Topic: columns
Will: Lucrative law enforcement will become lawless
Justices who fancy themselves “originalists” should acknowledge that those who wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights understood that courts were going to have to give content to the concept of excessiveness (as well as to cruelty and unusualness in punishments, and unreasonableness regarding searches and seizures, and other open-textured constitutional language).
Morici: China’s race for global dominance
China is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into accomplishing dominance in artificial intelligence – a technological ecosystem that will be analog in this century to what water power and mechanized mills were in the 19th century and electrification and assembly line were in the early 20th century.
Will: This Thanksgiving, ample servings of amusement
North Carolina had second thoughts about the 12-count criminal indictment against Tammie Hedges for practicing veterinary medicine without a license when, during Hurricane Florence, she offered shelter and first aid to pets left behind by their evacuating owners.
Rahn: Measuring public officials’ performance
The question is, why do so few of them actually undertake the obvious reforms necessary? Even if some leaders care little about their own citizens, one would expect their own egos to drive them to make major constructive changes.
Morici: U.S. Democrats must accomplish something
Democrats must give up the fantasy of socialized medicine based on confiscatory taxes on upper-income Americans.
Will: Harvard’s problem is a version of America’s
Harvard’s problem today is a version of America’s, the tension between two problematic approaches to providing opportunities – “meritocracy” that is clearly but too simply quantified, and a less tidy but more nuanced measurement of the mixture of merits that serves a university’s, and society’s, several purposes.
Mitchell: With good policy, poor nations can succeed
The link between good policy and convergence explains why Hong Kong and Singapore, for instance, have caught up to the United States. And the adverse effect of bad policy is a big reason why Europe continues to lag.
Morici: Understanding Trump’s trade policy
When the U.S. economy was nearly half the global pie, we might have been able to dictate terms, but these days it is about one-sixth, and other players can simply retaliate and go around us.
Rahn: The limits of our economic knowledge
Rather than a small yearly amount of inflation – given the change in what people now buy in goods and services and the benefits that they obtain, it can be argued we have actually had a massive amount of deflation – meaning a much larger increase in living standards than has been reported.
Tackling health threats requires governments and private sector working in tandem
Paul Allen leaves behind a legacy of philanthropy, innovation and impact.
Will: The madness of college basketball extends beyond March
George F. Will
WASHINGTON – Until last week it seemed that the Division 1 college basketball industry could produce nothing more risible than its pieties...
Will: Missouri’s Hawley is an actual conservative
Hawley can be part of the GOP’s intelligent future, if it chooses to have one.
Morici: Trump gets tough with immigrants on welfare
America needs more skilled immigrants to grow rapidly and compete internationally.
Morici: Harrowing times for stock investors
Most economists and Fed policymakers see the inflation neutral, short term interest rate a bit less than 3 percent, and that would imply only three more rate increases.
Rahn: Tech offers hope for Central America
Richard W. Rahn
As I write this, there is a caravan of several thousand people coming north, primarily from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, with...
Will: Arizona voters can save their judiciary from politics
To their credit, Arizonans have never exercised their power to remove a justice of the state’s Supreme Court.
Mitchell: The real reason red ink keeps rising
If the burden of government spending is growing faster than the private sector, that is a very worrisome trend. In the long run, it leads to fiscal crisis.
Will: An unsparing look at the Vietnam War’s mendacities
A history book can be a historic act if, by modifying a nation’s understanding of its past, it alters future behavior.
Rahn: Who makes and enforces the rules?
A major reason for the Brexit vote in the U.K. was that after a thousand years of being in charge of their own destiny, Englishmen were finding, among other things, the shape and size of the cucumbers they were being allowed to sell was being dictated by unelected EU bureaucrats in Brussels.
Morici: Trade agreements do not threaten US sovereignty
WTO rules were created for market economies adhering to Western concepts of law, and China has taken industrial policy and state-sponsored confiscation of foreign intellectual property and industrial espionage to criminal levels that the WTO was simply not designed to discipline.
Morici: The fourth industrial revolution
Productivity growth, after languishing during the Obama presidency, is taking off again.
Rahn: What would Adam Smith think?
Smith was a practical man who wrote about the importance of “common sense.” After two centuries, we know that most of his common-sense insights as to the way the world works were indeed correct then and are now.
Will: America’s disturbing plunge into protectionism
Tariffs are taxes collected at the border and paid in one way or another by various residents of the importing nation.
Cousteau: Open letter opposing cruise berthing facility
I hope the decision makers will see that the value of keeping what draws tourists to their island, the ocean and its reefs, is far more valuable in the long run than more cruise ships and a congested George Town.
Morici: Fixing higher education and student debt
If Mr. Obama could bail out the banks, Mr. Trump could do the same for students sold on a lousy idea by their government. And he can finance some of that by going after the resources of for-profit colleges and mainstream universities.
Hewitt: Kavanaugh confirmation is a rumbling of the volcano that the left cannot hear
Media elites locked inside “blue bubble” newsrooms don’t see, hear or feel it. Just as they didn’t see, hear, or feel the 2016 volcano’s rumblings either.
Berger: Could Puerto Rico be a model for energy independence?
As Puerto Rico emerges from the darkness, its uneven recovery is shining a light on a challenge that will shape the future of electricity across the United States.
Morici: Trade war could end in a stalemate
Industry leaders almost always dislike changes in the regulatory environment.
Rahn: Why care about economic freedom
Despite having the world’s largest oil reserves, Venezuela is now the least free of the ranked countries and is becoming poorer and poorer year by year – all because of incompetent and corrupt political leadership.
Will: The Supreme Court confirmation process has become a maelstrom of insincerities
This debacle du jour dramatizes how the court’s stature is hostage to the degrading confirmation process ...
Morici: Welcome to Trump’s new economy
The GOP may well get skewered in the midterms and Mr. Trump may be denied a second term from the sheer weight of hectoring by liberal Democrats, Bush-era Republicans and the media, but history will treat him more kindly.
Abernathy: Anonymous commentary is internet’s big drawback
The risk of retribution – lawsuits, advertiser boycotts, ridicule, harm to reputation – is what keeps, and has always kept, expressed opinion somewhere between the lines of responsibility.
Will: Fear-based parenting
Because of the belief in “parental determinism,” mothers, especially, are susceptible to the fear that something seemingly minor that is done or left undone will impede Suzy’s path to Princeton and Congress.
Will: In Texas, a template for victory in 2020
A Fletcher victory might be an early tremor of a political earthquake.
Rahn: Bad news sells, but optimism wins
There is a rational explanation as to why the owners of major media often act in ways seemingly contradictory to their public advocacy.
Will: The college campus’s cult of fragility
Students encouraged to feel fragile will learn to recoil from “microaggressions” so micro that few can discern them.
Morici: How Democrats exploit inequality
Families in West Virginia or in coastal ghettos will not catch up if their men are denied proper training and forced to leech off others.
Rahn: The rush to cryptocurrencies
Many governments, such as Chinese, Russian, Swiss and others, as well as millions of private individuals and companies want to free themselves from the U.S. financial yoke. Hence, the search for a functional cryptocurrency.
Will: Mississippi election tells an American story
The odds are somewhat, but only somewhat, against Espy, so the possibility of victory is not an illusion.
Rahn: A tale of two pairs of states
People voting with their feet is the strongest indication of whether they approve or disapprove of the policies of any state or country.
Morici: Why divorcing China might be the right way to go
Asking China to reform would be akin to asking pre-World War II Germany to give up militarism and become a benevolent state.
Mitchell: The hidden tax of political cronyism
The bottom line is that cronyism promotes and protects inefficiency. And when an economy is less productive, that results in lower incomes and diminished living standards. Sadly, this is not just a problem in developing and transition nations.
Thiessen: Suddenly, the Reformation makes perfect sense
If Vigano is right, it means the corruption in the Catholic Church has reached not just the highest levels of Roman Curia but the papacy itself.
Will: Questions for Kavanaugh
The 1978 Bakke case involving racial preferences in admissions said that race can be a “plus” factor for certain government-preferred minorities. Are there constitutional principles controlling decisions about which groups are to be preferred and about tailoring preferences?
Guest column: The red tape fiasco
You do not have to be a governor or a rocket scientist to figure out that the islands are awash in red tape.
Will: US is overdue for another Lehman-like episode
The president’s Office of Management and Budget – not that there is a meaningful budget getting actual management – projects that the deficit for fiscal 2019, which begins in six weeks, will be $1.085 trillion. This is while the economy is, according to the economic historian in the Oval Office, “as good as it’s ever been, ever.”
Rahn: When bureaucratic bullies are in charge
The problem is many of the EU countries have excessively high and prosperity-destroying tax-systems, and hate the competition from countries that provide high levels of government service with far lower tax rates and more efficient systems.
Abernathy: America cannot stop watching
Trump appeals to Americans who were never invited onto the red carpet, a snub that was due in part to their lack of formal training in political theater.
Rahn: Prosperity and the rule of law
I would bet, unless China institutes a true rule of law, that economic growth will slow and eventually cease – without the country ever becoming rich on a per capita income basis.
Morici: The label that scares most Americans
In the European Union, Brussels experts impose regulations and make antitrust, civil rights and international trade policies with little or only distant political accountability.
V.S. Naipaul, quintessential West Indian intellectual
From “Biswas” to “Mimic men,” the West Indian journey to justice is narrated in the contradictory pains and passions of our attempts to detach and depart from the colonial scaffold.
Will: Book underlines axiom that if you want peace, prepare for war
Today’s U.S. ships are more capable than ever, but too few for comfort, as Lehman’s readers will realize when they consider what only the Navy can do.
Rahn: Eat endangered species
Under the current system, a landowner finding an endangered species on his or her property has a strong incentive to kill it before the government becomes aware that it is on the landowner’s property, which they then might lock up.
Mitchell: Do crises produce liberalization or more statism?
The authors wanted to find out whether bad economic news (as captured by data on “GDP growth, deep recession, unemployment, crisis”) leads to pro-market reforms.
Thiessen: Where is the outrage about Clinton’s links to Russia?
The Russians are not stupid. They were preparing for the prospect of a Clinton presidency, and they played both sides.
Will: The future’s constituency is the conscience of the present
Because it is politically expedient to sacrifice the future, which does not vote, to the consumption of government services by those who do, America is eating its seed corn.
Will: A California election could catalyze K-12 improvements – and perhaps end the state’s...
Because about two of California’s 277,000 teachers (0.0007 percent) are dismissed each year for unsatisfactory performance, school districts resort to what is called “the dance of the lemons,” shuffling incompetent teachers from one school to another.
Morici: Why Detroit must keep making sedans
If Detroit stays on course, it will lose considerable market share to Japanese, Korean and German manufacturers and eventually the Chinese as folks on limited budgets seek their sedans.
Thiessen: The hypocrisy of the Democratic Russia hawks
For decades, while the Soviet Union sowed tyranny across the globe, sent millions to rot in the Gulag, and threatened America with nuclear annihilation, Democrats were for detente and peaceful coexistence.
Rahn: Why some problems seem never to be solved
Public choice economists recognize that most people have some concern for others, but their main motive – whether they are voters, politicians, lobbyists or bureaucrats – is self-interest.
Mitchell: Great moments in British government
Government should only step in when there’s a threat to life, liberty, or property. Sadly, the British government is policing speech, perhaps even speech that should be considered totally benign.
Will: Will New Jersey send a Republican to the Senate?
The Republicans’ most recent presidential victory in New Jersey was in 1988. In the subsequent seven elections, the Democratic presidential candidates’ average margin of victory was almost 13 points. This state last elected a Republican senator (Clifford Case) in 1972. This 46-year drought might end in November.
Thiessen: Democrats should hope for GOP unity on Kavanaugh
It is shocking that one of its own leaders just gave the left-wing base license to demand that these senators vote in such a way that will virtually guarantee the loss of their seats. Don’t expect these senators to forget it if they are still in office for the next leadership election.
Morici: Dollar will hold as reserve currency
Sorry Bitcoin, offshore dollars were a private currency for years – largely virtual, without official government sanction and lightly regulated – long before initial coin offerings came along. And it’s run by much more trustworthy and careful people.
Mitchell: Is the US a horrible place for women?
I’m assuming that the top-9 countries are not good places for women, but think about what sort of person would put the United States at #10.
Will: What might a socialist American government do?
Socialism requires – actually, socialism is – industrial policy, whereby government picks winners and losers in conformity with the government’s vision of how the future ought to be rationally planned.
Rahn: The unthinking and the unobservant
Can you think of one socialist experiment that worked in the last several hundred years?
Restoring workers’ First Amendment freedoms
There is no sugarcoating today’s reality. Public sector unions are conveyor belts that move a portion of government employees’ salaries – some of the amount paid in union dues – into political campaigns, almost always Democrats’, to elect the people with whom the unions “negotiate” for taxpayers’ money.
Morici: The potential harm of Screen Time
If we exercise self-control on their behalf – as helicopter parents too often do – then our children will not likely develop the executive skills necessary to occasionally refrain from multitasking and balance priorities as adults.
Morici: Merging education and labor departments makes sense
Many college graduates land in low-paying dead-end jobs and are saddled with a lifetime of debt when more practical alternatives are available.
But her emails? You are dang right her emails
We still do not know the full extent of the damage Clinton caused, because the inspector general reports that the FBI intentionally chose not to follow every potential lead of compromised classified information.
Will: Can Bill Weld restore conservatism?
Because of its 2016 efforts, the Libertarian Party will automatically be on 39 states’ ballots this fall and has a sufficient infantry of volunteers to secure ballot access in another nine.
