It was one thing for gullible college students in the late 1960s to present themselves for voluntary sterilization as a result of their buying into Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb myth. In keeping with the premise of the annual Darwin Awards, it might be just as well that those so prone to falling for groundless...
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The blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng’s hopefully being able to take refuge (with his family) as a visiting scholar at NYU would indeed be a happy outcome of his ordeal. His documentation of forced late-term abortions and sterilizations has led to more than four years in prison; followed by his, his wife’s, and children’s...
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If there is one thing to be hoped will come out of the current controversy over the proposed mandate for religious organizations to pay for free pregnancy prevention and termination coverage for their employees, it is that women and American religious leaders and believers come to realize that the state is not a benevolent,...
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I don’t get it. Here is an article saying that President Obama is “riding the populist wave” of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, giving him ” his best chance to reconnect with the American people.” These Occupy Wall Street people claim to represent the 99% against the elite 1% who are getting rich by taking...
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In chapter 24 of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes laid out his screwball idea that capital might soon become, or be made to become, no longer scarce; hence no payment would have to be made to induce people to save, and that condition would be splendid inasmuch as it would...
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Data recently released by the Census Bureau shows the poverty rate in the United States at the highest rate it has been in more than a quarter of a century. (You can find the historical statistics by downloading Table 5 on this page.) Poverty is sometimes blamed on laissez faire policies that favor the...
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So let me get this straight. After the most socialistic century in history, during which all industrialized nations finally found themselves gravitating toward a mixed economy model, we see a somewhat significant financial collapse of international significance and then another stock market drop a few years later, and it supposedly tells us that capitalism...
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Immigration is often a contentious public policy issue and there are legitimate hard questions that surround the issue. Unfortunately, all too often, public debate is centered around a few economic misconceptions people have about immigration instead of focusing on the tougher issues. Immigrants are not a drag on the economy, they don’t steal jobs...
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In a recent piece in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Ralph Nader bemoans President Obama’s failure to use his position and standing to advance the non-profit sector: Yet, though he rhetorically urges more volunteerism, as all presidents do, in his travels around the country, he stops most often at factories and campaign fund-raising events patronized...
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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