Free Republic

CHARLES MURRAY: If by some miracle that change were made in that Amendment, it would be the biggest unintended consequence in the history of liberalism. You know what's going to happen? Every red state and a whole bunch of blue states, too. The state legislatures will create militias. And guess what? There are going to be a whole lot of people who want to be in those in those militias. There are going to be -- JOHN AVLON: We already have those, it's called the National Guard. BILL MAHER: Yeah, exactly. Thank you, John. MURRAY: No. If you change the...

"American exceptionalism is a fact of America’s past, not something that you can choose whether to “believe in” any more than you can choose whether to ‘believe in’ the battle of Gettysburg. Understanding its meaning is indispensable for anyone who wants to understand what it has meant to be an American." ~ Charles Murray

American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray suggested on Friday that former Heritage Foundation analyst Jason Richwine, whose doctoral dissertation at Harvard included evidence that Hispanic immigrants have lower IQs than non-Hispanic whites, had been railroaded and forced to resign by people without integrity or “balls.” Quote: Jason Richwine, guilty of crimethink, "resigns." The bashing from the right has been as mindless as from the left. Thank God I was working for Chris DeMuth and AEI, not Jim DeMint and Heritage, when The Bell Curve was published. Integrity. Loyalty. Balls.DeMuth was the president of AEI from 1986 to 2008. The Bell...

President Obama took an apparent racial swipe at Colin Powell in a 1994 NPR interview in which he implied the four-star general is acceptable to “white America.” In the same interview, Obama advocates that the government should provide jobs for every citizen and prenatal care for all women. Obama in 1994 was a community organizer and lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. WND unearthed an Oct. 28, 1994, interview the future president gave to NPR in response to political scientist Charles Murray’s controversial book “The Bell Curve,” which argues that there are racial differences in intelligence. During the...

The Pew Foundation discovered in a recent poll that tensions over inequality in wealth now outrank tensions over race and immigration. But income inequality isn’t really the problem. A new upper class is the problem. And their wealth isn’t what sets them apart or creates so much animosity toward them. Let’s take a guy — call him Hank — who built a successful auto-repair business and expanded it to 30 locations, and now his stake in the business is worth $100 million. He is not just in the 1%; he’s in the top fraction of the 1% — but he’s...

Although Latinos make up only a seventh of the population, they have "racked up half the employment gains posted since the economy began adding jobs in early 2010", the Los Angeles Times reported this morning. In 2011, the trend accelerated. Of the 2.3 million jobs added in 2011 according to the Household Survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.4 million, or 60 percent, were won by Latinos.

I am a 52-year-old mother of three children - a 24-year old grad student, a 21-year old college senior, and a 13- year-old 7th grader. I am a public school teacher of Math to 7th graders. I am concerned about the welfare of our country, our Constitution, and the hope (NOT Obama's) for our nation. PLEASE help me to understand what is happening to our country. I am dismayed by the garbage I am hearing and reading. I have been involved in local politics. I could NOT suffer the bullsh*t, so I resigned from the county Republican Executive Committee, after...

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, by Charles Murray (Crown Forum, 416 pp., $27) Charles Murray is back, and the debate about wealth and inequality will never be the same. Readers of the political scientist’s earlier work, especially The Bell Curve and Losing Ground, might assume that with his new book he is returning to the vexed subject of race. He is, but with a twist: Murray’s area of intensive focus (and data mining) is “the state of white America”—and it’s not what you might think. According to Murray, the last 50 years have seen the emergence of...

American exceptionalism is not just something that Americans claim for themselves. Historically, Americans have been seen as different, even peculiar, to people around the world.1 I am thinking of qualities such as American industriousness—not just hard work, but the way that Americans have treated their work and their efforts to get ahead in life as a central expression of who they are. There is American neighborliness. Many cultures have traditions of generous hospitality to guests, but widespread voluntary mutual assistance among unrelated people who happen to live alongside each other has been rare. In the United States, it has been...

I think of all the couples with advanced degrees who have remarkably successful children, and I wonder how other kids can enjoy such success. Charles Murray has long made this a theme of his. The full account can be found in The New Criterion. "Many [in the new elite] have never worked at a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day, never had a conversation with an evangelical Christian, never seen a factory floor, never had a friend who didn't have a college degree, never hunted or fished." Here is the excerpt from...

The size of government threatens the American way of life as we know it. The solution is straightforward -- cut government. A vibrant grassroots movement insists that it happen, and Washington is lousy with rival plans for how to go about it. The social threat to the American way of life is as dire, if not more so. But it is more insidious, and more complicated. No grassroots movement has mobilized against it, and no high-profile bipartisan commission is suggesting remedies. Yet it proceeds apace, all but ignored except in the lives of Americans. Among those trying to sound the...

No excerpt allowed, story here

The word median is statistical: it is the point at which 50% of the observations of a thing are smaller and 50% larger. For example, according to the CIA Factbook, the median age of U.S. citizens is 37 years; thus, half the population is younger than 37, half older. Sometimes, as in Murray’s case, and in this review, the median is synonymous with average (sometimes the later implies numerical mean; the median and numerical mean are often nearly or practically equal). We accept that some people naturally excel at sports and that others, no matter the purity of their souls,...

The question posed by social scientist Charles Murray at the American Enterprise Institute's annual dinner this month could hardly have been simpler — Do Americans want the United States to be like Europe? He asked as someone who admires Europe and Europeans. He asked also because it is becoming increasingly apparent that restructuring the United States along the lines of the European social-democratic model is the change many in the new administration - perhaps including President Obama himself - believe in. Mr. Murray is convinced that Europeanizing America is a bad idea, and not only because the European model creates...

The question posed by social scientist Charles Murray at the American Enterprise Institute’s annual dinner this month could hardly have been simpler: Do Americans want the United States to be like Europe? He asked as someone who likes and admires Europe and Europeans. He asked also because it is becoming increasingly apparent that restructuring the U.S. along the lines of the European social-democratic model is the change many in the new administration — perhaps including President Obama himself — believe in. Such a redirection surely deserves consideration. Murray is convinced that Europeanizing America is a bad idea, and not only...

When I began to work on this lecture a few months ago, I was feeling abashed because I knew I couldn't talk about either of the topics that were of the gravest national importance. Regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, I have not publicly said a word on foreign policy since I wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times in 1973. Regarding the economic crisis, I am not an economist. In fact, I am so naive about economics that I continue to think that we have a financial meltdown because the federal government, in its infinite wisdom,...

Do we want the United States to be like Europe? The European model has worked in many ways. I am delighted whenever I get a chance to go to Stockholm or Amsterdam, not to mention Rome or Paris. There's a lot to like -- a lot to love -- about day-to-day life in Europe. But I argue that the answer to this question is "no." Not for economic reasons. I want to focus on another problem with the European model: namely, that it drains too much of the life from life. The stuff of life -- the elemental events surrounding...

  Charles Murray delivers the 2009 Irving Kristol Lecture. Photo by Peter Holden Photography/AEI.   My thanks to AEI's Council of Academic Advisers for this great honor. As best I can estimate, tonight is the twentieth of AEI's annual dinners that I have attended. It has been a memorable series of evenings. There was, for example, the night in 1996 when Alan Greenspan reflected upon the "irrational exuberance" of American investors, and the next morning the Dow dropped two percent in the first half hour. The stature of the occasion has led most of the honorees to deliver a summum...

Leave Those Kids Alone by: Heather Latham, January 14, 2009 Charles Murray has a few problems with the United States’ current educational policy. In his book Real Education, he lists four cardinal ones: ability varies; half of all children are below average; too many people are going to college; and America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted. He argues that these are ideas that must be embraced before public education can improve. Murray starts with the idea that the ability to do and learn certain things varies in degree and kind with children. He uses the multiple-intelligence...

... As president, Mr. Obama should use his bully pulpit to undermine the bachelor’s degree as a job qualification. Here’s a suggested battle cry, to be repeated in every speech on the subject: “It’s what you can do that should count when you apply for a job, not where you learned to do it.” The residential college leading to a bachelor’s degree at the end of four years works fine for the children of parents who have plenty of money. It works fine for top students from all backgrounds who are drawn toward academics. But most 18-year-olds are not from...