Courtesy of Powerline Blog, we have a story about how Sweden’s bureaucratic health system made a mistake and…well, I’m not sure how to delicately phrase this…so let’s just give you the headline of the story: “Man’s penis amputated following misdiagnosis.” Here are some of the details from a news report about the incident. The man, […]

There’s an odd debate in the blogosphere. As happens every Thanksgiving, libertarians and conservatives take joy in pointing out that there was mass starvation and suffering during the early years of the Plymouth Colony because of a socialist economic model. Here’s what John Stossel recently wrote. Long before the failure of modern socialism, the earliest […]

It seems that reports of Castro’s conversion were premature.  While American politicians are learning from Castro how to tank an economy with reckless government intervention (not that there’s any other kind), Castro has apparently learned from our pols how to walk back an accidental utterance of the truth, otherwise known in political circles as a […]

Here’s a story for the better-late-than-never file. Former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro confessed that communism doesn’t work and that his nation’s economic system should not be emulated. Fidel Castro told a visiting American journalist that Cuba’s communist economic model doesn’t work, a rare comment on domestic affairs from a man who has conspicuously steered clear […]

I sometimes joke that the French are the world’s most statist people. I have no idea if that is actually true, but the latest protests in France certainly are a good piece of evidence. French workers (especially government bureaucrats) are protesting a plan to increase the retirement age from 60 to 62. They apparently think […]

This little story appeared in my inbox. It’s obviously meant to illustrate the perverse incentive structure created by redistribution, but one wonders why statists in the academic world don’t follow through on their convictions and use this grading system. A professor said he had never failed a single student before but had, once, failed an […]

According to a new poll from a Democratic firm, an astounding 55 percent of people think “socialist” is a term that describes Obama. Here’s a blurb from a National Review post. Deep in the poll, they ask, “Now, I am going to read you a list of words and phrases which people use to describe […]

Barack Obama and Angela Merkel are the two main characters in what is being portrayed as a fight between American “stimulus” and European “austerity” at the G-20 summit meeting in Canada. My immediate instinct is to cheer for the Europeans. After all, “austerity” presumably means cutting back on wasteful government spending. Obama’s definition of “stimulus,” by […]

Jeff Jacoby righteously – and rightfully – condemns the moral perversion that allows people to overlook the barbaric cruelty and oppression of communism. If Jose Saramago, the Portuguese writer who died on Friday at 87, had been an unrepentant Nazi for the last four decades, he would never have won international acclaim or received the […]

The President had another “spread the wealth” slip of the tongue the other day, this time remarking that “at some point you have made enough money.” Some have commented that this exposes Obama’s anti-capitalist ideology, and others have correctly noted that the government should have no role in determining the “right” level of income. But […]