The American Enterprise articles from March 2000

The American Enterprise archives from March 2000

No Thanks to Them.(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... "Future historians may well mark the mid-1980s as the time when Japan surpassed the United States to become the world's dominant economic power." --Harvard professor Ezra Vogel, 1986 "America [is] on the verge of losing its middle...

Sidelights.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Communist Unification Rule Over All is a new and growing Russian religious movement dedicated to the mystical deification of past Communist rulers. Teaching that Christ and Lenin are reincarnated in Russia today, it sees the "class enemy" as...

Imperial Air.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... One of President Clinton's favorite jabs at Ken Starr was the complaint that the independent counsel's investigation of various White House corruptions had cost taxpayers the mighty sum of $40+ million. Well, that's just a drop in a...

American Heritage.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... "Our national discussion about race is fundamentally dishonest. We're in a state of denial about behavior. For whatever reasons, the behavior of African Americans in the cities has been atrocious since the great migrations of mid-century. The...

RACE BAITING AHEAD.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... While we hear often about the disadvantages facing African Americans, the truth is, blacks have many advantages over others (for instance immigrants) who aspire to "make it" in American society. They enjoy long familiarity with the common...

ENGLISH FIRST.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Joanne Jacobs, a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, opposed Proposition 227--the California initiative to end bilingual education--when it was on the ballot a couple years ago. But overwhelming evidence that children are now doing much...

LIBERATE THE CONGESTED!(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Congress has recently been hearing consumer complaints against the 1992 law that made it illegal to buy any new toilet other than one of the new low-flush models that turn out to not work very well. Often requiring two flushes, or more, these...

BATTLING THE TORT SHARKS.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Cape May is a historic seashore town at the southern tip of New Jersey, full of beautifully kept nineteenth-century architecture. Normally hushed and peaceful, it is experiencing a grassroots uprising launched from the spindled front porch of...

IS COBBLESTONE ILLEGAL?(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Remember Hollywood's Walk of the Stars, where celebrities have chunks of pavement in their honor? Well, New York City has something similar in front of a theater on St. Mark's Place. For 28 years, Joan Crawford, Dom DeLuise, Gloria Swanson, and...

BURNING BOTH ENDS.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... The day after she was elected lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1998, less than three weeks after the birth of her daughter Elizabeth, Jane Swift said the question of whether women can combine full-time work with childraising "has long...

PULLING GOD'S LICENSE.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... There is still some speech in America so off-putting to federal bureaucrats that they're willing to restrict it: Expressions of sincere religious faith. That's the upshot of the recent diktat by the Federal Communications Commission that the...

SURE THEY'RE IN FAVOR OF DIVERSITY.(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... "Stanford's department of history has 22 Democrats but just two Republicans. Dartmouth's has 10 Democrats and zero Republicans. Cornell's has 29 Democrats and not a single Republican. Reflecting the sort of political diversity seen in Castro's...

HOLLYWOOD PROVES ITS PULL.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... When the home videos made by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris before their Columbine rampage were recently leaked to the press, they showed in horrifying detail just how right critics were to point to trashy popular media as a spur to teenage...

Heaven is where...(Poem)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... the police are British the chefs Italian the mechanics German the lovers French and it's all organized by the Swiss

Hell is where...(Poem)
March 1, 2000... the police are German the chefs British the mechanics French the lovers Swiss and it's all organized by the Italians

"Live" with TAE.(Interview)
March 1, 2000... AN OLD-SCHOOL POLITICAL ADVISOR WHO WENT THROUGH THE WARS WITH RONALD REAGAN MULLS THE PRESIDENTIAL FIELD, TALKS ABOUT HIS FORMER BOSS, AND DISCUSSES HIS SECOND CAREER. California newspaperman Lyn Nofziger signed on as the press secretary...

Thank You 1990s Political Gridlock.
March 1, 2000... Thank You 1990s Political Gridlock IF FORCED TO PICK ONE MEASURE of the quality of a President's economic policy, I will generally choose the average return of the stock market during his term. The stock market is the world's most...

Thank You Federal Reserve.(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... Today's U.S. prosperity owes a great deal to the Federal Reserve--the central bank which controls America's supply of money in sometimes mysterious ways. During the 1970s the Fed made some horrendous policy errors, for which the nation paid,...

Thank You Ronald Reagan.(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... In 1984 the U.S. economy surged out of the '80-'82 recession, recording a 5 percent growth rate. The day after this impressive statistic was announced, an exuberant Ronald Reagan took a little swipe at his political adversaries by observing,...

Thank You American Businessmen.(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... The most important reason for the unprecedented prosperity of the past two decades hides in plain sight. Like the purloined letter of Edgar Allen Poe, it's so obvious that it is consistently overlooked: The economy boomed because businesses did...

Thank You New Technology.(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... Simplistic thinking leads some Americans to imagine that economic prosperity originates in Washington. When looking at the record of the U.S. economy since 1982, it is surely true that smarter policies from the White House, Congress, and...

The Great Exception.(Statistical Data Included)
March 1, 2000... Right now, American farmers feel like the slowest kid in gym class, the one who is always chosen last. Even as the Dow Jones sets new highs, farm prices and incomes are in the tank. Overall U.S. department of Agriculture statistics show a drop...

The Evolution of Shopping.
March 1, 2000... Almost every week I drive or bike along Dixwell Avenue in Hamden, Connecticut, and see stores with "grand opening" or "going out of business" sales. There's a torrent of them, and that says a lot about the unending resourcefulness retailers...

The Plague of New ANTI-Monuments.
March 1, 2000... A thick fog of political correctness envelopes commemorative design in Washington. In Our Nation's Capital The monuments Americans see when they visit their capital are bound to affect how people think about the nation's history....

A Gay Man Decries "Gay Rights".
March 1, 2000... THE GAY ACTIVISTS OF YESTERYEAR asked government to leave them alone. Their political program centered on decriminalizing homosexual relations between consenting adults. But today, as tolerance of homosexuality grows, gay activists are...

When Fairness is Unjust.
March 1, 2000... An edited excerpt from recent remarks delivered at the American Enterprise Institute by author Thomas Sowell, whose most recent book is The Quest for Cosmic Justice. Whenever I hear about "fairness" in education, I think back to my own...

LEAVING THE CITY BEHIND.
March 1, 2000... PIERRE, SOUTH DAKOTA--Riding on the Washington subway a while back, I was hit by a strong sense of deja vu. Just two years earlier I had taken that same Orange Line train to Vienna, Virginia, on a nightly basis. And I remembered, caught there...

Trade: The Overlooked Engine of U.S. Growth.
March 1, 2000... Of the several factors that contributed to our economy s amazing rebound from the traumas of the 1970s, some--like reduced marginal tax rates and a more rational monetary policy--are widely recognized. Others--like transportation deregulation...

A Tax Innovation Worth Fighting For.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Buried amidst the 1999 tax cut that Congress passed and President Clinton vetoed was a pathbreaking provision overlooked by most observers. It proposed expanding the education savings accounts (ESAs) that were launched on a small scale back in...

The Tax Collector Who Turned.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... The Accounting Hall of Fame, located at Ohio State University, attracts considerably fewer tourists than the nearby Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton. (Though just wait until the accountants get their interactive depreciation games...

Narcissus Enters the Press Pool.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Fact: Everything interesting that has been written about Bill Clinton this decade, pro and con, has been about his personality. That is the nature of 1990s journalism. The rush to therapeutic, personality-based reporting kicked into high...

Out of the Huddled Mass.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Among the first and last images we see in Angela's Ashes, the big-screen adaptation of Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir about growing up poor and miserable in Limerick, Ireland, are shots of the Statue of Liberty, that emblem of...

the Digest.
March 1, 2000... SUMMARIES OF IMPORTANT NEW RESEARCH FROM THE NATION'S UNIVERSITIES, THINK TANKS, AND INVESTIGATIVE PUBLICATIONS POLITICS California Fights the Race Wars Ron Unz, "California and the End of White America," in Commentary (November 1999),...

The Black Book of Communism.(translation by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer)(Review)
March 1, 2000... The Black Book of Communism By Stephane Courtois et al., translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer Harvard University Press, 858 pages, $37.50 The Black Book of Communism is one of those rare books that really matters. It is the first...

A Newer World.(Review)
March 1, 2000... A Newer World By David Roberts Simon & Schuster, 302 pages, $25 With its sesquicentennial soon upon us, California still exerts a tremendous pull on the American psyche. To many it is a golden place of ease and opportunity, a palm-graced...

Gold Dust and Gunsmoke.(Review)
March 1, 2000... Gold Dust and Gunsmoke By John Boessenecker John Wiley and Sons, 367 pages, $30 With its sesquicentennial soon upon us, California still exerts a tremendous pull on the American psyche. To many it is a golden place of ease and opportunity,...

For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today.(Review)
March 1, 2000... For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today By Jedediah Purdy Alfred A. Knopf, 226 pages, $20 Do you pine for the dewy days of John Denver and Jimmy Carter? Then you'll find what you are looking for in Jedediah Purdy,...

THE ECONOMY RESPLENDENT.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... As the chart below shows, our confidence in the performance of the U.S. economy has soared. Given the importance of economic concerns in most people's lives, it's not surprising that the economy's stellar performance has boosted the incumbent...

PROSPERITY EFFECTS.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... Good feelings about the economy are spilling over to other areas. Americans are more confident than in the past that the country is on the right track. They are also more satisfied with the way things are going in the country. There are other...

INTERNET BROWSING.
March 1, 2000... Two-thirds of Americans now say they use a computer at work, school, or at home. Half say they go online to access the Web or to send or receive e-mail, up from about a quarter just three years ago. Around 15 percent bought some holiday gifts...

The Mail.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2000... The title "Wrong Again" (SCAN, November/December) could apply to your reporting on the abandonment of the National Maximum Speed Limit in 1995. You display ignorance of how to analyze statistics when you assert that recent figures from the...

Last Gasp.
March 1, 2000... "Sir, could I handcuff this man to you? The policeman escorting him to Phoenix got bumped from this flight." "We'd like to be seated near people with stimulating conversations." "I'd like the prime rib with a baked potato and my...