It’s a staple of feminist rhetoric: Women make less money than men because of discrimination. “We’d all like to think, in 2012, that pay discrimination is a thing of the past,” the progressive activist Joy Lawson wrote in the Huffington Post recently. “But the pay gap still exists, and it’s big: women earn an average of 77 cents on a man’s dollar.” April 17 has been designated Equal Pay Day: Supposedly that’s how long women have to work to catch up to men’s pay from the previous year. U.S. Presi

Republicans complain that the Obama administration is moving to gut the highly popular 1996 federal law that put strict time limits on welfare payments and required recipients to find work. Mitt Romney, on the stump and in a new TV ad, says this is more evidence that the White House is promoting a “culture of dependency.”“That is wrong,” Romney said in Elk Grove Village, Ill., this week. “If I am president, I will put work back in welfare.”What launched all this talk was a July 12 directive from

The tragedy of the commons is how Francis Fukuyama describes the infeasibility of Utopia in his new book, “The Origins of Political Order.” When Garrett Hardin used the phrase as a title for his article in 1968, he actually talked about the dilemma: When everybody owns something, nobody owns it.We Chinese have a similar saying to describe almost the same thing: A monk fetches water in buckets hanging from a bamboo pole on his shoulder; when he is joined by another monk, he shares the burden with

Japan Airlines Co. owes me something as it plans an $8.5 billion initial public offering: a thank you. Not because I’m a frequent flier, but a Japan taxpayer. In the euphoria over the carrier emerging from bankruptcy, aren’t we forgetting the jumbo-jet-sized role of the state? A $4.5 billion government-orchestrated bailout and even bigger subsidies that let it avoid billions of dollars in future tax payments. So next month, when JAL attempts the most ambitious IPO since Facebook Inc., it should

What do you call an ocean that sits atop more than 10 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 100 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, provides transit for $5.3 trillion worth of shipborne trade every year, and is bordered by a half-dozen nations with competing maritime and territorial claims? If you’re a geographer, the South China Sea. If you’re a geostrategist, however, it’s a powder keg ― and one that has been heating up dangerously over the past year. Defusing it peacefully will be a test not

To see how the federal government has pursued money-laundering cases against big banks over their dealings with Iran and other countries under U.S. trade sanctions, consider what happened when Barclays Plc and the Justice Department were required to file reports describing the U.K. bank’s cooperation under a settlement in 2010. The deadline came and went. Barclays and the Justice Department failed to comply, infuriating U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan of Washington, who had ordered that the r

By choosing U.S. Representative Paul Ryan as his running mate, Mitt Romney has added some verve to what had been a tedious presidential contest. Romney deserves credit for his audacity, to borrow a word from his opponent. The question is whether the Republican campaign’s newfound energy will be used more to obfuscate or illuminate. If the latter, voters might find that the two presidential candidates agree more than they would have you believe. The debates over such phony issues as whether Romne

Three years ago, Dan Senor, now a foreign-policy adviser to Mitt Romney, was in my radio studio promoting a book he’d co-authored called “Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle.” It is a book that Romney acknowledges as having shaped his thinking on Israel.Back then, Senor laughed when I said reading the book made me think of something once told to me by Bobby Greenberg, a businessman and former Philadelphia treasurer: “Always try to dress British and think Yiddish.” But Senor w

The U.S. this year is set to have the worst outbreak of whooping cough since the 1970s. Already, from January to mid-July, there have been 17,000 registered cases and nine deaths. Like the whoop that punctuates the cough, this number is a warning that something is very wrong. The increase, researchers suspect, is partly due to the waning effect of whooping cough vaccines introduced in the 1990s to replace older formulations. It’s also connected to the rising number of parents who refuse to get t

Olympic athletes want to win ― we all know that. So why are they being disqualified for trying to lose? After the badminton scandal that marred the early days of the games, the latest athlete to be kicked out was Algerian middle-distance runner Taoufik Makhloufi, who walked off the course in an 800 meters semifinal on Aug. 6. Makhloufi got lucky. After an appeal, the International Association of Athletics Federations accepted the doubtful excuse that he was feeling injured, and reinstated him. T