Honest Services The estimable Tom Kirkendall, of the blog “Houston’s Clear Thinkers,” performs a useful chore today: Reminding us how large a part the press played in the “Great Houston Rich-Hunt” that brought down Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and many others. (Kirkendall’s own Enron client, the company’s post-Fastow CFO, Jeffrey McMahon, was never criminally charged.) Kirkendall mentions, in particular, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, although it has, over the years, been the single least culpable voice in the media when it comes to business prosecutions—and in many cases it has done splendid work in opposing them. Thus, its apology the other day to Conrad Black was both the most expected and the least truly needed: The Black and Skilling cases are precisely the kind involving high-profile, unsympathetic defendants in which willful prosecutors like Mr. Fitzgerald are inclined to abuse the honest services law. They know the media won't write about the legal complexities, and they know juries are often inclined to find a rich CEO guilty of something. We regret that in the case of Mr. Black, that failure of media oversight included us. I mentioned the other day that Timothy Sandefur of Pacific Research Institute and Timothy Lynch of the Cato Institute filed an amicus brief in the Skilling case, but I failed to provide a link. Here is it . The Gulf Spill Lawrence Solomon of Canada’s Financial Post has a must-read article on the BP spill, called “The Avertible Catastrophe.” In it, he compares the American response to the Gulf spill with the Dutch response to oil spills--and what they could have done to mitigate the Gulf spill had their offers of assistance been accepted. Here is an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal on measuring the size of oil spills . Anyone listening to the chattering classes knows that many accuse BP of having systematically underestimated the extent of the Gulf spill, while others offer precise comparisons between the Deepwater Horizon spill and those of Ixtoc 1 and the ExxonValdez. As the Journal article points out, the figures calculated for those earlier spills are highly inexact, even long after the fact. spiderID=605
Be it the public option (that’ll eliminate all other options), the co-opting “co-op”, or the make-believe market that is the “insurance exchange”: if implemented, these euphemisms for centrally planned medicine will mean many more bureaucracies manned by plenty of government workers. Government workers may not always be genial to the public that pays them, but they are generous to a fault with their own. In the course of providing the stellar service for which the United States Postal Service has become famous, they pay themselves sizeable salaries and bountiful benefits, and retire years before the stiffs who support them can afford to.
April 16, 1967. A wet, icy wind blew off the Charles River and howled down the wide channel of Massachusetts Avenue, gusting into narrow ...
Six decades after its publication, The Fountainhead is still very much alive. New readers by the hundreds find it every day
Atlas Shrugged is structured in three major parts, each of which consists of ten chapters. The parts and chapters are named, and the....
"You want to stand alone against the whole world?" That's certainly how it seems for Howard Roark as he's expelled from...
Objectivism holds that man has free will. In every moment, many courses of action are open to us; whichever action we take, we could equally
Objectivism reads "I am my brother's keeper" as a short-hand for an ideal of self-sacrifice and service to the group. In other words, it...
Libertarianism is the political position that all human relationships should be voluntary, i.e. not subject to the initiation of force by...
Transhumanism (e.g. H+ ) or Extropianism is an ideological coalition centered on the idea that, in the near future, substantial....
In Atlas Shrugged , the hero, John Galt, makes a radio speech to the nation revealing the strike of the producers and explaining its......
Objectivism holds that the fundamental standard for all relationships is the trader principle. This principle holds that we should interact
I am sitting on the shore of Lake Ontario. It is late spring, and the sun rose about five minutes ago. The waters, which appeared blue
In its heyday, the instant book was an invaluable resource. Appearing shortly after a major news event, the tome would give a complete news
The Objectivist ethics holds the human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifices of anyone to anyone.
A system of government with elected representatives is a good thing, but more fundamental than the form by which the government is chosen...
The Atlases who bear this world on their shoulders. Uniquely, Rand’s work portrays the exploited entrepreneurs of the mixed economy as the..
First, it is not true, as is often claimed, that human beings “all must live together.” There are far too many examples to the contrary—for
Piracy is thriving at the beginning of the twenty-first century—and no, I’m not talking about people playing fast and loose with intellectual property rights by illegally downloading music, films, or software. The past few years have seen a resurgence of actual, honest-to-goodness armed pirates terrorizing the high seas. They may have traded in their peg legs and eye patches for assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, but other than that, they’re back to their old tricks. Incidents of piracy have been increasing for three straight years, according to the Piracy Reporting Centre of the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), with the global total shooting up to 406 in 2009, from 263 in 2008. Somali pirates accounted for over half of the 2009 incidents, including 47 of the 49 hijackings and 867 of the 1052 crew members taken hostage. On January 18 of this year, the Greek supertanker Maran Centaurus was released by Somali pirates in exchange for a $9 million ransom, according to a report by Agence France-Presse. Why, in this modern world of ours, has piracy managed to stage such an impressive comeback?
The Atlas Society has now launched its ground-breaking Business Rights Center, headed by the brilliant editor, writer, and business analyst Roger Donway. The Business Rights Center (BRC) is dedicated to defending businessmen who are wrongly defamed by the media and unjustly prosecuted by the government. The BRC also strives to expose and challenge the false premises of today’s post-Enlightenment, anti-business intelligentsia.
Honest Services The estimable Tom Kirkendall, of the blog “Houston’s Clear Thinkers,” performs a useful chore today: Reminding us how large a part the press played in the “Great Houston Rich-Hunt” that brought down Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and many others. (Kirkendall’s own Enron client, the company’s post-Fastow CFO, Jeffrey McMahon, was never criminally charged.) Kirkendall mentions, in particular, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, although it has, over the years, been the single least culpable voice in the media when it comes to business prosecutions—and in many cases it has done splendid work in opposing them. Thus, its apology the other day to Conrad Black was both the most expected and the least truly needed: The Black and Skilling cases are precisely the kind involving high-profile, unsympathetic defendants in which willful prosecutors like Mr. Fitzgerald are inclined to abuse the honest services law. They know the media won't write about the legal complexities, and they know juries are often inclined to find a rich CEO guilty of something. We regret that in the case of Mr. Black, that failure of media oversight included us. I mentioned the other day that Timothy Sandefur of Pacific Research Institute and Timothy Lynch of the Cato Institute filed an amicus brief in the Skilling case, but I failed to provide a link. Here is it . The Gulf Spill Lawrence Solomon of Canada’s Financial Post has a must-read article on the BP spill, called “The Avertible Catastrophe.” In it, he compares the American response to the Gulf spill with the Dutch response to oil spills--and what they could have done to mitigate the Gulf spill had their offers of assistance been accepted. Here is an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal on measuring the size of oil spills . Anyone listening to the chattering classes knows that many accuse BP of having systematically underestimated the extent of the Gulf spill, while others offer precise comparisons between the Deepwater Horizon spill and those of Ixtoc 1 and the ExxonValdez. As the Journal article points out, the figures calculated for those earlier spills are highly inexact, even long after the fact. spiderID=605
Be it the public option (that’ll eliminate all other options), the co-opting “co-op”, or the make-believe market that is the “insurance exchange”: if implemented, these euphemisms for centrally planned medicine will mean many more bureaucracies manned by plenty of government workers. Government workers may not always be genial to the public that pays them, but they are generous to a fault with their own. In the course of providing the stellar service for which the United States Postal Service has become famous, they pay themselves sizeable salaries and bountiful benefits, and retire years before the stiffs who support them can afford to.
April 16, 1967. A wet, icy wind blew off the Charles River and howled down the wide channel of Massachusetts Avenue, gusting into narrow ...
Six decades after its publication, The Fountainhead is still very much alive. New readers by the hundreds find it every day
Atlas Shrugged is structured in three major parts, each of which consists of ten chapters. The parts and chapters are named, and the....
"You want to stand alone against the whole world?" That's certainly how it seems for Howard Roark as he's expelled from...
Objectivism holds that man has free will. In every moment, many courses of action are open to us; whichever action we take, we could equally
Objectivism reads "I am my brother's keeper" as a short-hand for an ideal of self-sacrifice and service to the group. In other words, it...
Libertarianism is the political position that all human relationships should be voluntary, i.e. not subject to the initiation of force by...
Transhumanism (e.g. H+ ) or Extropianism is an ideological coalition centered on the idea that, in the near future, substantial....
In Atlas Shrugged , the hero, John Galt, makes a radio speech to the nation revealing the strike of the producers and explaining its......
Objectivism holds that the fundamental standard for all relationships is the trader principle. This principle holds that we should interact
I am sitting on the shore of Lake Ontario. It is late spring, and the sun rose about five minutes ago. The waters, which appeared blue
In its heyday, the instant book was an invaluable resource. Appearing shortly after a major news event, the tome would give a complete news
The Objectivist ethics holds the human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifices of anyone to anyone.
A system of government with elected representatives is a good thing, but more fundamental than the form by which the government is chosen...
The Atlases who bear this world on their shoulders. Uniquely, Rand’s work portrays the exploited entrepreneurs of the mixed economy as the..
First, it is not true, as is often claimed, that human beings “all must live together.” There are far too many examples to the contrary—for
Piracy is thriving at the beginning of the twenty-first century—and no, I’m not talking about people playing fast and loose with intellectual property rights by illegally downloading music, films, or software. The past few years have seen a resurgence of actual, honest-to-goodness armed pirates terrorizing the high seas. They may have traded in their peg legs and eye patches for assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, but other than that, they’re back to their old tricks. Incidents of piracy have been increasing for three straight years, according to the Piracy Reporting Centre of the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), with the global total shooting up to 406 in 2009, from 263 in 2008. Somali pirates accounted for over half of the 2009 incidents, including 47 of the 49 hijackings and 867 of the 1052 crew members taken hostage. On January 18 of this year, the Greek supertanker Maran Centaurus was released by Somali pirates in exchange for a $9 million ransom, according to a report by Agence France-Presse. Why, in this modern world of ours, has piracy managed to stage such an impressive comeback?
The Atlas Society has now launched its ground-breaking Business Rights Center, headed by the brilliant editor, writer, and business analyst Roger Donway. The Business Rights Center (BRC) is dedicated to defending businessmen who are wrongly defamed by the media and unjustly prosecuted by the government. The BRC also strives to expose and challenge the false premises of today’s post-Enlightenment, anti-business intelligentsia.