Commentary

return to orbit. A "space tourist," originally scheduled to visit Mir earlier this year, has been included with a Russian crew that will join residing astronauts at the International Space Station in late April. This transfer from Mir to the ISS represents a misguided attempt to transfer the responsibilities of a private contract to the other members of the international space program. California investment executive Dennis Tito made news last year by paying MirCorp and RKK Energia (Mir's operating company) roughly $20 million for the privilege of accompanying two Russian astronauts to Mir, at a time when the aging space station's future was still uncertain. Tito's high-profile purchase was the kickoff to MirCorp's strategy to transform Mir into a commercial venture open to wealthy travelers and for-profit scientific research.

Mar 31, 2010

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October 6, 2004 -- When Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in 1975, they shot for the stars and succeeded. More recently, Allen shot for the stars again. The two successful launches of his SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize competition for private, manned space flights. This feat may ultimately do for private space ventures what Charles Lindbergh's crossing the Atlantic did for commercial aviation. The success of these enterprises obviously depended on such factors as genius, guts, and foresight. It also depended on the less obvious absenceof something—government regulation.

Mar 31, 2010

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March 22, 2002 -- Amtrak’s financial hemorrhaging is so severe that it may be insolvent by summer. The railroad’s auditor, KPMG LLP, is holding back from declaring it a “going concern.” Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.) has flatly declared, “Amtrak isn’t broken, it’s bankrupt,” and he’s right. The Amtrak Reform Council has found Amtrak incapable of surviving without continuing taxpayer subsidies and, following a 1997 law, sent a plan to Congress recommending Amtrak be reorganized. That finding triggered a requirement that Amtrak simultaneously submit a liquidation plan to Congress, which would choose among the plans or create a hybrid plan.

Mar 31, 2010

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July 4, 2007 -- On July 4, 1776, America's Founders declared the country's independence from Britain, largely as a revolt against excessive and unfair taxation. So in our nation, which is much more overtaxed than it was over two centuries ago, it would be fitting if, in recognition of our Founding principles, federal, state and, local governments made July Fourth a totally tax-free day. Many cities already suspend sales taxes for a few days a year on items such as clothing and school supplies, usually to garner the favor of overtaxed parents struggling to raise kids and to give mom and pop an incentive to frequent overtaxed downtown enterprises struggling to make profits. So wouldn't this be appropriate for all of us, who struggle every day to be allowed to keep our money, on that day on which we celebrate our freedom?

Mar 31, 2010

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Edward Hudgins

March 6, 2002 -- Because I live in Warsaw, I get most of my TV news from the BBC. Recently I have watched, dumbfounded and amused, the outpouring of concern for the comfort of the al-Qaeda prisoners kept at Guantanamo Bay. They were transported shackled with bags over their heads! They sleep in open cages! Four of them have British passports! Have they all had their Miranda warnings? The fact that they are undoubtedly living in less discomfort than they freely chose to undergo in the field doesn’t seem to register. I often think that the most common error in reasoning is a kind of category error, the placing of an issue in a category in which it doesn’t belong. The classic example is the “no right to shout fire in a crowded theater” issue, often cited in a free-speech context when it clearly belongs in an implied-contract context.

Mar 31, 2010

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December 4, 2001 -- In the coming months, ethicists will be variously defending or condemning human cloning and embryonic stem cell research. They will debate the potential benefits of the technology and discuss the social consequences of the advancing science. But in the end, the ethical question will turn on the issue of when a human life begins—i.e., the life of a distinct, individual human being, a person. There is no simple answer, because the different dimensions of a person's identity emerge at different points in a continuous and complex process of development. Genetic identity is present in the fertilized egg. Cognitive identity emerges later when the fetus acquires the neural basis for conceptual thought. Biological identity as a distinct organism begins to emerge at the point of viability, and is fully present at birth. The person's moral identity as a being capable of voluntary choice on the basis of knowing right from wrong, and his spiritual identity as a self-consciously differentiated personality, are both later developments of childhood and adolescence.

Mar 31, 2010

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Patrick Stephens

October 9, 2001 -- As the full impact of the barbaric attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon unfolded, we realized that we were witnesses to the worst terrorist attack in history. And even for the majority of us who do not personally know anyone whose life was stolen, the reports out of New York and Washington left a painful spiritual wound. Events as horrific and terrifying as these attacks tear us from the normal context of our lives and throw us into a seemingly inescapable world of chaos and unknown terrors. These events destroy, at least temporarily, the connection we feel with reality. We feel lost, alone, and without a way to make sense of the world. It makes it hard, as many people experienced, to focus on mundane tasks and everyday activities. These lose their meaning and make our lives feel as if they are also without meaning.

Mar 18, 2010

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Shawn E. Klein

January 1, 2007 -- [Published in The Washington Times] Janus, the Roman god after which the first month of our year is named, had two faces. One looked at the past year and the other looked ahead at the year to come. On New Year's Day in ancient Rome, the new magistrates would assume power; we wait until a few days later to swear in ours, since politicians hung over from partying would be even less fit for office than they already are. New Year's is traditionally when we reflect upon the year gone by and make solemn resolutions for the twelve months to come. Surveys find self-improvement rather than saving the world is most often on Americans' minds.

Mar 18, 2010

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Edward Hudgins

January 30, 2006 -- A Columbia, Maryland neighborhood has been invaded by vultures. Not lawyers, politicians, and others to whom this description is often attached, but the real, flying, circling-the-dead, feeding-on-decaying-corpses ones. They are damaging the roofs on which they perch. The droppings of these fowl foul houses, cars, sidewalks, and streets, exposing the children who they frighten to diseases as well as nightmares. Non-violent means have failed to chase away the pests. In a more enlightened age, the answer to the problem would be simple. The adults might pack off the children for a Saturday afternoon, get out their rifles, have a neighborhood shooting party, take away the dead bird bodies for sanitary disposal, do a final cleanup, and spend a peaceful Saturday night, kids safely back to home and hearth.

Mar 18, 2010

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Edward Hudgins

February 27, 2002 -- The enemies of capitalism are using Enron Corporation’s sudden bankruptcy to launch a new wave of attacks on the free market. Enron confirms the Left’s view that business is a dog-eat-dog arena of swindlers and exploiters that requires active government management. Enron lets the Right make a show of standing up to big business. So a host of new regulations on private business activities is moving forward in Congress, ranging from more restrictive rules on 401(k) retirement savings to intensive government oversight of the accounting profession. These new regulations won’t help Enron employees or shareholders. They aren’t meant to. They are meant to fix capitalism, but politicians can’t fix the problems that Enron exposed.

Mar 18, 2010

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William Thomas

February 6, 2002 -- During last Sunday’s Superbowl, the President’s Office of National Drug Control Policy aired the first two commercials of a new ad campaign linking drug use with terrorism. The ads, aimed at teenagers, are meant to capitalize on the kids’ growing sense of political awareness. Their message is simple: If you buy drugs, you might be financing terrorists. But as is often the case, the simple message masks a more complicated reality. The administration acknowledges that teenage potheads aren’t terrorists. But the ad campaign is pretty clear when it comes to what those little tokers are doing: They’re helping to finance terrorism, kill judges, murder families, and torture people. Sound a little extreme? It is. One television ad, titled “I Helped,” features a series of teenage faces reciting a litany of their crimes: “I helped kill a judge,” “I helped kill policemen,” and, of course, “I helped blow up buildings.”

Mar 16, 2010

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Patrick Stephens

November 19, 2001 -- On November 8, President George W. Bush proposed his own version of the "national service" plan that had been espoused two days earlier by Senators John McCain and Evan Bayh. The New York Times's headline read "Bush Seeks New Volunteer Force for Civil Defense." But most of the text of the president's proposal had little to do with civil defense and much more to do with the senators' broad-ranging scheme for "national service." Thus, the president began to outline the ways in which people could help their country by saying: "You can serve your country by tutoring or mentoring a child, comforting the afflicted, housing those in need of shelter and a home." None of those could plausibly be classified as civil defense. They are precisely the activities that, in a free country, are carried out by a civil society of for-profit and non-profit organizations—educational, medical, cultural, recreational, and charitable organizations.

Mar 16, 2010

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October 16, 2003 -- On October 15, 2003, China joined the United States and Russia as a country capable of putting humans in space. The launch of that country's "taikonaut," Yang Liwei, harkened back to the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite, and 1961 launch of Yuri Gagarin, the first man into space—both ahead of the United States. Those events spurred America into a space race with the Russians that led to its historic lunar landings. Today, the U.S. government's reaction to China's challenge should not be a new space race and bigger NASA budgets. Rather, the United States should turn to private providers in a free market to open outer space to all humanity. The Chinese people are understandably thrilled about their government placing a man in orbit. Space travel is a symbol of modernity at its best. For many years, China has used its Long March rockets to place commercial payloads in orbit, including American-manufactured satellites. Now that it has achieved the more difficult feat of placing a human in space, it has the prestige of playing in the big leagues with the United States and Russia. But China's newfound prestige in part reflects the failures of America's space program.

Mar 16, 2010

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Edward Hudgins

July 23, 2002 -- The recent furor over accusations of insider trading by high-profile shareholders of ImClone Systems has been touted as yet another example of corporate fraud, heralded by the collapse of Enron in December last year. These allegations led to the arrest of ImClone’s ex-CEO Sam Waksal and have shrouded Martha Stewart’s activities in doubt. They have also elicited the usual demand for stricter government regulation of corporate functioning. It is another rallying point for the voices that routinely decry big business and capitalism and clamor for the government’s protection from them. President Bush has already acquiesced to such demands for action and has promised steps to strengthen the Securities and Exchange Commission. There is also talk of creating an accounting industry Oversight Board (effectively expanding government regulation of the accounting industry).

Mar 16, 2010

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Malini Kochhar

December 2003 -- Communist China is experiencing a sexual revolution, and Beijing is not at all happy about it. Sexologist Li Yinhe believes that while less than two decades ago only 16 percent of Chinese engaged in premarital sex, today at least 60 percent do. One-night stands, urban bar scenes, and open Internet discussions of sexual issues are now common among young people. It’s no mystery why the communist authorities are chagrined by this revolution. George Orwell's 1984 was published in 1949, the year the communists took over China. It depicted a future Stalinist regime in which sex, except for producing children, is prohibited and punishable by death. Similar to Orwell's nightmare, public displays of affection in Red China—even handholding—were banned, and romantic relationships could get one fired or worse. Clothing in Orwell's world is unattractive and unisexual. China followed as Orwell foretold—remember those Mao jackets? Unable to fight a totalitarian regime and secret police, a woman in Orwell's hell rebels by having as many pleasurable, secret sexual trysts as possible. China now is at that stage, though the rebellion is very public.

Mar 16, 2010

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Edward Hudgins

September 6, 2001 -- The mountains are ablaze. The chickens of the radical environmental movement have come home to roast. While screaming that trees are sacred and should never be harvested, the radical greens deny their responsibility for the horrendous destruction that now visits our western forest. But they are responsible, and the billions spent on fire suppression, the gut-wrenching pain of those who lose their homes, the hundreds of thousands of acres of forests annihilated, and the injury and death caused by these fires are the direct result of their actions. To lock up our Western forests from active management is unconscionable. Letting the dead trees accumulate without salvaging them has allowed fuels to build on the forest floor until virtually any fire is a catastrophe. Designating millions of western acres as roadless, without access for management, and denying rational management of the national properties is causing nature to react by destroying the very beauty these people claim to want to protect forever.

Mar 16, 2010

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March 5, 2002 -- On March 6, 1982, writer and philosopher Ayn Rand died. Her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and non-fiction works like Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal were major influences on the development of the libertarian movement, and in the two decades since her death, the accuracy of her insights has been demonstrated time and again. Ayn Rand was born in 1905 in czarist Russia. Before she left in 1926, she witnessed the rise of that most evil empire, a communist regime that would take the lives, liberty, and property of millions of people. She understood firsthand the horrid consequences of evil philosophies and the importance of defending the right ideas for the right reasons.

Mar 16, 2010

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Edward Hudgins

October 11, 2007 -- Two important events occurred in October 1957. First, the Soviet Union launched into orbit the first artificial satellite, named Sputnik, causing many to speculate that the West was losing to the superior technology and, possibly, inevitable ideology of communism. Second, the novel Atlas Shrugged was published. Its author, Ayn Rand , had fled the tyranny of Soviet communism in 1926 for freedom in the West. Ayn Rand's ideas are needed today, to provide the basis for a culture of principled individualism. Today, communism in Russia and its satellite countries is dead. Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand's other works continue to sell millions of copies. A 1992 Library of Congress survey found it to be the most influential book in the country after the Bible. It helped launch the modern free market and libertarian movement.

Mar 16, 2010

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Edward Hudgins

April 14, 2004 -- Americans celebrate July 4 with pride as the day we gained our independence. However, we should lament April 15—tax day—as the day that too many of us all too willingly surrender our liberty and opportunities in life. Here's why. All free individuals want to run their own lives. When we leave the loving protection of our parents, we should express our love for those who raised us by acting as independent adults. As grown men and women, we should look forward to the challenge of discovering and creating the goals and purposes that will give us joy in life; of acquiring the knowledge and skills we need to make a living; and of earning the resources necessary to realize our dreams.

Mar 15, 2010

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Edward Hudgins

September 4, 2001 -- Last Friday, public broadcasting stations across the country aired the last original episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. After 33 years, the series finished neither with a bang nor with a syrupy-sweet ending, but rather with Fred Rogers's trademark closing—"see you next time"—promising to return to television next week. And he will, of course—with about 1,000 episodes from the past three decades already canned, Rogers's neighborhood will be a staple for yet another generation of developing minds. Last Friday's episodes are no exception; producers plan on working them into the mix alongside his other vintage episodes.

Mar 15, 2010

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Donald Cooper