A few days ago, I wrote about David Brooks’ inane op-ed titled “Weed: Been There, Done That.” Looking back, what strikes me as most galling about Brooks’ post and other pro-prohibition sentiments that I’ve heard expressed in the past is the shriveled, impoverished, reductive view they have of human character. Their advocacy of prohibition reveals […]

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  Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was full of tough talk when he visited the island kingdom of Bahrain in early December. The United States, he vowed, will continue to guard “the free flow of energy and commerce” from the Persian Gulf and keep Iran nuclear-free, through the presence of 35,000 U.S. military personnel or […]

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The nuclear power industry is having its roughest time since reactors were first conceived in the 1950s. Health risks are at the core of the problem. At Fukushima, huge amounts of radioactivity continue to pour into the Pacific Ocean. Nobody knows exactly where the three melted reactor cores are—somewhere in or under the buildings—since it […]

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I stumbled on the following quote from economist Ha-Joon Chang over the holidays: Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rich as what they are—a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told. […]

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One of the worst epithets that can be leveled at a politician these days is to call him a “redistributionist.” Yet 2013 marked one of the biggest redistributions in recent American history. It was a redistribution upward, from average working people to the owners of America. The stock market ended 2013 at an all-time high—giving […]

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