Free Republic

You should know, dear reader, we are not among those who despised ADM Jeremy "Mike" Boorda. In fact, we did and always will admire this fine man, who went all the way from Seaman to Chief of Naval Operations. No one has done it before, and it's very likely no one else will accomplish such a feat in the future. ADM Boorda deserves our respect and remembrance as a great leader who deeply cared about his sailors and country. On this, the 16th anniversary of his mysterious death, we should mourn his loss, but also demand the Pentagon come clean...

President Biden recently announced a controversial, half-trillion-dollar student-loan-forgiveness scheme in which his administration would use a minor provision of the post-9/11 HEROES Act to excuse student borrowers from repaying roughly $500 billion in federal taxpayer funds. This regressive, unnecessary, and perverse maneuver promises to steer vast sums to affluent college-goers, even as it encourages colleges to be ever more cavalier about raising tuition and future borrowers to take on additional debt. Biden is sticking taxpayers with a half-trillion-dollar loss in order to subsidize borrowers who’ve decided college wasn’t worth the cost. That’s a pretty damning indictment of higher education. Even...

Gerald Griggs, vice president of the NAACP Atlanta chapter, appeared on Tucker Carlson's Fox News program to discuss the whole Colin Kaepernick issue and the two sports illiterates went at it. However, sports (unlike activism) is a game of stats and almost every statistic that came out of Griggs' mouth was a fumble.

Of late, the Obama administration has been applying pressure to ban the criminal record box – that is, to keep employers from asking if an applicant has ever been convicted. That is supposed to open up more job opportunities for people who have criminal records. It could, but then it could also have harmful consequences if people with past criminal records and current criminal intent are put in jobs where they can commit more crimes. (Another objection is that the federal government has no constitutional authority to dictate hiring policies, but let’s put that aside.) There is another hiring policy...

Perhaps you have noticed that many jobs that require only basic skills and a cooperative attitude are now walled off to Americans who don’t possess a college degree. A recent study entitled Moving the Goalposts: How Demand for a Bachelor’s Degree is Reshaping the Workforce contains a lot of evidence on that. For example, for sales representatives and retail supervisors, 56 percent of recent job postings specify that having a college degree is a requirement. This doesn’t mean that those jobs have such high intellectual demands that no one without a college degree could possibly do them. What it means...

Abstract: In Ricci v. DeStefano, 129 S. Ct. 2658 (2009), the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed the doctrine, first articulated by the Court in Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 401 U.S. 424 (1971), that employers can be held liable under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for neutral personnel practices with a disparate impact on minority workers. The Griggs Court further held that employers can escape liability by showing that their staffing practices are job related or consistent with business necessity. In the interim since Griggs, social scientists have generated evidence undermining two key assumptions behind that decision and...

In this episode of the Conscience of Kansas I interview David Horsman, author of the book, "The Cosmopolitan Club Dossier." Next, we play by request my 2008 debate with Shirley Phelps-Roper of the Westboro Baptist Church. Next I interview Ray Griggs, filmmaker of the new documentary "I Want Your Money."

WASHINGTON -- Like pebbles tossed into ponds, important Supreme Court rulings radiate ripples of consequences. Consider a 1971 Supreme Court decision that supposedly applied but actually altered the 1964 Civil Rights Act. During debate on the act, prescient critics worried that it might be construed to forbid giving prospective employees tests that might produce what was later called, in the 1971 case, a "disparate impact" on certain preferred minorities. To assuage these critics, the final act stipulated that employers could use "professionally developed ability tests" that were not "designed, intended or used to discriminate." Furthermore, two Senate sponsors of the...

Clarion CallThe Supreme Court and the Inflation of Educational Credentials No. 385 By Lowell Gallaway November 09, 2006 Editor's Note: This week's Clarion Call features a guest commentary by Lowell Gallaway. He is an emeritus professor of economics at Ohio University. Gallaway discusses the impact of a Supreme Court decision 35 years ago and the current emphasis on obtaining academic credentials. In the mid-nineteenth century, the French economist Frederic Bastiat distinguished between good and bad economists by focusing on whether they thought through the long-run consequences of their arguments. According to Bastiat, a good economist was not blinded by the...