Athletics, like economics, is an endeavor of human action. While we can see scores and statistics, there is no true way to quantify how good or bad a team may be. Indeed, if the computer polls with their mathematical formulas were so accurate and useful, then one would hardly see the need for a championship game after all.
In the weeks immediately following the World Trade Center and Pentagon disasters, commentators were quick to predict in apocalyptic terms that television and movies would never be the same again. It is still too early, however, to tell whether there really has been a sea-change in the American psyche. Paul Cantor explains.
It comes as no surprise that governments spend more money and regulate more actively during crises--wars and economic bailouts are expensive and complicated. But a more active government also attracts opportunists, who perceive that a national emergency can serve as a useful pretext for achieving their own objectives.
The poor security of U.S. airlines is a predictable outcome of government regulations and subsidies. Only through complete privatization of the industry will consumers be able to fly cheaply and safely.
Almost any food you can name--if you study its history--has something to say about economics, politics, history, or culture. For whatever reason, tea seems to teach more lessons by its history than almost anything else we could eat or drink.
AmeriCorps is little more than social work tinged with messianic delusions. Citizens should no longer be forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars of taxes each year for a bunch of photo opportunities for politicians and do-gooders.
Politics creates a setting where, in the words of Longfellow, "man must either be anvil or hammer." Thus, a vast array of political machinery is created to represent a wide variety of interests and to further those interests at the expense of the other groups.
Making the boom continue at home and abroad has been the prime focus of U.S. monetary policy for quite some time. But among the unintended consequences emerge the broadly based lowering of perceived risk levels in the financial markets and a global spread of careless investment activities.
My 7-year old daughter asked me the other day whether I was born before email. "Yes," I confessed. Then she quickly followed up: "Where you born before plastic?" "No," I said, "I was born after plastic but before email." Satisfied that she had placed me within the structure of the history of the world, she went back to her weekend play.
"Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else," writes Frederic Bastiat in his 1848 essay, Government, which may be the most insightful critique of America's government available today.
