Policy Review articles from July 1996

Policy Review archives from July 1996

Corporate upsizers.
July 1, 1996... The American economy has created 9.5 million new jobs in the last four years, 660,000 in just the first quarter of 1996. Unemployment has tumbled from 7.8 percent to 5.4 percent. California has pulled itself out of recession. In Wisconsin and...

HUD slaps drug-rehab wonder. (Victory Fellowship of San Antonio, Texas)
July 1, 1996... Rather than study him," Newt Gingrich once complained, "the bureaucracy has tried to put folks like Freddie out of business because they don't have Ph.D.s or can't fill out the paperwork." The Speaker of the House was referring to Freddie...

The untold triumph of concealed-carry permits.
July 1, 1996... In recent years, the debate over gull policy has been dominated by two federal initiatives: the Brady bill's waiting period for the purchase of handguns and tile ban on so-called assault weapons. While these federal issues have riveted tile...

Citizen initiatives fertilize the grass roots.
July 1, 1996... There may be no better barometer of citizen involvement in politics than ballot initiatives, and this year's bountiful crop suggests that activism at the state level is surging. Grass-roots conservative activists are not waiting for the...

How business delivers the good. (corporate social responsibility)
July 1, 1996... By anyone's definition, Jerome Lemelson is a great philanthropist. Lemelson has donated tens of millions of dollars over the years to organizations ranging from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to local charities across the country. He...

Make way for Mom, Inc. (home businesses for women)(includes excerpt from 'Mother in the Middle')
July 1, 1996... Wendelyn Martz has lived on both sides of the mommy wars. An urban planner in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, she had always intended to pursue her career. She took a leave of three months after the birth of her son; five weeks after her daughter was...

Making public schools safe for religion.
July 1, 1996... Even in the lazy days of summer, when most schools are as noisy as a mausoleum, classrooms are rattling with the ghosts of First Amendment debates left unresolved: A parent sues a Mississippi school district for allowing prayers over the school...

Citizens at bat: baseball's community all-stars.(Cover Story)
July 1, 1996... Poor battered baseball. It's got more problems than the Detroit Tigers pitching staff. Among Generation X's favorite sports, it ranks somewhere between beach volleyball and Mortal Kombat. Its TV ratings resemble Greg Maddux's earned-run average,...

Smart women, foolish quotas. (affirmative action)
July 1, 1996... Willie Brown, then the Speaker of the California Assembly, predicted in March 1995 that the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) would be defeated if it were given the "face . . of a white woman." Opponents of the CCRI -- an amendment to the...

Atlanta's other Olympians. (private charities)
July 1, 1996... In the late 18th century, Catherine the Great's favorite field marshal and reputed lover, Grigori Potemkin, built phony villages one block deep throughout Russia's Black Sea provinces to give the tsarina a false sense of the region's prosperity....

Pro-life dilemma: pregnancy centers and the welfare trap.
July 1, 1996... A story like this begins perhaps a thousand times every day: A woman's hand trembles as she scans the big-city Yellow Pages. The ads for abortion clinics have flowers and birds and slogans about caring, and one shows a pretty couple grinning at...

City Hall's license to kill civil society. (oppressive government licensing requirements)
July 1, 1996... The sharp knock at the door provoked a frown on the face of Taalib-Din Abdul Uqdah. As the co-owner and manager of Cornrows & Co., the first African hairbraiding salon in the District of Columbia, Uqdah was in the midst of another busy day, and...

The naturalizers. (immigrants and naturalization)
July 1, 1996... Come November, hundreds of thousands of immigrants are likely to cast their first votes in a presidential election. That's because record levels of foreigners have filed applications for citizenship with the Immigration and Naturalization Service...

Social contract or social covenant.
July 1, 1996... There are two fundamentally different ways of thinking about human association. Consider two phrases we associate with the Greek and Jewish traditions and their most distinguished representatives, Aristotle and Maimonides. Aristotle described...

The lawyer's conscience. (19th century attorney David Hoffman)
July 1, 1996... To early generations of Americans, republicanism conveyed two concepts of citizenship: "rights," which limited government, and "responsibilities," which constituted civic virtue. If the former is divorced from the latter, the law becomes a...