At least, that’s the message many in the storm ravaged communities along the Gulf Coast are getting from their insurance companies as they attempt to rebuild their homes and their lives after last years devastating Hurricane Katrina reduced their hopes and dreams to so much clutter.
This AP article, which is appearing in many newspapers across [...]

(An apology to regular readers of Common Sense. As of late, I have become increasingly occupied with beginning a campaign. That explains the increasing length of time between posts. This post was originally published here in June 2005. But it came back to mind today after I read another similar essay, and it seems to [...]

Free speech…it is one of the hallmarks of the American way of life. The ability to freely express oneself without fear of government reprisal is so fundamental that it is enshrined in the first amendment to our national Constitution. Yet despite this protection, there have always been restrictions on how free our speech really is, [...]

Thanksgiving is one of our oldest national holidays, and is purely American in its origins. Ostensibly, we are honoring the European settlers who managed to carve out a living in a strange and not altogether hospitable new land. They began this holiday themselves, to rejoice at their good fortune for staying alive against the odds. [...]

One of the basic tenets of American society is the right to privacy. Or at least, it used to be. With advances in technology though, it seems as if privacy is a passé idea in an information age where every transaction is digitally stored, every report is saved in bits and bytes, every communication traceable. [...]

By the end of the 19th century, business interests had grown so powerful in our society that their stranglehold on individual prosperity created an inequity between the common citizens and the wealthy, industrial class. Tired of working harder and getting less than those who owned the businesses they helped succeed, and angered by conditions that [...]

To the average person living in a democracy, capitalism, and the social changes it forges, rarely is given much thought. And yet our very lives, not to mention our livelihoods, are so wholly connected to our capitalistic economy, that the line between people and business has become blurred, and the properties of one has been [...]

Sometimes, bad things just happen. It’s a fact of life, plain and simple. Houses burn down. Stores get robbed. Cars get wrecked. People get cancer. In each of these scenarios (and any number of misfortunes) there is likely to be emotional, physical, or material damage. There is also a negative financial impact that can run [...]

Financially speaking, bankruptcy occurs when you don’t have enough money coming in to cover your bills. As a legal maneuver, bankruptcy offers an individual, business, or government entity an opportunity to crawl out from under their accumulated debt and either restructure a repayment plan, reduce amounts to be repaid to creditors, or liquidate real assets [...]

We live in a society that at times seems to take great pains to produce the most idiotic and inane policies possible. In this era of nonsensical political correctness, where up is told it’s really down, and the word “is” has infinite meanings, one of the most confounding practices to be injected into our society [...]