In the Public Interest

As compared with portrayals of virtue, depictions of vice are more likely to stimulate attentiveness on the part of radio and television audiences. But Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh have taken this craven pit to new depths. Howard Stern, in case you’ve never heard him, is the multimillionaire radio “shock jock” with long flowing hair,…

What is happening to Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia? Talk to him about his demands that wrongfully injured victims of medical malpractice and product defects be further restricted from having their full day in court and the normally shy, self-deprecating politician behaves like his great grandfather, the arrogant oil billionaire who crushed…

No one could pigeonhole the multiple careers of Betty Furness who lost a battle with cancer on April 2 in New York City at the age of 78. If the only true ageing is the erosion of one’s ideals, she never did age. Instead Betty Furness was the paragon of ageless living with the last…

The President has been playing and relaxing. Everyone needs a rest, even one whose ten day vacations cost the taxpayer one big bundle. But have you ever heard of a President who goes to three NCAA playoff basketball games and opening day of the baseball season in one week? Have you ever heard of a…

Ever wonder how vigorous markets in collectibles — stamps, coins, beer cans, match covers, baseball cards — got started? Numerous economists I’ve put this question to have no idea and cannot point to any research in this area. What we do know is that these collectible marketplaces usually do not start from one “producer” or…

At last count there were more insurance consumers by far in Connecticut than insurance companies and their executives, but you wouldn’t know it by examining the political behavior of the state’s two Democratic Senators Christopher Dodd and Joseph Lieberman and Republican Rep. Nancy Johnson. As legislative heel-clickers for the giant insurance lobby, many of which…

The nation’s most prosperous drug dealers — the tobacco companies — are on the defensive these days. After years of control over Congress and the White House, the once powerful tobacco lobby is under attack by forces determined in all kinds of ways to reduce the annual death toll of over 400,000 Americans from tobacco-related…

Disney, Inc., ultimatum corporation that freeloads on taxpayers, wants to build a history theme park in northern Virginia as a camouflage for a massive real estate development in the beautiful, historic countryside around Haymarket. Secretly buying rights to 3000 acres of land, and probably more yet to be disclosed expansions, Disney went partially public last…

The thirty-year long struggle to tame the tobacco industry the opened a new phase last month when the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it would focus on “presence of nicotine in cigarettes in amounts associated with addiction.” FDA chief, Dr. David Kessler, wrote the American Heart Association on February 25, 1994 to say that…

A fast-growing service industry based on the commercialized privatization of settling conflicts is called Alternative Dispute Resolution. Known as ADR, for short, its growth over the past 15 years is fed by assertions that the courts are too clogged, judicial procedures too dilatory, and the judicial system too expensive. ADR’s proponents argue that mediation, arbitration…