The Death Of The American Way Of Life
Don Watkins
If you saw a three-hundred pound prize fighter pummeling a small child, would your main concern be that the kid’s pocket change was spilling onto the ground? That’s how I feel about the debate over entitlements. It takes place almost purely on a narrow, economic level. How much does Social Security cost? How much of that cost is funded? Is there a trust fund or a pile of worthless IOUs waiting for us down the road?[More...]

The Arab-Israel Conflict and the Palestinian Refugees [podcast episode #06]
Elan Journo
In the intricate, sometimes convoluted history of the Arab-Israel conflict, the “right of return”/refugee issue is just one thread. But it is a particularly revealing one. Explore it, and you can learn a great deal about the nature of the broader conflict and some of the reasons it has come to seem irresolvable.[More...]

How controls are bred from controls
Doug Altner
It is not always obvious what motivates business leaders to endorse such interventions—I question whether such endorsements are usually calculated, nefarious attempts to cripple competitors. But I think it happens sometimes, and these situations remind me of a rather apt analogy from Ayn Rand on how controls can breed controls.[More...]

Leading Obamacare proponents: health law doesn’t improve quality of health care, but so what?
Rituparna Basu
Some time ago I wrote on this blog that proponents of greater government intrusion in health care are not motivated by improving the quality of health care Americans enjoy. A recent comment from two leading proponents of Obamacare serves as an example of this.[More...]