One of the clearest wedge issues between Republicans and Democrats should be tax policy and it has always amazed me how Republicans have defaulted their natural advantage on this issue. Of course, the “read my lips” commitment of 1988 still haunts, but the most damaging to this advantage has been the failure (and often unwillingness) […]
Archives for 2000
Moyers’ Politics of Justice
Journalist and former LBJ aide Bill Moyers delivered the spring commencement address at my alma mater, The University of Texas at Austin. I wasn’t there, but I read the speech and it struck me as something out of The Great Society dustbin. Here’s an excerpt: “You would think a rich, dynamic nation with the […]
Hayek and His Legacy
For most of his career, economist Friedrich Hayek was the proverbial “voice in the wilderness” with his championing of free market capitalism over socialism. Then an amazing thing happened – socialistic thought was soundly defeated, at least everywhere but the higher reaches of many American elite universities. His breakthrough work was The Road to Serfdom […]
Quote
“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”—Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Internationalism and American Exceptionalism
Various commentators have written about the growing influence that Corporate America has assumed over U. S. foreign policy, particularly trade policy, in the Clinton Administration. It has been noted that foreign policy formulation under Clinton has been as much dictated by the Commerce Department as by the State Department. A good question, recently posed by […]
Truth and Consequences
“Truth is something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not something you can make up as you go along.”—George Orwell, 1944.“There are no facts.”—Michael Foucault, 1968 The two quotes above illustrate both the wide divergence of views of truth that have come to prevail and the drift in the conception of truth from the […]
The Inevitability of Marketization
A couple of months ago, I was struck by a notice in the Wall Street Journal that fourteen leaders of industrialized countries signed The Berlin Conference communiqué titled “Progressive Governance in the 21st Century”. Among other center-left aphorisms, it states that globalization “should not just be allowed to happen” and that there should be a […]
Quotes
“There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.”—Alfred, Lord Tennyson “As we celebrate this July 4th, there is much to be thankful for and, as Tennyson admonishes us, much to challenge. An election year in which a president will be chosen is as fine a time as any to […]
Genetic Considerations
The recent announcement of breakthrough progress in mapping the human genome reminded me of a lecture on bioethics at Rice University I attended several years ago. It became clear to me then that our 27-year old war over abortion and the Roe v. Wade decision is just the tip of the iceberg compared to […]
Old Thoughts on Leadership
Recently, in thumbing through some old files, I rediscovered copies of a speech and an article I authored on two occasions in the mid to late 1980’s. I was honored to be invited to deliver the commencement address to the Spring 1985 graduating class at Stephen F. Austin State University and, in 1989, I was […]