No one can prevent hurricanes, but prosperous communities are much better able to withstand them than poor ones.
Like the producers of crops, airplanes, and books, producers of natural gas provide goods to meet the size of their available market. The larger the market, the more they can produce, and the more revenue they can obtain to cover their fixed costs and invest in future development.
Trillions of dollars in out-of-control entitlement spending cannot be remedied by cuts in NASA, or even in the entire discretionary budget, defense included. Rather, the financial bleeding needs to be staunched where the hole is and nowhere else.
Starting as a few bands of hunter-gatherers, humanity expanded the food resources afforded by the land a thousandfold through the development of agriculture.
In their efforts to discredit human freedom, the Putinites denounce the sins that may occur under the reign of liberty with the same ardor, the same sincerity, and the same purpose that animated their Soviet forebears.
When people have their own money at stake, it's a lot easier to find and settle on practical, no-nonsense solutions to engineering problems than is ever the case in the complex and endless deliberations of a government bureaucracy.
Economic growth must be the central issue because it is only through growth that the devastating threat of national bankruptcy can be averted. Furthermore, it is only by reviving American economic growth that the West's global predominance can be sustained, and peace and freedom kept secure around the world.
By enriching the carbon-dioxide content of the atmosphere from its impoverished pre-industrial levels, human beings have increased the productivity of the entire biosphere - so much so that roughly one out of every seven living things on the planet owes its existence to the marvelous improvement in nature that humans have effected.
In the 1960s, reaching for the moon meant just that. It was a metaphor for attempting the impossible, and we attempted it, and we did it. And it inspired millions of people in every way. The number of science graduates in this country doubled in the 1960s at every level - high school, college, Ph.D.
In addition to virtually banning methanol outright, the EPA has created regulations to prevent cars from being modified by small businesses to optimize their performance, including through the use of methanol.
The largest automobile company in the world is Volkswagen. Who owns it? The answer is the government of Qatar.
Putin is sometimes described as a revanchist, seeking to recreate the Soviet Union. That is a useful shorthand, but it is not really accurate.
The U.S. trade embargo on Cuba is almost completely ineffective, as many other countries, including the European Union, do not honor it.
Some conservatives say that whether it's popular or unpopular, imposing strict limits on immigration is the right thing to do, and it must be defended.
The problem with Russia is not that it has laws restricting promotion of the gay lifestyle. The problem with Russia is that it has no laws that effectively constrain the strong or protect the weak.
In the wake of the disaster caused by Tropical Storm Sandy, various allies of the Obama campaign have rushed to claim that the event was caused by anthropogenic global warming, thereby justifying the president's program of crushing the economy with regressive carbon taxes, a supposedly necessary measure to prevent future bad weather.