Religious Skepticism and American Lawyers
By Mark Movsesian | Law has an outsized influence on American culture. And, according to University of Michigan Law Professor Dan Crane, religious skeptics have an outsized influence on the legal profession. He refers to a recent survey of students at an elite…
Persecution Myth?
By Raymond Ibrahim | A new book claims Christian martyrdom was fabricated, but the present sheds light on the past. Christian martyrdom under the militant Roman Empire has long been an unquestioned historical fact, but Candida Moss in her new book The Myth of Persecution (HarperOne, March 2013) claims that many of history’s best known…
Immigration Reform at What Cost?
By Derrick Morgan | Lawful immigration can bring important economic and cultural benefits both to the United States and to the immigrants. Americans rightly live and celebrate the values of America, including limited government, personal liberty, and free enterprise, and beckon others to join us. We are united by belief in…
Dumber Each Day?
By Elias Crim | Are you tired of the “trifecta” metaphor about the three current Washington scandals as yet? I won’t even ask if you’re tired of the Benghazi, IRS or AP scandals themselves. Not because they have no significance. But because they are only the latest examples of…
Amazon Uses Government to Crush Competition
By Rich Tucker | People line up to go to the Apple store, but can’t stand waiting in line at the DMV. That’s because consumers love good products and good service. Businesses tend to provide reasons for lining up, while governments simply force us to. So for years now, conservatives have rejoiced in the power of the Internet. Web-based businesses increase competition, squeezing down costs and forcing their stodgy competitors to improve or…
The High Cost of Education
By Arthur Herman | The median pay for public-college presidents is now $441,392, with four presidents being paid more than $1 million a year. Despite the growing evidence that colleges and universities cost too much, deliver too little and push too many young people into a lifetime of debt, the idea of going to college remains a key part of the American Dream. Now William Bennett, a former secretary of education…takes on a question that parents and teens are starting to ask…
B.A., With a Sex Change on the Side
By Nathan Harden | Once upon a time college was for things like learning and job training — shaping of the mind. Nowadays, you can get so much more — like shaping of the genitals. Gender-reassignment surgery is the latest luxury item to be added to the bloated list of educationally irrelevant services offered by…
Resisting the Tyranny of Productivity
By Michael Sacasas | Some brief thought on the Programmable World (in which ubiquitous wireless sensors make objects and machines “smart”): The envisioned Programmable World, as Bill Wasik has called it, is a tremendously sophisticated time- and labor-saving...
We Have Not Yet Begun to Fight
By John Mark Reynolds | The Wall Street Journal, noting the retirement of Donald Kagan, states the obvious: higher education is broken. Its brokenness begins with the faculty. College is expensive, dominated by faculty unions, and hostile to moral education. Higher education does research well and is vital to our continued economic growth, but it no longer forms leaders fit for Republican values. What does it profit our republic if we gain scientific power, but lose any ability to use it morally? Kagan is right that law and liberty must remain…