When the Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page lead story that the Department of Energy had concluded the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from a leak from China’s Wuhan laboratory, you might have argued it was old news. The FBI had already, it turns out, come to the same conclusion and […]
Michael Barone
How many people believe, really believe, in freedom of speech? Or, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, not just “free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate”? The answer is not as many as I supposed before reading my Washington Examiner colleague […]
The ordinarily fluent and unperturbed Justice Elena Kagan seemed, judging from the transcript, to be sputtering a bit in the oral argument of the Supreme Court’s case challenging the racial quotas and preferences used in admissions by the University of North Carolina. Questioning the counsel for those suing the university, […]
From all those lists of best books of 2022, here’s one with the potential to change public policy debate and discourse for the better. It’s “The Myth of American Inequality,” and the three authors are two Ph.D. economists, former Sen. Phil Gramm and his long-ago Texas A&M colleague Robert Ekelund, […]
What issues are the candidates and the parties not talking about? It’s worth asking, because sometimes these issues turn out to be important. I don’t remember any candidates talking about Islamic terrorism in the midterm elections of 1998 or about the risk of investing in mortgage-backed securities in 2006. Going […]
“A Bailout for Woke Higher Ed” reads the headline on the stringent analysis by the Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley of the Biden student loan forgiveness program. It’s a program that’s economically regressive, “even worse than you thought,” with big bailouts for the most affluent, as economist Tyler Cowen points […]
When federal agents removed top-secret documents from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence last week, they carried with them a search warrant citing possible violations of the Espionage Act. Ah, the Espionage Act! How that must have sounded comfortingly confirmatory to those leftists who still believe, despite the total lack […]