News reports now indicate that WorldCom's overstatement of its profits in the last few years may exceed initial reports. But, writes George Reisman, whatever the ultimate figure may be—$7.1 billion or even $10 billion—it pales into insignificance in comparison with the overstatement of profits regularly engineered by the U.S. government.
Brazil, which is so blessed by nature and by an entrepreneurial population with one of the highest rates of self-employment in the world, has been kept down by a misleading ideology. Antony Mueller explains the political effects of embracing Auguste Comte, an embrace which no financial bailout can fix.
Terrorists killed nearly three thousand people on September 11, 2001, but more than three thousand died in the year 2001 waiting for a kidney transplant. Mark Thornton reports that these deaths are largely avoidable, via a market for organs.
The same politicians who cannot remember the names of major corporations pretend to understand accounting while they are preening before the television cameras, writes James Sheehan. If these solons really knew how misleading corporate accounting was, surely they would have acted to correct the problem before now.
Gregory Bresiger offers his compassion for the regulatory Quixotes, and says that it is time to think the unthinkable: Forget about the system of regulation; consign it to the garbage bin of history. Close down the SEC, along with myriad other regulatory bodies.
Social Security was designed as a tool of macroeconomic policy: a social arm of central planning passed in age of boundless faith in the power of the state.
The latest self-appointed "savior" of capitalism is Senator John McCain of Arizona, who likes to speak of himself as "straight talking," but actually is nothing more than one of the many who are now pushing for destructive new regulations. William Anderson examines the proposals to empower politicians, of all people, to clean up business.
As soon as Abraham Lincoln and the new Republican Party gained power, the average tariff rate was quickly raised from a nominal 15 percent to 47 percent and higher, and remained at such levels for decades after the war. South Carolinian John C. Calhoun's free-trade arguments, as eloquent and advanced as they were, were no match for a federal military arsenal.
Charles Lindblom is at it again. In God and Man at Yale, William Buckley, Jr.’s indictment of leftist teaching at Yale University written half a century ago, a young teacher at the college was mentioned
It is time to recognize that food prices will likely continue to fall over the long term, and that the number of commercial farmers will continue to diminish and to recognize the benefits such a trend confers upon society. It should also be made apparent that to continue to fight this trend is futile, and that it is a waste of time and money—not to mention the outright theft involved in seizing money from one group only to give it to another.
