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Democratic presidential candidates, including Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, along with progressive economists like Thomas Piketty and Paul Krugman, have made a case for redistributing income from the wealthy to the poor as a means of reducing inequalities in income and wealth. Meanwhile, public opinion polls show that voters reject programs of redistribution in favor of policies designed to promote overall economic growth and job creation. While voters are concerned about inequality, they are more skeptical of the capacity of the government to do anything about it without making matters worse for everyone.   In this Broadside, James Piereson explains why the voters are right and the progressive politicians and economists are wrong. As he demonstrates, the progressive case is based upon a serious fallacy: it assumes that the government is actually capable of redistributing income from the wealthy to the poor. For reasons of policy, tradition, and constitutional design, this is not the case. The United States currently has one of the more progressive income tax systems in the industrial world but it does little to redistribute income from the wealthy to the poor. One reason for this is that, though the government spends vast sums on programs to aid the poor, most of these funds flow to providers of services rather than to the poor themselves. Thus, whatever one may think of inequality, redistributive tax and spending policies are unlikely to do much to ameliorate it but will instead line the pockets of providers and advocates who wield great influence in Washington.

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Cronyism is a serious problem in the United States, but unfortunately it is still not very well understood. In this new essay, Jay Cost explains what it is, and why we should be so worried about it. By mingling private and public interests, cronyism costs us hundreds of billions of dollars per year and threatens to transform our republic into an oligarchy, where the rich dominate the middle class. Worse, modern cronyism has become embedded into the laws themselves, so politicians in Washington assume that such corruption is just the way things should be. To confront the dangers of cronyism, reformers need to think outside the box, paying special attention to how the political process functions.

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The terms “Front-Row Kids” and “Back-Row Kids,” coined by the photographer Chris Arnade, describe the divide between the educated upper middle class, who are staying ahead in today’s economy, and the less educated working class, who are doing poorly. The differences in education—and the values associated with elite schooling—have produced a divide in America that is on a par with that of race. The judiciary, requiring a postgraduate degree, is the one branch of government that is reserved for the Front-Row Kids. Correspondingly, since the Warren era, the Supreme Court has basically served as an engine for vindicating Front-Row preferences, from allowing birth control and abortion, to marginalizing religion in the public space, to legislative apportionment and libel law, and beyond. Professor Glenn Reynolds describes this problem in detail and offers some suggestions for making things better.

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How bad is the problem of media bias? The answer can be summed up in a few words: President Donald J. Trump. Whether you love him or hate him, there’s no question that Trump gained a huge amount of support for his willingness to criticize the media in harsh and unsparing terms. The media seems baffled by the fact that it’s lost the trust of the American people. It has responded by being extraordinarily defensive and doubling down on histrionic attacks. However, the American system has always depended on a strong and trusted media to hold those in power accountable. Journalist Mollie Hemingway looks at the impressive list of media failure that led us to this unique moment and asks, Is it possible for the media to recover its credibility before it’s too late?

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The United Nations is failing abysmally, and dangerously, in its mission. Founded in 1945 as a vehicle to avert war and promote human dignity and freedom, the U.N. has instead become a self-serving and ever-expanding haven of privilege for the world’s worst regimes, rife with bigotry, fraud, abuse, and corruption, both financial and moral. Yet the American foreign policy community treats it as taboo to speak seriously about sidelining, supplanting, or leaving the U.N. The usual argument is that the U.N. may be imperfect, but it’s all we’ve got.<BR> <BR>In this Broadside, Claudia Rosett explains why the U.N.’s basic design means it cannot really be reformed and why it is becoming ever more urgent to seek alternatives. Rosett argues that it’s time to break the taboo, and to bring fully into America’s foreign policy debates the question of how to dispense with the U.N. altogether.

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While Americans focus on terrorism, a more insidious Islamist threat to our way of life lurks. It is the agenda of sharia, Islam&#226;&#8364;&#8482;s authoritarian legal and political system. The global Islamist movement aims, in the words of the international Muslim Brotherhood, to destroy the West by sabotaging it from within. Its principal strategy is not mass-murder but the exploitation of Western freedoms and the insinuation of sharia principles into Western legal systems. Because those principles are hostile to our core liberties – indeed, hostile even to the bedrock premise that people are free to govern themselves as they see fit – sharia&#226;&#8364;&#8482;s advance gradually undermines our culture.The sharia agenda has found a friend in the Obama administration, which has embraced its vanguard, including the Brotherhood and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. President Obama is actively abetting the Islamist platform: promoting sharia in his foreign policy, easing enforcement of laws that stop Islamic &#8220;charities&#226;&#8364;&#157; from diverting funds to jihadist terror, and even sponsoring a United Nations resolution that – under the guise of insulating Islam from criticism – would stifle First Amendment rights.

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Appeals to &#8220;human dignity&#8221; are at the core of many of the most contentious social and political issues of our time. But these appeals suggest different and at times even contradictory ways of understanding the term. Is dignity something we all share equally, and therefore the reason we all ought to be treated as equals? Or is it what distinguishes some greater and more admirable human beings from the rest? What notion of human dignity should inform our private judgments and our public life?<BR><BR>In Neither Beast Nor God, Gilbert Meilaender elaborates the philosophical, social, theological, and political implications of the question of dignity, and suggests a path through the thicket. Meilaender, a noted theologian and a prominent voice in America&#8217;s bioethics debates, traces the ways in which notions of dignity shape societies, families, and individual lives, and incisively cuts through some common confusions that cloud our thinking on key moral and ethical questions. The dignity of humanity and the dignity of the person, he argues, are distinct but deeply connected&#8212;and only by grasping them both can we find our way to a meaningful understanding of the human condition.

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At the onset of Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity, Leon Kass gives us a status report on where we stand today: &#147;Human nature itself lies on the operating table, ready for alteration, for eugenic and psychic &#145;enhancement,&#8217; for wholesale redesign. In leading laboratories, academic and industrial, new creators are confidently amassing their powers and quietly honing their skills. For anyone who cares about preserving our humanity, the time has come for paying attention.&#8221; Trained as a medical doctor and biochemist, Dr. Kass has become one of our most provocative thinkers on bioethical issues. In Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity, he has written a book that grapples with the moral meaning of the new biomedical technologies now threatening to take us back to the future envisioned by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. In a series of mediations on cloning, embryo research, the sale of organs, and the assault on mortality itself, Kass questions the wisdom of trying to break down the natural boundaries given us and to remake the human body into an instrument of our will. He also attempts to chart a course by which we might avoid the dehumanization of biotechnical &#147;recreationism&#8221; without rejecting modern science or rejecting its genuine contributions to human welfare. Leon Kass writes profoundly about the limits of science and the limits of life, about what makes us human and gives us human dignity. Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity.

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The suicide bombings carried out in London in 2005 by British Muslims revealed an enormous fifth column of Islamist terrorists and their sympathizers. Under the noses of British intelligence, London has become the European hub for the promotion, recruitment and financing of Islamic terror and extremism – so much so that it has been mockingly dubbed Londonistan. In this ground-breaking book Melanie Phillips pieces together the story of how Londonistan developed as a result of the collapse of traditional English identity and accommodation of a particularly virulent form of multiculturalism. Londonistan has become a country within the country and not only threatens Britain but its special relationship with the U.S. as well.

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