This column by ACRU Senior Fellow Robert Knight was published December 15, 2013 on The Washington Times website.

Baseball and football fans know that when coaches chew out umpires and referees, there’s little chance that the questionable call will be overturned — especially in baseball. In many cases, though, that’s not the intent. The idea is to intimidate the umpire into giving them a better call the next time around.

I thought about that in October when the Democrats and media fomented massive outrage over the two-week, partial government shutdown. The crocodile tears were not really shed over the government employees, who were made whole […]

This column by ACRU Policy Board Member and Professor of Economics Dr. Walter E. Williams was published December 04, 2013 on Townhall.com.

In a March 2008 column, I criticized pundits’ concerns about whether America was ready for Barack Obama, suggesting that the more important issue was whether black people could afford Obama. I proposed that we look at it in the context of a historical tidbit.

In 1947, Jackie Robinson, after signing a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers organization, broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball. He encountered open racist taunts and slurs from fans, opposing team players and even some members of his […]

This column by ACRU General Counsel Peter Ferrara was published November 27, 2013 on Forbes.com.

Just one month before the 2012 election, the Obama campaign received a major illegal campaign contribution from the Commerce Department. The Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported on October 5, 2012 that the nation’s unemployment rate suddenly dropped sharply over the prior month, from 8.1% to 7.8%. That supposedly ended the longest period in the nation’s history with unemployment over 8%, except for the Great Depression, which occurred under President Obama.

Just before the election. How convenient.

That was totally unbelievable at the time, and […]

This column by ACRU General Counsel Peter Ferrara was published November 30, 2013 on Forbes.com.

A common fallacy is that the Great Depression was ended by the explosive spending of World War II. But World War II actually institutionalized the sharp decline in the standard of living caused by the Depression. The Depression was actually ended, and prosperity restored, by the sharp reductions in spending, taxes and regulation at the end of World War II, exactly contrary to the analysis of Keynesian so-called economists.

True, unemployment did decline at the start of World War II. But that was a statistical residue of […]

This column by ACRU Policy Board Member and Professor of Economics Dr. Walter E. Williams was published November 20, 2013 on Townhall.com.

There’s more to the deceit and dishonesty about Social Security and Medicare discussed in my recent columns. Congress tells us that one-half (6.2 percent) of the Social Security tax is paid by employees and that the other half is paid by employers, for a total of 12.4 percent. Similarly, we are told that a Medicare tax of 1.45 percent is levied on employees and that another 1.45 percent is levied on employers. The truth of the matter is that the burden of both taxes […]