The critics of voter ID and election reform need to come up with better arguments. First, they allege that these laws are a ploy by Republicans to suppress the minority vote. Second, they say that voter ID laws put a burden on the poor to get a proper ID in order to vote. As Robert Knight explains in a recent column, neither of these two arguments can be used to explain why the Rhode Island chapter of the ACLU has demanded an end to the photo voter ID law in the state.

The law was put into effect by the solidly Democratic legislature in 2011. In fact, it was an African-American Democrat who introduced the bill in the Rhode Island Senate. Members of both parties cosponsored the bill in the House. This was hardly an example of voter suppression pushed through by Republicans.

What about the argument that photo ID laws are a burden on the poor or disabled? That can’t be an argument in Rhode Island. The state works very hard to help anyone from students to the homeless to seniors to the disabled obtain proper identification. You can register to vote showing several forms of ID. This includes such documents as an employers ID card, a credit or debit card, military ID card, student ID card, health club ID card, insurance plan ID card or a public housing ID card. If you don’t have any of those, there are 19 other items you can use. The state of Rhode Island even has a mobile phone app that gives citizens lots of voter information and even includes GPS directions to the nearest polling place.

Let me suggest that if you aren’t registered to vote or don’t have a photo ID, it is not the fault of the state of Rhode Island. That’s why I said at the beginning, that critics of voter ID laws are going to have to come up with a more convincing argument than the ones they have been using.

Is poverty in the world increasing or decreasing? Economists are discovering that it has substantially decreased. Kevin Hassett summarizes the data from economists who have been looking at the world distribution of income. By gathering data from many different countries, they have been able to count the number of individuals who live on a $1 per day or less, which is a key measure of poverty.

According to their calculation, the number of people living in poverty so defined has plummeted. The number used to be 967 million in 1970 and is now about 350 million. This trend is even more impressive when you consider that the world population has increased by 3 billion people over the same period of time.

What is the reason for this reduction in poverty? The biggest factor is the emergence of middle classes in previously poverty-stricken China and India. And as capitalism has spread to other countries, there has been a similar impact.

Kevin Hassett makes a bold prediction. He believes that if this current trend continues for just 40 more years, “poverty will have been essentially eradicated from the globe. And capitalism will have done it.”

Does capitalism reduce poverty more effectively than socialism? To answer that question the authors reconstructed the distribution of income for the countries of the former Soviet Union. Back in the days of communism, poverty was much higher than it is today. More open societies with freer market raised annual incomes.

Kevin Hassett believes that the current criticisms of capitalism may be off target. He disagrees with “those who have argued that the current financial crisis has served as proof that capitalism is a failed ideology.” The work of these economists “suggests that there are about a billion people whose lives prove otherwise.”

At one time or another we have all heard the comment that what we believe “may be true for you, but it isn’t true for me.” In his article, Francis Beckwith provides a humorous but instructive way to respond to that oft-used comment.

He said: “Several years ago, after a pick-up basketball game, I got into a discussion with one of my teammates about a book I was reading on the Christian philosophy of religion. When I mentioned that the book claimed that a Christian may have rational warrant for his theological beliefs, my teammate, a committed believer in reincarnation, responded, ‘That may be true for you, but that’s not true for me.'”

We have all heard someone say something like that before. So let’s rejoin Francis Beckwith and hear how he handled it. He said: “Puzzled by that response, I replied, ‘Is it true for both of us, or just true for you, that what may be true for me is not true for you?’ Quickly losing confidence in his coffeehouse aphorism, he said he didn’t think it right that I was trying to push my religion on him.”

“I, of course, was suggesting that he was trying to push his religion, in particular, his religious epistemology, on me. . . . In other words, under the guise of openness and tolerance, he was, without my consent, dictating the epistemological terms under which I could announce my religious beliefs to others.”

Francis Beckwith is using some big words here, but essentially what he is saying is that phrase “it may be true for you but not for me” is actually pushing a particular philosophy of knowledge. So it is indeed ironic that his basketball teammate then retreated to saying that Francis Beckwith was trying to push his religion on him.

Without realizing it, his teammate was more dogmatic then he even realized. I think he ended up learning some philosophy and apologetics on the basketball court.

The numerous videos of Planned Parenthood have generated lots of comments and conversation. Sadly, they have also demonstrated how many Americans want to deny what is happening. And they have provided a platform for lots of disinformation.

Denial is how most of us react to news that is troubling and unexpected. We shouldn’t be surprised that many Americans have troubling accepting the reality presented in these undercover videos. John Zmirak reminds us that the Allies in World War II had difficulty understanding the full extent of the Final Solution when it was first revealed. The Holocaust seemed unthinkable, so it was difficult to grasp the horror of what took place in the death camps.

He adds that the villains this time aren’t Nazi soldiers. “They are pretty, well-coifed women like Planned Parenthood’s Cecil Richards, and spunky legislators in pink running shoes like former Texas State Senator Wendy Davis.” No wonder it is hard for many Americans to accept and understand what is taking place in these abortion clinics.

It also makes it easier to accept Planned Parenthood’s disinformation campaign. Some candidates say they will continue to support the organization because of the supposed good they do for women’s health. Yet, the latest statistics show that abortions make up 94 percent of Planned Parenthood’s pregnancy services. Their annual reports show that abortions are on the rise and non-abortion services are declining.

Pro-life politicians and advocates remind us that there are 13 times more Federally Qualified Health Centers in American that do not provide abortion than there are Planned Parenthood centers. They deserve our funding and support not an organization that aborts more than 300,000 babies every year and receives $1.5 million in taxpayer dollars every day.

Earlier this month, I saw an article in USA Today with the title: “Pentagon’s elite forces lack diversity.” That same day Col. Allen West was in my radio studio, and I commented that you could also say that the elite NHL hockey teams lack diversity and some NBA basketball teams lack diversity. That’s because they are dedicated to putting the best players on the ice or on the court. Doesn’t the same standard apply to the men and women in uniform?

He agreed, so I wasn’t surprised to see his recent commentary with the provocative title: “If I were Secretary of Defense, here’s the FIRST position I’d eliminate.” He says there is “no need for diversity agents to try and manipulate the composition of our armed forces, sacrificing our effectiveness in pursuit of fairness, under the guise of enhanced increased capability.” Diversity is not the goal of the military. The goal is to fight and win wars.

He wonders if the mantra of “every kid gets a trophy” that inhabits our youth athletic programs has now come to the Pentagon. Let’s be clear, anyone who can rightfully be called a Navy SEAL or a Ranger or a member of the Delta Force earned that designation. Skin color or ethnic origin had nothing to do with becoming one of our nation’s elite forces.

At a time when we are facing so many potential threats from terrorists and countries like Russia, China, and Iran, we should be putting the most qualified people in these elite forces regardless of their skin color.

Allen West concludes that the “policies of our Defense Department MUST not be about meeting quota goals, but rather in placing the MOST qualified, trained and ready force on the field of battle.” Thank you Col. West for your service and for injecting some common sense into this discussion.

The Republican presidential campaign and the first Republican presidential debate have shown that many Americans don’t seem to value previous political experience in choosing a candidate. Donald Trump has been leading in the polls for weeks. Not only has he never served in political office, this is the first time he has even run for political office.

After the first presidential debates, some wondered if some Americans would change their minds about the candidates. They did, but not in a way that many pundits predicted. A poll taken after the debate showed that of the 17 participants, the top 5 were all people who had never run a state government or a federal agency.

We shouldn’t take polls taken this early too seriously. Eight years ago, the leading Republican candidate in the polls was Rudy Giuliani. Second was Fred Thompson. Candidates rise and fall long before the first caucus or primary.

Still the phenomenon before us is interesting, and perhaps troubling. Americans generally favor someone with administrative experience as a governor. Think of who we have elected as president in the last eighty years: Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Governor Jimmy Carter, Governor Ronald Reagan, Governor Bill Clinton, and Governor George W. Bush. Add to that others who were nominated but not elected: Governor Michael Dukakis and Governor Mitt Romney.

This is an unusual year in which non-politicians like Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina are some of the most popular candidates along with senators like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Few governors have made it into the top tier.

At the moment, the polls illustrate the Republican voters dislike of the political establishment rather than a desire for someone with previous administrative experience. It remains to be seen whether they will later give some of the governors a second look.

A few decades ago, marriages were the foundation of what many commentators referred to as “the traditional family.” Now marriages and families are taking some very unfamiliar shapes and orientations due to different views of marriage and family.

Americans are not exactly sure about what to think about these dramatic changes in marriage and family. On the one hand, they believe that marriage and family are very important. One survey found that their readers rated their relationship to their spouse as the single most important factor in their personal happiness. On the other hand, Americans are much less sanguine about other people’s marriages and families.

I call this the “Lake Wobegon effect” where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are about average.” In other words, their marriage and family are fine, but the rest of the marriages and families are not. The MassMutual Family Values Study found that a majority (81 percent) pointed to their family as the greatest source of pleasure, it also found that a majority (56 percent) rated the family in the U.S. “only fair” or “poor.” And almost six in ten expected it to get worse in the next ten years. The survey came to the same conclusion that I mentioned earlier. It said that: “Americans seem to see the family in decline everywhere but in their own home.”

Similar results can be found in many other nationwide polls. A Gallup poll found that Americans believe the family is worse off today then it was ten years ago. And they believed it would be worse off in the future as well. This belief that the future will be worse than the present appears to be true not only for family but for other social issues as well.

While most Americans feel good about their own marriage and family, they are concerned about other marriages and family. Perhaps their own experience is closer to reality.

If you want to know the future of an economy or a technology, one helpful measure is Wriston’s Law (named after Walter Wriston, a significant name in banking and finance). His book, The Twilight of Sovereignty, explained that capital (both financial capital and intellectual capital) “will go where it is wanted, stay where it is well-treated.”

The success of America in the recent past illustrates the reality of Wriston’s Law. America was a safe place for smart people and investment capital. America attracted talent and money while other countries repelled it.

Immigrants came to America is droves in the 20th century because this was the land of opportunity. They came to this country with some skills and dreams of success. They succeeded because there were many opportunities and few barriers.

America developed the atomic bomb in the 1940s in part because America welcomed talented immigrants from central Europe because Nazi Germany repelled them. Later, some of them helped build the American space program.

The economic conditions of America were also welcoming. While Europe raised taxes, presidents like John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan lowered them. Capital moved to America and created jobs and provided a foundation for new technologies. Investment capital also attracted great minds and encouraged foreign students to come and study in our universities.

Let’s now apply Wriston’s Law to America today. Are we as attractive to investment capital as we were just a few decades ago? I don’t think so. Our tax rates are equal to or even exceed the tax rates in other developed countries.

And are we attracting talent and entrepreneurs like we were in the past? Once again, I don’t think so. America also seems to be making it harder for educated and skilled foreigners to enter this country and become U.S. citizens.

I don’t think it is too late to turn this around, but we need to change our policies.