POLITICS

A Washington Post editorial (7/24/97) said that had the reading portion of the Stanford Achievement Test been used as this year's criterion for promotion, 33 percent of D.C.'s third-graders and 29 percent of its eighth-graders would have been left down. Test results...

In pursuit of what's deemed as worthy objectives, decent people often pave the way for tyranny. The process usually begins by the piecemeal destruction of the foundations of liberty: private property, rule of law, voluntary exchange and limited government. Those basic...

Jonas Salk once named the ambition that guided his career: "I wanted to do independent work and I wanted to do it my way." His ideas were opposed by the scientific establishment, but he persevered, holding nothing above the verdict of his own mind. The result of his...

Should we obey laws? It all depends; some laws aren't worthy of obedience. "There you go again, Williams;" you say, "what kind of society would there be if people decided which laws they'd obey or disobey?" That might be a problem but let's look at it. During several...

Terry Nichols is currently on trial as an accomplice to the truck bombing that killed 168 people two years ago in Oklahoma City. As in the trial of Timothy McVeigh, who was sentenced to death for his role in the bombing, many people are still asking: What could...

After years of procrastination, I finally got around to reading Yale University law professor Stephen L. Carter's, book, Reflections of An Affirmative Action Baby. Carter writes engagingly about race issues like affirmative action, racial stereotypes, and the civil...

"Economic Freedom of the World: 1997", written by Professors James Gwartney (Florida State University) and Robert Lawson (Capital University), has just been published. It is an annual report that uses 17 objective factors to derive a summary economic freedom rating,...

There's been one balanced budget in the last 38 years (1969). In 1979, Congress passed the Balanced Budget Act making balanced budgets the law of the land. In 1982, a "concerned" Congress enacted what was then the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history....

Let's look at how pressure groups are able to impose their values and preferences on others in ways that restrict liberty. To make my case, I list several restrictions that have been, are, or are being sought such as bans: on handgun ownership, abortion, smoking in...

The best thing we can do for American education is to abolish university education departments, abolish the U.S. Department of Education and fire education "experts." You say, "Williams, have you gone mad?" Let's look at it. Over the last 30 years, achievement test...

Last February, I wrote about the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) air bag safety coverup and the 52 lives (32 were children) lost caused by 200 mph deploying air bags. Then there were air bag lies. In 1977, the Transportation Department claimed...

Volunteerism is touted as a celebration of the American spirit of community involvement. "Citizen service belongs to no party, no ideology," said President Clinton. "It is an American idea, which every American should embrace." His sentiment is shared by Presidents...

In October 1994, Lt. Kara Hultgreen was killed during an attempted landing of her F-14 on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. Femfeared (fear of feminists) Navy officials first re ported that engine failure caused the death of the Navy's first female F-14 pilot....

John Stossel's ABC special "Freeloaders" which aired last week showed just how far we've come to being a nation of parasites. It featured people (thieves) who'd go to a restaurant, eat half their meal, and then place an insect in the remaining food in order to get the...

Dr. Thomas Sowell, Hoover Institution's distinguished senior fellow, delivered a lecture in New Zealand last year titled "The Quest for Cosmic Justice." He discussed how often we observe tragic differences in the lives of people. Some live in luxury; others live in...

For nearly four decades, the education establishment has delivered one failure and set of excuses after another. Education for blacks is nothing less than a catastrophe and education for white kids is nothing to write home about. People can and do make mistakes and...