Principles Of Government

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    Higher Education’s Deeper Sickness A

    By John M. Ellis - Nov. 13, 2017

    Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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    By John M. Ellis – Colleges need to be accredited; state universities answer to governing boards. Accrediting agencies and governing boards are created through a political process. What if voters were to insist that those agencies demand answers to some elementary questions? …How can a department of political science that excludes half the spectrum of viable political ideas be competent to offer degrees in the field? How can a history curriculum be taught competently when only one extremist attitude to social and political questions is present in a department? …How can these extraordinary deficiencies deserve either accreditation, or support by state and federal funds?… Read More

    The U.S. Should Show It Can Win a Nuclear War B

    By Seth Cropsey - April 27, 2022

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    By Seth Cropsey – The reality is that unless the U.S. prepares to win a nuclear war, it risks losing one. Robert C. O’Brien, a former White House national security adviser, proposed a series of conventional responses, which are necessary but not sufficient to deter Russian nuclear escalation. Developing a coherent American strategy requires understanding why Russia threatens to use nuclear weapons and how the U.S. can recalibrate its strategic logic for a nuclear environment. Read More

    Entitlements Always Grow and Grow A

    By John F. Cogan - Jan. 3, 2022 

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    By John F. Cogan – The seven-decade-long growth of entitlements and the pandemic response are the product of expansionary forces that operate on Congress regardless of who is in charge. Throughout history, the most potent force has been the equally worthy claim. The claim originates from a well-meaning impulse to treat all similarly situated persons equally under the law. Here’s how it works. When first enacted, entitlement benefits are usually confined to a narrow group of worthy individuals. As time passes, groups of excluded individuals claim that they are no less deserving of aid. Pressure is brought by, or on behalf of, these excluded groups to expand eligibility rules. Eventually, Congress acquiesces. But the broadening of eligibility rules only brings another group of claimants closer to the eligibility boundary lines, and the pressure to relax qualifying rules begins again. The process of liberalization repeats itself until the entitlement program’s original limited goals are no longer recognizable. Read More

    Awakening From Nihilism: The Templeton Prize Address A

    By Michael Novak – May 5 1994

    Copyright @ First Things 1994

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    By Michael Novak – Longer article – This essay is adapted from an address presented by Mr. Novak at Westminster Abbey on May 5, 1994. He is the twenty-fourth recipient of The Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

    As we draw near the close of the twentieth century, we owe ourselves a reckoning.

    This century was history’s bloodiest. From this revered and mortally threatened Abbey some fifty years ago, one could hear the screech of falling bombs. At a time they didn’t choose, and in a way they didn’t foresee, more than a hundred million persons in Europe found their lives brutally taken from them. An earlier Templeton laureate, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, has agreed that, beyond the war dead, 66 million prisoners perished in the Soviet labor camps. Add the scores of millions dead in Asia, Africa, and the other continents since 1900.

    Nor is there any guarantee that the twenty-first century will not be bloodier.

    And yet the world has drawn four painful lessons from the ashes of our century. First, even under conditions of nihilism, better than cowardice is fidelity to truth. From fidelity to truth, inner liberty is wrested. Read More