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Showing posts from March, 2012

Helping North Koreans 'strike the blow' (Korea Times)

H ave you ever engaged in action not because you were sure it would change the world, but to satisfy your own heart? That, I emailed to an American friend, is why I have joined the effort to help North Koreans who are trying to escape from their homeland. I can’t change the direction of policy in North Korea or China but I can row the boat I am sitting in rather than lamenting that I can’t steer the yachts somewhere else. So I have tried to do what I can: Attending protests in front of the Chinese embassy in Seoul (and I plan to do so when I visit America in April); donating money to the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights ( www.nkhumanrights.or.kr ); educating myself, writing articles and emailing friends; and, as a member of the board of trustees, I recently submitted a resolution to the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association (FDMHA) in Washington, D.C., to try to call attention to the plight of North Koreans. Our organization’s missi

Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell

Thanks to Thomas Sowell's publicist, I just received a copy of Sowell's revised and updated Intellectuals and Society. 669 pages, so it might be some time before I get around to doing a review. Below is a photo I took with him back in 1999 when I met him. I told him that when I switched my ideology from socialism that friends and I dubbed ourselves "Sowell Brothers."

Keynote address to Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association (2003)

Parents: Save Yourselves and Your Children by Casey Lartigue This article appeared on cato.org on October 28, 2003.    Ever since I received the invitation to speak here, I've been looking at education in the 21st century through the 19th century, yet timeless, eyes of Frederick Douglass. We can never know exactly what Frederick Douglass would have thought about education today. But I hope you won't mind that I take a few guesses. I've divided my talk into two parts. First, what we can learn today from what Frederick Douglass did and said when he was faced with tough circumstances. Second, I want to guess about some of the things that Douglass would say directly to parents today. My main conclusion is that Frederick Douglass would have tried to improve the public school system, but also that he would have been quite content to fight or abandon it. So let me start by spending a few minutes talking about how Freder

Mything the Point on Sweden (the Korea Times)

By Casey Lartigue, Jr. The message was clear: “Don’t do what we’re doing” when it comes to welfare and economic policies. That’s what (former) Senator Franco Debendetti and lawyer Alessandro De Nicola of Italy, and University of Athens professor Aristides Hatzis said in policy forums organized by the Center for Free Enterprise (CFE) in Seoul last August and October. Professor Hatzis took it one step further, in a speech that caught the attention of Korean president Lee Myung-bak: “If you see Greece doing something, then do the opposite thing.” “But what about Sweden” was the response from those pushing for universal welfare policies in Korea. That has become the common refrain from politicians and academics around the world for several decades in the West and recently in Korea. “What about Sweden?” With that in mind, CFE invited Johnny Munkhammar, a member of the Moderate Party in the Parliament of Sweden, to Seoul from March 5 to 7. Munkhammar surprised the audience