The St. Croix Review speaks for middle America, and brings you essays from patriotic Americans.
Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist for The Washington Times.
Murder Inc., or Murder Incorporated, was the name of a New York organized crime group in the 1930s and 1940s that carried out hundreds of murders on behalf of the mob. The name "Murder Incorporated" was coined by a 1930s reporter for the old New York World Telegram. The law finally broke up New York's Murder Inc. Unfortunately for Vladimir Putin's victims, Murder Inc. is another name for law in Russia, such as it is.
With the death of Alexander V. Litvinenko, the former Russian KGB officer and Kremlin foe killed in England last week by radiation poisoning, and the earlier assassination in her Moscow apartment house lobby of Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent anti-Kremlin Russian journalist, it is safe to say a 21st century Murder Inc. headquartered in the Kremlin offices of President Putin has been established. Murder Inc. did not exist during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras.
There is ample precedent for extramural Kremlin criminality. Leon Trotsky, Josef Stalin's uncompromising foe, was assassinated on Aug. 20, 1940, in his exile home in Mexico by a Kremlin agent. Walter Krivitsky, Stalin's intelligence chief who broke with Communism, supposedly committed suicide Feb. 10, 1941, in a Washington, D.C. hotel. In September 1937, Ignace Reiss, another KGB agent who broke with Communism, was machine-gunned to his death in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Russia as Murder Inc. has one humongous advantage over the New York mob. Russia is a state in the same way Adolf Hitler's Third Reich was a state, and therefore enjoyed all the protective advantages of sovereignty. It took a global war to stop Hitler. Mr. Putin, a onetime KGB agent, doesn't face that risk since he has no desire to start World War IV. (I am using here Norman Podhoretz's designation; World War III is what he calls the Cold War.) And nobody today is prepared to do anything about the death of a lowly onetime Russian apparatchik.
Mr. Putin's Murder Inc. has two central ambitions: to weaken the United States as the global superpower and, to undermine America's friends and allies. Since he has no ideological message to impart to Arabdom, and is no friend of Israel, he can move freely in the Middle East and strengthen Russia's alliances with the Arab states and Iran, whose aspiration, according to its leader, is to wipe Israel off the map.
Mr. Litvinenko's murder is a warning by the Kremlin's Murder Inc. to Mr. Putin's opponents outside Russia: You've no place to hide. And there's nothing we can do about it. *
"Unless a man is master of his soul, all other kinds of mastery amount to little." --Theodore Roosevelt
We would like to thank the following people for their generous support of this journal (from 9/11/06-1/8/2007): H. W. Agnew, John E. Alderson, Ariel, Nancy M. Bannick, William P. Barr, Charles Benscheidt, Jan F. Branthaver, Walter I. C. Brent, Robert M. Buchta, William G. Buckner, Thomas M. Burt, Alva D. Butler, William C. Campion, Dino Casali, John Alden Clark, John D'Aloia, Josep R. Devitto, Richard A. Edstrom, Nicholas Falco, The Andersen Foundation, Noel C. Franz, Donald G. Galow, John B. Gardner, Jane F. Gelderman, Robert C. Gerken, Philip Gilmore, Joseph H. Grant, Joyce Griffin, Alene D. Haines, Anthony Harrigan, Paul J. Hauser, John H. Hearding, Bernhard Heersink, Norman G. P. Helgeson, William J. Hempel, Jaren E. Hiller, Arthur Hills, David Ihle, Arthur H. Ivey, Marilyn P. Jaeger, Stephen W. Jenks, D. Paul Jennings, O. Guy Johnson, O. Walter Johnson, Robert R. Johnson, Louise H. Jones, Gloria Knoblauch, Thomas F. Kordonowy, John S. Kundrat, Robert E. Lane, Harvey & Mary Larsen, Allyn M. Lay, Alan Lee, Herbert London, Gregor MacDonald, Cary M. Maguire, Francis P. Markoe, Curtis Dean Mason, Roberta R. McQuade, Henry M. Mitchell, Walter M. Moede, Robert A. Moss, B. William Pastoor, Daniel D. Payne, Gary J. Pressley, Garland L. & Betty Pugh, Howard J. Romanek, Michael J. Ryan, Irene L. Schultz, Dave Smith, Paul Sopko, Clifford W. Stone, Frank T. Street, Michael S. Swisher, Paul B. Thompson, Thomas Warth, Robert D. Wells, Gaylord T. Willett, Piers Woodriff.
John A. Howard is Senior Fellow at the Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society. A highly decorated veteran of World War II, he served in the Eisenhower Administration and later became President of Rockford College.
An Iran armed with nuclear weapons and led by the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could be the gravest danger ever to confront Western Civilization. Iran's President openly and brashly defies the United Nations and the countries that have been pressuring him to cease enriching uranium, a process essential for nuclear weapons. He declares that Israel must be eliminated and, "If America and its allies do not abandon the path of falsehood, their doomed destiny will be annihilation."
It is easy to discount these threats as the bluster of a tin-horn tyrant. However, his uranium enrichment is said to be moving ahead unchecked, and past history indicates there is virtually no likelihood that the influential countries of the UN will impose sanctions severe enough to convince Iran of anything.
It needs to be remembered that Ahmadinejad is not impelled by dreams of power or empire or personal glory. Rather, he is driven by a burning compulsion to Islamify the world. Unlike civilized people, he would not have the slightest hesitation to use his weapons of mass destruction to slaughter millions of people. That action he would regard as a triumphant step in ridding the world of Infidels. Such bloodthirstiness is so appalling that the American mind is disinclined to consider it a real possibility in evaluating the Iranian threat. Yet there are regular news reports of the inhuman savagery of Muslim fanatics who torture their captives before assassinating them.
Without a trace of compassion for infidels, Ahmadinejad, made invincible by his new weapons, might well close the Strait of Hormuz. It is the narrow waterway adjacent to Iran through which passes 40 percent of the world's oil. The sudden devastating consequences of that action for all aspects of modern life are inconceivable.
How should America react to this nightmare? One option is to do nothing and hope it goes away. Another is to launch a preemptive assault on Iran. Both could result in such comprehensive disaster that one gropes for something else. It would be well to seek guidance from the recorded wisdom of minds that have analyzed the problem of world conquest by terrorism and military might. Wisdom, which used to be highly esteemed in America, denoted a knowledge of what is right and what is good, coupled with sound judgment of what will achieve those goals. In this era, notions of good and right have largely been supplanted by individual judgments. The American culture has so denatured itself morally that a decision of what to do in an unfathomable crisis will probably fall to the shifting sands of partisan politics. Another potential disaster?
There is one extraordinary source of such wisdom. For more than four decades he has studied the circumstances and causes of internationally imposed tyranny and he has labored to share his knowledge with unreceptive Western nations. The accuracy of his predictions and analyses commend him to a worried Western world.
Twenty-eight years ago in a notable speech he said:
How short a time ago, relatively, the small world of modern Europe was easily seizing colonies all over the globe . . . usually with contempt for any possible values in the conquered peoples' approach to life. . . . We now see that the conquests proved to be short-lived and precarious and this in turn points to defects in the Western view of the world which led to these conquests. Relations with the former colonial world have now switched to the opposite extreme, and the Western world often exhibits an excess of obsequiousness, but it is difficult yet to estimate the size of the bill which the former colonial countries will present to the West, and it is difficult to predict whether the surrender not only of its last colonies, but of everything it owns will be sufficient to clear this account.
This remarkable discernment is an excerpt from the Commencement Address Alexander Solzhenitsyn delivered at Harvard University in 1978. The speech was widely reported in the news and in journals of opinion. Many of the reactions, ranging from that of First Lady Rosalyn Carter to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s, complained about what they judged to be Solzhenitsyn's inability to understand the United States. A current reading of his text suggests that what he did understand was human nature and human institutions, the solid foundations of wisdom.
During the 1960s Solzhenitsyn wrote a series of novels powerfully attacking the Communist totalitarian system, with the title The Gulag Archipelago published in the underground press. Solzhenitsyn became widely known to the outer world in 1972 through his Nobel Prize speech. It was entitled "A World Split Apart." In that text, he observed that down through the ages, societies have developed their own views and scales of values according to local circumstances and personal experience. Different values prevailed in different places and that variance among scattered societies didn't pose a global problem. However, the advent of instant worldwide communications swiftly destroyed the foundation of that placid coexistence.
A wave of events washes over us and, in a moment, half the world hears that splash. . . . In various parts of the world, men apply to events a scale of values achieved by their own long-suffering, and they uncompromisingly, self-reliantly judge only by their own scale of values and no one else's. . . . [M]ankind is not at fault; that is how he is made . . . Given six, four or only two scales of values, there cannot be one world, one single humanity; the difference in rhythms, in oscillations will tear mankind asunder. We will not survive together on one earth, just as a man with two hearts is not meant for this world.
When Solzhenitsyn voiced those two fateful facts about mankind, the intolerable incompatibility of conflicting value systems, and the fact that such incompatibility is an inherent feature of human nature--he was referring to the seemingly irresistible spread of Communism across the world. Those observations apply just as directly to today's powerful global aggression by Muslim fanaticism.
Two centuries before Solzhenitsyn, another of Western Civilization's wisest analysts was France's Charles de Montesquieu. In his magnum opus, The Spirit of Laws, he analyzed different forms of government. In the second chapter of Book IV, he wrote:
As honor has its laws and rules . . . it can be found only in countries in which the constitution is fixed, and where the nations are governed by settled laws. . . . Honor is a thing unknown in arbitrary governments, some of which have not even a proper word to express it.
When a Western nation with its fixed constitution signs a treaty or other formal agreement with a despotic government, the Western nation expects to honor the agreement and observe any compromises it entails. The despotism will only abide by the agreement as long as it serves its own best interests. America never understood this awkward, built-in pitfall in its relationships with Soviet Communism, and is equally naive in its efforts to arrive at peaceful negotiations with North Korea and Iran.
What Solzhenitsyn has told us is not that the conflict of value systems is a problem for which we must find a solution. It is, instead, that the world's value systems have been placed in a giant caldron where they are stewing and jostling against one another until the seething process boils down to a single regnant cultural ethic.
Terrorism and violence are the means Muslim fanaticism has chosen to try to achieve its dominance in the world. The campaign to kill Americans and their allies was formally declared a God-given duty for Muslims in a communique issued by the World Islamic Front on February 23, 1998. It was made known to the West in the British newspaper, The Guardian. Osama Bin Laden and high-ranking religious figures in Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh signed the document.
Here is an excerpt:
[I]n compliance with God's order, we issue the following Fatwah to all Muslims: The ruling to kill Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible . . .
Shortly after 9/11, Newsweek published a map identifying Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Syria, and Afghanistan as nations with state-sponsored terrorist activities. The article indicated a Bin Laden presence in all those countries and 27 others. The system for producing young fanatic militants is worldwide. A December 15, 2003, U.S. News and World Report article stated:
. . . the Saudi rulers decided to insure their pre-eminence in the Arab world by a financial investment of $70 billion. With these funds they created 1,500 mosques, 210 Islamic Centers, 202 colleges and 2,000 schools in non-Islamic counties. These institutions spread the radical Wahhabi form of Islam among the young people they serve.
The article continued:
Saudi Arabia's quasi-official charities became the primary source of funds for the fast-growing jihad movement. In some 20 countries the money was used to run paramilitary camps, purchase weapons, and recruit new members.
These are the fanatic suicide bombers surfacing in growing numbers around the globe.
Military action is the means by which America and some other nations are trying to blunt and suppress the violent Muslim jihad. If this effort fails, Muslim tyranny may well come to dominate the world.
However, America's fighting in the Middle East is increasingly challenged by a sharp division of opinion about the justification for carrying on the war.
Solzhenitsyn has much to say about such challenges. In a 1976 interview (Interviewed by Michael Charlton in London. Published in Chicago's Elite, September/October, 6) he said that his outlook on life had largely been formed in concentration camps:
[T]hose people who have lived in the most terrible conditions, on the frontier between life and death . . . they all understand that between good and evil there is an irreconcilable contradiction . . . one cannot build one's life without regard to this distinction.
He regarded the tyranny of Soviet Communism as extreme evil and a life of freedom as a good of the highest order:
[W]e can't comprehend how one can lose one's spiritual strength, one's will-power, and possessing freedom, not to value it, not to be willing to make sacrifices for it.
In his Nobel speech, he said:
The spirit of Munich has by no means retreated into the past. It was not a brief episode. I even venture to say that the spirit of Munich is dominant in the twentieth century. The intimidated civilized world has found nothing to oppose the onslaught of a suddenly resurgent fang-bearing barbarism except concessions and smiles. The spirit of Munich is a disease of prosperous people; it is the daily state of those who have given themselves over . . . to material well-being as the chief goal of life on earth.
On September 29, 1938, the governments of Great Britain, France, and Italy signed a pact with Hitler to cede to Germany the Sudetenland, the Western part of Czechoslovakia. They had no authority whatsoever to give part of one country to another, but what the Munich Pact signified was that the three other countries would not go to war with Nazi Germany if it seized only that one small piece of property. That act of international cowardice at Munich opened the door for Hitler to seize Austria the same year and begin his military conquest of other nations.
In his Harvard speech, Solzhenitsyn stated:
The Western World has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.
It was, he said, the recognition of the irreconcilable difference between good and evil that provided the boldness and tenacity to stand firm against the evil of a tyrannical government. In Russia as in America, the definitions of good and evil were elements of the Christian faith.
In Solzhenitsyn's response after receiving The Templeton Prize, he said:
It was Dostoyevski who drew from the French Revolution and its seething hatred of the Church the lesson that "revolution must necessarily begin with atheism." That is absolutely true. . . . Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principle driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions.
In the Western tradition, the believer who has an absolute and ultimate allegiance to God does not readily yield to the demands of a tyranny that conflicts with religious requirements. A nation of believers cannot be ruled by an authoritarian government. Religion has to be stamped out. It was the deeply religious Polish people who held freedom to be more important than life who stood up against Soviet Communism. That was the beginning of the unraveling of the Soviet empire.
There is truth in the old axiom that there are no atheists in a foxhole. When the Muslim terrorists attacked America on 9/11, what had been a nation with religion largely excluded from public life suddenly found God. There was a spontaneous response throughout the land of prayer and religious services in homes and hamlets, towns and cities by people of every religious affiliation, and earnest, forthright supplications to God by our President, mayors, governors, and other public officials. For a moment Americans reasserted themselves as a people of faith. However, after the shock and horror of 9/11 wore off, the event tended to settle into history as a monstrous blitzkrieg which the nation survived. And then life resumed its course with religion safely barred once again from public activities.
If this analysis of President Ahmadinejad has substance, a nuclear-armed Iran could produce a long-term global foxhole. Thinking parents will realize that the best protection they can provide to their children for living under the perpetual threat of fanatical terrorist regimes is to help them develop a solid religious mooring that will shield them from a life of uncertainty and fear. As a nation, the United States will have to decide whether it will continue to try to negotiate with regimes that have no fixed constitution and no intention of abiding by any agreements that don't serve their interests, or courageously standing firm against tyranny, ready to make whatever sacrifices are required by that stand.
At the conclusion of his 1983 Templeton Prize Address, Solzhenitsyn said:
Let us ask ourselves: Are not the ideals of our century false? And is not our glib and fashionable terminology just as unsound, a terminology that offers superficial remedies for every difficulty? Each of them, in whatever sphere, must be subjected to a clear-eyed scrutiny while there is still time. The solution of the crisis will not be found along the well-trodden paths of conventional thinking. . . . To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries which have reduced us to insignificance, and have brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God . . .
Our five continents are caught in a whirlwind. But it is during trials such as these that the highest gifts of the human spirit are manifested. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone.
As before, we should listen to the wise. *
"Civilizations die from suicide, not murder" -Arnold Toynbee
I can remember when there was much talk of the Republic of the United States as a censure of those who talked of Democracy. We were not founded as a democracy; the Founding Fathers believed that history gave no record of a successful democracy. Perhaps the little cantons of Switzerland are an exception, but they are so small their example is not relevant. Aristotle talked of democracies but did not think well of them. He defined democracy as rule by the majority, which may mean rule by a mob or a consensus for dictatorship. "A country must respect the wealthy and the poor, as the neglect of either will bring a country to ruin," said Aristotle more than two thousand years ago. It is sad we neglect wise men.
Our Founding Fathers despised sectarian bitterness that began in the first Congress of the country. Washington thought it a disgrace, as did John Adams. Both men suffered extraordinary abuse, which ended only with their death, when they were lionized. Washington and Adams thought men could be rational and avoid an unbalanced government by a sound constitution and a restricted government: two houses, one representing the people as a whole, and a smaller group which could censure excesses by the house of the people; an independent judiciary to ensure that politicians did not become contemptuous of law; and a strong executive which would be responsible for the conduct of the country. The president could only do what Congress approved but he had the power to veto what he thought unwise.
The Constitution of the United States made this country a republic, not a democracy. The present universal talk of the need to make the world safe for democracy is a repudiation of our traditions and a false hope. Character weaknesses destroy democracy. The various tribes of Islam have been formed by different theories of the proper descendants of Mohammed!
Being the world's superpower and being entangled the world over with people who fight each other, along with us, our advice should not be about becoming democracies, but the necessity of good behavior. We should encourage men to do something useful, like making shoes, or building homes. That is how Europe emerged from feudalism and founded the modern world. Men did what was helpful to their neighbors. Civilized countries still do this, and this is capitalism.
The new Democratic majority in Congress is anxious to deliver on its promise to change what has been wrong the last six years, and I hope they do. What they plan, however, is not clear. According to the "Tuesday Group," a group of "centrist" Republicans that has been outlining possible action, the goal is to have an economy that "works for the people." That was the goal of the Communists and is the pledge of all dictators. Capitalism is the friend of the people and we should admit the obvious. Specifically, the Tuesday Group advocates raising the minimum wage, lowering the price of drugs, and supporting a drug plan direct from Medicare. This is the voice of the people they say.
Addison Wiggin and Bill Bonner make the following observations in their book, Empire of Debt:
The United States will owe foreigners $8 trillion by the end of 2008.
The trade deficit with China in 2005 was $162 billion. Because of subsistence-wages in China, we have lost three million manufacturing jobs. In 2005 we spent $185 billion on Chinese manufactures. At the same time American businessmen have invested almost $4 billion in Chinese manufactories, looking for a profit from cheap labor and helping to bury America.
Our lack of common sense on the national level is equaled by personal folly. The average American household has $8,000 in credit card debt. For every $19 Americans earn, they spend $20.
The National Debt has $36 trillion dollars in outstanding loans. At 5 percent interest, debt service payments are $1.8 trillion. If our creditors demand payment we are done because we don't have the money to pay our obligations.
In 1945 the American dollar replaced sterling, a safe haven in times of economic or geopolitical unrest, as the most favored currency of central banks. The dollar replaced gold because of the latter's severity. Now, however, the dollar is in trouble because of the failure of the United States to live within a budget. Individuals and central banks don't want to hold dollars and are turning to the euro or the Brazilian real and the Chinese yuan . Jim Rogers suggests people invest in agricultural commodities: coffee and soybeans. "The price of agricultural commodities is more than 95 percent below their all-time highs when adjusted for inflation." These radical suggestions are of poor value. We must solve the problem and preserve the vitality of America. The euro is collapsing because it does not represent accurately the problem of the differing nations in the European Union, as Milton Friedman warned. The Chinese yuan is in trouble. The Chinese currency is undervalued purposely so it can overturn the economies of other nations.
When former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin say there is a crisis, we are stupid not to pay attention. "It's incredible people have gone on so long holding dollars," Volker said. "At some point, you will get a situation where people have had enough." Rubin pointed out the government is just five years away from rapid acceleration of spending on the nation's entitlement programs as millions of baby boomers start to retire. The government must address the problem now.
We have to decrease government spending. Allowing politicians to spend money is asking drunks to sponsor cocktail parties. An increase of taxation to pay the mortgage will increase unemployment and decrease investment activity. There is only a handful of politicians with economic prudence and citizens should realize the fact and insist on change.
Our national debt results not only from the excitement of politicians spending someone else's money but from the global economy. Everyone dumps on the U.S. and the popular theory is that this is a benefit. We get cheaper goods. So we do, but we also lose jobs. To live by a service economy is nonsense. A service economy is good only when you have something to serve. An economy is dependent on things. You don't make money playing bridge but by growing potatoes. We invented the service industry with computers, but computer knowledge is easy to export and India is now the leader in the field, and at cheaper rates than Hollywood.
According to Alan Tonelson, a research fellow at the U.S. Business & Industrial Council Educational Foundation, the largest losses in the United States have been in aircraft, and aircraft parts, including engines; telecommunications equipment; pharmaceuticals; navigation and guidance instruments; machine tools; ball bearings; turbines for power plants; farm and construction equipment. I suspect that the loss of jobs in the United States and other countries is much larger than the items listed by Professor Tonelson.
China has a population of around 1.3 billion. The rural population of 23.85 million does not have adequate food or clothing. The total of the population who are poor is at least 200 million. The country is doing what it can but it must do more than rely on welfare. It should turn from promoting exports to manufacturing for the needs of its citizens. That is what made Europe and the United States wealthy and is the only way for any country.
The world is engaged in trade wars, and the United States is the guinea pig. Americans show their true colors at football games. They come in droves and are excited, full of energy and goodwill, without rancor. Looking at the world, and hearing of the horrors of other countries, they give their shirts to help and are pleased to do so. Much of the time they are used. We give away billions, and politicians in recipient countries are blessed while their own citizens are as poor as before.
What shall we do? First and foremost we have to cut spending and live within a budget we can afford. I do not want to criticize President Bush, and believe history may see much in his presidency that is noble, but there is no doubt he has continued the wild spending of the last forty years. Spending under George Bush has grown faster than any administration since Nixon and Ford.
Second, like it or not, we have to be a part of the universal trade war. We repudiate taxation as a method to reduce our debt. We cannot afford taxation, as it means poverty for all, and great hardship for the working class. We must impose tariffs on imports. Economists have calculated "a 25 percent tariff on all non-oil imports would cut the trade deficit in half and generate enough new tax revenue to balance the federal budget." Any tariff program would have to be selective according to our need to preserve manufacturing, but a remedy has to be made to solve the present unbalance.
Following this advice would not only correct our financial mistakes and restore our reputation as the financial bastion of the world but illustrate decent republican government rather than democracy, the rule of the mob. *
"Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones." -Phillips Brooks
The quotes following each article have been gathered by The Federalist Patriot at: http://FederalistPatriot.US/services.asp.
The following is a summary of the December 2006, issue of the St. Croix Review:
In "Immigration-Editorial" Angus MacDonald reminds us that patriotism is an outgrowth of history, a common language, and religious and intellectual heritage that enables us to know each other. We have an immigration problem because Mexico has a corrupt goverment that profits from sending its poor north. Our culture is at risk and we need to take steps to defend it.
In "A Letter to the Editor" W. Edward Chynoweth responds to Winkfield F. Twyman's "The Introspection of a Nation," appearing in our August issue, and Winkfield Twyman responds.
Allan Brownfeld, in "Self-Proclaimed Black Leaders Are Refusing to Confront the Community's 'Culture of Failure,' Charges Author Juan Williams," writes that current black leaders are throwing away 100 years of struggle, are leaving blacks without needed guidance, and are enriching themselves.
Herbert London, in "The Futility of the Third Way in the War Against Islamic Terror," writes that because the Islamists want unconditional submission from the West, there is nothing to negotiate; in "Why the U.S. Is Silent" he responds to Noah Feldman's article that urges negotiations with terrorists by quoting the terrorists' statements; in "Intimidation and Preemptive Surrender in the West" he looks at the media focus on Guantanamo and the NSA's terrorist surveillance program, and the Berlin opera house's decision not to stage an opera for fear of Muslim reaction, and questions whether the West has the needed will to defeat our enemy; in "Former President Carter and His Middle East Views" he criticizes Carter's comments to a German magazine; in "Flags of Our Fathers" he discovers the cynical, Hollywood slant in Clint Eastwood's latest film; in "More Financial Legerdemain at the UN" he reveals the huge amount of money the UN leadership wants to renovate their building, and how much more cheaply Donald Trump is willing to do the work.
Colonel Melvin Kriesel writes in "Moving the Masses: The Rise of Militant Islam" that politically correct inhibitions keep us from understanding and facing the threat. The modern jihad is a renewed effort to achieve Islam's historic mission of submitting the world to the will of Allah-a threat that began with Islamic conquests in the 7th century.
Bernard Lewis, in "Freedom and Justice in Islam," gives us a history lesson on how modern Islam has developed. He believes that free government in the Islamic world is possible, though their forms of government may not look like ours.
In "Historical Dates of Note" John D'Aloia Jr. compares turning points in the past (going back 13 centuries) to our present confrontation with militant Islam.
Joseph S. Fulda, in "My Experiences with Muslims in the United States," provides hope for redeeming qualities in human nature.
Jigs Gardner writes about Jonathan Swift's masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels, and his protagonist, Lemuel Gulliver, in "Writers for Conservatives: 6." As Gulliver travels to different fantastic lands, he meets beings he supposes to be inferior and superior to himself; his reactions to changing circumstances reveal much about his character.
In "A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste!" Thomas Martin describes educators concerned that children are "at risk" before they enter kindergarten. He believes that educators would do better to heed Aristotle, and tend to the goods of the soul: intellectual and moral virtues.
In "Feminist Admissions" James R. Harrigan and Gianna Englert debunk the assertion that women are disadvantaged in higher education; they write that feminists are not merely aiming at equality, but are indeed striving for dominance on campus and off.
William Barr goes back to the 1948 presidential election to document emerging Republican success and Democrat frustration in "Majority Favorite Presidents."
Harry Neuwirth comes up with a plan in "Immigration Fix" for our problem with the southern border. The fault is widely shared; the solution is simple, but will not be entirely satisfactory.
Martin Harris looks at how educators and a majority of voters in Vermont are getting away with (so far) an unfair system of property tax that penalizes a minority of taxpayers, in "No Taxation Without Realization."
Thomas Martin teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. You may contact Thomas Martin at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
I recently attended a forum on early childhood learning at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, where Daniel Pedersen, president of the Buffett Early Childhood Fund, spoke of the thousands of preschool children in Nebraska who are "at risk" because they are not prepared to enter kindergarten.
Pedersen noted that 80 to 90 percent of brain development takes place in the first five years of life and then levels off while the government's investment in education for children starts to increase at age 5. If you superimpose those two arcing lines, what you have is a hole that makes no sense.
A short time ago, there was a bill in the Nebraska Legislature that proposed creation of a fund, made up of $20 million in private money and $40 million in state money, that would establish $3 million in programs each year to target Nebraska's most "at-risk" children from birth to age 3. Furthermore, we are told:
. . . research indicates . . . in some estimates, the return on the investment ranges between $4 and $16 for every dollar spent on quality early childhood programs.
Jack P. Shonkoff, pediatrician and chairman of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, noted in an address before Nebraska legislators at the Governor's Mansion that:
. . . nurturing responsive and individualized relationships in the early years builds healthy brain architecture that provides a strong foundation for all future growth and development.
The developing brain is most malleable in the first few years of life, when its structure--its architecture--is undergoing essential change. Public policies should capitalize on the important opportunity presented in the preschool and early school years.
In effect, more and more childrens' brains are "at risk" because their parents are not providing for their nutritional, emotional and intellectual needs. Therefore, these children ought to be placed in "early childhood centers" at birth, better ensuring that they become productive adults.
It is important to remember that what Shonkoff says about the "developing child" applies to all animals: When poorly nourished, their brains are impaired.
However, what is left out of Pedersen's and Dr. Shonkoff's equation is that man's soul, which is the seat of reason placed in him by God, has separated him from animals.
The problems of the "at-risk" children of Nebraska are not those that require a scientist to figure out. The problem facing the "at-risk" children is the moral problem of not having responsible parents. This problem is not going to be solved by turning infants over to yet another government program staffed by experts in "early childhood centers."
Aristotle long ago noted the categorical difference between goods of the body and goods of the soul. The nurturing of the brain is one of the goods of the body, the nature that man shares with the animals. But the goods of the soul are the intellectual and moral virtues--the former of which come from instruction and the latter from habit.
Aristotle, as well as St. Thomas Aquinas, saw that the intellect, which is synonymous with the mind, was the "divine element" within man's soul. The mind moves from and toward principles and is the seat of both moral judgment and the will, by which man acts and can do what is right-minded for the greater good.
While scientists can find what is good for the body, it is beyond the realm of methodology of the natural and social sciences to find what is good for the development of the soul.
The more time that educators, scientists, and businessmen spend on what stimulates the brain for a "better return on their investment," the less time is spent on developing the minds of students.
Though the public schools of Nebraska are spending more than $7,500 annually on each student's education, far too many students graduate illiterate and ignorant of Western history. Many graduates know barely the smallest amount of literature, not to mention mathematics, essential for the formation of a mind that moves from and toward principles.
All the children in Nebraska will be at further risk when the social engineers start tampering with the brain when it is "most malleable" for the educational ends established by state legislatures eager for joint ventures with businessmen who are concerned with their investments.
In all of this, I am reminded of G.K. Chesterton, who noted,
There is in this materialism a mad indifference to real thought. By disbelieving in the soul, it comes to disbelieving in the mind.
As the saying goes, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste!" *
"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong." -Voltaire
Martin Harris lives in Brandon, VT. He is an architect, and a property rights and education advocate.
A long time ago, in a far-away galaxy--oops, that wasn't a different galaxy, it was Massachusetts before it became known as Taxachusetts-some of the locals objected to a new tax imposed by their royal government. It wasn't much as such things go--a few pennies on the pound, or well under one percent of Fair Market Value-but the locals responded ungraciously by dumping the tea in the harbor. In this violation of the future Clean Waters Act they were incited to feats of carton-tossing by one Sam Adams, who went on to an illustrious career recognized, long after his death, by the marketing of an adult beverage bearing his name. Sam was something of a sloganeer as well, suggesting to the uppity tax-protestors (their conduct was lamented by their betters in government, who worried that perhaps they had failed to educate the ungrateful rabble into understanding all the wonderful things they, the natural leadership, were trying to do for their children) that they explain their underlying principle as "No Taxation Without Representation."
That turned out to be a catchy phrase, even if one of the words has five syllables, something carefully avoided in modern political/philosophical debate, where monosyllabics like "Bush Lied." "Stop the Hate," and "Tax You, Fund Me" push the outer limits of proficiency-in-comprehension.
That NTWR, it turned out, has its own Achilles Heel (a little Greek-mythology lingo, there) as described by Plato, who taught that democracies would last only until the majority figured out how to vote themselves benefits at the expense of the minority. Part of the lesson (the ain't-it-fun-to-sell-tax-breaks-for-votes part) was gleefully embraced two millennia later under Vermont's legislative Golden Dome, where politicians created Act 60 and then son-of-60, Act 68, wherein a new "principle" was established: you can vote for tax increases and, even at a median family income twice the state average, not have to pay for them. The "income-sensitivity" provisions of 60 and 68 (no more than 2.5 percent of income may go for property taxes) insures that a majority of property-tax-payers/voters would be immunized from their own education-spending-increase decisions by shucking off "extra" costs onto such attractive political-minority targets as non-voting business and non-resident property owners, and, of course, deservedly-attackable resident rich people, whose votes are too few to matter anyway.
The tea-tossers went on to perpetrate actual physical violence against their taxing betters, and even though we're told that wars never solve anything, it all ended up with Taxation With Representation, which actually worked (in terms of levies against property like tea or real estate) fairly well as long as 1.) the taxers showed restraint in taxing because 2.) the spenders showed restraint in spending and 3.) the majority voters didn't stoop to shoving off their own spending wishes on a minority of others to pay for and, of course 4.) that property values correlated predictably with income and ability-to-pay. Now, all of those once-accepted rules-of-the-game have been discarded.
There was, once, a fifth rule: that property-appraisals were revenue (tax)-neutral in that, with spending held level, a higher appraisal would merely convert, arithmetically, to a lower tax rate. That, too, is history in Vermont but not the other 49 states. Here, thanks to 60 and 68, a higher appraisal converts to a higher tax unless a few pennies are shaved off the official rate by a magnanimous legislature when they get around to it. Because the voting majority benefits, no remedy short of tea-tossing and its follow-up seems likely.
Which leaves a fairly inadequate substitute argument: No Taxation Without Realization. This modern-day NTWR would require that unrealized paper gains in property value (and these have been substantial as real estate has boomed in recent years) not be taxable. California has been on this form of NTWR since the mid-70s, and it works. The Golden State has (like Vermont but not as severe) a middle-class flight problem, but the underlying cause is different. People flee California not because of property taxes but because of earthquake fears and other considerations not mentionable in a family newspaper. People (particularly in the 25-44 and the 65-plus age cohorts) are fleeing Vermont, Census data show, and one of the major reasons for such out-migration is a steadily increasing property tax burden. The younger folks are leaving because they find housing unaffordable against prevailing wage rates here; the better-off older folks are leaving as more of the tax burden is shifted to them.
Terms like in- and out-migration, as used by demographers, refer to the numbers of people who move into or out of a given state or country; they don't refer to motives. A phrase like "voting with their feet" does, suggesting that in-migrants (think of the hippie influx to Vermont in the 1960s) respond to something they find attractive enough to move into, and out-migrants do just the opposite. It's interesting that politically "blue" states (using the color coding for liberal = blue and conservative = red invented by USA Today editors for reporting on the November 2000 elections) almost invariably show higher rates of out-migration--citizen flight, if you will--than red states, and it's commonly speculated, in Vermont, for example, that the present out-migration of some population sectors is caused by such issues as "affordability," which is now, suddenly, deemed a "crisis" by the same political class which has systematically caused it with their legislative actions ever since the hippies began their in-migration forty years ago. In 1960, before present trends began, the record shows Vermont was spending $344 per pupil in its public schools, compared to a national average of $350; now Vermont spends at least $11,500--some reports say $12,500--against a national average in the upper $8000 range. That spending level is all tax money, primarily the property tax, and, at one of the highest per-capita level in the nation--some reports say the highest--education spending is now commonly recognized as a critical part of the "affordability" problem.
With Vermont showing the smallest average class size in the nation, and at or near the top in pupil-teacher ratio and pupil-staff ratio, and staffing the single largest expense by far in school budgets, it's not an exercise in advanced math to show that staffing decisions over the past forty years have driven tax burdens to levels now being called a "crisis." Sure enough, politicians respond with rhetoric. "We need to attack the property tax issue head on," says Vermont House Speaker Gaye Symington.
Does she propose to address staffing levels? No. Edu-crats are part of her voter base. She proposes to address school district configuration (the previous label, reorganization, is apparently now unfashionable), the turnover of superintendents, the cost impact of unfunded federal mandates. Included in that last item is the notion that a federal requirement for higher student proficiency levels is an unfunded mandate, and that Washington shouldn't expect or demand teacher productivity levels for which it won't pay extra. Schools shouldn't be expected to produce student proficiency, edu-crats say.
Her chosen tactic, tax-level concern-pretense, reflects a majority voter preference, reflected by continuing voter approval of escalating school budgets; the minority can accept it or leave. So much for the spending side of the "crisis." On the taxing side there's equally little hope, because her political colleagues have put in place a system whereby increases in property appraisals automatically translate into increased tax collections rather than rate reductions. But there is one straw to grasp at: the idea that taxing property at its speculative worth (including unrealized paper gains) shouldn't be done by an honest government. After all, shares of stock, another form of property, aren't even taxed (except in Florida) until they're sold. That's the basic principle of No Taxation Without Realization: starting in 1978 with a voter/taxpayer initiative called Proposition 13, California has been doing just that with property taxes, accepting the last purchase price (rather than an appraiser's estimate) to serve as the basis for the taxable value until the next sale, which establishes a new taxable value. It's too bad that there's practically no chance of a Proposition 13 adoption in Vermont, because, unlike such fig leaves as administrator-turnover studies, it might actually reduce collections and thereby constrain spending. Those seemingly noble goals are, however, precisely what the voting majority, many of whom derive paychecks from government spending, in education and out of it, doesn't want. It's going to be interesting to see how far this self-serving style of politics can go before some other, as yet unanticipated, economic or political consequence, arises to correct it. Recent straws-in-the-wind suggest that a correction process may already have started: they are responses to the unpleasant truth of tax increases leading, ultimately, to property confiscation by government.
Some students of the Constitution claim that the Founders' intent was that property ownership in the new United States be allodial rather than feudal, meaning, among other things, that it wasn't subject to a quitrent payment to the local baron and couldn't be confiscated for non-payment of such debts as taxes. It hasn't worked out that way, with the result that, as the property tax has become the main source of funding for public education, and as those charges have increased dramatically in recent years (even though student test scores haven't) more and more property owners now find the situation unaffordable. Indeed, Vermont politicians now speak glibly of an "affordability crisis" as something they've suddenly discovered rather than a tax-and-spend pattern they've been systematically enlarging here for the last forty years.
Since the barons of government here have the feudal privilege of confiscating property for non-payment of taxes by the land-owning peasantry, it's not a theoretical problem, and taxpayers' restlessness has caused the political class to attempt to respond in different ways. One is a pretense of concern, illustrated by the House Speaker's proposal to "address property taxes head-on" by calling for a study of superintendent turnover. Another is to smile with amusement and a not-so-veiled threat of legal and, ultimately, physical force, should towns like Killington pursue their declared path to secession from Vermont. A third has been Acts 60 and 68, a tweaking of the property tax so that a majority of payers can shuck off the full impact of their spending-approval votes on a hapless minority. For obvious political reasons, there's been a total refusal to concede the extraordinary cost of a public school system which employs teaching and non-teaching staff at the highest per-pupil levels in the nation; after all, they're the job-holder beneficiaries and they vote. There's also been a systematic refusal to recognize a sort of supply-side solution: the capping of property tax levels as a means to constrain spending growth. The template has been visible, and successful, for 28 years in California, where the property tax system provides that taxes don't go up just because theoretical appraised values go up; a homeowner's Fair Market Value would be the basis for his property tax (with, at most a 2 percent annual inflation adjustment) as long as he owns it. When he sells, a new FMV is established by the new sale price. It's been challenged, legally, again and again by politicians and edu-crats, but has won every court case. Most recently, a part of the old Prop. 13, requiring all new property levies to pass with 2/3 voter approval, was again challenged by the tax-and-spend groups. Taxpayers responded with a new initiative: Prop. 218, The Right to Vote on Taxes Act. It too has been upheld by courts there. California's decisions reflect two principles, the lesser of which is the 2/3 voter-majority requirement for any levies against property. The more important is the No Taxation Without Realization principle, which states that paper gains--unrealized value estimates that may reflect nothing more than a temporary housing price bubble--shouldn't be taxable until they've actually been realized via a property sale. NTWR has a side benefit as well: it rewards homeowners who don't sell and flee to lower-tax states. You'd think politicians and educators would be in favor of encouraging long-term residency, but you'd be wrong: Here in Vermont, for example, I've frequently heard them suggest to tax-complainers that they sell and leave, so that a new owner would pay all they want, for the sake of the children, of course.
A closing thought: in California, when real estate values drop, taxes don't. Only a new FMV from a new sale establishes a new tax bill. In Vermont, when values drop (as is now quite likely) will the "system" be as quick to re-appraise downward as it has been to re-appraise upward? Here a cut in FMV would, if recognized under present rules, produce a cut in school income. Historical fact: in 1992, housing values did turn downward, but the system chose not to notice. "Our schools can't afford a cut," they said. So much for the pretense of true FMV property taxation here. And so much for the pretense of concern over the accelerating out-migration of such cohorts as the age 25-44 families-with-children group, a phenomenon which explains fairly substantial year-to-year shrinkage in school-enrollment numbers. Here, the new reality is a pay-to-stay policy, and if, you can't easily afford it, we don't want you around. *
"If men of wisdom and knowledge, of moderation and temperance, of patience, fortitude and perseverance, of sobriety and true republican simplicity of manners, of zeal for the honor of the Supreme Being . . . are chosen to fill the seats of government, we may expect that our affairs will rest on a solid and permanent foundation." --Samuel Adams
Harry Neuwirth writes from Silverton, OR.
From the natural tendency of people to ally themselves with the land of their birth, there should be no emigration-immigration imbalance. Yet with an impoverished nation bordering on a highly prosperous one, migration in a single direction becomes reasonable as people defy their birthright to seek employment on the prosperous side of the border.
It is also perfectly natural for businessmen everywhere to seek price advantage and lower costs. The work force being a major cost factor in most enterprises, finding capable employees willing to work at lower than domestic wages has powerful attraction.
This, as we all know, is the crux of our "immigration problem," as the U.S. Congress has surely known for decades. It should also have known what must be done to correct the condition. But congressmen obviously lack the courage to do what's needed on their own initiative, nor have they had sufficient public pressure to induce them to provide a solution.
So the difficulty is not with learning how to put things right, but with having the conviction to do it. Obviously that conviction must arise in the electorate and be conveyed to the capitol before the Congress will do anything substantive; it's up to us down here in the precincts.
Here is a formula for putting things right over a period of a few months. If it sounds sensible to you, pass it on to your congressional delegation.
1. Tighten the southern border: Not pretend to seal it, but significantly reduce the rush of illegals.
2. Announce to America that all illegal immigrants must register (with efficient private enterprise firms) within 90 days of that announcement to receive a tamper-proof registration card with name, address, fingerprints, photo, years in country. Registration privilege ends 90 days after initial announcement!
3. Announce to such registrants that they must maintain a current address with the INS, then fall in at the end of the line of foreigners who've already petitioned for citizenship in the U.S., thereby becoming the nucleus of citizenship applicants for the next 24 years. (We can't seek out 12 million unwilling fugitives, so we must provide an incentive for them to come forward voluntarily: citizenship!)
To those who resent offering citizenship to persons who've violated U.S. law, we might consider extending that same feeling to the members of the executive branch who've ignored those laws. Decades of immigration-policy violation by Americans and their congressional and executive branch functionaries makes us complicit in those violations, thus subject to making amends in equal measure with the immigrants we decry.
4. Announce at the same time as the initial announcement in item 2 above that illegals who fail to register within 90 days will, ipso facto, become felons.
5. Announce that felons described in item 4 above will be vigorously pursued, prosecuted, punished, and repatriated as ex-felons. Then do it!
6. Announce to the American employers that commencing 6 months after implementation of item 2, above, American firms discovered employing unregistered illegals will themselves become felons and prosecuted as such. Unregistered employees and illegal immigrants will be naked before the law, American employers vulnerable to the law.
7. Jobs in America will dry up for illegal immigrants, pressure at the border will subside without need of a wall.
8. A guest-worker program that meets the needs of the nation can then be established.
The root of our problem is not at the border with Mexico, it's in Washington, D.C. and out in the precincts. For forty years or more the Congress and the executive have been guilty of ignoring and violating American immigration policy, diluting our sovereignty.
Sovereignty has a price: In America it's met under the rule of law. *
"The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts." --Bergan Evans
William A. Barr had a business career in engineering and has published many articles and books.
Since WW II four Republican presidents have been reelected while only one Democrat, Bill Clinton, has repeated. The Republicans have enjoyed a majority of the total vote for president seven times while the Democrats have done so only twice-Lyndon Johnson (60 percent) in 1964 and Jimmy Carter (50.07 percent) in 1976.
The following election results show a gradual erosion of liberal popularity since 1948.
Candidates Votes Party Vote% Truman/Barkley, 1948 24,105,695 Dem. 49.51% Dewey/Warren 21,969,170 Rep. 45.12%
Other candidates in 1948 2,610,023 5.36% Eisenhower/Nixon, 1952 33,778,963 Rep. 54.88% Stevenson/Sparkman 27,314,992 Dem. 44.38%
Other candidates in 1952 457,663 0.74% Eisenhower/Nixon, 1956 35,581,003 Rep. 57.52% Stevenson/Kefauver 25,738,765 Dem. 41.61%
Other candidates in 1956 538,837 0.87% Kennedy/Johnson, 1960 34,227,096 Dem. 49.72%
Nixon/Lodge 34,107,646 Rep. 49.50% Other candidates in 1960 501,643 0.73% Johnson/Humphrey, 1964 42,825,463 Dem. 60.77%
Goldwater/Miller 27,175,770 Rep. 38.56% Other candidates in 1964 468,547 0.66% Nixon/Agnew, 1968 31,710,470 Rep. 43.44%
Humphrey/Muskie 30,898,055 Dem. 42.33% Wallace/LeMay 9,446,167 12.94% Other candidates in 1968 935,512 1.28%
Nixon/Agnew, 1972 46,740,323 Rep. 60.31% McGovern/Shriver 28,901,598 Dem. 37.29% Other candidates in 1972 1,861,716 2.40%
Carter/Mondale, 1976 40,828,929 Dem. 50.07% Ford/Dole 39,148,940 Rep. 48.01% Other candidates in 1976 1,573,676 1.93%
Reagan/Bush, 1980 43,899,248 Rep. 51.59% Carter/Mondale 35,481,435 Dem. 41.69% Other candidates in 1980 5,719,437 6.72%
Reagan/Bush, 1984 54,451,521 Rep. 58.78% Mondale/Ferraro 37,457,215 Dem. 40.55% Other candidates in 1984 624,187 0.67%
Bush/Quale, 1988 48,881,221 Rep. 53.90% Dukakis/Bentsen 41,805,422 Dem. 46.10% Clinton/Gore, 1992 44,908,254 Dem. 43.28%
Bush/Quale 39,102,343 Rep. 38.30% Other candidates in 1992 19,741,065 19.03% Clinton/Gore, 1996 47,401,185 Dem. 49.18%
Dole/Kemp 39,197,469 Rep. 40.67% Other candidates in 1996 9,789,438 10.16% Bush/Cheney, 2000 50,459,211 Rep. 47.89%
Gore/Lieberman 51,003,894 Dem. 48.41% Other candidates in 2000 3,898,260 3.84%
Bush/Cheney, 2004 60,693,281 Rep. 50.99% Kerry/Edwards 57,355,978 Dem. 48.19% Other candidates in 2004 971,543 0.82%
This loss of favor is enough to make liberal Democrats see red!
James R. Harrigan is an Assistant Professor in the McKenna School at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Gianna Englert is a writer based in Latrobe, Pennsylvania.
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1876, Susan B. Anthony made an impassioned plea for gender equity. "We ask justice," she said, "we ask equality, we ask that all civil and political rights that belong to the citizens of the United States be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever." This reasonable vision of equality in the 1870s, though, gave way to a radicalized feminism in the 1970s. The quest for equal rights became, from that point forward, the quest for special rights.
Of course, no feminist would ever admit as much. There is no point in letting the truth get in the way of a good argument, after all. Nowhere is this more apparent than in American higher education, where the feminists still claim that opportunities are closed to women as a matter of course, even as those same feminists remade the American university in their own, supposedly softer, image. "Women's Studies" was necessary as a discipline, they said, to combat "the phallo-centric worldview" of the "male dominated university." What was really at stake, though, was not gender equity. Women's Studies was then and is now, nothing more than an unvarnished power grab.
Contrary to what the feminists would have you believe, women are not a downtrodden minority on American campuses. And there is evidence aplenty to support this claim. Equality was never the goal of the feminists; dominance was.
There are, to be sure, significant gender disparities in college admissions, but they are not the kind that do a feminist a whole lot of good. They are, however, so striking that no feminist could have missed the obvious truth. Policy analyst Thomas Mortensen of the Postsecondary Education Newsletter reports that currently 57 percent of all college students are women. This is hardly a result of natural divisions in society. There are 15 million college-aged men in the United States, but only 14.2 million of women of similar age. Further, men outperform women on the SAT, long an indicator of potential first-year college success. Men score, on average, 35 points better than women on the Math section of the test and 3 points better on the Verbal section. This is hardly the gender equity that the feminists once espoused; this is distaff dominance.
And the dominance does not end with the admissions process. The entire university system in America is, as Mortensen asserts, "well on its way to being feminized." Not only has the undergraduate admissions process been hopelessly skewed in favor of women, graduate programs, too, have gone irretrievably pink. According to a recent New York Times article "women earned about 60 percent of the master's degrees conferred in 2003-4."
Only a willful disregard of the obvious facts could lead anyone at this point in time to conclude that there is a male bias in higher education. It has been a good number of years since women have been at a competitive disadvantage to their male counterparts in American colleges and universities, and it is high time the feminists admitted as much. If feminists were really concerned with justice and equality as Susan B. Anthony said 130 years ago, they would now be campaigning for increased male participation in higher education, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Feminist cries for gender equity, however, are now nowhere to be heard.
This silence of the part of the feminists speaks volumes. Having surpassed the goal of gender equity, and having achieved the further goal of gender dominance, one wonders what is next. The answer should be clear to even the most casual of political observers. Radical feminists, the great granddaughters of Susan B. Anthony, have long hoped for nothing other than a working feminist majority, one that could (and would) share in the spoils of political victory the way that all majorities do. Gender equity was just a tool in a larger fight, a fight which they hoped would remake American society from the universities outward.
The time is at hand to revisit the idea of gender equity on our campuses, and if the feminists want to be taken seriously, they should have something to say about it regardless of whom it benefits. *
Endquoute: "It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed." --Albert Einstein
Thomas Martin teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. You may contact Thomas Martin at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
I recently attended a forum on early childhood learning at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, where Daniel Pedersen, president of the Buffett Early Childhood Fund, spoke of the thousands of preschool children in Nebraska who are "at risk" because they are not prepared to enter kindergarten.
Pedersen noted that 80 to 90 percent of brain development takes place in the first five years of life and then levels off while the government's investment in education for children starts to increase at age 5. If you superimpose those two arcing lines, what you have is a hole that makes no sense.
A short time ago, there was a bill in the Nebraska Legislature that proposed creation of a fund, made up of $20 million in private money and $40 million in state money, that would establish $3 million in programs each year to target Nebraska's most "at-risk" children from birth to age 3. Furthermore, we are told:
. . . research indicates . . . in some estimates, the return on the investment ranges between $4 and $16 for every dollar spent on quality early childhood programs.
Jack P. Shonkoff, pediatrician and chairman of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, noted in an address before Nebraska legislators at the Governor's Mansion that:
. . . nurturing responsive and individualized relationships in the early years builds healthy brain architecture that provides a strong foundation for all future growth and development.
The developing brain is most malleable in the first few years of life, when its structure--its architecture--is undergoing essential change. Public policies should capitalize on the important opportunity presented in the preschool and early school years.
In effect, more and more childrens' brains are "at risk" because their parents are not providing for their nutritional, emotional and intellectual needs. Therefore, these children ought to be placed in "early childhood centers" at birth, better ensuring that they become productive adults.
It is important to remember that what Shonkoff says about the "developing child" applies to all animals: When poorly nourished, their brains are impaired.
However, what is left out of Pedersen's and Dr. Shonkoff's equation is that man's soul, which is the seat of reason placed in him by God, has separated him from animals.
The problems of the "at-risk" children of Nebraska are not those that require a scientist to figure out. The problem facing the "at-risk" children is the moral problem of not having responsible parents. This problem is not going to be solved by turning infants over to yet another government program staffed by experts in "early childhood centers."
Aristotle long ago noted the categorical difference between goods of the body and goods of the soul. The nurturing of the brain is one of the goods of the body, the nature that man shares with the animals. But the goods of the soul are the intellectual and moral virtues--the former of which come from instruction and the latter from habit.
Aristotle, as well as St. Thomas Aquinas, saw that the intellect, which is synonymous with the mind, was the "divine element" within man's soul. The mind moves from and toward principles and is the seat of both moral judgment and the will, by which man acts and can do what is right-minded for the greater good.
While scientists can find what is good for the body, it is beyond the realm of methodology of the natural and social sciences to find what is good for the development of the soul.
The more time that educators, scientists, and businessmen spend on what stimulates the brain for a "better return on their investment," the less time is spent on developing the minds of students.
Though the public schools of Nebraska are spending more than $7,500 annually on each student's education, far too many students graduate illiterate and ignorant of Western history. Many graduates know barely the smallest amount of literature, not to mention mathematics, essential for the formation of a mind that moves from and toward principles.
All the children in Nebraska will be at further risk when the social engineers start tampering with the brain when it is "most malleable" for the educational ends established by state legislatures eager for joint ventures with businessmen who are concerned with their investments.
In all of this, I am reminded of G.K. Chesterton, who noted,
There is in this materialism a mad indifference to real thought. By disbelieving in the soul, it comes to disbelieving in the mind.
As the saying goes, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste!" *
"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong." -Voltaire