Walter Donway's Contributions

Despite deaths almost daily, demonstrators in Venezuela continue to struggle with government forces to protest the lurch of Socialist President Nicolas Maduro’s government toward dictatorship. The opposition now is conducting “sit-ins” in...

The Big Short: Inside The Doomsday Machine, the movie based on Michael Lewis’s best-selling 2010 book, was released on December 23 and promises to challenge attendance records. Familiar with the book, I expected to endure rather than enjoy The Big Short. Nope, I enjoyed it. Probably it deserves...

Its economy crushed by debt, mass unemployment, and bank closures Greece’s only hope may be economic freedom. “Greece has been devastated and humiliated...

Somewhere in Hell, apparatchiks who ran Gosplan are laughing and slapping each other on the back. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, when the rulers of socialist economies still strove to demonstrate the superiority of...

No coercive monopoly or business able to sustain its prices without regard for competition can prevail in a free market. Its profits, above those prevailing in the market, will attract competitors, either producing its product or an alternative product, and they will gain market share by charging lower prices.

Gasoline is cheaper at the pump, recently; my dental technician commented on it just today. And I am relieved not to fill the Subaru for 50 bucks. Estimates are that, should current prices hold, the American consumer will save $1,100 a year.

In the United States, if we hold a referendum, so voters may speak directly and decisively on a question, it always is at the state level, and, lately, most often addresses the legality of gay marriage, the decriminalization of marijuana, getting tough on illegal immigrants, or some other grave matter.

My town’s zoning board, the East Hampton Village Zoning Board of Appeals, met last week and heard several appeals. Two of them made headlines in the East Hampton Star—one involving Steven Spielberg of movie fame, the other Dylan’s Candy Bar.

If you have studied Bitcoins, used them, or traded them you know more about them than I do. But, I do know something about the nature of "money," "real money," fiduciary media, fiat currency, and the long...

I wonder if, watching the clamorous melodrama in the United States Congress over the budget and the debt, the American public and world could miss the sound track--the theme song--playing in the background?

It is going on five years since the financial panic that began in 2008 and cascaded into a stock market crash and depression. How many efforts have been made to explain to the public what happened?

Not a single critic I have read grasped the compelling central theme of Atlas Shrugged Part 2 —or chose to mention it. Why? Because they are unable to see what is happening to the world they live in.

According to a multi-decade economic study, the United States, long considered the standard bearer for economic freedom among large industrial nations, has experienced a substantial decline in economic freedom over the past ten years, now ranking behind Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.

Quite long ago, Whittaker Chambers said: “The great failing of American conservatives is they don’t retrieve their wounded.” That bitter reflection, but as applied to American businessmen, came to mind when I finished reading the story of Greg Reyes, a second-generation Cuban immigrant

When government proposes to nationalize a major industry, it is a loudspeaker blaring the message that the country is abandoning the market economy, moving from capitalism to full socialism.

To the great economists of free trade and free markets, from Adam Smith and David Ricardo to Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman, capitalism meant laissez faire (“let us compete free of government help or hindrance”). To them, laissez faire in the phrase “laissez faire capitalism” was redundant. To opponents of capitalism, today, such as leftist MIT Professor Noam Choamsky or sociologist Jane Jacobs, “crony capitalism” is the redundant phrase.