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August 14, 2002 -- The Internet is a wonderful tool. It allows for easier research, entertainment, and better communication with friends and relatives. But it also has spam. Junk email arrives every day with promises of riches and weight loss. These really don’t bother me; it only takes a second to press delete. What bother me are the petitions, in particular the petition to save public radio. I must get this petition every three or four months. “NPR funding is in danger of being cut!” “Congress is going to end public radio!” If only such things were true. These petitions, it turns out, are just one of the many urban legends floating around the Internet. NPR isn’t in any real danger of losing its taxpayer funding. But it should be.

Restoring Our World After September 11th

September 18, 2001 -- As the full impact of the barbaric terrorist attacks of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon unfolded, TV anchors, commentators, and community leaders invoked God and prayer as a means of personally dealing with all the tragedy of this attack. Communities and congregations organized prayer vigils and religious services. President Bush declared Friday, September 14, 2001, a "National Day of Prayer and Remembrance." For atheists, the call to a higher power for support or guidance is an empty one. Still, the reports of death tolls and lost loved ones leave a painful spiritual wound, even for the majority of us who do not personally know anyone whose life was stolen. We were witnesses to the worst terrorist attack in history, but now we need to rebuild and move on with our lives.

Responsibility, Not Regulation

July 30, 2002 -- In the Business Ethics class I teach, my students ask, “Can a company be profitable and successful and still be moral?” My answer is always a resounding “Yes!” I explain to them that Enron and MCI Worldcom are exceptions. And they are, despite the seeming rash of such scandals recently. Business is a fundamentally moral activity. Like medicine, at its core it’s about the things most important to our lives. While the practice of medicine protects our health, business produces the rest of our values. And like medicine, business has its own version of the quack. Kenneth Lay is the business world version of the faith healer.

Assault on Science Spreads

February 3, 2004 -- Unfortunately, the assault on science that I discussed in my January 30th commentary is not confined to bookstores at the Grand Canyon. Proposed curriculum guidelines for Georgia schools suggest that the word “evolution” not be used. It would be replaced with “biological changes over time.” The Georgia Education Department already omits much material referring to the Earth’s age and the relationship of various living organisms to one another. (Yes, if governments didn’t own and run schools, bad ideas might be better confined. But unfortunately that’s not the case.)

Two George Bushes

September 3, 2004 -- Nearly every speaker at the Republican Party convention commented on John Kerry's flip-flops; there are two Kerrys—one, for example, who votes for funding our troops in Iraq and another who votes against it. Points well taken! But we also saw at the convention two George Bushs, not flip-flopping on any single issue but, rather, taking the freedom position on one issue and the statist position on another. Depending on which half of his laundry list of recommendations you attend to, you'll think you're listening to either Ronald Reagan or Teddy Kennedy.

The Witless Battle Over General Boykin

October 24, 2003 -- The crackle of small-arms fire that you hear about General William Boykin is the sound of the latest skirmish in America’s culture wars. Boykin is the Pentagon’s head of intelligence in the war on terrorism. He is also an evangelical Christian who has told church groups that Muslim terrorists hate the United States because it is a “Christian nation,” that our real enemy is not Osama bin Laden but Satan, and that we will prevail only if “we come against them in the name of Jesus.” It gets worse. According to the Los Angeles Times reporter who broke the story, Boykin would show audiences a picture he took in Somalia after the “Blackhawk Down” fiasco in Mogadishu. Pointing to an unnatural-looking dark streak in the sky, he said, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your enemy. It is the principalities of darkness. It is a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy.”

David Kelley, Ph.D.

The Court's Black and White Decision

June 27, 2003 -- Much will be written about the legal flaws of the Supreme Court's decision on the University of Michigan's admissions policies. The court found race-based admissions in the name of "affirmative action" to be constitutional, upheld that university's law school admissions criteria, but struck down Michigan's practice of automatically awarding points to government-approved minorities for undergraduate admissions. Of course, private schools should be free to use any admissions criteria they wish, and all schools should be private. But most schools are government-operated or -funded, and when governments are involved, they should not treat individuals differently based on race. And unfortunately the Bush administration, while opposing Michigan's particular policies, supported the concept of affirmative action.

Special Interests or the Special Use of Force?

February 25, 2004 -- Denouncing special interests is all the rage on the current election landscape. Each candidate accuses the others of wanting to give benefits to some unfairly favored group at the expense of others. The sheer hypocrisy of all candidates reflects an even deeper truth about the system that they all support. Ralph Nader has entered the presidential race vowing to fight the special interest groups that pay money for special favors from Washington. Of course, Nader does not consider it a special favor to him and his Green friends when the federal government prohibits property owners from using their own land in ways they think are not friendly to the environment. Nor does he see himself as an agent of corruption when he urges the federal government to prohibit people from buying products of which he disapproves. But he denounces businesses that manufacture those products, and that hire lobbyists to keep those products legal, for subverting the will of the people.

Protecting Property and Profits

July 18, 2003 -- The House of Representatives soon will take up H.R. 2427 concerning the re-importation of drugs from foreign countries. The policy debate over this issue seems to pit two free market principles against one another. The free trade principle is invoked by those who want to allow Americans to re-import from Canada pharmaceutical products that American companies have shipped to that country for sale. The prices for those products in Canada are generally well below the prices in the United States. But American pharmaceutical companies counter that the property rights principle means that they should be able to sell their products for whatever prices and on whatever conditions they wish to set, including barring Canadians who buy their products from reselling them in the United States.

Private Space Triumph

September 30, 2004 -- Private entrepreneurs again have triumphed! On September 29, SpaceShipOne, built by Burt Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, and financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, completed its first flight in pursuit of the $10 million Ansari X Prize. The money was secured by private individuals and will be paid to the first private party to put a craft into space twice in a two-week period carrying at least three individuals. Rutan's rocket had its first test flight over the 100-kilometer limit on June 21, and with the success of the latest launch the clock is now ticking to see if his ship can do it again in a fortnight.

Principles vs. Sentiments in the State of the Union Address

January 22, 2004 -- In his State of the Union address, President Bush said, “A government-run health care system is the wrong prescription.” But he also praised the new government-backed prescription drug benefit under Medicare that he championed last year. He wants to keep taxes low, but he also wants four percent more discretionary spending this year. This is down from his out-of-control spending of the past few years but still drains the taxpayers’ wallets by keeping in place or expanding most government programs. For example, he wants more federal money to help high school students who fall behind in math and science. Republicans are thought of as the guys who don’t like a lot of government. So why would Bush, as well as many other Republicans, be all over the map with their programs and policies? Simple: Bush, like so many other Republicans, acts based on sentiments or short-term pragmatism rather than on a consistent set of core principles. In other words, Bush believes that individuals should be free and unencumbered by government except where he feels that government should intervene.

Obese Medicare and Fatheaded Politicians

July 18, 2004 -- In the mid-1990s, I used to argue against the war on tobacco as follows: Supposedly, 400,000 individuals die each year because of smoking. (It's closer to 200,000; the government fakes the numbers, but that's another story.) Since governments pick up many of the health care costs of people who are sick from smoking, governments claim the right to wage a war on tobacco. But nearly as many individuals allegedly die from bad diets and lack of exercise. By this logic, it will only be a matter of time before you're limited to two Big Macs per month, potato chips are kept behind the counter and not sold to anyone under 18, and there's a five-day waiting period to buy Twinkies so government bureaucrats can check your medical records. My reductio ad absurdum is one step closer to surrealist reality, thanks to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tommy Thompson, who has now defined obesity as a "disease" under Medicare. Thompson is on a jihad against extra pounds and expanding waistlines in this country. This change in the Medicare rules undermines freedom on four fronts.

Mouse Droppings and Government Hypocrites

July 31, 2003 -- The other day, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cafeteria was shut down by the Washington, D.C. Department of Health for health code violations. That’s right, the federal agency that oversees food safety, that inspects meat and poultry, couldn’t keep the mouse droppings out of its own eatery! But why should we be surprised? Various federal agencies have been raking WorldCom and Enron over the coals for not conforming to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Yet at a February 23, 2000 Capitol Hill hearing, two senators thought nothing of suggesting that Amtrak, the money-losing government passenger railroad, abandon just those principles—that would too clearly demonstrate just how poorly that railroad was being run. Can’t let the public see that!

Monkeys, Men, and Morality

August 6, 2003 -- August 7, 2003, marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great anthropologist Dr. Louis S. B. Leakey (1903-1973). This day deserves commemoration not just because of Leakey's achievements but also because of the political and cultural implications of his lifelong enterprise. Leakey spent his career with his wife Mary and son Richard in Kenya and in the Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, seeking fossils of man's prehistoric ancestors. Truly finding needles in haystacks, the Leakeys discovered bones of the 20-million-year-old Proconsul man, a possible link between apes and humans; the 1.75-million-year-old Zinjanthropus; and Homo habilis, which Dr. Leakey considered the first true member of the human genus and the first toolmaker.

Will America Unite in One Obama?

December 29, 2008 -- George W. Bush ran for president as “a uniter, not a divider.” He only managed to unite Republicans and Democrats in disappointment—though for different reasons—with his administration. Barack Obama sounded the same theme: “We’re all in this together!” Will he succeed where Dubya failed? Divided States of Americans Many Americans have seen in recent years the culture and politics growing more mean and coarse, contentious and uncivil, malicious and malevolent. We’re bombarded by coast-to-coast bellyaching on 24-hour cable news channels where we’re likely to encounter shout-fests. Talk radio has its screamers as well—Michael Savage, Mark Levine. On websites like the Daily Kos and Huffington Post, we run into vicious personal attacks, and on almost any online discussion thread we’ll probably be burned by flame wars. Entertainers and celebrities wear their mostly nutty left-wing politics on their sleeves, while many members of their audiences want them to shut up and stick to their acting and singing. Other individuals, depending on their perspective, patronize or boycott companies—Starbucks, Ben and Jerry’s—that are as well known for their politics as their products. Will this nastiness never end?

Kerry's Collectivism

July 30, 2004 -- For those of you who missed John Kerry's acceptance speech for the Democratic presidential nomination, you are certainly better off than those of us who, for professional reasons, must suffer through such stuff. Here are a few things you missed. In several cases, Kerry seemed to be making jokes that he assumed his audience, with self-induced attention deficit disorder, would never pick up on. For example, he began by stating that President Bush misled us into war—despite the fact that Kerry, Clinton, and everyone else believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, based on the same now-known-to-be-flawed intelligence. After calling Bush a liar to begin his speech, he ended it by asking Bush to run a civil campaign: "Let's respect one another." Very funny, John! Also amusing was Kerry, nominee of the Democratic Party—the party that believes judges should act as social engineers, ignoring the law in order to foist on us their own crackpot beliefs

Remember: It's Not

November 20, 2001 -- On November 17, First Lady Laura Bush used her husband's regular Saturday radio show to speak about the oppression of women under the rule of the Taliban. Inasmuch as Mrs. Bush is not a public official, one might suppose that she was simply using her position as First Lady to speak out against an indisputably deplorable situation that is of particular concern to her. But whatever the facts may be, observers have not construed her talk as a matter of heartfelt concern. According to the New York Times (November 19): "Democrats reminded anyone who would listen that President Bush lost women voters by 11 percentage points in the 2000 election." Nor is that interpretation unduly cynical." Karen P. Hughes, the senior presidential advisor who dreamed up the information campaign publicizing the plight of Afghan women, said: “If through this initiative women who might not have previously wanted to support the president can see him in a different light, then I hope they will see his compassion and his sincere concern for human dignity." If that is indeed the significance of Mrs. Bush's talk, it represents bad tactics and bad strategy.

Reilly Steals Home: A.G. ''Deal'' With the Red Sox Was Simply Extortion

January 17, 2002 -- Using the power of his office, Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly was able to secure an extra $30 million for the Yawkey Trust. There is another word for this: extortion. Reilly wasn’t happy with the amount the Yawkey Trust was going to get from the Red Sox sale; he thought it should’ve been more and threatened a lawsuit to get it. This would have mired the Red Sox in months of legal battle, preventing them from going ahead with the sale of the team. With Reilly’s big stick hanging over their head, the Red Sox and John Henry had to agree to Reilly’s terms.

Powell and Arafat: An Exercise in Futility

April 16, 2002 -- Every job has its downside: Multimillionaire CEOs spend a bazillion hours at the office, famous actresses are mobbed by obsessive fans everywhere they go, even international beer writer Michael Jackson (no, not the pop star), who travels around the world and drinks beer for a living, has to—OK, maybe not all jobs have a downside—but being U.S. Secretary of State certainly does. Colin Powell is on the Secretary’s obligatory semi-annual “Futile Mid-East Peace Junket.” I think it’s actually in the Constitution somewhere: “The President shall have the power to make treaties…and send the Secretary of State on a Futile Middle-Eastern Peace Junket.” Powell can’t be having any fun at all. Powell has about as much chance of stopping the conflict as Albright or Kissinger did—which is to say, not much. Conflict has been raging in the land of Canaan since before Jehovah made that infamous bargain with Abraham, and Colin Powell won’t stop it.

Patrick Stephens

Policing Phone Calls and Perverting Principles

May 18, 2006 -- The revelation that the Bush administration has secured records of millions of phone calls from three telecom companies should shock every American who is concerned about freedom. Apparently it does not. A poll the day after the disclosure found that two-thirds of Americans have no apparent problem with this practice. Perhaps those opinions will change as more details are revealed. But in any case, for the sake of our freedom, Americans would do well to do what most politicians refuse to do: think in terms of principles. The proper purpose of government is to protect the lives, liberty, and property of citizens. Preventing terrorist attacks certainly falls under this principle. Administration defenders argue that its open-ended approach to tracking phone calls is simply part of that effort.

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