Free Republic

In the recent opinion article “Paying the price for breakdown of the country's bourgeois culture,” published in The Philadelphia Inquirer, law professors Amy Wax and Larry Alexander lament the loss of the “bourgeois cultural hegemony” of the 1950s. They claim that erosion of commitment to marriage, hard work, patriotism, civic-mindedness and respect for authority has produced low male labor force participation, high rates of nonmarital childbearing, subpar educational attainment, an underqualified workforce, substance abuse and rampant urban violence. The downward spiral started in the late 1960s, they argue, with “identity politics” and “multicultural grievance polemics.” This is bad history. Like...

Why not nuke Mecca? Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO) has brought the issue to the table. The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has demanded that he apologize to Muslims, and commentators left and right have subjected him to vociferous criticism. Although many have attacked him for the wrong reasons, his suggestion is still wrong. Primarily, of course, it contravenes Western principles of justice which, if discarded willy-nilly, would remove a key reason why we fight at all: to preserve Western ideas of justice and human rights that are denied by the Islamic Sharia law so beloved of jihad terrorists. But...

On 18 July, 1969, Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick. He escaped, but left Mary Jo Kopechne to suffocate in the submerged car. That ended his chances of ever being President. Now Hillary Clinton has experienced an event with a similar political result. On 15 October, 2000, Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senatorial Campaign filed a report with the Federal Election Campaign that included falsified cost statements (about $750,000 low) for her Hollywood Gala on 12 August. Her National Finance Director, David Rosen, has just been indicted on four felony counts for that and related filings. Those events...

Marines' Machines By John Baden All modern societies are critically dependant upon bureaucracies. These organizations, be they for-profit, nonprofit, or governmental, are central to our well-being. Hospitals, schools, courts, and supermarket chains are all bureaucracies. They constitute our institutional environment. The natural tendency of a bureaucracy is to defend and perpetuate itself and to resist change. Private bureaucracies, however, differ from the governmental variety. Although both may have ponderous hierarchies and cumbersome procedures, ultimately private companies are subject to the discipline of market forces. And the market process is relentless, constantly separating the systematically unlucky and the incompetent from control...