For decades, sensible skeptics have warned that government tariffs and subsidies designed to encourage the conversion of corn to alcohol and requiring fuel distributors to mix this corrosive stuff into our gas tanks was not going to “solve the energy crisis,” reduce dependence on imported oil, or do anything helpful for “the environment” — unless […]
Prompted in part by government interventions including the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 — which required banks to make riskier loans to less credit-worthy borrowers to avoid charges of racist “red-lining” — America’s banks and mortgage companies created new sources of high investment return in recent decades. Home mortgages — both the secure and the […]
Word that ailing Cuban dictator, “president” Fidel Castro, has decided to step aside and turn over the reins of power to his younger brother (how democratic!) appears to be evoking some predictable nostalgia from America’s political left, which holds that Cuba is an economic basket case only because the United States viciously allows the island […]
In their private lives — what today we would call “lifestyle choices” — there’s a tradition in America and particularly here in the West to let our neighbors alone, in hopes of being let alone, ourselves. An imperfect tradition, but one in which we continue to make progress. One of the great exceptions is in […]
Hundreds of years ago, banks and insurance companies — the businesses are related; both need to quantify risk — went belly-up fairly often. Folks could be left in the lurch. Most consumers probably assume that can’t happen today because of government regulation. Indeed, regulatory standards may have helped. Though it could be argued a consumer […]
Three years ago, Mary Jo Pletz of Walnutport, Pennsylvania — about 70 miles north of Philadelphia — learned her 6-month-old daughter had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. To care for her child, Mrs. Pletz, 33, had to give up her job as a dental hygienist and look for some kind of home-based employment that […]
In the early Woody Allen comedy “Bananas,” our hapless hero helps a bearded revolutionary curiously reminiscent of Fidel Castro fight his way to victory in a revolution against his banana republic’s ruthless dictator. The triumphant freedom fighter strides out onto the palace balcony to accept the adulation of the cheering crowd, declares himself dictator for […]