In a recent article, the Wall Street Journal quotes Mark Zuckerberg, the kid from Harvard who heads the CEO of a company-not-yet-public. (Goldman-Sachs VIP insiders only, please). What disturbed me about the article is not that another company is breaking into the so-called China market after the Google row over censorship. I’m more disturbed...
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Big numbers can be hard to visualize. What’s the difference between a million and a trillion? They both sound like big numbers, but a trillion is 1,000,000 times bigger than a million. The terrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan last month helps visualize some big numbers. Surely you’ve seen image after image of the...
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Independent Institute Senior Fellow Alvaro Vargas Llosa was interviewed at Pepperdine University. Download mp3 file. Also, please see the following books from him: Liberty for Latin America: How to Undo Five Hundred Years of State Oppression The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty Lessons from the Poor: Triumph of the Entrepreneurial Spirit

Speaking to CNBC in Las Vegas recently, Steve Wynn, the billionaire developer and operator of entertainment properties, said: “Washington is unpredictable these days. No one has any idea what’s next . . . the uncertainty of the business climate in America is frightening, frightening to everybody, and it’s delaying recovery.” Wynn complains of “wild,...
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I’ll confess up front to being a Walmart stockholder. The company’s annual report arrived in my mail last week, with the statement on the front, “We save people money so they can live better.” A number of studies (for example, here, and here) suggest that Walmart has lowered prices significantly in the United States,...
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In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Google co-founder Sergey Brin elaborated on what was apparently primarily his decision for Google to withdraw from mainland China. Mr. Brin immigrated with his family to the U.S. at the age of 6: The 36-year-old co-founder said he was moved by growing evidence in China of...
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With frigid weather discomforting millions and resulting in deaths worldwide, Britain’s Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband maintained in a parliamentary answer last week that the science of global warming was “settled.” Meanwhile, U.S. governments from local to federal continue to push CO2 controls, and global warming advocates stand fast by their predictions of Arctic...
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Syndicated columnist and bestselling author Dave Barry’s provides an incisive and hilarious, month-by-month review of the year 2009, “Dave Barry’s year in review: 2009.” As he begins: It was a year of Hope—at first in the sense of “I feel hopeful!” and later in the sense of “I hope this year ends soon!” It...
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Saturday Night Live lampoons Barack Obama and his reckless and gargantuan, federal government spending and debt mongering in their recent skit of a joint press conference with Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao, “China Wants Its Money Back”:

September 1, 1939—exactly seventy years ago today—is customarily considered the day when World War II began, owing to the German invasion of Poland. Of course, some belligerents, most notably the Japanese and the Chinese, had already been at war for years, and others did not join the fray until later. The United States actually began...
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