Freedom in America: Is the Glass Half-full or Half-empty?

It is an age-old question of perception. Show a person a glass with some liquid in it and ask, “Is it half-full or half-empty?” The importance of the answer depends on the interests of the person asking the question. If you owned a restaurant and wanted to skimp on the wine, you would rather your [...]

Cultural Competence and Your Child

A buzz term is appearing with increased frequency in the literature and programs surrounding education at both the public-school and university levels: cultural competence. Parents would do well to ask, “What is it, and how could it affect my children?” The term “cultural competence” first arose in connection with health care, where a standard definition is: [...]

Book Reviews – October 2006

• Reviving the Invisible Hand: The
  Case for Classical Liberalism in the Twenty-First Century
  by Deepak Lal Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
  
• Laws of Fear
  by Cass Sunstein Reviewed by Donald J. Boudreaux
  
• Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an
  Empire’s
  Slaves
  by Adam Hochschild Reviewed by Becky Akers
  
• Why Men Earn More
  by Warren Farrell Reviewed by George C. Leef
  

Book Reviews – July 2003

Diversity: The Invention of a Concept by Peter Wood Encounter Books • 2003 • 308 pages • $24.95 Reviewed by George C. Leef Anthropologists study the origins and development of human customs and beliefs. Often that takes them to places like New Guinea, but anthropologist Peter Wood did not need immunizations or a passport to write this remarkable book. It examines [...]

They Learned from the Workers

I have a confession to make: there has always been something attractive to me about the Maoist idea of sending the intellectuals out into the countryside and into the factories to “learn from the peasants and proletarians.” When I listen to the endless stream of leftist pronouncements that comes from academia these days I really [...]

Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt

Johns Hopkins University Press • 1997 • 314 pages • $35.95 cloth; $16.95 paperback Thomas Bertonneau is the author of Declining Standards at Michigan Public Universities and teaches literature at Central Michigan University. Richard Cutler is president of the Michigan Association of Scholars and a former vice president of the University of Michigan. Science, along [...]

Capitalism: Discrimination’s Implacable Enemy

John Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation, a nonprofit think tank in North Carolina, and the author of The Heroic Enterprise: Business and the Common Good (Free Press), from which this article is adapted. Do racial minorities, women, and other groups need the government to protect them against prejudice and discrimination? To hear [...]

Affirmative Action: Institutionalized Inequality

Mr. Mulcahy is a student and Dr. Block a former professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Dr. Block is currently chairman of the department of economics at the University of Central Arkansas. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy established a program of “affirmative action” with the declaration of [...]

Book Review: Backfire by Bob Zelnick and The Affirmative Action Fraud by Clint Bolick

Backfire by Bob Zelnick Regnery • 1996 • 416 pages • $27.50 The Affirmative Action Fraud by Clint Bolick Cato Institute • 1996 • x + 170 pages • $10.95 paperback Professor Levin teaches in the Department of Philosophy at City College and The Graduate Center of The City University, New York, New York. Despite [...]