Archive | March, 2001

Ever since racial quotas in college admissions were banned by Proposition 209 in California and by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in Texas, academics and politicians have been racking their brains to come up with something that would allow quotas to continue under new names. The latest attempt to get away from admitting students [...]

Now we know which political party is truly the Party of the Little People. Noble Senate Democrats have come to the aid of a downtrodden woman. They are furiously passing the plate for this destitute soul, pulling out all the stops to help her get back on her feet. Who is this charity case? Not [...]

Last week I attended a full-day business conference “ASIA: Restructuring in Action,” at NYU’s Stern School of Business. There, professors and industry experts met to discuss how post-crisis Asia was progressing. We discussed macroeconomic trends, the restructuring of the Asian banking sector, and the economic effects of new technologies. The conference reflected “conventional wisdom” within [...]

It is no secret that the civil rights establishment has become a parody of what was once a courageous army for racial dignity and fairness. There was a time when those who claimed to fight against prejudice confronted genuinely terrible injustice: segregated public schools, the bombing of black churches, willful flouting of the Fifteenth Amendment. [...]

Is it possible to take a moral inventory of our culture — to see, in a single event, what, if anything, the most influential parts of our culture hold as the good? There is an important forum in which we take such an inventory every year at this time — and broadcast it to the [...]

The date was Dec. 5, 1996. The scene was the ballroom of the Washington Hilton Hotel. The speaker was Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, keeper of the nation’s money. He had been droning on for 45 minutes with an address on the 83-year history of the Fed, and much of the [...]

A young Harvard undergrad enraged the campus emperors of political correctness this week when he tried to tickle their funny bones. Justin Fong, a writer for the Harvard Crimson student newspaper, quickly discovered that the emperors have no clothes, no spine, and absolutely no sense of humor. Fong, a 19-year-old sophomore from Foster City, Calif., [...]

In his recent testimony before Congress, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick painted an attractive portrait of free nations “bound together by free trade.” But it is a portrait marred by a little-noticed Catch-22 of U.S. trade law that hurts Americans and many poor nations America seeks to help. Despite a lot of “free trade” lip [...]

Q: What is the difference between what is “immoral” and what is “criminal”? Isn’t something criminal, so long as it’s objectively judged, also immoral? A: If something is rationally judged criminal, then by definition it’s immoral as well. For example, it’s rational to judge fraud as criminal. And fraud is immoral, even by an ethical [...]