The American Enterprise articles from March 2005

The American Enterprise archives from March 2005

Take ownership.(Bird's Eye)
March 1, 2005... What a year! The world's first full-color feature film has just been released. Now there are whispers of special-effects-laden Hollywood blockbusters to come over the next several years. Two projects thought to be gestating: an adaptation of a...

Sidelights.
March 1, 2005... The first radio station for federal bureaucrats, WFED-AM, went on the air in Washington, D.C. * Roughly 90 percent of American soldiers shot or hit by bombs in Iraq have survived, the Washington Post reported. During the Vietnam War, the figure...

Affirmative action is no favor.(bar examinations)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Writing in the Stanford Law Review, UCLA professor Richard Sander calculates that by methodically placing black students one or two slots ahead of what they are prepared for, preferential admissions policies set them up for failure. ...

Teen sex declining.(Indicators)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... For a decade now, sexual activity, pregnancies, and births have been declining among American teenagers. Behavior has changed most among teenage males. Behind the changed behavior are changed attitudes. Among teenagers who have never had...

Gas price panic.(Indicators)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... For a while last year, regular gasoline prices topped $2 per gallon at many American gas stations. Amidst much rumbling from politicians, and conspiracy mongering from oil-company haters, prices crested and then retreated during the fall. ...

A giving people.(charitable donations)
March 1, 2005... Within three weeks of the Asian tsunami disaster, private donors in America had given even more than the $350 million in official assistance pledged by the U.S. government, note researchers Gary Tobin, Alexander Karp, and Aryeh Weinberg in a...

Welcome good men.(immigrants)
March 1, 2005... One of them is a combat engineer who cleared the way for America's lightning advance to Baghdad in March 2003. Another spent a grueling 15 months in Iraq with the 1st Infantry Division. Still another lost a leg when his convoy was hit by a...

Life was better when daddy was one of the dictators.(Brief Article)(Reprint)
March 1, 2005... "The Sami sisters, ages 17, 15, and 11... rarely venture outside their upscale home in central Baghdad out of fear of explosions and violence.... Their teenage world was simpler when Saddam Hussein was in power. Back then, they said, they hung...

Time for new rules on judges.
March 1, 2005... Nearly all agree today that the U.S. judicial nomination process is broken. A few years ago, Democrats complained bitterly about the difficulties that President Clinton faced in confirming judges; now Republicans cite "inexcusable" delays...

Paying teachers what they're worth.(Scan)( School at Columbia)
March 1, 2005... While New York City public schools face an epic shortage of good teachers, many private schools in the Big Apple have no trouble attracting candidates. The School at Columbia, for instance, received 1,700 applications for 39 teaching positions...

Endangered country.(country music)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... Is country music losing its soul? Traditional songs about love of God, nation, and family are now being pushed to the wayside in the world of country, as new tunes championing hedonism take center stage. The latest example of this trend is...

Randall Wallace: he's a former preacher and Scots-Irish "hillbilly" who has fought his way into Tinseltown. As a screenwriter and director, he has produced some of the most popular--and best--films of the last decade, without drifting away from real Americans and their moral worldview.("Live" with TAE)(Interview)
March 1, 2005... Screenwriter and director Randall Wallace is a man on a mission to bring the values of America's heartland to Hollywood. Born in Tennessee of Scots-Irish and Southern Baptist stock, he studied theology at Duke and became a minister before...

God on the quad: at religious colleges--which are growing fast--student life is different.
March 1, 2005... In February 1988, author Tom Wolfe gave a Class Day address at Harvard in which he described ours as the era of the "fifth freedom"--freedom from religion. Religion, he commented with his satirist's smile, is "the last hobble" on the...

How America drifted from welfare to "entitlement".
March 1, 2005... "Most modern Americans view government handouts as natural and necessary. We happily endorse payments for the poor, to the rich, for the middle class, to college students, for apple growers, opera lovers, cotton farmers, electricity consumers,...

An ownership society evolves: who says individualized accounts are a better way to solve social problems? The laws of nature.
March 1, 2005... The field of study is fashionably referred to as "complexity science," or "chaos theory." Its academic practitioners use $50 words like "autocatalysis," "self-organization," or "spontaneous order" to describe what they are observing. But Adam...

Our current system is old and broken.(Be not afraid: Social Security reform is no radical idea)
March 1, 2005... The idea of an Ownership is politically and economically revolutionary, because it's a way to create a nation of stakeholders. Every American could own a share of the larger American economy--and have a chance to share in its prosperity. That...

Personal retirement accounts are not unproven.(Be not afraid: Social Security reform is no radical idea)
March 1, 2005... While I was Chile's Secretary of Labor and Social Security, from 1978 to 1980, we converted our national pension system to one based on ownership, choice, and personal responsibility--just as George Bush proposes to change America's today. ...

Even Russia beat us to personal retirement accounts.(Be not afraid: Social Security reform is no radical idea)
March 1, 2005... In one more enormous step on its path to civilized liberal capitalism, Russia recently launched a privatization of its national old-age pension system. The long-term impact on the country's economy, society, and politics is hard to...

Reform-related deficits are not to be feared.(Be not afraid: Social Security reform is no radical idea)
March 1, 2005... The pundits who have been predicting dangerously higher interest rates based on large U.S. deficits have some explaining to do. Many high-profile commentators such as Robert Rubin and Pete Peterson have long been warning that long-term...

A nation of citizen investors.
March 1, 2005... "The more ownership there is in America," said George W. Bush last June, "the more people have a vital stake in the future of this country." This is a profound notion. The idea behind what the President has called the "Ownership Society"...

We're already a homeowner's society.
March 1, 2005... FRESNO, CALIFORNIA -- In the late 1980s, Rich Mostert had the usual dream--a house, a flourishing business, a family--but in the wrong place. He was living in San Francisco, one of the nation's most expensive places, and he didn't have...

Homeowner politics propelled Bush.(George W. Bush)(home ownership)
March 1, 2005... While Democratic leaders debate how to find a more mainstream message in 2008, they might examine an economic phenomenon that has turned against them in recent years: homeownership. In simple terms that resonated with much of Middle...

Broad ownership needs broad taxpaying: if we encourage the first without the second, we may regret it.
March 1, 2005... After the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, authorizing an income tax, was ratified in 1913, Congress enacted a levy immediately. Initially, just 1 percent of the population paid this income tax, and the top rate of 7 percent...

Ownership can be revolutionary.(proposals of George W. Bush)
March 1, 2005... George Bush ran for re-election not as a status quo, stay the course candidate of "morning in America," but with a call for creating an "Ownership Society"--where citizens own their own homes, retirement plans, health care coverage, and...

Liberal and conservative as defined by the media.(Beat the press: the hand that rules the press ... rules the country--Judge Learned Hand)
March 1, 2005... Everybody loves Viktor Yushchenko, and why not? The plucky populist stared down Ukraine's corrupt oligarchs to become his country's president, surviving an attack on his life in the process. Even members of the establishment media love him. You...

Curry's favor to Kansas.(Flashback: to know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child--Cicero)(John Steuart Curry)(Biography)
March 1, 2005... In 1897, back when the Jayhawk state still raged with the prairie fires of agrarian revolt, painter John Steuart Curry was born outside Dunavant, Kansas. By the 1930s, Curry had become, along with Iowa's Grant Wood and Missouri's Thomas Hart...

The power of a good family man.(In Good Company)(Movie Review)
March 1, 2005... Those of us who detected a glimmer of maturity in the seminal 1999 teen sex comedy American Pie have been vindicated of late by its director, Paul Weitz. With About a Boy, in which a solipsistic womanizer finds truer companionship with a...

Green fictions.(State of Fear)(Book Review)
March 1, 2005... State of Fear By Michael Crichton HarperCollins, 603 pages, $27.95 On the of his latest book, State of Fear, Michael Crichton's name appears in type at least three times the size of the title. Mr. Crichton is now a brand, like iPod, Dell,...

Deep in the Middle East.(From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East)(Book Review)
March 1, 2005... From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East By Bernard Lewis Oxford University Press, 349 pages, $28 This distillation of a lifetime of writing from Bernard Lewis on Islamic history, the Middle East, and their relationship with...

How businesses get big.(Deals of the Century: Wall Street, Mergers, and the Making of Modern America)(Book Review)
March 1, 2005... Deals of the Century: Wall Street, Mergers, and the Making of Modern America By Charles R. Geisst Wiley, 330 pages, $29.95 Charles Geisst's Deals of the Century is a chronology of 100 years of mergers and acquisitions, and their effects on...

Hungry for the truth.(Mayors' Claims of Growing Hunger Are Once Again Exaggerated)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 1, 2005... Melissa Pardue, Robert Rector, and Kirk Johnston, "Mayors' Claims of Growing Hunger Are Once Again Exaggerated," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, December 16, 2004 (www.heritage.org) On December 14, the United States Conference of Mayors...

Helping attentive moms.(What Do Women Really Want?)(Book Review)
March 1, 2005... Neil Gilbert, "What Do Women Really Want?" The Public Interest, Winter 2005 (thepublicinterest.com) University of California at Berkeley professor Neil Gilbert takes a look at the recent spate of articles indicating that growing numbers of...

Healthy religion.(America Passes the Religious Test)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 1, 2005... James Q. Wilson, "America Passes the Religious Test," AEI on the Issues, December 2004 (aei.org) In this brief essay, James Q. Wilson, chairman of AEI's Council of Academic Advisers, refutes those, especially in Europe, who have suggested...

Guns Don't Kill People....(gun violence)
March 1, 2005... National Research Council, Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review, National Academies Press, 2004 (books.nap.edu) A panel assembled by the National Research Council (which many assumed would be predisposed to find a connection between gun...

Rethinking military bases.(National Security)
March 1, 2005... Thomas Donnelly, "Rebasing, Revisited," AEI National Security Outlook, December 2004 (aei.org) Location, location, location, is the mantra AEI's Thomas Donnelly urges the Pentagon to adopt when it looks at how its forces should be deployed...

Baptists and bootleggers.(banning of alcohol)
March 1, 2005... Urs Brandt and Gert Svendsen, "Fighting Windmills: The Coalition of Industrialists and Environmentalists in the Climate Change Issue," International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, Volume 4, 2004...

Modernizing social security.(surveys of non-retired people)
March 1, 2005... In 1979, non-retired Americans told pollsters from Hart Research that Social Security would be their most important source of retirement income. In Gallup's 2004 question, non-retired people were far more likely to say that private pensions...

The United States and Canada.(surveys of americans and canadians)(Illustration)
March 1, 2005... As the polling data below show, the United States and Canada differ--sometimes sharply--on a number of social issues. Canadians are more likely than Americans to say that premarital sex, extramarital affairs, divorce, and having a baby outside...

The United States and Mexico.(surveys of americans and mexicans)(Illustration)
March 1, 2005... Mexicans and Americans think it is best for their countries to take an active role in world affairs rather than to stay out. People in both countries agree on the importance of combating terrorism, preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, and...

The mail.(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2005... I enjoyed reading William Tucker's "The Solution" (January/February). Nuclear power plants are safer, cost less to operate, have zero emissions, and occupy much, much less space than an emissions-belching, coal-fired power plant. However, the...

Last gasp.(Comic)
March 1, 2005... "Yes, I think I have good people skills. What kind of idiot question is that?" "I'm afraid the Gameboy has fused with his hand and surgery will be required to remove it" "I know the place is very special to you and holds a lot of good...