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Health care: No, the state doesn't know best

May 16, 2012  •  The Boston Globe

PRICES WERE OUT OF CONTROL at the end of 3^rd-century Rome, and the Emperor Diocletian was determined to rein them in. In AD 301 he issued his famous Edict on Prices, a complex piece of legislation that banned speculation and established price ceilings for a wide range of goods and services. But the ambitious law failed. Though violators could be punished with death, inflation and speculation persisted. Goods were hoarded, or sold on the black market. The economic crisis worsened. Eventually the law was abandoned. Like countless rulers before and since, Diocletian discovered the hard way that price controls don't work. They worsen the problem they are intended to solve, leading to shortages, rationing, and even higher prices.

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What if Obama's 'evolution' had been sincere?

May 13, 2012  •  The Boston Globe

IT WAS HARD to suppress the cynicism after President Obama announced the outcome of his much-hyped "evolution" on same-sex marriage last week. He had "just concluded," he told ABC's Robin Roberts, that "same-sex couples should be able to get married."

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review of When General Grant Expelled the Jews

May 2012  •  Commentary magazine

IN DECEMBER 1862, from his military headquarters in Mississippi, Major General Ulysses S. Grant issued a directive expelling "Jews as a class" from the immense war zone known as the Department of the Tennessee. General Orders No. 11 was the most notorious anti-Jewish edict ever issued by an official of the US government, and it was overruled by the commander-in-chief -- President Abraham Lincoln -- as soon as he learned of it in Washington.

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The ghastly hellhole of Camp 14

May 9, 2012  •  The Boston Globe

SHIN DONG-HYUK grew up in North Korea's Camp 14, one of the monstrous slave-labor prison complexes in which the world's most tyrannical regime has crushed hundreds of thousands of its citizens, working them to death in conditions of excruciating brutality and degradation. Though the North Korean concentration camps have lasted far longer than their Soviet or Nazi counterparts did, Shin is the first person born and raised in one of them to have successfully escaped abroad. His story is told in journalist Blaine Harden's Escape from Camp 14, a heart-crushing reminder that man's inhumanity to man has no limit.

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'The defining issue of our time'? Hardly

May 6, 2012  •  The Boston Globe

There is nothing new under the sun, including politicians who seek to win votes by milking the gap between rich and poor.

Today it's Barack Obama, demanding a "Buffett rule" and decrying the harm caused when "the gap between those at the very, very top and everybody else keeps growing wider and wider and wider and wider." Not so long ago it was John Edwards, intent on riding his "Two Americas" stump speech ("One America does the work while another America reaps the reward") all the way to the White House.

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