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Все книги издательства IngramWhy We Should Call Ourselves Christians
The intellectual and political elite of the West is nowadays taking for granted that religion, in particular Christianity, is a cultural vestige, a primitive form of knowledge, a consolation for the poor minded, an obstacle to coexistence. In all influential environments, the widespread watchword is “We are all secular” or “We are all post-religious.” As a consequence, we are told that states must be independent of religious creed, politics must take a neutral stance regarding religious values, and societies must hold together without any reference to religious bonds. Liberalism, which in some form or another is the prevailing view in the West, is considered to be “free-standing,” and the Western, liberal, open society is taken to be “self-sufficient.”Not only is anti-Christian secularism wrong, it is also risky. It's wrong because the very ideas on which liberal societies are based and in terms of which they can be justified—the concept of the dignity of the human person, the moral priority of the individual, the view that man is a “crooked timber” inclined to prevarication, the limited confidence in the power of the state to render him virtuous—are typical Christian or, more precisely, Judeo-Christian ideas. Take them away and the open society will collapse. Anti-Christian secularism is risky because it jeopardizes the identity of the West, leaves it with no self-conscience, and deprives people of their sense of belonging. The Founding Fathers of America, as well as major intellectual European figures such as Locke, Kant, and Tocqueville, knew how much our civilization depends on Christianity. Today, American and European culture is shaking the pillars of that civilization.Written from a secular and liberal, but not anti-Christian, point of view, this book explains why the Christian culture is still the best antidote to the crisis and decline of the West. Pera proposes that we should call ourselves Christians if we want to maintain our liberal freedoms, to embark on such projects as the political unification of Europe as well as the special relationship between Europe and America, and to avoid the relativistic trend that affects our public ethics. “The challenges of our particular historical moment”, as Pope Benedict XVI calls them in the Preface to the book, can be faced only if we stress the historical and conceptual link between Christianity and free society.
Confronting Terror
After the September 11, 2001 attacks the United States went to war. With thousands of Americans killed, billions of dollars in damage, and aggressive military and security measures in response, we are still living with the war a decade later. A change of presidential administration has not dulled controversy over the most fundamental objectives, strategies and tactics of the war, or whether it is even a war. This book clears the air over the meaning of 9/11, and sets the stage for a reasoned, clear, and considered discussion of the future with a collection of essays commemorating the 10th anniversary of the attacks. The contributors include supporters and critics of the war on terrorism, policymakers and commentators, insiders and outsiders, and some of the leading voices inside and outside government.
Sovereignty or Submission
The Twenty-First Century is witnessing an epic struggle between the forces of global governance and American constitutional democracy. Transnational progressives and pragmatists in the UN, EU, post-modern states of Europe, NGOs, corporations, prominent foundations, and most importantly, in America’s leading elites, seek to establish “global governance.” Further, they understand that in order to achieve global governance, American sovereignty must be subordinated to the “global rule of law.” The U.S. Constitution must incorporate “evolving norms of international law.” Sovereignty or Submission? examines this process with crystalline clarity and alerts the American public to the danger ahead. Global governance seeks legitimacy not in democracy, but in a partisan interpretation of human rights. It would shift power from democracies (U.S., Israel, India) to post-democratic authorities, such as the judges of the International Criminal Court. Global governance is a new political form (a rival to liberal democracy), that is already a significant actor on the world stage. America faces serious challenges from radical Islam and a rising China. Simultaneously, it faces a third challenge (global governance) that is internal to the democratic world; is non-violent; but nonetheless threatens constitutional self-government. Although it seems unlikely that the utopian goals of the globalists could be fully achieved, if they continue to obtain a wide spread influence over mainstream elite opinion, they could disable and disarm democratic self-government at home and abroad. The result would be the slow suicide of American liberal democracy. Whichever side prevails, the existential conflict of global governance versus American sovereignty (and democratic self-government in general) will be at the heart of world politics as far as the eye can see.
Why America Needs School Choice
Expanding school choice and competition is the single most important action we can take to improve America's schools. Although school choice faces strong opposition from powerful teacher unions and their entrenched political allies, expanding choice via vouchers, charters, and tax credits has repeatedly been shown to improve student achievement, reduce segregation, promote civic values, and facilitate other productive reforms. This eloquent Broadside outlines the case for school choice and shows how it is the most appealing strategy for anyone serious about educational reform.
What's Wrong with Benevolence
Is benevolence a virtue? In many cases it appears to be so. But when it comes to the “enlarged benevolence” of the Enlightenment, David Stove argues that the answer is clearly no. In this insightful, provocative essay, Stove builds a case for the claim that when benevolence is universal, disinterested and external, it regularly leads to the forced redistribution of wealth, which in turn leads to decreased economic incentives, lower rates of productivity, and increased poverty.As Stove points out, there is an air of paradox in saying that benevolence may be a cause of poverty. But there shouldn’t be. Good intentions alone are never sufficient to guarantee the success of one’s endeavors. Utopian schemes to reorganize the world have regularly ended in failure.Easily the most important example of this phenomenon is twentieth-century communism. As Stove reminds us, the attractiveness of communism—the “emotional fuel” of communist revolutionaries for over a hundred years—has always been “exactly the same as the emotional fuel of every other utopianism: the passionate desire to alleviate or abolish misery.” Yet communism was such a monumental failure that millions of people today are still suffering its consequences.In this most prescient of essays, Stove warns contemporary readers just how seductive universal political benevolence can be. He also shows how the failure to understand the connection between benevolence and communism has led to many of the greatest social miseries of our age.
How the EPA?s Green Tyranny is Stifling America
The relationship between environmental regulation and economic growth has gone from dysfunctional to disastrous under the leadership of Barack Obama’s USEPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson. Jackson’s EPA has assumed broad new powers and promulgated sweeping new regulations unlike anything that America has seen since the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were signed into law forty years ago. While much of the public has focused on the EPA’s plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, the Agency’s power grab extends into far more areas of society and the economy than fossil fuel use alone.Rich Trzupek explains why Obama’s EPA is different and more dangerous, than any other since the Agency was created forty years ago. From the oceans to consumer products, from the manufacturing line to the showroom floor, the tentacles of this EPA are silently creeping into more and more parts of our lives as Lisa Jackson smilingly assures the nation that everything the EPA does generates revenue rather than costing industry billions of dollars and America hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Government Unions and the Bankrupting of America
Government-workers unions have been political juggernauts in the U.S. since the unseen collective-bargaining-rights revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. These unions are different and more powerful than those that battle owners and managers in the private sector. To advance their interests, unions in the public sector have created cartels with their political allies, mostly in the Democratic Party, to the exclusion of the taxpaying public.In this Broadside, Daniel DiSalvo shows us how this government takeover happened and tells us what can be done to protect the public interest. The fiscal consequences have already proven dire and threaten the long-term power and prestige of the United States on the world stage.
After the Fall
Robust financial markets support capitalism, they don't imperil it. But in 2008, Washington policymakers were compelled to replace private risk-takers in the financial system with government capital so that money and credit flows wouldn't stop, precipitating a depression.Washington's actions weren't the start of government distortions in the financial industry, Nicole Gelinas writes, but the natural result of 25 years' worth of such distortions.In the early eighties, modern finance began to escape reasonable regulations, including the most important regulation of all, that of the marketplace. The government gradually adopted a «too big to fail» policy for the largest or most complex financial companies, saving lenders to failing firms from losses. As a result, these companies became impervious to the vital market discipline that the threat of loss provides.Adding to the problem, Wall Street created financial instruments that escaped other reasonable limits, including gentle constraints on speculative borrowing and requirements for the disclosure of important facts.The financial industry eventually posed an untenable risk to the economy – a risk that culminated in the trillions of dollars' worth of government bailouts and guarantees that Washington scrambled starting in late 2008.Even as banks and markets seem to heal, lenders to financial companies continue to understand that the government would protect them in the future if necessary. This implicit guarantee harms economic growth, because it forces good companies to compete against bad.History and recent events make clear what Washington must do.First, policymakers must reintroduce market discipline to the financial world. They can do so by re-creating a credible, consistent way in which big financial companies can fail, with lenders taking their warranted losses. Second, policymakers can reapply prudent financial regulations so that markets, and the economy, can better withstand inevitable excesses of optimism and pessimism. Sensible regulations have worked well in the past and can work well again.As Gelinas explains in this richly detailed book, adequate regulation of financial firms and markets is a prerequisite for free-market capitalism – not a barrier to it.
Surviving Hell
On April 19, 1967, Air Force Colonel Leo Thorsness was on a mission over North Vietnam when his wingman was shot down by an enemy MiG, which then lined up for a gunnery pass on the two American pilots who had bailed out. Although his F 105 was not designed for aerial combat, Thorsness engaged the MiG and destroyed it. Spotting four more MiGs, he fought his way through a barrage of North Vietnamese SAMs to engage them too, shooting down one and driving off the others. For this action, Thorsness was awarded the Medal of Honor. But he didn’t learn about it until years later—by a “tap code” coming through prison walls—because on April 30, Thorsness was shot down, captured, and transported to the Hanoi Hilton. Surviving Hell recounts a six-year captivity marked by hours of brutal torture and days of agonizing boredom. With a novelist’s eye for character and detail, Thorsness describes how he and other American POWs strove to keep their humanity. Thrown into solitary confinement for refusing to bow down to his captors, for instance, he disciplined his mind by memorizing long passages of poetry that other prisoners sent him by tap code. Filled with hope and humor, Surviving Hell is an eloquent story of resistance and survival. No other book about American POWs has described so well the strategies these remarkable men used in their daily effort to maintain their dignity. With resilience and resourcefulness, they waged war by other means in the darkest days of a long captivity.
President Obama's Tax Piracy
Starting on Jan. 1, 2011, President Obama’s economic recovery policy will begin the implementation of comprehensive, across-the-board tax rate increases for every major federal tax, along with some completely new taxes. Yet Obama and Congressional Democrats seek even more tax increases.In this insightful Broadside, Peter Ferrara shows that while President Reagan’s tax policies created a 25-year economic boom, the Obama tax tsunami will sink the economy further if it is not stopped. It will produce a double-dip recession in 2011 , if not a full economic crash. President Obama’s tax policies are effectively tax piracy, and they are more likely to lose revenue and leave bigger federal deficits and debt for the country.