The bureaucrats at the International Labor Organization (which shouldn’t even exist) are correct to note that high levels of unemployment threaten social unrest. But like most left-wing international bureaucracies, they think the solution is more government – including so-called stimulus and government intervention in labor markets. The extended loss of employment and growing perceptions of […]

Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute decimates the bean-counting feminist “paycheck fairness” legislation being considered by the Senate. Republicans presumably know this is a bad idea, but one can only wonder whether they will do the right thing and block this initiative that at best will be a boon for trial lawyers and […]

Considering they could have sat on their hands and relied on unhappy voters to give them big gains in November, I’m not too unhappy about the House GOP’s “Pledge to America.” Yes, it’s mostly filled with inoffensive motherhood-and-apple-pie language, but at least there’s some rhetoric about reining in excessive government. After eight years of fiscal […]

Consider this a prelude to Obamacare: Tens of thousands of Texas children will be directly affected by the 11th-hour decision of a number of major health insurance companies to stop selling child-only policies rather than comply with the new federal law that requires they cover youngsters with pre-existing conditions. …Spokespersons for Aetna and Cigna said […]

No CAP bedwetter to debate in this segment.

Jonah Goldberg writes in National Review that President Obama is beginning to look like the next Herbert Hoover. This is rather ironic since the left wanted him to become the next Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ushering in a new era of politically-popular statism. …the Great Depression discredited laissez-faire economics for a generation or more. Hoover, who was […]

In a free society, people obviously should be free to join unions and companies should be free to negotiate with unions. But that also means that companies should be free to resist union demands and hire non-union workers. There is no right or wrong in these battles, just as there is no right or wrong when McDonald’s […]

Here’s some horrifying news from the United Kingdom, where the government-run healthcare system allowed 239 patients to die of malnutrition in 2007. Another 8,000-plus entered the system for malnutrition and actually deteriorated. In 2007, 239 patients died of malnutrition in British hospitals, the latest year for which figures are available. A wag might say it […]

As is so often the case, Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe hits the nail on the head, asking why taxpayers should be forced to fund embryonic stem-cell research. The moral issues in this debate are very important, to be sure, but Jacoby’s column takes a different approach and uses economic arguments to thoroughly debunk those […]

Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune makes several excellent points in his column on the recent salmonella scare, commenting on the absurd tendency to reward government bureaucracies that screw up. But more important, he explains that there are very strong incentives for safety in an unfettered marketplace. The fundamental issue, though, is that there is […]