May 26, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
Here is an excellent analysis of the Bombings in Saudi Arabia from David Holcberg at the Ayn Rand Institute:How did Islamic terrorists react to the U.S. announcement that it would withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia--a central demand of Bin Laden? With bombings that killed at least 7 Americans.
The terrorists interpreted the U.S. withdrawal as a concession to Bin Laden's demands and as proof of U.S. weakness. From their perspective, the U.S. withdrawal shows that terrorism pays, and that the more they terrorize Americans the more they stand to gain.
The lesson to be learned is that concessions--apparent or real--will not change the minds of Islamic terrorists committed to destroying the United States and its influence in Muslim countries. Concessions only embolden them. If the United States wants to end Islamic terrorism it must not appease terrorists--but ruthlessly and methodically destroy them.
May 25, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, 55 percent of Americans prefer that government spend more on health coverage while only 36 percent favor cutting taxes. To the extent that the poll reflects the population, this shows how huge numbers of Americans lack both an understanding of economics and justice. They don't grasp that money comes from the private sector; that without a flourishing private sector, there would be no money for government to forcibly redistribute into health care coverage. Instead, 55 percent of the population assumes that government can somehow just create the funds out of thin air -- on the backs of an already heavily taxed private sector -- to pay for health care.The worse news is that huge numbers of Americans don't understand justice. They evidently feel it's unjust to have to pay for their own health care, but they feel it is just to tax the population to forcibly pay for everyone else's health care.
This serves as more evidence that while Americans reject socialism and statism in principle, they more than ever before embrace it in practice. This could mean good news for liberal Democrats such as Dick Gephardt, who favors spending on government health care over cutting taxes and plans to run on this plank in 2004.
May 25, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
From Newsday:Baghdad - Throughout the 13 years of UN sanctions on Iraq that were ended yesterday, Iraqi doctors told the world that the sanctions were the sole cause for the rocketing mortality rate among Iraqi children. "It is one of the results of the embargo," Dr. Ghassam Rashid Al-Baya told Newsday on May 9, 2001, at Baghdad's Ibn Al-Baladi hospital, just after a dehydrated baby named Ali Hussein died on his treatment table. "This is a crime on Iraq." It was a scene repeated in hundreds of newspaper articles by reporters required to be escorted by minders from Saddam Hussein's Ministry of Information. Now free to speak, the doctors at two Baghdad hospitals, including Ibn Al-Baladi, tell a very different story. Along with parents of dead children, they said in interviews this week that Hussein turned the children's deaths into propaganda, notably by forcing hospitals to save babies' corpses to have them publicly paraded.
...Under the sanctions regime, "We had the ability to get all the drugs we needed," said Ibn Al-Baladi's chief resident, Dr. Hussein Shihab. "Instead of that, Saddam Hussein spent all the money on his military force and put all the fault on the USA. Yes, of course the sanctions hurt - but not too much, because we are a rich country and we have the ability to get everything we can by money. But instead, he spent it on his palaces." ["Blood of Innocents: Doctors say Hussein, not UN sanctions, caused children's deaths", May 23, 2003]
May 24, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
From MSNBC:On Friday, The New York Times suspended star reporter Rick Bragg for two weeks, news first reported on the Web site run by the Columbia Journalism Review and confirmed by several newsroom sources, who said they first heard about the suspension Friday afternoon. The suspension of Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize winner, comes on the heels of the Jayson Blair plagiarism and fabrication scandal, which seems likely to roil the newspaper's newsroom for some time to come. [Newsweek, May 23, 2003]
May 23, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
Comments economist Richard Salsman in the May 2003 edition of the InterMarket Forecaster:...Congressional Republicans are helping to gut the tax-cut proposals made by their party's leader in the White House; they promise to phase in any tax cuts that are enacted, thereby inducing deferrals of economic and investment activity and causing near-term stagnation...Not to be out-done, the D.C. regulators, especially at the SEC, persist in suffocating free speech (and the free flow of information) on Wall Street -- while sabotaging investor confidence.
The only honest heroes out there -- the only ones quietly delivering the higher profits and equity gains so eagerly sought by investors -- are the entrepreneurs and CEOs (and the few people who defend them). They are working against enormous odds, under the boot of a hostile government (and public)...It's not the Washington-types but the business heroes who've delivered the goods and the gains in U.S. equity prices that we've all seen since last Fall. We can add a word of sincere thanks to the Pentagon and the military -- the only honest and capable elements in the entire U.S. government...
May 23, 2003 | Dollars & Crosses
From Cox and Forkum:
