Over the past few weeks, the American business lobby and in particular the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have come out in force to support the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. These groups and their puppets in Washington insist that the Ex-Im Bank is good for American small businesses and supports job…

In “Invitation to a Dialogue: Alternative Therapies” (New York Times, May 14), Dr. James S. Gordon writes: “Many economists believe that health care costs will continue to rise. Even more distressing, the Affordable Care Act will likely reinforce current practice, which dictates surgical and pharmacological interventions that can be expensive, inappropriate, burdened by side effects and, often,…

Last Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed something called “the USA Freedom Act.” The bill was intended by its authors to end the National Security Agency’s broad and privacy-shredding bulk data collection program, but the final version that passed is so weak that bulk data collection will still be permitted. Trevor Timm at the…

Rudolph Rocker once said that there is a definite trend in the historical development of human civilization which strives for the “free, unhindered unfolding of the individual and social forces of life.” This is indeed an accurate account of human history — we strive for the beautiful ethic of liberty. Liberty can be described, rather simply,…

Recently Rodrigo Mezzomo, in an article for Instituto “Liberal,” argued for the removal of the favelas as an urban necessity in Rio de Janeiro. According to the author, favelas symbolize “disorder and illegality,” and result from “invasions and disordered occupations.” Moreover, favela dwellers are “superior citizens, not subjected to the constitutional order of the country, because they…

I saw my first “homemade gun” when I was a kid. Older kids — teenagers — would save up the 4th of July fireworks known (for obvious reasons) as “bottle rockets” and play “war” with them: Stick the firework in a glass soda bottle (this was back when soda came in glass bottles that one…

According to Leonardo Dupin on journalist Juca Kfouri’s blog, Minas Arena consortium will have the right to operate the Minerao soccer stadium in Belo horizonte for 25 years, after their investment of about $300 million, $180 million of which was kindly lent by Brazil’s state development bank, BNDES. The agreement guarantees that the government of the…

“The biggest challenge to getting functioning space hotels and moon colonies might not even be, you know, building them and subsisting in space,” writes Jason Koebler (“The First Space Colonies Might Be Illegal,” Vice, May 15). “Instead, it might be navigating the tricky international legal framework governing off-world ownership.” Koebler’s concerns, which he hangs on…

It’s been a pretty bad couple of weeks on the climate front. Two separate teams of climate scientists warn that the collapse of the western Antarctic ice sheet has already begun and is now too late to stop. The six glaciers already in retreat are enough, by themselves to add four feet to global sea…

[Note: This piece was originally written as a letter to the editor of the New York Times in reply to its “Invitation to a Dialogue” on alternative therapies.] As Dr. Gordon notes, legislation ostensibly aimed at increasing the affordability of health care has had the effects of locking in a status quo of needlessly high levels of costly treatment required…

It’s over. As the evening started on Thursday (May 15), the Military Police of the State of Pernambuco, in Brazil decided to finish a strike that had lasted the whole day. Looting, depredations, disorder and murder all happened during the strike. Stores closed, people went home. “Arrastoes” (“draggings,” where large groups of people set off…

In Seattle, St. Louis and elsewhere, “ridesharing” services such as Uber and Lyft are causing a kerfuffle. These services, which allow users to submit orders via a smartphone app that are then filled by individuals driving their own cars, run afoul of long-standing regulations requiring the special licensing of taxis by municipal authorities. These licenses,…

In the village of Kalabalge, in the northern Nigerian state of Borno, the people struck back. While politicians dithered and activists twittered, the people of Kalabalge armed themselves and took the fight to their enemies, ambushing a Boko Haram convoy en route to attack their village. At least forty-one Boko Haram militants were killed and ten…

Like any other Para-born person, I like acai (pronounced “assa-IH,” people) a lot. Every Paraense, regardless of socio-economic status, eats it. It is an undeniablefact of life in Para. If you live in the capital, Belem, that is a constant reminder that we live in the Amazon, just like the herons downtown. Acai, as it is traditionally…

Of all the complex wicked problems facing the biosphere today perhaps the most contentious, and ultimately the most important, is climate change. A new paper in Geophysical Research Letters  from lead author Eric Rignot at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory adds to the already substantial body of evidence that climate change poses an immediate threat to human civilization. The study notes that due…

It is common in Brazil to say, “Text with no context is pretext.” The wordplay conveys a valuable truth: Out of context reasoning can be easily used as pretext for an agenda. To comprehend reality outside of context can serve interests very different from those originally intended. This should be a wakeup call for the…

Two researchers at Utah State University have discovered a factor which may be silently impacting the much-discussed, but poorly understood, gender wage gap. Lindsey McBride and Grant Patty examined the gender bias of occupational licensing requirements. What they found is that —  at least at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder — women are…

In Nigeria, radical Islamic group Boko Haram has carried out a series of horrific attacks, culminating in the recent abduction of 234 girls from a boarding school in the city of Chibok. The group allegedly intends to sell the girls into slavery. The Nigerian government pledges to free them, but thus far reports on the…

For decades taxi regulations have served as the textbook example of government regulations creating artificial enclosures, rents, and wage labor. In addition to a host of prohibitous regulations that even extend to the color of a driver’s socks, the “medallion” system dramatically limits the number of taxi in major cities while at the same time…

It’s common for Democrats to depict themselves as the “party of compassion,” as opposed to the Wall Street stooges in the GOP,  resorting to soccer mom rhetoric about “American working families” and “sitting around the kitchen table.” Republicans, on the other side, frame themselves as the “free enterprise” party — unlike those anti-business socialists on…