Larry Haas

As President Obama focuses the nation’s attention on the prospect of huge, long-term federal budget deficits, some experts in Congress and elsewhere will try to build momentum to create a “budget commission” that would draft a deficit-cutting plan on which Congress would then vote. The idea is borne of frustration with soaring deficits and with …

Continue reading “Budget Commission? Bad Idea; Responsible Budgeting is Congress’s Job”

Facing growing threats to free speech across the West from what’s called “libel tourism,” lawmakers in Washington and London are beginning to awaken to propose legislative remedies. Their response is long overdue. Libel tourism is the practice by which the subjects of critical books or articles – such as Arab billionaires who allegedly finance terrorism …

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You might not know it, but the country lost a great man the other day, the kind of man that Americans say they want to see more of in Washington. His name was Donald C. Alexander, though any friend or acquaintance called him Don. He was Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service from May 1973 …

Continue reading “Don Alexander: A Man for Our Time”

Something is stirring in the world’s most populous nation, and it could eventually mark a watershed event in the march for human rights. That something is called “Charter 08,” a manifesto that more than 300 Chinese scholars, writers and activists issued online in December, that more than 8,000 Chinese of all vocations have since signed, …

Continue reading “China’s Human Rights Movement Could Soon Test Obama”

A controversial Dutch parliamentarian faces trial for violating hate speech laws in a case that presents a huge new threat to Western norms of free speech, free debate and critical inquiry. On January 21, the Amsterdam Court of Appeals ordered the criminal prosecution of Geert Wilders, who produced the 2008 film Fitna which argues that …

Continue reading “Dutch Debacle: Orwell Lives in Geert Wilders Free Speech Case”

No two names are more closely associated with misguided economic policy than Sen. Reed Smoot and Rep. Willis C. Hawley, authors of the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which helped convert a deep downturn into the Great Depression. Raising tariffs on more than 20,000 imported goods, the law prompted other nations to retaliate against …

Continue reading “Obama Needs a Narrative on Free Trade”

The world‟s all-too-predictable condemnation of Israel over its military operation in Gaza begs an ironic question: Beyond the heated rhetoric, who really cares for the people of Gaza? Who, that is, seeks to protect human life within this narrow strip of land and to build the economy and civil society that will ensure a bright …

Continue reading “Who Cares for the Gazans? How About Israel?”