School choice – which gives parents control over where the public dollars earmarked for their children’s education will be spent – is the most promising education reform in the United States today. Among reform proposals, it alone transfers power over basic education decisions from bureaucrats to parents, providing poor children in the worst school systems […]
A number of weeks ago, the Calvert Institute released the first of its new Calvert Issue Brief (CIB) series. These in-depth studies of the concerns of the day are available to all institute donors upon request. We realize, however, that time is limited for many readers. Therefore, space permitting, the institute shall in future also […]
It is a rare day indeed when this journal opposes a tax cut, a rarer one still when it actually suggests an increase. But Harford County Executive Eileen Rehrmann’s proposal to do away with the state property tax prompts this response. It is, of course, entirely natural for gubernatorially aspiring politicians to dream up election-year […]
Each year, the Maryland General Assembly considers over 2,500 bills during its 90-day session. Because of this volume and due to limited time, it is difficult adequately to address each bill proposed. It would help if there were fewer bills, if certain categories of bill were simply ignored or ruled “off limits” or were dealt […]
Will Rogers is supposed to have said, “The trouble with most folks isn’t their ignorance, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.” Ron Dworkin’s disapproving review of Charles Murray’s What it Means to Be a Libertarian, published in the spring 1997 issue of Calvert News, is based on some ideas about economics […]
From time to time, the Calvert Institute will be interviewing the major contenders in the 1998 gubernatorial race. In this issue, we have a conversation with Eileen Rehrmann, county executive for Harford County, who is challenging incumbent Governor Parris Glendening in the Democratic primary. Calvert Question. What has moved you to challenge Governor Glendening in […]
There can scarcely be a soul in Maryland convinced by Governor Parris N. Glendening’s (D) rationale for his plan to pump $250 million or so of state money into the Prince George’s County school system over the next five years. The funds will supposedly be used for any new school construction required if the school-busing […]
The 1990s will come to be known as the heyday of the information age. The cost will be the loss of personal privacy. Privacy will become the legislative issue of the late 1990s. If we maintain that government can only be for the cause of the governed, then government must rein in the erosion of […]
Reprinted with permission of the Capital Research Center, Washington, D.C., in one of whose publications a version of it previously appeared. The word “crisis” is much overused in America these days, but there really is no better word to describe the problems afflicting the nation’s inner cities. The social pathologies are overwhelming: illegitimacy, crime, drug […]
Beginning in 1985, nearly five million members of the American military underwent routine drug testing, a program which continues, and which is credited with having virtually eliminated from the military the serious problems of drug abuse which afflicted it following the Vietnam war.1 That program is generally adjudged a successful one, though it has inspired […]