The Welfare State Dilemma, Left and Right

Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State William Voegeli with a foreword by Steven F. Hayward Encounter Books, 2010; 327 pages, $30.50 Government Is the Problem: Memoirs of Ronald Reagan’s Welfare Reformer Robert B. Carleson, Edited by Susan A. Carleson and Hans A. Zeiger American Civil Rights Union, 2009; 160 pages, $25.00 If the American Conservative, National Review, and […]

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Creating a Family-Centered Economy

Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Healthcare, Deficits, and More John C. Médaille ISI Books, 2010; 282 pages, $26.95 God’s Economy: Faith-Based Initiatives and the Caring State Lew Daly The University of Chicago Press, 2009; 318 pages, $37.50 Recessionary times mean job losses, belt tightening, bailouts, and greater […]

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Demographic Predictions

Shock of Gray: The Aging of the World’s Population and How It Pits Young against Old, Child against Parent, Worker against Boss, Company against Rival, and Nation against Nation Ted C. Fishman Scribner, 2010; 416 pages, $27.50 Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century Eric Kaufmann Profile Books (U.S. […]

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Paving the Way for Title X:

How Protestants Swallowed the Pill and Evangelicals ‘Out-Libertined’ the Mainline Every great president since Abraham Lincoln has learned that political success requires uniting one’s party and splitting the opposition. In the same way, the success of Margaret Sanger in transforming American attitudes toward contraception, without which the government’s forty-year campaign for birth or population control […]

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The Incoherence of Federal Sex Policy:

Title X, Medicaid, and the Eisenstadt Decision In a 1972 decision widely hailed by the political classes, the Supreme Court opined in Eisenstadt v. Baird, “If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right to be free from unwarranted government intrusions into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to […]

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Forty Years of Title X Is Enough:

The Folly of the McNamara Approach to Family Planning When Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of defense for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, passed away in 2009, the media recounted achievements that few in his generation could match. While charting his rapid rise in the Ford Motor Company and his leadership of […]

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The Roots of the Recession

When the U.S. Commission on Population Growth and the American Future—a project of President Richard Nixon and John D. Rockefeller III to tap the bright minds of their generation on a pressing issue—released its report in 1975, its cover letter stated “we have concluded that, in the long run, no substantial benefits will result from […]

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A Cohort of the Rich the Media Overlook

The research continues to demonstrate that dual-income married couples, especially those who are high-earners, contribute substantially to rising levels of income inequality. Even as the labor-force participation rate of married women has declined since the mid-1990s, the earnings gap separating men and women has narrowed while the income gap separating rich households from all others […]

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The Deeper Issue Behind Political Polarization

Since the Clinton presidency, the pundits have regularly lamented the “polarization” of politics that divides the parties ideologically and allegedly results in legislative gridlock. Why such developments are necessarily problematic is more assumed than explained, but a recent study by Kyle Dodson of the University of California (at Merced) finds that increased polarization has its […]

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A Sequel to the Kinsey Report

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, “There they go again.” Indiana University was the source for the notorious Kinsey Report. The same agenda that characterized the discredited 1953 report seems to permeate a new survey, the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, whose findings were released in October by the school’s Center for Sexual Health Promotion. […]

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