People Still Think Taxes are the Problem
by John Reit(March 30, 2006)

Yesterday, I received an email a friend of mine that included a link to a website (mywireless.org) that's trying to abolish taxes on cell phone service. He sent it to all of his friends who live in Pennsylvania - a state that levies a tax of about 3% on our total cell phone bill each month. I paid my friend the courtesy of clicking the link and checking out the site. Within five minutes, this website had lost all credibility with me. Not only was it completely hypocritical, it missed the point entirely. More...

French Protests Show Exactly What’s Wrong with Socialism
by John Reit(March 22, 2006)

The main fallacy in liberal philosophy is that it’s entirely based on theory and high hopes, not logic or results. For instance, those against the war – the likes of Cindy Sheehan – believe that if we just “be nice” to the Muslims, they won’t attack us. Even though history proves time and again that appeasing hostility only encourages an aggressor (Chamberlain’s kid-glove approach to Hitler in the 1930s, for instance, and the 60 million dead as a result), liberals stick to that hypothesis like glue. It’s the same with economic theory. Liberals believe that if you simply guarantee employment to everyone no matter who they are, they will faithfully perform their duties for the good of the country – regardless of incentives. Once again, real life is proving how wrong they are. In France, young people are making it very clear that job security at all costs is more important than performance. More...

The Danger of Socializing Wal-Mart
by Mayank Kumar (March 20, 2006)

The intention of this article is not discussion about Wal-Mart or the law passed in the Maryland legislature but the idea and the motive force behind them. Even though this small article would be totally inefficient, I would like to touch upon them due to their sheer importance. Two conflicting ideas have been at loggerheads since the dawn of civilization in one form or other. Simply speaking, it has been the conflict of individualism and collectivism. More...

Why Do We Act Like Poverty is Something New?
by John Riet (March 17, 2006)

The "crisis of poverty" (or, "poverty crisis") is a term that's become so popular with those who support a socialist agenda for the United States. Before we examine the subject, let's take a look at the word, "crisis." According to dicitionary.reference.com, the definition of crisis is: (1a) A crucial or decisive point or situation; a turning point. (1b) An unstable condition, as in political, social, or economic affairs, involving impending abrupt or decisive change. (2) A sudden change in the course of a disease of fever, toward either improvement or deterioration. (3) An emotionally stressful event or traumatic change in a person's life. (4) The point of a story or drama when a conflict reaches its highest tension and must be resolved. So when we refer to poverty as a "crisis," by definition, we assume that it is an abrupt change in the human condition that needs an immediate solution. Nothing could be further from the truth. More...

Fiscal Responsibility, Shmiscal Shmesonsibility
by John Riet (March 16, 2006)

I often use farcical personal stories in my articles to prove my point. But this one is 100% true. A few years ago, with the help of a spend-happy woman I was dating at the time, I ran up an extremely large amount of credit card debt. I mean scary large. Particularly in my case because all my life I had been quite fiscally responsible. Even when I couldn’t save, at least I didn’t go nuts with carrying a credit card balance. Anyway, when I realized I was in trouble, I changed my spending habits and came up with a plan of how to pay off this debt. The one thing I didn’t do was to call my credit card company and ask them to raise my limit. In other words, I acted responsibly. Our government could take a lesson from me. More...

We’ve Learned the Lessons. We Just Choose to Ignore Them.
by John Riet (March 13, 2006)

At a very young age, I learned that if you have two apples and you add two more apples, you end up with four apples. I remember learning it. I know it by heart. And yet, whenever I go to the market, I pick up two apples in one hand, another two in the other; yet expect to be holding five apples when I look down. What’s worse, I’m always shocked when I only see four. No matter what my knowledge tells me, I always anticipate the sum of 2 and 2 to be 5. More...

Let’s Call the “Have-Nots” What They Really Are
by John Riet (March 9, 2006)

As far back as I can remember, our society has been classified in many different ways. According to income levels, you have the poor, the lower middle class, the middle class, the upper middle class, and the rich. Like most classifications, none of these tells the whole story about the individual. No one knows how a particular poor person became poor, and no one knows how a rich person became rich. But it’s easier to classify people than to treat them as individuals responsible for their own destinies. More...

Would the Poor Really Care Where Their Charity Comes From?
by John Riet (March 8, 2006)

The case can be made that, in many ways, conservatives and liberals are not that different from each other. We both want many of the same things. One of them being to help those we consider poor. On this issue, the similarity ends with our solutions to this “crisis.” Conservatives believe the only true way to help someone is with employment. It not only gives them an income, but teaches them responsibility and self-reliance. And if someone needs a helping hand getting back on his/her feet, we should look to private charities. Liberals, on the other hand, prefer to throw taxpayer money at them and hope for the best. More...

Legislators Should Be Economists or Statisticians – Not Lawyers
by Johann Robert Riet

I had my car inspected yesterday. The laws vary from state to state, but the state in which I live, forces you to inspect your car once a year. Actually that is down from twice a year in the past. The state I used to live in, until five years ago, required you to have it inspected once a year also. However, that state did it “free of charge”. They established state-run inspection stations, to which all car owners went for a free inspection. I know, I know, “there is no free lunch,” but that is not my point. By making it free, they accomplished inspection more efficiently than my current state, although more inconveniently because lines tended to form, which is not the case in my current state where you take your car to a mechanic so he (or she – in a diversity world) can really rip you off. But these are not really my points either. My point is going to have to do with the government’s ability to do by law, what the free market would never do. It will have to do with absurd utilization of precious resources, and to some extent the power of a lobby – probably auto mechanics. And finally it has to do with what most articles on this site will have to do with: The stupidity of, or the lack of interest, or the lack of information by the average American who gets to pull a voting lever. More...

Bush and His Oil Buddies Have Decided to Ease the Pressure a Bit (But Maybe Only In My Town)- Part 1
by Johann Robert Riet

As I was driving a few days ago, doing some errands, I noticed that the price of gas seemed to be relatively lower. By relatively lower, I mean the price of gas had declined by about 20 cents a gallon, as compared to a few weeks earlier. Because I have a number of friends, and a far greater number of fellow citizens, who believe that the price of gas is set by a conspiracy, the most current one and most oft mentioned one being "George Bush and His Oil Buddies", I began to think about the reasons for why they would decide to take less money for gasoline at this time. As hard as I tried, I could not think of a reason. I considered that they might be easing off a bit so that those who believed in a conspiracy, might be convinced that there is no conspiracy, and after accomplishing that, they could raise the price once more without receiving complaints from the conspiracy-theorists. More...

Bush and His Oil Buddies Have Decided to Ease the Pressure a Bit (But Maybe Only In My Town)- Part 2
by Johann Robert Riet

With warm temperatures, the high volume of active drivers, and both heating oil and gasoline beginning to accumulate in their storage tanks, George and his oil buddies are in a pickle to say the least. I know that they get a big kick out of charging the public the highest possible price for gasoline and hate to lower it. The current situation is a crisis indeed. So, I begin to imagine George W. Bush getting on Air Force One, and flying to an undisclosed location where he meets with all of his oil buddies, who manage all of his refineries on a daily basis. More...

Hi. My Name is John, and my Taxes Directly Support Terrorism.
by John Riet

Although I support it, I can see why the port deal with the U.A.E. would make some Americans question the commitment of our government to our national security. Well, let there be no more question in anyone’s mind… it couldn’t care less about our safety. That became obvious when, despite all of our big talk about refusing aid to a terrorist organization until it changed its attitude toward Israel, the U.S. decided to continue sending money to the Palestinians. More...

The Case for Capitalism
by Kris Avalon (Guest Columnist)

I have long been fascinated by the invisible line that exists between anarchism and communism. I tend to envision the two concepts as being like neighboring countries, let's say France and Germany. When looking at the two nations on a globe, you may notice that they are separated by nothing more than a paper-thin arbitrary line, and yet when you spin the globe only slightly, it becomes apparent that an entire world encompassing thousands upon thousands of miles exists between them. Such can most certainly be said of anarchism and communism. More...