Providence Journal

With Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick’s announcement that the Bush administration had agreed to increase and extend its support for Massachusetts’s bold health-care reform initiative, we witnessed the kind of bipartisan leadership that has thus far eluded those trying to stabilize the financial markets.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees not only the freedom to speak but also the freedom not to listen. The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that "no one has a right to press even good ideas on an unwilling recipient." Nevertheless, American businesses are increasingly violating the First Amendment freedoms of their employees.

Frito-Lay Inc., one of the world's largest producers of snack foods, is also one of America's worst abusers of employees' right not to listen.… more

For better or worse, America has a habit of conducting much of our policymaking through the presidential election process. This can be dangerous when meaningful reform efforts get trumped by volatile politics. Sure, we’d like campaign promises to mean something but it’s counter-productive if we let the consideration of good ideas get easily diverted into the gutter.

A case in point was the recent discussion of Hillary Clinton’s Baby Bond proposal, which was quickly hijacked by partisan politics.… more

A half-century ago, many urbanists, including the late Lewis Mumford, believed that the inexorable shift to the suburbs was transforming cities into discarded parcels of "a disordered and disintegrating urban mass." Yet today, cities seem in many ways not to be disintegrating; rather, they are widely believed to be enjoying a revival of considerable proportions.

Such an assessment may be replacing the excessive pessimism of the 1960s with an overblown optimism. In reality, thoughout the last 40 years the suburbs have gained ground on the urban centers… more

No sooner has the ineffective and unlamented "lockbox" gone to its grave than the next Social Security gimmick enters the scene.

Congressional Republicans are promoting legislation to issue certificates to each new retiree to "guarantee" their Social Security benefits would never be cut. Designed to make necessary reforms more palatable, these guarantees are little more than a P.R. stunt and, worse, one that is likely to backfire. Even today, as criticism of guarantee legislation mounts, Republican leaders hope to sneak it… more