January 2009
Kiss Wall Street Goodbye
Does the public stock market actually serve a purpose? To some free-market zealots, the answer is obvious: The public markets increase liquidity, and this enables fledgling businesses to get off the ground by allowing them access to capital. Moreover, we can all reap the benefits of capitalism’s “creative destruction” and become a nation of investors (as opposed to one of actual producers). For well over a decade, the public bought this line with increasing gullibility. New research, however, suggests that the only institutions public financing helps are those which arrange the financing. That is to say, public equity finance is a business whose greatest beneficiaries are its salesmen.
Just One More Justice
At the polls last November, conservatives and libertarians who vote according to conscience had two options: Bob Barr (Libertarian Party) and Chuck Baldwin (Constitution Party). Combined, these two garnered only 719,655 votes—a paltry amount compared with John McCain’s 59,082,002. For those who believe in smaller government, fiscal responsibility, and individual liberty, the 2008 election was the perfect opportunity to reject the GOP’s latest insult. Why, then, did 59 million Americans hold their noses and pull the lever for McCain?
Pakistan: America’s Pandora’s Box?
On September 10, 2008,the New York Times reported that, back in July, President Bush had authorized ground incursions and missile attacks to destroy Taliban and Al Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. As the Times noted, “It is unclear precisely what legal authorities the United States has invoked to conduct even limited ground raids in a friendly country.”
After the first ground assault on September 3, which lasted several hours and involved two-dozen Navy Seals, the unanimous reaction of Pakistan’s democratically elected parliament was to call on its government to repel future U.S. incursions with military force. Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, agreed, declaring that his country’s territorial integrity “will be defended at all costs.”
