Discovery Institute | Page 794 | Public policy think tank advancing a culture of purpose, creativity, and innovation.

Americans have decided, if the polls are right, that the most important issue facing this country is campaign finance reform. But the polls probably are not right, reflecting, as they do, the media’s priorities and the lack of any military or economic bad news. This may be a case where the survey respondents are trying to guess the answer that Read More ›

We are enjoying–maybe even wallowing–in the increasing “peace dividends” from the ending of the Cold War. Yet few in the media or academia are reflecting on what caused the war or how the peace was achieved. In an age that synthesizes victimhood in many ways, it is curious how little attention is paid the hundreds of millions of genuine victims, Read More ›

In the next few weeks the Federal Communications Commission will decide whether the U.S. telephone industry unleashes a new birth of competition, entrepreneurship and innovation. When Congress completed last year’s comprehensive revision of telecommunications legislation–the first in 60 years–pundits foresaw a flowering of new services in the telecommunications marketplace. The Baby Bells were to take on the long distance companies, Read More ›

He was a restless young attorney who was also a frustrated architect and planner. On Sunday afternoons in the late 60’s he used to recruit his wife and a friend (me, on some occasions) to drive around Seattle looking at any new buildings going up. He would complain about the lack of good planning in town and sketch in the Read More ›

The general theme of my argument is, Don’t solve problems. When you solve problems, you end up subsidizing your weaknesses, starving your strengths, and achieving expensive mediocrity, and in a competitive global economy expensive mediocrity goes out of business. Washington has a compulsion to solve problems, and that is really the basic flaw of the Washington approach to problems-it tries Read More ›