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.
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(A) Articles are foundational content and (B) Articles are urgently important but may be replaced as they become dated

(A) Education

How Public Unions Took Taxpayers Hostage AA

By Fred Siegel - Jan. 25, 2011

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By Fred Siegel – But there was another “rights” movement, largely overlooked, that has also had a profound effect on American life. The looming public-pension crisis that threatens to bankrupt city, county and state governments had its origins in those same years when public employees, already protected by civil-service rules, gained the right to bargain collectively. Read More

‘The Gulag Archipelago’: An Epic of True Evil AA

By Gary Saul Morson - May 5, 2023

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By Gary Saul Morson – How was such evil possible? … but those who commit the greatest harm think of themselves as good. Before interrogators could torture prisoners they knew were innocent, they had to discover a justification for their actions. Shakespeare’s villains …had no ideology,” nothing to compare with Marxism-Leninism’s “scientific” and infallible explanations of life and ethics. “Ideology—that is what . . . gives the evil-doer the necessary steadfastness and determination . . . the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good . . . in his own and others’ eyes.” Read More

Why Independence Day Matters A

By Michael B. Poliakoff - June 29, 2023

Copyright ©2023 Michael Poliakoff and ACTA

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By Michael B. Poliakoff – What these books have in common is an intense commitment to the liberal democracy that gives us the right to participate in it, indeed to criticize it. And, with that, the absolute obligation to instill the values and principles of our free society. Dr. Haass and President Daniels call not only for better K-12 civic education, but, like past president of Harvard University Derek Bok, for a required college course on American history and government….Those in our nation who do not understand the blessing of freedom and the price past generations paid for it are likely to scorn that heritage. Read More

DEI at Law Schools Could Bring Down America A

By Tunku Varadarajan and Ilya Shipiro - March 28, 2023

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By Tunku Varadarajan and Ilya Shipiro – … The threat to ‘dismantle existing structures’ is an idle one in English class. But in legal education it targets individual rights and equal treatment under the Constitution.… If you read critical legal studies, of which critical race theory is a subset, you’ll read about the need to ‘fundamentally dismantle existing structures,’ to ‘change the way social hierarchies operate.’ . . . The goal is to fundamentally change the way that American society operates”…. Read More

DEI Spells Death for the Idea of a University AA

By Matthew Spalding - Feb. 10, 2023

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By Matthew Spalding – Wherever this agenda is allowed to take root, free expression and academic integrity are doomed…The first object of government, Madison tells us,…is the protection of diversity in … different opinions, to be encouraged to preserve liberty. Equity is an ancient legal concept of justice …, developed over centuries of English common-law practice. …. Yet in true Orwellian fashion, they have been redefined.…Diversity is no longer a term to describe the breadth of our differences but a demand to grant privileges to purportedly oppressed identity groups. Equity assigns desirable positions based on race, sex and sexual orientation rather than character, competence and merit.  Read More