AEI Press

Deconstructing the republic; voting rights, the Supreme Court, and the founders' republicanism reconsidered.

Just as Friedrich Hayek once argued that the "fatal conceit" of socialists and social democrats was the idea that political institutions have the knowledge necessary to regulate social and economic life, so Peacock (public law, Utah State U.) argues that the "fatal conceit" of the Supreme Court since the 1960s was that it had the knowledge to reconstruct American republicanism from the top down in accordance with a preconceived vision of "fairness." Nowhere is this more clear than in the Court's decisions in the reapportionment and Voting Rights Act cases of the 1960s, which he argues substituted multicultural republicanism for Madisonian republicanism by going beyond affirming the right to vote and instead guaranteeing the right to "effective" representation and an "undiluted vote." This development, Peacock argues, has led to a situation in which race has been effectively, and divisively, institutionalized in American government. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Ground truth; the future of U.S. land power.

The authors (both of the American Enterprise Institute) call for expanding the number of ground troops that the US can deploy in coming wars. They argue for training them to be able to fight across the "entire spectrum of conflict, from high-end major war to low-end peacekeeping missions." They discuss case studies of recent military campaigns in order to highlight current battlefield realities with which ground forces will need to cope. They describe the types of leadership, particularly junior leadership, that they believe will be needed in "forward deployment" situations and also discuss the necessity to build effective partnerships with foreign militaries they are seeking to develop and train. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Making a killing; the deadly implications of the counterfeit drug trade.

Bate (of the American Enterprise Institute) reviews the problem of counterfeit pharmaceuticals around the world from Internet pharmacies in the United States to street vendors in Africa. He discusses the economic dynamics of the counterfeit-drug trade, covering such topics as economic incentives to counterfeit, supply chains, tariffs, and the involvement of organized crime. Efforts to combat the counterfeit drug trade by national governments, international organizations, and corporations are reviewed and policy recommendations to render counterfeiting unprofitable are proffered. (Annotation ©2008 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)