Principles Of Government

All material on this site is for educational purposes only.
This site is designed to generate ideas for a supplementary section on think tank websites.
An online subscription to the Wall Street Journal is required get full use of this site.
(A) Articles are foundational content and (B) Articles are urgently important but may be replaced as they become dated

(A) Education

‘Follow the Science’ Leads to Ruin A

By Bjorn Lomborg - March 13, 2024

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Over the past two centuries, global life quality has dramatically improved, to a large extent because of an incredible increase in energy, mostly from the harnessing of fossil fuels. That has made agriculture, industry and transportation vastly more productive. Average life spans have more than doubled, hunger has dramatically declined, and real income has increased tenfold. We risk all that progress if we just stop using fossil fuels.
The world still gets four-fifths of its energy from fossil fuels, because renewable sources rarely provide good alternatives. Half the world’s population entirely depends on food grown with synthetic fertilizer produced almost entirely by natural gas. If we rapidly ceased using fossil fuels, four billion people would suddenly be without food. Read More

Higher Ed Has Become a Threat to America AA

By John Ellis - Dec. 4, 2023

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By John Ellis – Our corrupt, radical universities feed every scourge from censorship and crime to antisemitism. America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design, children poorly educated while sexualized and politicized against parental opposition, unconstitutional censorship, a press that does government PR rather than oversight, our institutions and corporations debased in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”—and more. To these has been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism. Every one of these degradations can be traced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education by radical political activists. Read More

Dostoevsky Knew: It Can Happen Here AA

By Gary Saul Morson - Oct. 18, 2023

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By Gary Saul Morson – Cruelty often thrives among the sophisticated. Dostoevsky recalls the French terror, when people were humiliated and murdered in the name of the highest principle…. during the Stalinist terrors millions were routinely tortured … and that during the collectivization of agriculture, millions more were deliberately starved to death, with young Bolshevik idealists brought in to enforce the famine…. In the West, intellectuals justified such behavior because it was done in the name of socialism …Dostoevsky adds that there is no need to resort to examples from the past because the same dynamic can occur in any place at any time that allows the dark side of human nature to show itself, clad in the language of whatever passes for progressive and enlightened. “Believe me, the most complete aberration of human hearts and minds is always possible.” Read More

Florida’s Education Triumph A

By Scott Yenor and Anna Miller - Aug. 16, 2023

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By Scott Yenor and Anna Miller – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s antiwoke education agenda has drawn national attention, but equally important and far less noticed is how Mr. DeSantis advanced new educational standards. A pedagogical revolution is afoot in the Sunshine State, which could serve as a blueprint for states across the country.

Florida’s education reformers understand that antiwoke rhetoric alone is insufficient. A vision for education excellence must displace underperforming K-12 institutions. Florida has passed universal education savings accounts, which give families access to public per pupil funds for tuition to private or classical schools, school supplies and home-schooling aid.

So far, Florida has introduced new standards in English, language arts, math, social studies, civics and health education. The English standards, for instance, are knowledge-based, rather than skills-based. They center on the great books of Western civilization Read More

Identity Politics Could Kill America’s Scientific Edge A

By Sadanand Dhume - July 6, 2023

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By Sadanand Dhume – China leads the U.S. in research on 37 of 44 critical technologies, ,,.Given this challenge, you might imagine that America would re-emphasize the principles of objectivity and merit that made it the world’s leading scientific innovator. You would be mistaken. …. Ironically, scientists in communist China need to care less about ideology than their American counterparts. In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health requires some prospective researchers to demonstrate “a strong commitment to promoting diversity and inclusive excellence” in order to receive funding”. Read More