The American Enterprise articles from July 2001

The American Enterprise archives from July 2001

Has the Debt Been Paid?(slavery reparations)
July 1, 2001... The activist campaign demanding payment of "slavery reparations" to today's black Americans probably strikes some readers as too far-fetched to take seriously. Better stop and look afresh. I myself realized that the concept had moved beyond...

Sidelights.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... The New Black Panther Party plans to protest Bill Clinton's decision to open offices in Harlem. "There goes the neighborhood," said politician and Panther supporter Charles Barron. * The Atlanta office of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity...

STEAL THIS MAGAZINE.(editorial choices of some current periodicals)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... The New York Times Magazine has long been known for its blend of left-leaning articles and ads catering to the wealthiest Americans. Feature stories laud liberal politicians and cutting-edge cultural trends. A weekly "Ethicist" column tries,...

THE VIRTUAL COMMUNITY?(social aspects of high technology cities)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... TAE has earlier reported scattered findings that Silicon Valley and other high-tech centers score low on measures of charitable donating, volunteering, church attendance, and other forms of social cooperation and generosity. Now a major new...

NEW ECONOMY, OLD HUBRIS.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... "It'll come back," the MBA-anointed sages droned as the once-invincible NASDAQ plummeted throughout the year 2000. "It's just a blip," said the 401 (k) day traders as the air hissed out of the Internet bubble. "It surely can't get any worse,"...

REPEAT OFFENDER.(comment on Congressman James M. Jeffords)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... From the minutes of the Kirby, Vermont Republican Town Caucus, back on April 24, 1984: "The caucus then unanimously adopted the following resolution: Whereas, Congressman James M. Jeffords has compiled a voting record of the sort one would...

DON'T BANK ON 'EM.(banking industry in China)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... A few years ago, massive bank debts pushed Japan and other Asian economies into a deep recessionary hole. Most have yet to emerge. Could China be the next economy to get into trouble? At a recent American Enterprise Institute forum, leading...

SWISS NAVY MEETS EUROPEAN ARMY.(comment on the possibility of creating an European defense force)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... From a recent lecture by former assistant secretary of defense and current AEI scholar Richard Perle at London's Centre for Policy Studies: There has been a great deal of discussion in recent months about the effort of European Union...

RACIALISM ON CAMPUS.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Ward Connerly, in an interview with Reason: Universities are the most race-conscious institutions in America. Race seeps out of every pore.... They take these suburban kids who have lived integrated lives--middle-class black kids--and they...

ON EATING DESSERT FIRST.(current marriages)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... An extract from one of the interviews in Iris Krasnow's new book Surrendering to Marriage: In the 1950s, we married young, and generally did not have premarital sex, let alone live together before the wedding night. The way things are...

MILKING THE HOLOCAUST.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... According to recent press reports, the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims has managed to distribute only a paltry $3 million to Holocaust survivors since 1998. Meanwhile it spent ten times that much on administrative...

ROUGH JUSTICE.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... At 3 a.m. on May 18, a Chicago man tried to rape a 42-year-old woman. The woman bit off his testicles and delivered them to police a half hour later, At 3:40 a.m., 21-year-old Erik Williams showed up in a hospital with injuries matching...

TOBACCO BONDS FOR SALE.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... The tobacco settlement hustle deepens. In 1998, 46 states, the District of Columbia, and numerous counties were awarded millions of dollars in future payments from tobacco companies, supposedly to cover future medical costs related to smoking....

MODERNISTS AGAINST PROGRESS.(school design)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Our great-grandparents, who lived in a far less affluent society, put up public buildings--courthouses, libraries, banks, schools--that spoke meaningfully to people of all ages. That's because they used the vocabularies, patterns, and rhythms...

EDUCRATS.(classroom teachers)
July 1, 2001... The Education Intelligence Agency reports that: * Classroom teachers now compose only 52 percent of the country's public education work force. * In 12 states, non-teachers outnumber teachers.

THE TRANSPORTATION JALOPY.(U.S. Department of Transportation)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... From its creation, the U.S. Department of Transportation has been an intellectual desert and a spending spigot. Few Americans realize that the federal highway program over which it presides is our largest aid program, dwarfing expenditures for...

INTERNAL RECREATION SERVICE.(evaluation of the employees and services of the Internal Revenue Service)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... A recent audit by the Inspector General of the Internal Revenue Service examined how 16,000 IRS employees use their computers. It found that more than half of the time spent on line by IRS employees was for personal business. Almost 23...

A Free-Market Reform of Campaign Finance.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Threatened by the worst economic slowdown in a decade, the Senate acted with uncommon dispatch as the new session began. Clearing the decks, it immediately got down to the urgent business at hand, and, on April 2, passed... a campaign finance...

Mark Helprin.(journalist, author)
July 1, 2001... One of America's most interesting novelists is also a conservative--and a crafter of powerful political rhetoric and commentary. Novelist Mark Helprin, 54, is one of the brightest lights in American letters. His fiction includes A Soldier...

Blood Money.(analysis of slavery reparations)
July 1, 2001... Why I don't want reparations for slavery My childhood was a typical one for a black American in his mid-thirties. I grew up middle class in a quiet, safe neighborhood in Philadelphia. I still miss living at the top of the tidy little...

A BEAN COUNTING NIGHTMARE TO AVOID.(reparations for slavery)
July 1, 2001... How big a reparations check should Tiger Woods get? Applauded as one of America's most prominent black athletes, the champion golfer actually is only part black. He coined the word "Cablinasian" to reflect his Caucasian, black, American...

The Poison of "I'm A Victim" Politics.
July 1, 2001... The Ugly Logic of Us vs. Them By Jonah Goldberg I'm an Internet columnist, and my e-mail in-box regularly provides evidence that measures like hate-crime laws, slave reparations proposals, and the general politics of victimology will...

Death Spiral on Main Street.(Post Office reform)(Statistical Data Included)
July 1, 2001... Our Postal Service is in worse shape than you think In a tone of sunny desperation, the U.S. Postal Service has taken to sending out press releases--via fax--which, like much of what this beleaguered giant attempts, only underscore its...

Red Lights Among the Ivy.(sexualization of universities)
July 1, 2001... On Today's Campuses, Everything is Sexualized Recently the president of a small college in Nebraska was forced to resign when he was caught committing plagiarism. He was lucky. He might have been charged with rape. To understand...

CAMPUS CRUSADE.(Ave Maria Law School)
July 1, 2001... The Unexpected Boomlet at Religious Colleges When Tom Monaghan called his friend Bernard Dobranski and said, "I'm thinking about starting a new law school," Dobranski recalls laughing, "What? Do you think we have too few lawyers, Tom?" ...

The Moral Roots of Liberty and Prosperity.
July 1, 2001... We face a deep problem today: The family where each member pursues his own self-interest. I have lived in such a family. I learned, to my surprise, that such homes do not make people very happy. A family held together by a series of contractual...

Historic Preservation goes Awry.(Georgetown, Washington)
July 1, 2001... When Congress passed a historic preservation law for the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., it was explicitly intended to protect handsome buildings erected in the city's "early years"-meaning the late 1700s and early 1800s. That's not...

Patriotic Ramble.(American historic sites)
July 1, 2001... To mark the confluence of Father's Day and America's 225th birthday, we offer this light, sweet, melancholy... During several childhood springtimes in the 1960s, I boarded the train with my father in New York and arrived some hours later...

What Great Books Do For Children.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... In his new memoir A Life in the 20th Century, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. discusses how he became a reader early in life, and why classic children's literature is valuable. I particularly remember my mother sitting in her chair...

My Cherry Red.(pickup truck)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... TARKIO, MISSOURI--It is red, with lots of chrome. It is so tall I had to spend $250 to have a step installed so I could climb into the cab. It has 6 gears and a 240 horsepower Cummins diesel engine that will pull a 24-foot trailer at 80 miles...

The Death of Japanese Industrial Policy.
July 1, 2001... In the London Review of Books, economic journalist Murray Sayle (who has lived in Japan since 1975) recounts the collapse of Japan's government/corporate business partnership--which a decade ago U.S. liberals were insisting would dash...

Salem: The Case for the Prosecution.(argument for witch hunts)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... As she stood before the gallows at Salem, condemned witch Sarah Good pronounced one of the most famous of American curses. "I am no more a witch than you are a wizard," she snarled at her most persistent persecutor, Reverend Nicholas Noyes,...

Patriotism For Sale.(Brief Article)(Review)
July 1, 2001... It's tempting to lower standards when it comes to patriotic films. After all, Hollywood movies that honor love of country are few and far between, so shouldn't we be grateful for those we get? Not in the case of Pearl Harbor. This...

Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, & the Courts From Reconstruction to the New Deal.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, & the Courts From Reconstruction to the New Deal By David E. Bernstein Duke University Press, 191 pages, $39.95 Jim Crow segregation is widely considered an historical relic,...

Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith By Robert A. Slayton Free Press, 480 pages, $30 Finally, a biography befitting the greatest twentieth-century leader of urban America: New York Governor Alfred Emanuel Smith....

A Line in the Sand: The Alamo in Blood and Memory.(Review)
July 1, 2001... A Line in the Sand: The Alamo in Blood and Memory By Randy Roberts and James S. Olson Free Press, 352 pages, $26 Who doesn't know, or think he knows, the story of the Alamo? The events of the great 13-day siege of 1836 are generally...

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.(Review)
July 1, 2001... Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus By Rick Perlstein Hill and Wang, 671 pages, $30 "America would remember the sixties as a decade of the Left," writes Rick Perlstein, in his fascinating and...

Campaign Finance Reform: The First Amendment Comes First.(Brief Article)(Review)
July 1, 2001... Campaign Finance Reform: The First Amendment Comes First Bradley A. Smith. Unfree Speech: The Folly of Campaign Finance Reform. Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540. Federal Election Commissioner Smith...

Drug Prices Are Reasonable.(Statistical Data Included)
July 1, 2001... Drug Prices Are Reasonable Ronald Bailey, "Damn the Pusher Man," in Reason (April 2001), 3415 South Sepulveda Boulevard #400, Los Angeles, California 90034. Science correspondent Bailey suggests that most criticisms of big pharmaceutical...

The New Economy's Not So New.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... The New Economy's Not So New Timothy Taylor, "Thinking About a `New Economy,'" in The Public Interest (Spring 2001), 1112 Sixteenth Street N.W. #530, Washington, D.C. 20036. Journal of Economic Perspectives managing editor Taylor believes...

Are Two Fathers Just As Good?(Review)
July 1, 2001... Are Two Fathers Just As Good? Robert Lerner and Althea Nagai, No Basis: What The Studies Don't Tell Us About Same-Sex Parenting. Marriage Law Project, Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1015 Fifteenth Street N.W. #900, Washington, D.C. 20005. ...

Let it Be.(management of nuclear waste sites)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Let It Be Robert H. Nelson, From Waste to Wilderness: Maintaining Biodiversity on Nuclear-Bomb-Building Sites. Competitive Enterprise Institute, 1001 Connecticut Avenue N.W. #1250, Washington, D.C. 20036. Nelson, a public policy professor...

A Shrinking Planet.(population forecasts)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... A Shrinking Planet Nicholas Eberstadt, "The Population Implosion," in Foreign Policy (March/April 2001), Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1779 Massachusetts Avenue N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. For decades, there have been,...

Ailing South East Asia.(aftermath of the economic crisis in the region)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Ailing South East Asia Peter Hartcher, "From Miracle to Malaise," in The National Interest (Spring 2001), 1112 Sixteenth Street N.W. #540, Washington, D.C. 20036. The currency crisis that scarred the nations of Southeast Asia in 1997-98,...

Racial Progress.(black and white attitudes towards racial discrimination)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)(Polling Data)
July 1, 2001... Majorities of blacks and whites believe there has been a lot of progress in getting rid of racial discrimination since the 1960s, and both groups say that race relations in their own communities are generally good. Blacks are much less positive...

Reparations?(white and black attitudes towards reparations for slavery)(Brief Article)(Polling Data)(Statistical Data Included)
July 1, 2001... No matter how you phrase the question, black and white Americans differ profoundly on the issue of an apology or reparations for past racial discrimination. In one poll last year, 53 percent of blacks supported the idea of the federal...

Attitudes Toward Marijuana.(Brief Article)(Polling Data)(Statistical Data Included)
July 1, 2001... In 1969, only 4 percent of Americans admitted to the Gallup Organization that they had ever tried marijuana. Today, slightly under 40 percent say they have. A third of college freshmen, down from 53 percent in 1977, say it should be legalized....

the Mail.
July 1, 2001... Being from England, I can fully understand the objections of American liberals to National Missile Defense described by P. J. O'Rourke ("No-Nukes Turn Pro-Nuke," April/May). I think I can explain these objections since I agree with them. ...

Last Gasp.
July 1, 2001... "I know the difference between right and wrong, Hargrove; but I'm also aware of the similarities." WHAT DO YOU MEAN OUR SITUATION IS WORSE THAN YOU THOUGHT!? "... I'm prescribing a depressant." I'm sorry folks, but we're not...