"You don't need a doctorate to understand that declaring your city a 'sanctuary' for illegal immigrants will attract more illegal immigrants," Noah Rothman writes in the new cover story of NATIONAL REVIEW magazine.
You need not be Milton Friedman to understand that price controls stand no chance of taming inflation stoked by loose monetary policy and huge amounts of federal fiscal stimulus.
And you need not be a big-city cop to understand the lessons learned in subduing the post-'60s crime wave that only crested with the "broken windows" law-enforcement paradigm.
But, as Noah writes in "The Great Unlearning," in recent years American society has almost deliberately set out to forget what it has learned. From the international chaos aided and abetted by American weakness and withdrawal to the corrosive effects of lawlessness on our streets and to the gigantic unseen tax on the middle class in the form of inflation, today's problems are "a product of willful disregard of the example set by our forebears."
We should expect a civic-minded citizenry to intuit the consequences of allowing the mentally unwell to, as one legal activist proudly suggested, "avoid psychiatric hospitalizations and the revolving door of jail." But that is the policy that in many cities has led to an increasing number of dangerous interactions between the public and the mentally disturbed. The elimination of cash bail and pre-trial-detention requirements for crimes ranging from arson to manslaughter doesn't advance anyone's idea of social justice. It just ensures that social and civic dysfunction will become a way of life.
"These truths do not need rediscovery," Noah writes. "They just need not to be forgotten." The question for Americans going forward is: Are we ready to admit that the grand rejection of the tried and true across many different areas of public life has been by and large a failure? Are the American people ready to demand a return to what has been proven to work in the past? Or will we suffer through more of the same by deliberately forgetting what works?
Read the entirety of Noah's essay here.
And while you're at it, check out the complete, new, January issue of NATIONAL REVIEW magazine — our third in our new monthly format. In it you'll find 72 pages packed with fantastic essays and lively reads — including the world-famous "The Week," book reviews and Ross Douthat's film criticism, and Rob Long's gonzo satire column, "The Long View." (In every new issue, I always read Rob first.)
Among other items in this issue, you'll find:
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Very sincerely yours,
Mark Antonio Wright
Executive Editor
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