This Week on the Web (March 3 – March 9)
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NEWS
Gates warns on US immigration curbs
Financial Times
Speaking before the Senate committee on health, education, labour and pensions, Mr Gates said that tighter
“It makes no sense to tell well-trained, highly skilled individuals, many of whom are educated at our top colleges and universities, that the
Mr Gates said that other countries were taking advantage of restrictive
Net worth of U.S. households skyrockets
Yahoo! News
The net worth of
Net worth — the difference between households' total assets, such as houses and bank accounts, and their total liabilities, such as mortgages and credit card debt, totaled $55.6 trillion in the October-to-December quarter.
That marked a 2.5 percent growth rate from the third quarter, the previous quarterly record high. Stocks gains helped fuel the increase in net worth, although real-estate gains played a role, too.
For all of last year, households' net worth rose by 7.4 percent, a slower pace than the 7.9 percent increase registered in 2005.
Household debt, meanwhile, grew by 8.6 percent in 2006, down from a 11.7 percent increase in the prior year. The Fed said this deceleration "was accounted for by much slower growth of home mortgage debt."
FEDS: February Temperatures were below normal, 34th coolest in 113 years
The average temperature in February 2007 was 32.9 F. This was -1.8 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 34th coolest February in 113 years. The temperature trend for the period of record (1895 to present) is 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.
1.56 inches of precipitation fell in February. This was -0.46 inches less than the 1901-2000 average, the 16th driest such month on record. The precipitation trend for the period of record (1895 to present) is 0.00 inches per decade.
COMMENTARY
Profit makes medicines cheaper
Richard Ralston, The Orange
Advocates of medical socialism want to reduce the profits of pharmaceutical firms and put health insurance companies out of business completely. But who profits from profits – and exactly who profits when they are destroyed?
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Of course, it is precisely because insurance companies need to make a profit that they monitor and control what they pay out. Their only source of funds to pay for services is the premiums paid by their policyholders. Medicare and Medicaid do not need to bother about such things as costs because of an endless source of tax revenue or government debt. That is why so much of the increase in cost that alarms politicians is caused by government health care spending. That is why the government can keep the "administrative cost" of burning money quite low. Who profits from that?
Our pharmaceutical industry has produced a revolution in medical treatment that has greatly improved health and longevity in the
Yet the most explicit and outrageous fabrication we hear from industry critics is that most drug research is funded by the government or universities, which then just hand the new drugs over to pharmaceutical firms to manufacture and make all the profit. The source of such nonsense is animosity toward free enterprise and all business as such. Business executives are considered "for-profit thieves" who must be exiled from the health care system as unworthy of providing health care, and the financial support of their investors must be denied any return on investment. Better more misery and no new miracle drugs than to allow someone, somewhere to make a profit. This ideology is enormously destructive.
David Holcberg, The Ayn Rand Institute (via Capitalism Magazine)
Last Wednesday 79 members of the House of Representatives introduced a bill instituting criminal and civil penalties on any corporation or individual found guilty of gasoline "price gouging." But the real gouger driving up gasoline prices is not the private sector, it is our government.
To "gouge" means to extort, to take by force--something that oil companies and gas stations have no power to do. Unlike a government, which can forcibly take away its citizens' money and dictate their behavior, an oil company can only make us an offer to buy its products, which we are free to reject.
Because sellers must gain the voluntary consent of buyers, and because the market allows freedom of competition, oil and gasoline prices are set, not by the whim of companies, but by economic factors such as supply and demand. If oil companies could set prices at will, surely they would have charged higher prices in the 1990s, when gasoline was under one dollar a gallon!
Al Gore's Inconvenient Electric Bill
Steven Milloy, JunkScience.com
The March 1863 Enrollment Act permitted wealthy men to legally dodge the Civil War draft by paying a $300 commutation fee to the U.S. Government. This controversial loophole fueled public perception of a “rich man’s war, but a poor man’s fight.”
The sight of well-dressed men during the 1863
It is, therefore, somewhat odd that Al Gore has ventured to become a latter-day $300-man in his crusade against global warming, especially since he touts himself as courageously leading the charge for wide-spread personal sacrifice.
At the end of Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” viewers are asked, “Are you ready to change the way you live”? Following this line of thinking, the movie’s web site suggests many ways that you can “reduce your impact at home,” including using less heating and air conditioning, buying expensive fluorescent light bulbs, using less hot water, using a clothesline rather than a dryer, carpooling, flying less and buying cost-inefficient hybrid cars.
Given that Gore calls the fight against global warming a “moral imperative” in the movie, you might reasonably think that he practices what his movie’s web site preaches. But you’d be wrong.
Debra Burlingame, Opinion Journal
He was the first American to die in what some have called "the real war." Johnny "Mike" Spann, the 32-year-old CIA paramilitary commando, was interrogating prisoners in an open courtyard at the Qala-I-Jangi fortress in
The bloody siege by Northern Alliance and
One of the committed jihadis who came out of that basement, wounded and unrepentant, was "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, now serving a 20-year sentence in a federal prison. Another who was shot during the uprising and pulled out of the basement along with Lindh was Nasser Nijer Naser al-Mutairi. Today, the 29-year-old is living somewhere in
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According to Michael Ratner, the radical lawyer and head of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the center received 300 pieces of hate mail when the organization filed the very first
But by 2004, when the first of three detainee cases was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, the national climate had changed. The country was politically divided, the presidential election was in full swing, and John Kerry was talking about treating terrorism like a criminal nuisance. The
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Allowing lawyers to subvert the truth and transform the Constitution into a lethal weapon in the hands of our enemies--while casting themselves as patriots--makes a mockery of the sacrifices made by true patriots like Mike Spann. If Sens. Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter, chairman and ranking members, respectively, of the Senate Judiciary Committee succeed in their plan to turn enemy combatant cases over to the federal courts, we will sorely rue the day that we eliminated "lawyer-free zones."
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Other links
Web Logs
Principles in Practice– Principled commentary on cultural matters and current events from “The Objective Standard”
Cox and Forkum – Political cartoons and commentary
The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid – Donald Luskin
Dollars and Crosses – CapitalismMagazine.com
Rule of Reason – The Center for the Advancement of Capitalism
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