Free Republic

In this clip from the 1980 special 'Free To Choose,' socialist Frances Fox Piven tangles with economist Thomas Sowell. Sowell discusses the "process" versus aspiration - concluding that whatever the purported social goals of egalitarianism, liberty suffers.

The more often liberals speak on the topic of same-sex marriage, the more illogical their arguments become. Of course, the worst arguments come from liberal professors because they talk about the subject to the point of obsession. And the worst of the worst come from English professors steeped in postmodern orthodoxy. A recent letter to the editor by North Carolina English professor Dick Veit is illustrative. Dick writes the following (in italics). I respond intermittently. Students considering a major in English at a secular university should read his words carefully: If you can’t claim that your own marriage would be...

Three crucial points underlie our crisis of culture in the Western world: 1) There is no culture, at least as we know it in the West, without the bourgeoisie. 2) The notion of egalitarianism, which in the last few hundred years has come to dominate our thinking, is wreaking havoc on Western culture. 3) By embracing the concept of egalitarianism, the bourgeoisie is precipitating the dissolution of our culture and the self-destruction of the middle class.[i] 1) Culture and the Middle Class The middle class has supplied most of the innovators in Western culture, science, and economics. The philosopher David...

Individual liberty vs. coercive social equality -- that's pretty much the uber-debate and story of the past 220 years! Freedom for the individual to economically and socially rise or fall, based on justice and the merits -- or at least based on the fairly-reliable and relatively-fair opinions of the free market and free society -- is the great political and social goal of all time. Forced equality of the individual with his fellows -- based on some sort of allegedly-wise-and-virtuous tyrannical and coercive government social mechanism -- is the all-time great evil.

Barack Obama has long seen the U.S. Constitution as an obstacle to what he considers progress. In a 2001 interview that surfaced during the presidential campaign, he made this very clear: the Supreme Court under Justice Earl Warren had failed to break "free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution," Obama mused on a radio show. The Warren Court was insufficiently radical, he said, conceding too much ground to the traditional interpreters of the Constitution as a "charter of negative liberties," which "says what the states can't do to you, says what the...

A Christian couple have been charged with a criminal offence after taking part in what they regarded as a reasonable discussion about religion with guests at their hotel. Ben and Sharon Vogelenzang were arrested after a Muslim woman complained to police that she had been offended by their comments. They have been charged under public order laws with using ‘threatening, abusive or insulting words’ that were ‘religiously aggravated’. The couple, whose trial has been set for December, face a fine of up to £5,000 and a criminal record if they are convicted. Although the facts are disputed, it is thought...

Forget the recession and the "uninsured." Obama has bigger fish to fry.If we believe that Obama is trying to end the recession or fix the health-care system, we’ll miss his real agenda. The first seven months of the Obama administration seemingly make no sense. Why squander public approval by running up astronomical deficits in a time of pre-existing staggering national debt? Why polarize opponents after promising bipartisan transcendence? Why create vast new programs when the efficacy of big government is already seen as dubious? But that is exactly the wrong way to look at these first seven months of...

This movie looks really good.

For the past few years, I’ve been arguing that those who like to be called “liberals” should instead be called statists. You know these people. They are the ones who, full of righteous indignation, speak incessantly of injustice and oppression in America. They also speak, in sentences full of smug self-assurance, as if they and only they possess the empathy and intellectual fortitude necessary to provide “solutions” to a host of social “problems” thrust upon a good people by a bad “society.” Edmund Burke was talking about these statists when he said “by (their) unprincipled facility of changing the state...

Few arenas can match the business office for its combination of humdrummery and world-shaping influence. Sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote of office workers, “Whatever history they have had is a history without events.” The history of office technology seems especially uninspiring: the invention of double-entry bookkeeping, calculators, and spreadsheets are unlikely material for a captivating History Channel feature, to be sure. Yet the importance of the business office and its techniques is undeniable. Max Weber saw the office’s methods of organization, its rationality, and its disciplines as hallmarks of modern capitalism, making possible dramatic gains in efficiency and forever altering...

This is the story of educational romanticism in elementary and secondary schools —its rise, its etiology, and, we have reason to hope, its approaching demise. Educational romanticism consists of the belief that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better. Correlatively, educational romantics believe that the academic achievement of children is determined mainly by the opportunities they receive; that innate intellectual limits (if they exist at all) play a minor role; and that the current K-12 schools have huge room for improvement. Educational romanticism characterizes reformers of both Left and...

Kansas activities officials are investigating a religious school's refusal to let a female referee call a boys' high school basketball game. The Kansas State High School Activities Association said referees reported that Michelle Campbell was preparing to officiate at St. Mary's Academy near Topeka on Feb. 2 when a school official insisted that Campbell could not call the game. The reason given, according to the referees: Campbell, as a woman, could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy's beliefs. Campbell then walked off the court along with Darin Putthoff, the referee who was...

...wish these assurances were true. They aren't. Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there's strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic. It's time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true. If this suggestion makes you angry—if you find the idea of genetic racial advantages outrageous, socially corrosive, and unthinkable—you're not the first to feel that...

Nothing in the Democrats' current domestic platform is more prominent than redressing income inequality. All of the major Democratic candidates believe that conservatives have purposively rolled back income equality....Liberal columnists routinely express this conspiratorial point of view, suggesting that conservatives want to dismantle all of the institutions of the New Deal and Great Society. ...The Democrats are correct that income inequality in America has increased over the decades. The U.S. Census Bureau, for example, measures this by using a "Gini coefficient," in which zero indicates no inequality (all incomes are the same) and one is perfect inequality (one person has...

In 1997, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) altered its ethics code, ruling that all social workers must promote social justice "from local to global level." This call for mandatory advocacy raised the question: what kind of political action did the highly liberal field of social work have in mind? The answer wasn't long in coming. The Council on Social Work Education, the national accreditor of social work education programs, says candidates must fight "oppression," and sees American society as pervaded by the "global interconnections of oppression." Now aspiring social workers must commit themselves, usually in writing, to a...

Judging from the rhetoric of leading Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards, a major domestic issue in the 2008 presidential campaign is the supposed problem of rising economic inequality. What is striking is that problem is being debated amid substantial evidence that the steady improvement in the economy since 9/11 -- largely under the impetus of the much-derided Bush tax cuts -- has benefited Americans of all income levels, and that the rich are paying a higher share of total taxes than ever before. But as Lawrence Mishel, president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, revealingly acknowledged...

From the beginning of history, sincere reformers as well as demagogues have sought to abolish or at least to alleviate poverty through state action. In most cases their proposed remedies have only served to make the problem worse. The most frequent and popular of these proposed remedies has been the simple one of seizing from the rich to give to the poor. This remedy has taken a thousand different forms, but they all come down to this. The wealth is to be "shared," to be "redistributed," to be "equalized." In fact, in the minds of many reformers it is not...

Robin Hood took from the rich and gave to the poor. A recent study by a team of researchers headed up by University of California-San Diego political scientist James Fowler suggests that we may all have Robin Hood tendencies. Experimental economists and psychologists from around the world have been watching how people play various economic games as a way to probe the bases of human cooperation. One of the more interesting discoveries is that in economic games some people - altruistic punishers - will take fairly big hits to their winnings in order to reduce the ill-gotten gains of cheaters....

My parents had conflicting views about the nature and origin of good manners. My father took the Romantic view that they were the expression of man’s natural goodness of heart and that they therefore emerged spontaneously—that is, if they emerged at all. If they didn’t, it was because of the social injustice that inhibited or destroyed natural goodness. My mother took the classical view that good manners were a matter of discipline, training, and habit and that goodness of heart would, at least to an extent, follow in their wake. The older I grow, the more decisively I take my...

BEIJING, Dec. 24 - Chateau Zhang Laffitte is no ordinary imitation. It is the oriental twin of Château Maisons-Laffitte, the French architect François Mansart's 1650 landmark on the Seine. Its symmetrical facade and soaring slate roof were crafted using the historic blueprints, 10,000 photographs and the same white Chantilly stone. Yet its Chinese proprietor, a Beijing real estate developer named Zhang Yuchen, wanted more. He added a manicured sculpture garden and two wings, copying the palace at Fontainebleau. He even dug a deep, broad moat, though uniformed guards and a spiked fence also defend the castle. "It cost me $50...

Mike Wallace is accustomed to asking the tough questions. Tuesday night, his aggressive personality got him arrested by two Taxi & Limousine Commission inspectors when he lunged at one during a parking dispute on the Upper East Side, the TLC said. Three witnesses, however, said the inspectors overreacted and that the gathering crowd booed as the "60 Minutes" personality was arrested. Wallace, 86, was handcuffed and taken to the 19th Precinct station house, where he was issued a summons for disorderly conduct and released. Wallace was picking up a meat loaf dinner at a restaurant when two TLC inspectors started...

Comments and criticisms of the PDF material at http://www.modernliberalism.org would be most welcome.

LOS ANGELES - Democrats aren't amused by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (news - web sites)'s use of the mocking term "girlie men" to describe some lawmakers, although a spokesman for the governor said no apology would be forthcoming. Schwarzenegger dished out the insult at a rally Saturday as he claimed Democrats were delaying the budget by catering to special interests. Democrats protested that the remark was sexist and homophobic. "If they don't have the guts to come up here in front of you and say, 'I don't want to represent you, I want to represent those special interests, the unions, the...

RUSSELL Halley takes pride in being able to do the splits as well as any woman on the dance floor. His partner, Jorge Guzman, can spin faster than the female competition. So when the two men don their see-through chiffon shirts to dance together, they alternate the lead. "I can send Jorge into a triple spin and catch him, and vice versa - even in the course of one move," Mr Halley boasts. "We can change place instantly. From an audience point of view it can be very exciting." The duo are at the forefront of an upheaval in America's...

Egalitarians believe that inequality is unjust and justice requires a society to move steadily toward greater equality. This is the aim and the justification of proportional taxation, affirmative action, equal opportunity programs, and of the whole panoply of anti-poverty policies that bring us ever closer to the socialist dream of a welfare state. These policies cost money. The egalitarian approach to getting it is to tax those who have more in order to benefit those who have less. The absurdity of this is that egalitarians suppose that justice requires ignoring whether people deserve what they have and whether they are...

Among contemporary economists and social theorists, one of the most prolific, intellectually independent, and iconoclastic is Thomas Sowell, now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. In nearly a half-century’s worth of books and essays, he has explored the cultures of the world and all the nooks and crannies of American society. Enormously learned, wonderfully clear-headed, he sees reality as it is, and flinches at no truth. Affirmative Action Around the World is exactly what its title announces: an empirical study of what the consequences really are, and really have been, in the five major nations in which "affirmative action"—the...

V.I. Lenin: Hey Adolph: we got to hand it to those liberals. They have perpetuated one of the greatest lies of all time. The libs' knack for deception and outward proclivity to obtuse individuals (got to love those unrestricted voting laws) have caused many credulous folks to think that your regime, the Third Reich, was actually on the conservative end of the political spectrum. Adolph Hitler: Gosh, I know. What's even better is that this lie is disseminated from my disciples in American Academia. These irrationally reckless malcontents preach that Communism and Nazism are opposites, not rivals. Obviously, the nomenclature...

Age of Opinion By Robert Wolf Garbage in Garbage out, a concept well understood by computer geeks, is the perfect metaphor for what has happened to public education in the United States. Just as democracy, a generic substitution for the more specific, republic, is the word of the day in politics, so egalitarianism or multi-culturalism is the by-word in American Education. Egalité is not a synonym for democracy, as those with a vested interest in promoting the concept would have you believe. The standard dictionary definition of egalitarianism is affirming, promoting, or characterized by belief in equal political, economic, social,...

The Injustice of Equality By Russell KirkThe Heritage FoundationLecture Number Four Hundred and Seventy-Eight October 15th, 1993 Let me commence with two aphorisms, widely separated in time and substance. The first is the observation of Aristotle that it is unjust to treat unequal things equally. The second is the declaration of Marx that to establish equality, first we must establish inequality. These two assumptions have been at war one with the other during the twentieth century. What did Aristotle mean by writing that to treat unequal things equally is unjust? He meant that not all human beings are worthy...

Should a Gardener Get the Same Care as a Vice President? Medicare should find a way to pay for lifesaving heart devices such as one implanted in Dick Cheney. By Leslie A. Saxon The other day I was treating a patient, a gardener, whose three grandchildren rely on him. He needs an implantable cardioverter defibrillator, or an ICD. This is the heart-shocking device made famous by Vice President Dick Cheney, who has one protecting his life. The press has called his ICD "an emergency room in the chest." The description is apt and a measure of the technological marvel that...

A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world. This complaint follows a common pattern we've seen with MUDs, BBSes, and online communities like Echo and the WELL. A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be...

After a protracted legal battle, Harry Potter's school, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, has been forced by the national government to accept "muggles," people without native magic skill, as students. Looking weary and strained from the long legal battle, the headmaster of the school, Albus Dumbledore, said, "this just doesn't make any sense. We simply don't know how to teach magic to those without native magical skill. This change can only mean the slow destruction of our ability to turn out top class users of magic. This school had an easier time functioning during the Witch Trials of the...

North American Report/Fatherhood At-Home Dads Gather and Bond by Kristyn Komarnicki in Des Plaines, Illinois At a November 21 convention in suburban Chicago, 100 American men gathered to network, listen to experts, and exchange strategies for improving job performance. But any resemblance to corporate America ended there. Dress was casual, the atmosphere noncompetitive, and topics included ways to support working spouses, tips on defusing a two-year-old's temper tantrums, and the desire to see more diaper-changing tables installed in men's restrooms. Giving voice to the growing ranks of men engaged in full-time fatherhood, the third annual At-Home Dads Convention in Des...

When Eric and Jody courted during graduate school, they assumed that when the time came to raise a family, Eric would work and Jody would stay home with the kids. Six years later, things looked different. "I liked my job, but Jody loved hers," says Eric. "Jody made lots more money than I ever could have. It became clear to each of us that she should work and I should stay home. We came to this decision through a lot of prayer and by discussing it with our church friends ad nauseum."Three children later, Eric is passionate about being a...

<p>"Thirty years ago, the ferment for ordination of women was on everyone's radar as far as 'gender issues in the church' were concerned. At the time, that issue was cast in terms of validating the ministry of women in the Church.</p>