The Future of Freedom Foundation is sponsor of an important conference -- Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties

The confirmed speakers list suggests this will be an event filled with people who take seriously their commitment to constitutional principles. The date: June 1- June 4, 2007
Get more information here.

Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans. ... The willingness of Americans to do a job depends on how much that job pays -- and the reason some jobs pay too little to attract native-born Americans is competition from poorly paid immigrants.

--Paul Krugman, excerpt from "North of the Border," New York Times (3/27/06)

The natural, free market way to help low income Americans is to increase their value by making them rarer commodities. How do you do this? You guessed it, by severely curtailing (a moratorium would be ideal) immigration. Do that and America becomes more of a worker's market, forcing businesses to offer more money to attract applicants.

-- Selwyn Duke, excerpt from "What Jobs Americans Won't Do?," NewsWithViews (4/3/06)

There are 8.3 million native-born workers 18 years of age or older working full-time who have not completed high school. In addition, there are 3.4 million adult native-born Americans who lack a high school education working part-time. There is a good deal of evidence that these workers are in direct competition with Mexican immigrants. ... In a comparison across cities, Cordelia Reimers found that the impact of immigration falls heaviest on African-American and white high school dropouts. Other research has come to a similar conclusion. Because immigration in general and Mexican immigration in particular increases the supply of high school dropouts, it should come as no surprise that it reduces wages for unskilled workers.

-- Excerpt from "Impact of Mexican Immigration on Wages and Prices in the United States," Center for Immigration Studies.

Right after the sixties' civil-rights victories came what I believe to be the greatest miscalculation in black American history. Others had oppressed us, but this was to be the first "fall" to come by our own hand. We allowed ourselves to see a greater power in America's liability for our oppression than we saw in ourselves. Thus, we were faithless with ourselves just when we had given ourselves reason to have such faith. We couldn't have made a worse mistake. We have not been the same since.

To go after America's liability we had to locate real transformative power outside ourselves. Worse, we had to see our fate as contingent on America's paying off that liability. We have been a contingent people ever since, arguing our weakness and white racism in order to ignite the engine of white liability. And this has mired us in a protest-group identity that mistrusts individualism because free individuals might jeopardize the group's effort to activate this [white] liability.

-- Shelby Steele, "The Age of White Guilt, and the Disappearance of the Black Individual," Harper's magazine, November 2002.

# Even wrong ideas have a contribution to make, when they provoke open discussions and investigations that end up with our knowing and understanding more than we knew or understood before. What contribution has the enforced silence of censorship ever made?

-- Thomas Sowell

# I once wrote that if reparations are paid to African-Americans, every cent of that money would be back in the hands of the white and Asian communities inside a week. I got called "Uncle Tom," I got called "Sambo," I got called "traitor," and everything else. A short time later, Louis Farrakhan comes to Baltimore and says the exact same thing, practically verbatim. He got a standing ovation. Go figure!

-- Gregory Kane, Baltimore Sun journalist

"The pursuit of integration has cost African-Americans too much," says Kenny Gamble. A well-known music composer and producer, and now a land developer, Gamble speaks of the thriving black communities where people once came to "enjoy black food, music and clubs." Reciting a fact acknowledged by so many regretful blacks before him, Gamble says, "We created a community for ourselves. That's the reason why I think the integration movement was not well-thought out, because you devastated the black community."

-- Doing it the old-fashioned way

An African's view of the film "Adanggaman":

After having seen the film, we would embarrass ourselves to ask for reparations. We've just seen how slavery was not caused only by white traders, but that it existed even before the arrival of the whites. The Negro kings, who enslaved other black people, made the bondage of their own sons possible in the New World. Who is it we can compensate today?

-- Some truth about slavery

On "eminent domain" and the Kelo Supreme Court decision:

As a matter of logic, no “just compensation” is possible in a forced sale of property, because the only just price is the one freely negotiated by seller and buyer. What makes a transaction morally legitimate is not compensation but consent. Eminent-domain cases are distinguished precisely by their lack of seller’s consent. . . . If the Court can liberate itself from any “literal requirement” when reading the Takings Clause, it follows that it can liberate itself from that requirement when reading any other part of the Constitution. But that means we can never know how the Court will claim to understand the Framers’ limits on government power. Which means: there are no limits on government power.

-- Sheldon Richman, "The Supreme Court Repeals the Constitution," Future of Freedom Foundation.

Do we need leaders who, for decades, misled the black masses away from economic strategies into corrupting social programs, any more than we need a former U.S. President who, during his Presidency, publicly gloated that he looked forward to the day when other races in this country outnumber his own? What kind of leaders offer demoralization in place of uplift, or encourage self-annihilation?

Think. It's patriotic.