Independent Review articles from September 2000

Independent Review archives from September 2000

"Burn, Baby, Burn": Small Business in the Urban Riots of the 1960s.
September 22, 2000... On August 11, 1965, a routine arrest of a drunk driver in the Watts section of Los Angeles sparked a riot that lasted five days and took the lives of thirty-four people. African American rioters looted and set fire to stores, as bystanders...

The School-Choice Choices.
September 22, 2000... In the United States today, most high school graduates are not ready for the challenges of the modern world or higher education. Their subpar skills pose a major threat to the vitality of our economy. In 1983, a presidential commission on...

Medicare Reform: Economics versus Politics.
September 22, 2000... No one familiar with the history of Medicare should be surprised that it remains at the center of an intense political debate. During the twenty years preceding the creation of the program in 1965, Democrats who sought to enact some version of...

Taxation, Forced Labor, and Theft.
September 22, 2000... The injustice of taxation--of taxation per se, not merely of this or that particular tax policy or of especially high levels of taxation--is a familiar theme of popular libertarian rhetoric. Curiously, it is less evident in the more...

Racism, Railroad Unions, and Labor Regulations.
September 22, 2000... Until recently, labor historians mostly ignored or whitewashed the role of racism in the American labor movement. Influenced by Marxist interest-group theory that attributes nearly all societal conflict to economic class conflict, these...

The Inhumanity of Government Bureaucracies.
September 22, 2000... The media attention focused on elected officials leads many people to think of them as "the government." Such thinking diverts us from the recognition of a critical truth: politically articulated agendas are transformed into reality only by...

The Agony of Public Education.
September 22, 2000... The tragedy at Columbine High School in Colorado has spurred another round of soul-searching on public education and yet another wave of reform proposals ranging from the hackneyed (more spending) to the whimsical (posting the Ten...

What Really Happened In 1981.
September 22, 2000... Timothy Muris's otherwise excellent piece "Ronald Reagan and the Rise of Large Deficits" (Independent Review 4 [winter 2000]: 365-76), necessarily misses some fascinating details known only to those of us who were actually there. The...

The Appeal of the Empire of Lies.
September 22, 2000... I am the adoptive mother of a child who spent his formative years in a Romanian orphanage. I spend most of my days dealing with the damage that was done to him. The harm done to many children like him in the eastern bloc set a new standard for...

Capitalism, Democracy, and Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Capitalism, Democracy, and Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery By John Mueller Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. 335. $29.95. Although capitalism and democracy are regarded by many as the twin engines propelling the United States...

Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction By J. Morgan Kousser Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Pp. x, 590. $65.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. Gerrymandering is as old as...

The Political Economy of NATO: Past, Present, and into the 21st Century.(Review)
September 22, 2000... The Political Economy of NATO: Past, Present, and into the 21th Century By Todd Sandler and Keith Hartley Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv, 292. $59.95 cloth, $22.95 paper. Todd Sandler and Keith Hartley claim that The...

All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery.(Review)
September 22, 2000... All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery By Henry Mayer New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. Pp. xxi, 707. $32.50, cloth; $18.95, paper. No one attacked the black slavery of the southern states with greater vehemence...

Property and Freedom.(Review)
September 22, 2000... Property and Freedom By Richard Pipes New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Pp. xvi, 328. $30.00 cloth, $15.00 paper. Richard Pipes is best known as an important scholar of Russian and Soviet history. In Property and Freedom, he combines his...

Double Standards, Double Talk, and Multiple Troubles.
September 22, 2000... More and more people are claiming to be the victims of double standards--blacks and whites, women and men, liberals and conservatives, isolationists and internationalists, teenagers and adults, and new and old immigrants. Again and again, one...

Correction.(Correction Notice)
September 22, 2000... The editor regrets that in the summer 2000 issue of the journal, volume V, number 1, p. 155, the date of death of Paul Heyne was incorrectly given as March 9, 2000. The correct date is April 9.