America the Conservative

Edward Glaeser (“America the Conservative,” Opinion, Sept. 26) says the United States is less likely to support redistribution of wealth than the Europeans because our population is more heterogeneous and our diverse racial and ethnic groups tend to help only their own kind.

But I believe a better way to think about our heterogeneity is that it makes our society less class-conscious than the Europeans. This, coupled with the least-regulated economy of any developed country (which Glaeser implies is somehow evil), allows anybody in this country to move ahead based on his own intelligence and ambition.

Nearly half the U.S. population can trace its roots to the mass of ethnically diverse immigrants entering this country through Ellis Island, mainly before World War I. Most came with just the clothes on their backs. Within two or three generations, their descendants have achieved the American dream without the help of wealth being redistributed to them by the government.

Sheldon Welles

Pacific Palisades

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When Glaeser says that we remain locked in the 18th century, I tend to agree. Compared with all the other developed countries in the world, the U.S is noticeably more conservative. In the traditional views regarding prostitution, light drugs or gay relationships, the U.S. stands way behind countries like Australia and Holland.

We are still afraid of change. We try to stick with “what works” as if what works for us must work for all Americans.

Can we for once or twice get down from Mt. Olympus and look around at other countries? Maybe we can learn a thing or two?

Gilat Rapaport

Encino

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Glaeser bemoans the fact that our nation is the most conservative developed nation in the world. He seems miffed that our economy is the least regulated, that our welfare state is the smallest, that our military is the strongest and our people the most religious.

Talk about your out-of-touch socialist professor trapped in an ivory tower who obviously wasn’t a Ronald Reagan man.

Steve Beck

Glendora

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Though Glaeser was accurate in calling America conservative, he made at least one mistake. He claims that the U.S. elects its representatives by “majority.” In most elections in the United States this is false, because the elections are determined by the winner of a plurality.

Glaeser mentions the better educational equity of primary and secondary education, but fails to mention that post-secondary education in the United States offers more opportunities to return to school for those who need new skills.

The public community college in the United States is largely unrivaled in its accessibility to nontraditional students and students who don’t meet the minimum academic requirements to directly attain admission to a four-year college.

Despite Europe’s socialism, college there is still more elitist and traditional in some respects than in the United States.

Shawn Augsburger

Irvine

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Two intellectuals offer Times readers the benefit of some bewildering advice in Sunday’s Opinion. Glaeser is of the opinion that if the United States changes its Constitution to be less protective of private property, destroys the power of the Supreme Court and abandons the concepts of separation of powers and majority rule, America could become just like France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. That will not happen.

Carlos Fuentes, in yet another of his U.S.-bashing pieces (“You Scare Us”), informs us that “many Latin Americans worry that U.S. unilateralism is incompatible with the multilateralist nature of globalization.”

That sounds as if our neighbors to the south would very much like the U.S. to abandon its national sovereignty in the interest of what he calls the “rule of law” -- of the utterly dysfunctional, ineffectual and corrupt United Nations, no doubt. If those are the options, I prefer that Latin Americans continue to worry.

What I suggest Fuentes do is to concentrate his efforts on how Latin America can develop economic and political systems that will operate in the interest of its people, systems that Latin America has lacked from even before the time the U.S. existed.

Manuel H. Rodriguez

Burbank