In the United States, thanks largely to Bernie Sanders, the term “single-payer health care” has become more or less synonymous with the phrase “universal healthcare.” This stems partially from the fact that “single-payer” is the term most often used to refer to foreign systems of universal healthcare, and also because most Americans know virtually nothing …

With the rise of the Yellow Vest Movement in France — which began last October and continues today — French activists and writers have begun to re-evaluate the state of French income and poverty. Since the movement began, articles with titles such as ” Revealed: The shocking scale of poverty in France in 2018 ” …

As I’ve noted in the past , when it comes to government spending on social welfare programs, the United States is hardly the free-market, libertarian “paradise” many social democrats suppose it to be. When we look at social spending as a percentage of GDP, the US is similar to Switzerland, and the US spends more …

Since I don’t exactly live in the world’s most crime-free neighborhood, I recently had to replace my house’s 30-year old steel doors. They weren’t cheap, but as I spoke with the salesman, he noted I had lucked out because their prices would be going up significantly in the near future due to new steel tariffs. …

Public high schools still aren’t taking school security seriously. Last month, hundreds of thousands of students in the Denver area stayed home from school when a woman in Florida suggested online that she was “obsessed” with the Columbine shootings. The woman, named Sol Pais, disappeared from her home near Miami in mid-April. Soon after, her …

Scanning the headlines, one might notice that there is now a multitude of articles on the measles virus in most major media outlets. Outbreaks in places like New York City have led to what the AP calls “extraordinary police powers” to mandate vaccinations or quarantine those suspected of the disease.
Proponents of mandatory vaccines defend these measures while contended there is too much resistance to measles vaccination based on a variety of philosophical or religious concerns. They want new state laws eliminating the possibility of opting out of any vaccination for any non-medical reasons.
Why So Few Choices in Vaccines?
But why are some people resistant to the measles vaccine? And more importantly, are there any ways that

The United States has a long, violent history of intervention in Latin America, although few Americans know about it. Were one to ask the average American, for example, about the US occupation of the Dominican Republic — which lasted for eight years from 1916 to 1924 — one is likely to only receive a blank …

Scanning the headlines, one might notice that there is now a multitude of articles on the measles virus in most major media outlets. Outbreaks in places like New York City have led to what the AP calls “extraordinary police powers” to mandate vaccinations or quarantine those suspected of the disease. Proponents of mandatory vaccines defend …

Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren says she wants to make public colleges and universities tuition-free. That is, she wants free college for anyone willing to attend a public higher education institution. Presumably, an important goal of this policy change — other than getting Elizabeth Warren elected, of course — would be to increase the total number …

Presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have both come out in favor in “free” public colleges and universities. The scheme could be funded, as CNN describes it, by “drastic increase in federal spending on higher education.” Much of the rhetoric around swirling around this issue relies on the idea that government spending on higher …

The Census Bureau has long known more about my family history than my family does. For instance, it was through old census forms that I discovered my grandmother changed her name from “Paula” to “Pauline” at some time after 1930. This was news even to her children. The 1930 census form also reported her place …

On Monday, Bernie Sanders released ten years of tax returns, and it turns out he’s a millionaire. Thanks especially to revenues from book royalties, Sanders is now, as CNN put it, “in the category of the super-rich.” Or, as some might say, he’s part of “the 1%.” After years of denouncing “millionaires and billionaires” and …

Julian Assange was arrested last week in London, and he awaits legal proceedings designs to extradite him to the United States to be tried on hacking charges. At least, those are the charges currently known. Experience suggests that US authorities are likely to add additional charges once they have Assange in the US. The US …

The Notre Dame cathedral in Paris isn’t the first historically significant church to go up in smoke. The Basilica of Saint Paul’s Outside-the-Walls — after standing for more than 1,400 years — was almost totally destroyed by fire in 1823. It housed the tomb of the Apostle Paul, and was a major basilica, second only to St Peter’s as a pilgrimage site. Thanks to a construction worker, the church was accidently set on fire.
Its destruction was a great disaster at the time, and an international appeal went out for assistance in its reconstruction. The world responded and the church was rebuilt to the original design. Today, it is a beautiful church, and it remains the site of the Apostle’s tomb. It also still contains many works of

When I was a kid in the 1980s, Velcro shoes hit the stores in force. Although Puma first started using the fasteners in 1968, it was not until the 1980s that the shoes became commonplace on the street and at retail outlets. At the time, many of us mocked the idea. “Who is so lazy …

Donald Trump this morning condemned the Federal Reserve’s “unnecessary and destructive actions,” by which he presumably means the Fed’s recent attempts to tighten monetary policy. Since 2016 — after nearly a decade of ultra-accommodative monetary policy, the Fed began to ever-so-slightly scale back its easy-money policies, beginning with gradual increases in the federal funds rate. …

In recent decades, a number of states enacted statewide law preempting local ordinances enacting rent control. Now, some state governments are beginning to move in the opposite direction. State-level policymakers are attempting to repeal these bans in some states with the hope that local governments will then enact rent-control measures of their own. Two recent …

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants more government regulation of social media. In a March 30 op-ed for the Washington Post, Zuckerberg trots out the innocent-sounding pablum we’ve come to expect from him: I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators. By updating the rules for the Internet, we can preserve what’s …

Although it was long assumed that the electoral college favored Democrats — and this assumption continued right up to election night 2016 — Democrats in the United States have now decided the electoral college is a bad thing. Thus, we continue to see legislative efforts to do away with the electoral college, accompanied by claims that it’s …

One of the great myths of modern journalism is that it is possible for journalists to report facts and make judgments in an objective manner. This myth has come under increasing attack in recent years as the mass media’s continued hostility to the Trump administration has become ever more fevered. Nevertheless, many both inside and …

Money supply growth slowed in February, falling to the lowest rate recorded since February of last year. Overall, money-supply growth remains well below the growth rates experienced from 2009 to 2016, and has fluctuated little since March of last year In February, year-over-year growth in the money supply was at 3.1 percent. That was down …

Well, at least they’re now being honest about it. A headline this week in The Guardian reads: “Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?” The article, by Phil McDuff, goes on the discuss the “Green New Deal” currently being peddled in the US Congress, and declares a …

In the wake of the March 15 New Zealand shootings, advocates for new gun restrictions in New Zealand have pointed to Australia as “proof” that if national governments adopt gun restrictions like those of Australia’s National Firearms Agreement, then homicides will go into steep decline. “Exhibit A” is usually the fact that homicides have decreased …

The Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee on Wednesday voted unanimously to keep the federal funds rate unchanged. Overall, the FOMC signaled it has made a dovish turn away from the promised normalization of monetary policy which the Fed has promised will be implemented “some day” for a decade. Although the Fed began to slowly …

The average square footage in new single-family houses has been declining since 2015. House sizes tend to fall just during recessionary periods. It happened from 2008 to 2009, from 2001 to 2002, and from 1990 to 1991. But even with strong job growth numbers in recent years, it looks like demand for houses of historically …

As the issue of reparations for victims of slavery rages within the Democratic party and on cable news stations, we encounter a common problem: virtually no one is addressing the specifics of how such a reparations effort would be administered. Who exactly would receive these reparations payments? Who would pay them? How would guilt and …

While one often hears a lot of talk about the virtues of “mom and pop” shops (and the evils of “big box” stores) policy makers do remarkably little to encourage the growth and health of small businesses. While the federal government has created a federal boondoggle ostensibly designed to favor small business — known as …

An old friend of mine, who taught political science for 25 years at the University of Colorado, was known to tell his students that the real reason they were there was to marry people from the right social class. While perhaps a little overly cynical, this assessment certainly wasn’t totally wrong. Few parents have ever …

January’s report on fertility from the CDC set off a new wave of speculation in the media about the alleged “fertility crisis.” We continue to see headlines like Fortune magazine’s article “Americans Aren’t Making Enough Babies, Says CDC ” and we hear from experts in this Marketplace interview that replacement-level fertility, “is needed to sustain …

In her essay “Redeeming the Industrial Revolution” Wendy McElroy notes how industrialization provided choices to women which had never been available before: When women had the opportunity to leave rural life for factory wages and domestic work, they poured into the cities in unprecedented numbers. … The women themselves believed that flight into the city …