Public Justice Report editor James Skillen evaluates America’s engagement in Iraq in the light of the just-war criteria. These include requirements such as that of a declaration of war by a legitimate authority for a just cause and only as a last resort. Also required is the expectation of success in achieving an outcome of stable governance by means of a properly proportioned use of force. Evaluating the war on these terms is quite different from making utilitarian calculations of whether the ends America wants to achieve are worthy enough to justify using military force to try to achieve them.

In the Editor’s Watch this issue James Skillen argues that the 40th anniversary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is the time to make an even greater advance in guaranteeing minorities the right to vote. Americans need the radical reforms of the kind entailed in systems of proportional representation.

Roy Clouser’s important book on the religious grounding of all theories has just been published in a second, revised edition: The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An Essay on the Hidden Role of Religious Belief in Theories. The editor offers an introductory overview.

Judith Dean (U.S. International Trade Commission) and two colleagues have edited a valuable book for those who want to get to the root of poverty in developing countries. Attacking Poverty in the Developing World: Practitioners and Academics in Collaboration is the book in which 20 highly qualified authors demonstrate what team work can do while calling for more of it.

Political scientist John Hiemstra cautions those who think that development of the oil sands in his province of Alberta will significantly meet the energy needs of North America and bring perpetual happiness to Albertans. Poverty, environmental degradation, and skewed economic development appear to be the unsustainable by-products.

Economist Prabhu Guptara points out the good and the bad of globalization. Yet he argues that technological momentum, overproduction at a time of growing world poverty, and an outdated economic theory of scarcity are driving us in the wrong direction.

This is an excerpt from the June 21 congressional testimony of Stanley Carlson-Thies, director of social policy studies at the Center for Public Justice. Congress needs to take seven essential steps, he argues, to secure government’s equal treatment of the hundreds of nongovernment service providers that cooperate with it in addressing social needs.