Free Republic

For the past few years, I’ve been arguing that those who like to be called “liberals” should instead be called statists. You know these people. They are the ones who, full of righteous indignation, speak incessantly of injustice and oppression in America. They also speak, in sentences full of smug self-assurance, as if they and only they possess the empathy and intellectual fortitude necessary to provide “solutions” to a host of social “problems” thrust upon a good people by a bad “society.” Edmund Burke was talking about these statists when he said “by (their) unprincipled facility of changing the state...

Few arenas can match the business office for its combination of humdrummery and world-shaping influence. Sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote of office workers, “Whatever history they have had is a history without events.” The history of office technology seems especially uninspiring: the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, calculators, and spreadsheets are unlikely material for a captivating History Channel feature, to be sure. Yet the importance of the business office and its techniques is undeniable. Max Weber saw the office’s methods of organization, its rationality, and its disciplines as hallmarks of modern capitalism, making possible dramatic gains in efficiency and forever altering...

This is the story of educational romanticism in elementary and secondary schools —its rise, its etiology, and, we have reason to hope, its approaching demise. Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better. Correlatively, educational romantics believe that the academic achievement of children is determined mainly by the opportunities they receive; that innate intellectual limits (if they exist at all) play a minor role; and that the current K-12 schools have huge room for improvement. Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and...

Kansas activities officials are investigating a religious school's refusal to let a female referee call a boys' high school basketball game. The Kansas State High School Activities Association said referees reported that Michelle Campbell was preparing to officiate at St. Mary's Academy near Topeka on Feb. 2 when a school official insisted that Campbell could not call the game. The reason given, according to the referees: Campbell, as a woman, could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy's beliefs. Campbell then walked off the court along with Darin Putthoff, the referee who was...

...wish these assurances were true. They aren't. Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there's strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic. It's time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true. If this suggestion makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you're not the first to feel that...

Nothing in the Democrats' current domestic platform is more prominent than redressing income inequality. All of the major Democratic candidates believe that conservatives have purposively rolled back income equality....Liberal columnists routinely express this conspiratorial point of view, suggesting that conservatives want to dismantle all of the institutions of the New Deal and Great Society. ...The Democrats are correct that income inequality in America has increased over the decades. The U.S. Census Bureau, for example, measures this by using a "Gini coefficient," in which zero indicates no inequality (all incomes are the same) and one is perfect inequality (one person has...

In 1997, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) altered its ethics code, ruling that all social workers must promote social justice "from local to global level." This call for mandatory advocacy raised the question: what kind of political action did the highly liberal field of social work have in mind? The answer wasn't long in coming. The Council on Social Work Education, the national accreditor of social work education programs, says candidates must fight "oppression," and sees American society as pervaded by the "global interconnections of oppression." Now aspiring social workers must commit themselves, usually in writing, to a...

Judging from the rhetoric of leading Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards, a major domestic issue in the 2008 presidential campaign is the supposed problem of rising economic inequality. What is striking is that problem is being debated amid substantial evidence that the steady improvement in the economy since 9/11 -- largely under the impetus of the much-derided Bush tax cuts -- has benefited Americans of all income levels, and that the rich are paying a higher share of total taxes than ever before. But as Lawrence Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, revealingly acknowledged...

From the beginning of history, sincere reformers as well as demagogues have sought to abolish or at least to alleviate poverty through state action. In most cases their proposed remedies have only served to make the problem worse. The most frequent and popular of these proposed remedies has been the simple one of seizing from the rich to give to the poor. This remedy has taken a thousand different forms, but they all come down to this. The wealth is to be "shared," to be "redistributed," to be "equalized." In fact, in the minds of many reformers it is not...

Robin Hood took from the rich and gave to the poor. A recent study by a team of researchers headed up by University of California-San Diego political scientist James Fowler suggests that we may all have Robin Hood tendencies. Experimental economists and psychologists from around the world have been watching how people play various economic games as a way to probe the bases of human cooperation. One of the more interesting discoveries is that in economic games some people - altruistic punishers - will take fairly big hits to their winnings in order to reduce the ill-gotten gains of cheaters....

My parents had conflicting views about the nature and origin of good manners. My father took the Romantic view that they were the expression of man’s natural goodness of heart and that they therefore emerged spontaneously—that is, if they emerged at all. If they didn’t, it was because of the social injustice that inhibited or destroyed natural goodness. My mother took the classical view that good manners were a matter of discipline, training, and habit and that goodness of heart would, at least to an extent, follow in their wake. The older I grow, the more decisively I take my...

BEIJING, Dec. 24 - Chateau Zhang Laffitte is no ordinary imitation. It is the oriental twin of Château Maisons-Laffitte, the French architect François Mansart's 1650 landmark on the Seine. Its symmetrical facade and soaring slate roof were crafted using the historic blueprints, 10,000 photographs and the same white Chantilly stone. Yet its Chinese proprietor, a Beijing real estate developer named Zhang Yuchen, wanted more. He added a manicured sculpture garden and two wings, copying the palace at Fontainebleau. He even dug a deep, broad moat, though uniformed guards and a spiked fence also defend the castle. "It cost me $50...

Mike Wallace is accustomed to asking the tough questions. Tuesday night, his aggressive personality got him arrested by two Taxi & Limousine Commission inspectors when he lunged at one during a parking dispute on the Upper East Side, the TLC said. Three witnesses, however, said the inspectors overreacted and that the gathering crowd booed as the "60 Minutes" personality was arrested. Wallace, 86, was handcuffed and taken to the 19th Precinct station house, where he was issued a summons for disorderly conduct and released. Wallace was picking up a meat loaf dinner at a restaurant when two TLC inspectors started...

Comments and criticisms of the PDF material at http://www.modernliberalism.org would be most welcome.

LOS ANGELES - Democrats aren't amused by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (news - web sites)'s use of the mocking term "girlie men" to describe some lawmakers, although a spokesman for the governor said no apology would be forthcoming. Schwarzenegger dished out the insult at a rally Saturday as he claimed Democrats were delaying the budget by catering to special interests. Democrats protested that the remark was sexist and homophobic. "If they don't have the guts to come up here in front of you and say, 'I don't want to represent you, I want to represent those special interests, the unions, the...

RUSSELL Halley takes pride in being able to do the splits as well as any woman on the dance floor. His partner, Jorge Guzman, can spin faster than the female competition. So when the two men don their see-through chiffon shirts to dance together, they alternate the lead. "I can send Jorge into a triple spin and catch him, and vice versa - even in the course of one move," Mr Halley boasts. "We can change place instantly. From an audience point of view it can be very exciting." The duo are at the forefront of an upheaval in America's...

Egalitarians believe that inequality is unjust and justice requires a society to move steadily toward greater equality. This is the aim and the justification of proportional taxation, affirmative action, equal opportunity programs, and of the whole panoply of anti-poverty policies that bring us ever closer to the socialist dream of a welfare state. These policies cost money. The egalitarian approach to getting it is to tax those who have more in order to benefit those who have less. The absurdity of this is that egalitarians suppose that justice requires ignoring whether people deserve what they have and whether they are...

Among contemporary economists and social theorists, one of the most prolific, intellectually independent, and iconoclastic is Thomas Sowell, now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. In nearly a half-century’s worth of books and essays, he has explored the cultures of the world and all the nooks and crannies of American society. Enormously learned, wonderfully clear-headed, he sees reality as it is, and flinches at no truth. Affirmative Action Around the World is exactly what its title announces: an empirical study of what the consequences really are, and really have been, in the five major nations in which "affirmative action"—the...

V.I. Lenin: Hey Adolph: we got to hand it to those liberals. They have perpetuated one of the greatest lies of all time. The libs' knack for deception and outward proclivity to obtuse individuals (got to love those unrestricted voting laws) have caused many credulous folks to think that your regime, the Third Reich, was actually on the conservative end of the political spectrum. Adolph Hitler: Gosh, I know. What's even better is that this lie is disseminated from my disciples in American Academia. These irrationally reckless malcontents preach that Communism and Nazism are opposites, not rivals. Obviously, the nomenclature...

Age of Opinion By Robert Wolf Garbage in Garbage out, a concept well understood by computer geeks, is the perfect metaphor for what has happened to public education in the United States. Just as democracy, a generic substitution for the more specific, republic, is the word of the day in politics, so egalitarianism or multi-culturalism is the by-word in American Education. Egalité is not a synonym for democracy, as those with a vested interest in promoting the concept would have you believe. The standard dictionary definition of egalitarianism is affirming, promoting, or characterized by belief in equal political, economic, social,...