President Bill Clinton went to Oklahoma City after a terrorist bombed the federal office building there in 1995. President George W. Bush lifted a bullhorn at the ruins of the World Trade Center on September 14, 2001. President Barack Obama sang “Amazing Grace” in Charleston, South Carolina, at a funeral there for a victim of the 2015 shooting spree in …

When John Adams wrote into Massachusetts’ Constitution a commitment to a “government of laws and not of men,” he probably assumed that the rule of law meant the rule of laws, no matter how many laws there might be. He could not have imagined the modern proliferation and complexity of laws, or how subversive this is of the rule of …

I have been recommending a defensive stance in equities since at least February, and truth be told, that hasn’t worked out so well. The S&P 500 Index has returned 4.3 percent since then, including reinvested dividends. I’m not ready to throw in the towel. What compels me to keep at it is the behavior of stocks at the close of …