After World War II, some Germans tried to defend venal behavior by claiming that they were “just following orders” from their government. Governments in America have never done anything nearly as awful as the Nazis, but there certainly are some very unpleasant blemishes in our past – and some very bad laws today. This raises […]

As a grumpy libertarian, I routinely get agitated about taxes, spending, and regulation. As far as I’m concerned, much of government is a racket that uses coercion to reward interest groups with unearned wealth. But there are degrees of evil. So if you asked me to pick the most reprehensible thing that government does,  “asset […]

I’ve already explained why the Department of Housing and Urban Development should be eliminated, but a superb column in the Wall Street Journal by my old friend Jim Bovard has my blood boiling. After reading Jim’s piece, I no longer want to merely abolish HUD. I want to bulldoze the building, cover the ground with […]

I wrote earlier this year about the connection between a morally corrupt welfare state and the riots in the United Kingdom. But what’s happening now is not just some left-wing punks engaging in political street theater. Instead, the U.K. is dealing with a bigger problem of societal decay caused in part by a government’s failure […]

I certainly take second place to nobody in my utter contempt for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund. Who knew that forcing yourself (allegedly) on women could earn you a reputation as “the Great Seducer”? I guess my failure to understand means I’m just a backwards and provincial American. I’m also a […]

Let’s start with a giant disclaimer that the head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is accused of forcibly sodomizing a hotel maid and we have no idea whether it’s true. There are even rumors that this is a plot hatched by Nikolas Sarkozy to cripple a potential rival in advance of next year’s French presidential […]

Here are two superb articles on the financial crisis. First, from Peter Wallison at the American Enterprise Institute, we have a piece on the role of government housing subsidies. Since he warned, in advance, that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were ticking time bombs, Peter has great credibility on these issues. Here is his key […]

My previous post looked at the federal government’s troubling decision to investigate, persecute, prosecute, and ultimately imprison a random home-loan borrower named Charlie Engle for the crime of mortgage fraud. Citing a column on the legal fallout from the financial crisis in the New York Times, I noted that it was rather odd that the […]

Joe Nocera has a must-read story in the New York Times about how the legal fallout from the financial crisis. His basic theme is that the government let all the bigwigs get away with their crimes, but then has a fascinating discussion about how the government targeted an inconsequential mortgage borrower. I’m not sure I […]

I confess to mixed feelings on this type of issue. If taxpayers are financing sidewalks, does that mean anybody has a right to use them for any purpose, at any time? Here’s a blurb from the People’s Republic of San Francisco. San Francisco police officers have started enforcing the city’s new ban on sitting and […]