FROM THE ARCHIVES.

15

YEARS AGO January 2008

If larger economies were to introduce guest worker programs like Singapore's, the impact on migrant welfare would be enormous. The number of foreign-born residents in the wealthy countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is now a mere 7 percent of the total population, as compared with the Asian city-state's 43 percent. The Harvard economist Dani Rodrik estimates that if OECD nations were to administer small temporary labor schemes, with the imported workers totaling just 3 percent of the countries' labor forces, the result would 'easily yield $200 billion annually for the citizens of developing nations,' dwarfing the $60 billion the same countries offer in official development aid.

KERRY HOWLEY

Guests in the Machine

20

YEARS AGO

January 2003

"The head of an organization standing for gun rights should damned well be prepared to address emotional anecdotal arguments against guns. Yet [Michael] Moore, like [Charlton] Heston, ultimately walks away from his toughest question. In the end, the only explanation for each individual gun death is an individual's choice to pull a trigger. Grand sociological theorizing can't provide the thousands of separate answers to why thousands of individuals made that choice. Any pressures of background or culture or poverty that weighed on shooters weighed similarly on thousands of nonshooters."

BRIAN DOHERTY

'Tears of a Clown"

25

YEARS AGO January 1998

The truth about sanctions is that they are typically one big geopolitical belly flop: a big splash and some self-inflicted pain. What's more, it's water sport to think that we must like those we buy from or sell to (do you check your grocer for political correctness, or do you examine her peaches?), or that we win hearts and minds by ham-handed attempts to solve longstanding battles in far-off locales. Those who argue for boycotting bad boys strike a righteous public pose--often at the cost of undermining progressive forces for genuine changes.

THOMAS W. HAZLETT

Peking Duck

30

YEARS AGO January 1993

There is an elusive but palpable sense in Miami that our leaders, no matter how much money they brought showering into town, failed us. Public opinion polls taken in the hurricane zone show that storm victims had a higher opinion of everyone else--the military, the Red Cross, their insurance adjusters, even the benighted FEMA--than they did of state government.

Fiery denunciations of the federal...