James Bovard

Of all the politicians complaining about the profits and practices of America's wicked oil companies, few can top Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.). Among her latest ventures is a demand that the oil company executives who testified Nov. 9 be brought back to the Senate,...

The first rule in government, as in medicine, is the Hippocratic one: Do no harm. Unfortunately, Congress is about to do severe harm to the U.S. economy if it fails to act in the next few months to stop three huge automatic tax increases. Let me shift metaphors. The...

James Glassman: Energy prices have been rising sharply, partly because of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. We decided to talk to probably America's number one expert on energy to try to separate some of the hysteria and the myths from the truth. Dan Yergin is the...

"An angry public wants quick relief from high prices" at the pump, says Business Week. That's hardly a surprise. Over the past year, the Energy Department reports, a gallon of regular gasoline has gone from $1.86 to $2.96. But even at less than bottled water, $3...

My biggest mistake in 25 years of writing newspaper and magazine articles about the stock market started innocently. My intention, in a February 23, 2003, column for the Washington Post, was to show readers how to analyze a stock and decide whether to buy it. The...

"An angry public wants quick relief from high prices" at the pump, says Business Week. That's hardly a surprise. Over the past year, the Energy Department reports, a gallon of regular gasoline has gone from $1.86 to $2.96. But even at less than bottled water, $3...

Dr. Roy Spencer is a principal research scientist for University of Alabama in Huntsville. In the past, he has served as Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where he directed research into the development...

As much of Europe struggles with double-digit unemployment this year, the United States has been creating an average of 200,000 new jobs a month. One of our great advantages is the relative ease with which Americans can start new businesses. Physical disability, the...

Reading Kurt Eichenwald's fascinating book on Enron Corp., "A Conspiracy of Fools," is enough to make an investor throw up his hands (or his lunch), sell all his stocks and buy a bundle of nice short-term U.S. Treasury bonds. Eichenwald shows, in vivid detail, how...

The U.S. commerce secretary, Carlos Gutierrez, last month took a ritual stroll through a Beijing market that teemed with pirated versions of "Star Wars" and "Seinfeld," along with bogus North Face windbreakers, Calloway golf clubs and Samsonite suitcases. "We would...

What's all the fuss? An energy company based in Hong Kong called CNOOC, Ltd. -- small by international standards -- a few weeks ago bid $18.5 billion in cash to buy another small energy company, Unocal, based in California. The bid was nearly $2 billion higher than a...

There's no public-policy topic more prone to intellectual abuse than energy. Take conservation. Refrigerators, automobiles, houses, factories

The clock is ticking. Unless Congress acts -- who knows? -- we could see a wave of suicides, patricides, matricides and rich-uncle killings in 2010. That's the year that the federal tax on estates -- also known as the "death tax," the most hated tax exacted by the...

Right after the November 1994 election, I wrote that "the way to tell how serious Republicans are about cutting federal spending is to watch