has long deserved to be. To ask who will replace him as host of "Meet the Press" is to confront the reality that there is no one comparable on the horizon. Those of us who have followed "Meet the Press" since the long ago days of Lawrence Spivak know that Russert was the best of some very good hosts. What made Tim Russert special was not some trademark catchword or contrived persona. What you saw...

The obsession of many high school students and their parents about getting into a prestige college or university is part of the social scene of our time. So is the experience of parents going deep into hock to finance sending a son or daughter off to Ivy U. or the flagship campus of the state university system. Sometimes both the student and the parent end up with big debts from financing a degree from some prestige institution. Yet these are the kinds of institutions that many have their hearts set on. Media hype adds to the pressure to go where...

On TV this week was a senior Member of Congress whom I knew from way back when, talking about “the gas crisis” and “what Congress should do about it.” I recall him from when he was a member of the Baltimore Jaycees, a young lawyer hustling for clients. Now he was on TV saying things that your average child would know was balderdash, with minimal thought about it. This gentleman thought that additional taxes on the oil industry would somehow lower the cost of gasoline. He also claimed that drilling for additional oil in the US in places where it...

Now that Senator Barack Obama has become the Democrats' nominee for President of the United States, to the cheers of the media at home and abroad, he has written a letter to the Secretary of Defense, in a tone as if he is already President, addressing one of his subordinates. The letter ends: "I look forward to your swift response." With wars going on in both Iraq and Afghanistan, a Secretary of Defense might have some other things to look after, before making a "swift response" to a political candidate. Because of the widely publicized statistic that suicide rates among...

Obama and McCain Thomas Sowell Thursday, June 05, 2008 Now that the two parties have finally selected their presidential candidates, it is time for a sober-- if not grim-- assessment of where we are. Not since 1972 have we been presented with two such painfully inadequate candidates. When election day came that year, I could not bring myself to vote for either George McGovern or Richard Nixon. I stayed home. This year, none of us has that luxury. While all sorts of gushing is going on in the media, and posturing is going on in politics, the biggest national sponsor...

Now that the two parties have finally selected their presidential candidates, it is time for a sober — if not grim — assessment of where we are. Not since 1972 have we been presented with two such painfully inadequate candidates. When election day came that year, I could not bring myself to vote for either George McGovern or Richard Nixon. I stayed home. This year, none of us has that luxury. While all sorts of gushing is going on in the media, and posturing is going on in politics, the biggest national sponsor of terrorism in the world — Iran...

Now that the two parties have finally selected their presidential candidates, it is time for a sober — if not grim — assessment of where we are. Not since 1972 have we been presented with two such painfully inadequate candidates. When Election Day came that year, I could not bring myself to vote for either George McGovern or Richard Nixon. I stayed home. This year, none of us has that luxury. While all sorts of gushing is going on in the media, and posturing is going on in politics, the biggest national sponsor of terrorism in the world — Iran...

Now that the two parties have finally selected their presidential candidates, it is time for a sober-- if not grim-- assessment of where we are. Not since 1972 have we been presented with two such painfully inadequate candidates. When election day came that year, I could not bring myself to vote for either George McGovern or Richard Nixon. I stayed home. This year, none of us has that luxury. While all sorts of gushing is going on in the media, and posturing is going on in politics, the biggest national sponsor of terrorism in the world-- Iran-- is moving step...

It is amazing how seriously the media are taking Senator Barack Obama's latest statement about the latest racist rant from the pulpit of the church he has attended for 20 years. But neither that statement nor the apology for his rant by Father Michael Pfleger really matters, one way or the other. Nor does Senator Obama's belated resignation from that church. For any politician, what matters is not his election year rhetoric, or an election year resignation from a church, but the track record of that politician in the years before the election. Yet so many people are so fascinated...

Years ago, when Jack Greenberg left the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to become a professor at Columbia University, he announced that he was going to make it a point to hire a black secretary at Columbia. This would, of course, make whomever he hired be seen as a token black, rather than as someone selected on the basis of competence. This reminded me of the first time I went to Milton Friedman's office when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago back in 1960, and I noticed that he had a black secretary. This was four years...

“Killing an Unarmed Man.” That is how the front-page headline in the New York Times characterized an incident in which a man tried to run over a policeman with his car and was shot by three policemen on the scene, including his intended victim. An automobile is a deadly weapon. If you are killed by an automobile, you are just as dead as if you had been shot through the heart. A phrase like “an unarmed man” makes a talking point— as if matters of life and death should be discussed in terms of how you can spin a talking...

Years ago, when Jack Greenberg left the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to become a professor at Columbia University, he announced that he was going to make it a point to hire a black secretary at Columbia. This would of course make whomever he hired be seen as a token black, rather than as someone selected on the basis of competence. This reminded me of the first time I went to Milton Friedman's office when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago back in 1960, and I noticed that he had a black secretary. This was four years...