"The twentieth-century statesman whom the Thomas Jefferson of January 1793 would have admired most is Pol Pot," head of the totalitarian....

Jun 23, 2010

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David N. Mayer

10 Mins

You asked “Are we any safer?” I have to ask you, safer from what? If we are talking about a repeat of the 9/11 incident, I think we are.....

Jun 23, 2010

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10 Mins

I’m never impressed by those studies that come out every so often showing that some large percentage of the American citizenry “does not

Jun 23, 2010

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Hugo Schmidt

5 Mins

What she came up with may give you the giggles. But the plastic horn-shaped device, dubbed a “ SheWee ,” has become a hot commodity for...

Jun 23, 2010

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Amanda Erickson

4 Mins

I concur in the conclusion of the Scholars Commission: the allegation that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children by his slave....

Jun 23, 2010

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David N. Mayer

6 Mins

Independent Review has published an article by Bruce Yandle on the cause of the financial meltdown. The Gulf Spill An excellent article by Richard Epstein, as usual, on why punitive damages and criminal prosecutions are undesirable in the BP case.

Jun 22, 2010

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Having recently learned about the show American Greed , I thought it worthwhile to make one general point about that concept, “greed.” It is a complete red herring. It implies that the pursuit of money is what makes many bad actions bad, and conversely that the pursuit of money is capable of making otherwise good actions morally dubious. And that is just not true. Money is not a moral pollutant of action. MINAMPOA! (Pronounced min-am-PO-ah.)

Jun 22, 2010

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The Only Safety is Absolute Terror From an NYT article by Andrew Ross Sorkin: “The [credit-rating] agencies have a long history of getting it wrong. Enron, WorldCom, Penn Central—the ratings agencies always seem to be a day late and a dollar short. Yet since the 1970s, the ratings agencies have been imbued with a special government status—Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations, they’re called—and a whole body of regulation has been written that revolves around ratings. Mutual funds, to cite one example, can hold only securities that have the highest investment-grade ratings.

Jun 22, 2010

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Ever since the Deepwater Horizon spill began on April 20, commentators have been playing the game of “what if?” What if George W. Bush were in office: Would criticism of the president be harsher? The answer is: of course. Most commentators and analysts understand that President Obama embodies that elite intellectual class—“the adversary culture,” in Lionel Trilling’s term—that despises commercial and industrial civilization. Consequently, people reasonably presume that he neither has nor will cut BP any slack—indeed that he will not even deal with it justly. Were President Bush in office, the opposite presumptions would prevail, and rightly so.

Jun 22, 2010

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Death by Rigidity The FTC is attempting to curb a sales pitch for Rice Krispies. And the effort involves an interesting syndrome. One of the more insidious methods of attacking capitalism is to take a theoretical model of how it “should” work and then force actual capitalists to operate “by the book.” The most egregious instance of this is the absurdity known as “perfect competition,” which declares how capitalist competition “should” work and then serves as a Procrustean ideal that allows bureaucratic regulators to torture actual competition. Nearly as absurd is the apparent model of “perfect advertising” that the enemeies of capitalism have tried to foist on the system. In a capitalist exchange, they say, the seller informs the buyer of what he has for sale and the buyer then determines if he values that product more than the money it would cost. Thus, an example of “perfect advertising” would be one of those unreadable sheets of miniscule print that comes with a prescription medicine.

Jun 22, 2010

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Attorney-Client Privilege under Attack in Manhattan The new Manhattan DA, Cyrus Vance Jr., via his assistant Daniel Alonso, has just issued guidelines for charging businesses and other organizations with crimes because of the behavior of individuals who work for those organization. (Hanging over the guideliness, of course, is the memory of Judge Lewis Kaplain’s rebuke to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, in the KPMG case.) At “White Collar Crime Prof Blog,” Ellen Podgor notes that Vance keeps open the door to demanding a company waive the attorney-client privilege if it wants credit for cooperationg. By contrast, footnote 7 in the DA’s document observes: “A particularly sensitive issue was whether an organization’s willingness to waive the attorney client privilege and work product protection should be considered under the rubric of cooperation. In 2006, through what is known as the McNulty Memorandum, DOJ modified, but did not eliminate, a federal prosecutor’s authority to demand or seek such privilege waivers as a factor of cooperation. DOJ’s latest word on the subject, issued in August 2008 by Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip, barred federal prosecutors from seeking privilege waivers from organizations (emphasis added).

Jun 22, 2010

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Here is an article from the Spring 2004 issue of the journal Independent Review, offering some libertarian perspective on oil spills. I almost never agree with Murray Rothbard or his acolytes. But I do find them interesting to read. That Anti–Industrial Revolution Lawsuit: Behind the Scenes Carter Wood (senior communications advisor with the National Association of Manufacturers) writes at Point of Law about speculation that a Leftist judge may have chosen to blow up the Fifth Circuit quorum that was set to hear Comer v. Murphy (For background on the suit, see BRC News, June 1, 2010). And here, from Russell Jackson, is an excellent summary of where things now stand in the suit.

Jun 22, 2010

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According to this June 1 NYT article : “The Obama administration said [today] that it had begun civil and criminal investigations into the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. . . . Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in New Orleans that he planned to ‘prosecute to the fullest extent of the law’ any person or entity that the Justice Department determines has broken the law in connection with the oil spill. . . . Mr. Holder’s comments, which echoed those of Mr. Obama earlier in the day in the Rose Garden, reflected deepening frustration within the administration at the inability to stop the spill. . .”

Jun 22, 2010

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John McDonnell, running to succeed Gordon Brown as head of the British Labour Party, said in a speech at the GMB Union Congress that he wished he could “go back to the 1980s and assassinate [Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher." (The GMB Union was formerly the General, Municipal, Boilermakers and Allied Trade Union.)

Jun 22, 2010

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The case of Comer v. Murphy began bizarre and went downhill from there. Several landowners in Gulfport, Mississippi, sued a huge number of energy and chemical companies for damages resulting from Hurricane Katrina. Their argument , if you can call it that, was that the companies’ emission of greenhouse gases contributed to global warming, thereby causing sea levels to rise, thereby intensifying Katrina, thereby exacerbating the damage from it. The companies responded, naturally enough, that one might try to indict the Industrial Revolution for global warming but the connection to their operations was tenuous. In 2007, U.S. District Judge Louis Guirola Jr. dismissed the suit.

Jun 22, 2010

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According to a story at Bloomberg.com:“ Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s ex- Chief Executive Officer Richard Fuld asked a judge to dismiss a lawsuit accusing him and his colleagues of failing to disclose Repo 105, a financing method allegedly used to conceal billions of dollars of debt, according to court records.” While the BRC does claim this case represents an anti-business animus, it clearly bears watching: Lehman’s auditor, Ernst & Young LLP, claims that its work was sound and has also asked the judge to dismiss the lawsuit, which was filed April 23 on behalf of several goverenment retirement funds.

Jun 22, 2010

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The Washington Post reports that “corporate CEOs and trade groups are asking their lawyers the same question: How can we get our companies involved in this political election season without leaving tracks?” Well, if that is how CEOs feel about the fight for political freedom, I hope they do not get involved, much less “leave tracks” on the battlefield of liberty. They would only sully holy ground. How are we to understand the socio-economic generalization that ‘capital is a coward”? The generalization is true: When threatened capital simply flees. Such pragmatism has its economic advantages, no doubt. But it cannot be the basis for a restoration of economic liberty in the United States.

Jun 22, 2010

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It looks as though Dreamworks could not have come up with a better slogan for its final Shrek movie: After

Jun 22, 2010

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2 Mins

My theme is that, on the German intellectual landscape, Kant is as close to Enlightenment thinking as it gets. From the perspective of most

Jun 22, 2010

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Stephen Hicks Ph.D.

6 Mins

Ayn Rand was an unusually creative philosopher. In every major branch of philosophy, from metaphysics to aesthetics, she had original...

Jun 22, 2010

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David Kelley Ph.D

5 Mins