Well, the paywall arrangement for the Wall Street Journal is apparently very profitable, and was so long before Mr Murdoch even bought the paper. It's a very special case though, one of the main reasons being that people's employers tend to pay the subscription fee rather than the readers themselves.

The problem is the belief that this special case really applies anywhere else.

For the benefit of those who can't get beyond the firewall, here are a couple more quotes:

"Instead Nixon signed a moratorium on California oil drilling, then proceeded to create multiple agencies (e.g., the Environmental Protection Agency) that gave environmentalists the tools to oppose oil development in any "environmentally sensitive" areas—including the proposed pipeline in Alaska. The Prudhoe Bay project had already been threatened by environmentalists, who regarded the entire Alaskan wilderness as off-limits to human development. The Santa Barbara outcry swung political momentum in their favor. They won a federal injunction in 1970 to stop the pipeline."

* * *

"Now Mr. Obama has banned deep water drilling in the Gulf at least through November. This is particularly ominous because deep water drilling, though still in its infancy, has already uncovered numerous billion-barrel reservoirs. The ocean floor is perhaps the great new frontier of mineral wealth and industrial progress, and Mr. Obama is cutting it off. Unless he reverses course, his response to the spill will, like Nixon's, be worse than the spill itself."

Nixon is best remembered these days for Watergate, which was an irrelevancy. What is forgotten is that he was responsible for imposing wage and price controls, outlawing the private ownership of gold, creating the EPA, the first campaign finance "reform" law and the "Anti-Impoundments Act" (which took away the President's functional line-item veto, setting the stage for uncontrollable federal spending). He was a disaster on almost every front, yet today only the memory of Watergate remains.

Epstein is correct: Obama is reminiscent of Nixon. All of the arrogance, but without the competence.

"…outlawing the private ownership of gold…"

That was Franklin Roosevelt. Nixon ended the gold convertibility of the dollar.

You're right, Mastiff. My mistake.

Yes, but the main difference is that Nixon's energy crisis was unintentional. Obama's is intentional (see his "put coal out of business" comments).

Worse than that, one can arguably maintain that the Nixon administration was even more liberal than that of Johnson. In fact Noam Chomsky called Nixon "the last liberal president."

Re: Nixon's Liberalism--if there's any truth to the comparison of Leftist ideology to religion (and I think there is plenty), it's worth bearing in mind the very vocal abhorrence of Nixon by certain sectors of the Left. A useful rule of thumb is that heretics are despised more for their similarities than for their differences.

There is a way to tweak the URL's to get behind these idiotically designed paywalls. Here(Link)'s an ungated version for your pleasure.

Okay, that failed, which does not make the design any less idiotic. Try copying the URL, pasting it into Google, and opening the first link. Sometimes, for example for FT, it helps to open the cached version, or to delete a few numbers from the end, if the original URL brings back no results.

You are a wise man, Bullfrog.

Obama is a new departure unless Rooselvelt was an undercover Marxist. If he was then I suppose that is whom he resembles.
To quote Garet Garrett (The Revolution Was - 1938):

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.
There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, "Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don't watch out." These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle. More than 2,000 years ago he wrote of what can happen within the form, when "one thing takes the place of another, so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power will be in the hands of those who have brought about
revolution in the state."
Worse outwitted were those who kept trying to make sense of the New Deal from the point of view of all that was implicit in the American scheme, charging it therefore with contradiction, fallacy, economic ignorance, and general incompetence to govern.

I think te realissue with Nixon was the "wage & price freeze".Which, if I rember correctly, the oil companies could not sell oil for more than the current peice. Then OPEC raise thier price per barrel, and the oil companies would sell it at a loss. Probably the only thing "Jimah" did right was to end it

jimmy didn't end price controls on gasoline, Ronald Reagan did. Now there was someone with balls-an honorable man, who didn't talk down to us.

Presidents of the US are usually considered to be smart, crafty, tricky, strong, wise persons.
The adjective that strikes me most is "idiot". They were all a bunch of unbelievable idiots.
Nixon, Carter, Johnson, Ford, Bush 1, the "smart" Obama. Kennedy too. No doubt about them.
Clinton was no idiot, therefore his presidency was plain, uneventful sailing, with the exception of the trivial, unimportant Lewinsky affair (but that hardly qualifies as "idiotic", it's more silly).
The only un-idiotic president was Reagan - dubbed by the MSM a retard.
Can't tell about Roosevelt.
Truman strikes me as a sort of decent, normal guy.
Eisenhower - a crafty apparatchik.
The only bunch of greater idiots were the candidates defeated in the presidential elections (except Goldwater).
remarkable how "the greatest democracy" produces such a crop of idiots as presidents.

I agree with Jacob's points, except that I don't find it "remarkable" in the least that the form of mob rule we have in the United States has resulted in "such a crop of idiots as presidents." On the contrary, it is not only expected, it is the inevitable result of unfettered democracy.

The philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe had this to say:

"[I]ncreasingly under democratic conditions, the worst will rise to the top of the State in free competition. Competition is not always good. Competition in the field of becoming the shrewdest aggressor against private property is nothing to be greeted. And this is precisely what democracy amounts to."

You can read the whole essay here.

Or, as Jouvenel put it, "A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."
Maybe, but I talked about idiots, not wolves. It's not the same, wolves are not idiots.
While some of those idiots had charm or charisma (like Kennedy or Clinton) or oratory gifts (Obama), others lacked even that ( Nixon or Johnson).

Idiots or not, they are all wolves.

Wolves don't have to be very bright, just reasonably cunning predators with sharp teeth. Which is precisely what you need to successfully navigate the jungle of national politics. In fact, intelligence might actually be a liability.

"In fact, intelligence might actually be a liability."
That is correct. It is empirically proven.