baker

Culture wars? Let the free market decide

Culture wars? Let the free market decide

Tina McCormick

The culture war has only just begun. This is not a conventional battle of two sides, sparring over rights and the merits of tradition within the confines of civil democratic debates. Sadly, we are in the midst of guerrilla warfare where unpredictable alliances are forming and personal feuds are fought with passion in the public courts and the sphere of public opinion.

The current national tension surrounding sexual and religious freedom raises a tangle of questions that concern public display and private conscience, personal affirmation and self-expression, the merits of the free market, the nature of business-consumer interaction, and the power of big business versus the vulnerability of small mom-and-pop operations. Above all, it raises questions about the meaning of liberty and exposes just how fragile it is.

With a higher rate of economic growth, we could ….
economy

With a higher rate of economic growth, we could ….

Brian Domitrovic

This economy sure isn't growing. The release this week of the size-of-the-economy measurement, "GDP," made it plain. So far in 2016, growth is all of half a percent—at an annual rate. This follows on the sub-2 percent trend of the previous quarters, and fully a decade now of yearly sub-3 percent growth, the first time that has ever happened in American history.

Negligible economic growth—bringing with it the masses of dropouts from the labor force, students drifting through universities on loans, and stagnating family incomes—typically calls forth urgent appeals for the trend to be reversed. Not this time. The Democrats are content to identify inequality as opposed to growth as the top issue, while Republicans have a weakness for blaming immigrants and foreigners, as if the relevant matter were reducing the number of people dividing up the pie, as opposed to increasing its size.

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