Under
Foreign Flags
By Paul Johnson
 Colonialism
is not the kind of condition that can be artificially restored.
It was initially an economic process, in which individual traders
sought to do business, exchanging wares (in which, in Africa, slavery
often played a part). The building of forts, the assumption of administration
and sovereignty, and its extension inward, followed in an attempt
to provide the security in which commerce could be safely conducted.
These conditions cannot be recreated. On the other hand, the League
of Nations mandate system, after the First World War, does provide
a relevant and workable precedent. The U.N. Security Council would
vote to declare a territory, such as Somalia, where government no
longer exists and international terrorists flourish, a "failed
state" and direct one of its members to exercise sovereignty
there until such time as it became possible to create an effective
government from the local population.
The State of Welfare
By Kate O'Beirne
The
GOP-designed welfare reform was based on the conviction that destructive
federal welfare policies discouraged work and subsidized illegitimacy.
Then-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan called them "the most brutal
act of social policy we have known since Reconstruction" —
but the reforms have in fact dramatically improved the lives of
poor children. Since 1996, welfare rolls have been reduced by over
50 percent. There are 4.2 million fewer people in poverty, including
2.3 million fewer children. The poverty rates for black children
and for single mothers are at their lowest point in history; and
after steadily increasing for a generation, the illegitimate-birth
rate hasn't risen in the past five years. In the coming round of
reform, conservatives are determined to build on the success of
the 1996 reforms with more of the same. Congressional liberals are
equally determined to move reform in the opposite direction.
I'm Okay, Your 401(k)
By Richard Nadler
To
deduce that company-stock ownership caused these thousands of investor
calamities is to overlook a few other problems at Enron: earnings
overstated by $580 million, a palimpsest of shredded financial documents,
and officers who misrepresented the troubled stock's value even
as they unloaded it. But never mind: Sens. Barbara Boxer and Jon
Corzine have proposed a bill limiting how much company stock several
popular work-based investment plans can hold. Their reforms are,
however, worthless: futile and unnecessary with regard to defined
contribution plans, destructive toward Employee Stock Ownership
Plans (ESOPs), and nonexistent (thankfully) in regulating stock
options. At first blush, they appear to give greater rights to worker-investors;
but in fact, they needlessly constrict the range of work-based savings
options available to employers and employees alike.
Right Rumbles
By John O'Sullivan
The
last year has seen a revival of conservatism in the advanced world.
Conservative parties have held or regained power in Italy, Australia,
and Denmark (in each case, the result was remarkable). The Irish
voted against ratifying the Nice Treaty on further European integration,
against the urgings of all major political parties; and the Portuguese
socialists lost heavily in municipal elections that are generally
seen as a guide to the next parliamentary contest. Against this
trend, the Left can boast only of holding on to a majority in Belgium
and of New Labour's retention of power in Britain. The first was
not seen as important by anyone, and the second, though undoubtedly
a substantial victory, was a guide to the past rather than the future.
Rages of the Age
By Theodore Dalrymple
Rage
is all the rage these days, as a quasi-neurological explanation
for outbursts of aggressive and violent conduct. We now have road
rage, air rage, grocery-cart rage. Even a man, Thomas Junta, who
killed a fellow father at their sons' hockey practice in Massachusetts,
was thought by some to be suffering from "rink rage."
The sequence seems to be this: A pattern of conduct is noticed and
given a name. It then becomes a diagnosis, then an excuse, then
a justification. Since all of us, when we are about to commit an
act that we know in advance to be wrong, rehearse justifications
for our ensuing wickedness, it is clear that by increasing the repertoire
of justifications available to us for our own misconduct, the process
I have described leads to a general deterioration in social behavior.
The more rage is a diagnosis, the more rage there will be.
Is There a Dr. in the House?
By Jay Nordlinger
This
business of honorifics may seem trivial, but it touches on some
enduring cultural and national questions. "Dr. King,"
for instance, is one of the great linguistic sacred cows in America.
Granted, ours is a country in which black men, not too long ago,
were routinely called "boy" (or worse); we are rightly
conscious of a little dignity, even redress. But what's more significant
about MLK? That he repeatedly put his life on the line so that black
Americans could, at long last, become fully Americans — eventually
paying the ultimate price — or that, early in his life, he
managed to plagiarize his way to a Ph.D.? Anyone, practically, can
get a Ph.D.; very few can be a Martin Luther King Jr.
Sins of the Fathers
By Rod Dreher
By
the time Father John Geoghan was convicted in the first of three
criminal trials in early January, more than 130 people had come
forward, claiming to have been sexually assaulted by Geoghan when
they were children. The Church has paid millions to settle civil
suits, and faces 90 more suits — none of which are being contested.
The archbishop of Boston, Bernard Cardinal Law, gave an extraordinary
press conference on January 9 in which he apologized for his "tragically
incorrect" 1984 decision to continue Geoghan's ministry. The
cardinal announced a new "get tough" policy that would
require all archdiocesan employees to report suspected incidents
of clergy sex abuse to civil authorities. "The Louisiana case
[that initiated the wave of lawsuits against the Church] was 1985!"
says one angry priest. "This is 2002! How does Law have the
hubris to stand in front of cameras and say that now, now
he's come up with a policy?"
The Enron Trap
By Byron York
Here's
a worrisome scenario for the White House as it tries to navigate
its way through the Enron mess: Weeks from now, there's still no
evidence that anyone in the administration did anything wrong, yet
the White House finds itself in a confrontation with Congress over
contacts with Enron. Democratic senators demand information, the
president refuses to give it up, and subpoenas fly. Legal battles
follow, and the White House ultimately loses — all without
any credible suggestion of wrongdoing. It might seem farfetched,
and indeed there appears to be great confidence in the White House
that it won't happen. But the president's increasingly hard-line
stance against releasing information related to Enron could make
it a reality.
Lapse of Reason
By Ramesh Ponnuru
Reproductive
cloning is said to be nothing to frighten us because a clone just
makes a twin of whoever is being cloned. ("To my knowledge,"
writes Reason science editor Ron Bailey, "no one has
argued that twins are immoral.") The destruction of embryos
in therapeutic cloning, meanwhile, is said to be okay because the
embryos are at such an early stage of development that twinning
is still possible. Since the embryo could become two embryos, it's
not an individual. But — although the libertarians seem wholly
oblivious to it — these arguments collide head-on. We're not
supposed to worry about reproductive cloning because it just makes
twins. But at the same time, it's okay to kill a human entity so
long as it's possible for a twin to be derived from it. Since all
of us can be cloned at any age, and a clone is just like a twin,
that seems to leave all of us without any ground to protest being
killed. Which I, for one, resent.
InDigestible
By John J. Miller
Reader's
Digest was the quintessential magazine of "red-state"
America. During the Cold War, it played a vital role in educating
the American public. In 1982, Susan Sontag sparked a bristling controversy
on the Left with this confession: "Imagine, if you will, someone
who read only Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and
someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The
New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed
about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give
us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?" The magazine
also served more broadly as a platform for conservative ideas. It
published articles in favor of small government and missile defense
and opposed to union corruption and welfare dependency. Much has
changed, however, and today, the magazine of red-state America is
run almost totally by blue-state Americans.
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