Amy Chua is a law professor at Yale, but at the moment she is best known as an advocate of “Chinese mothering.”

Following the release of her new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, she wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal that has elicited the most comments of anything to ever appear in the publication. The thrust of her article is that her uncompromising demands for excellence from her two children including no sleepovers, mandatory piano practice, no school sports, and rote memorization of basic math principles combined with condemnation of any grade other an A (even an A-) is the best way to raise children.

She scoffs at the soft American approach of complimenting the weak tries of children in order to enhance their sense of self-esteem. She argues that kids see through the shallow self-esteem ploy because it is insincere, while by earning praise through hard work and outstanding achievement children build a solid foundation for future success in a tough world.

After reading Amy Chua’s story I remembered an old Jewish joke.

A mother is pushing her 30-year-old son through a store in a wheelchair. An acquaintance comes up to her and says, “Mrs. Goldberg, how sad. You’re son cannot walk.” She replies, “Oh, he can walk fine, but thank God he doesn’t have to.”

Two sides of the spectrum. Where do you stand?

Chua has taken a lot of heat for her ode to Chinese parenting. She has backtracked a little, saying the piece was partly satirical in its black and whiteness, but she stands by her approach. Her two daughters have brilliant academic and musical achievements and she claims to have a great relationship with them.

Question: Do you agree with her style of parenting? Should that style of treatment be used with employees in the workplace?

I laud the Republican effort in the House to repeal the new health care law, not because it will succeed directly, but because it will rekindle the debate about how we balance the needs of the uninsured, share the costs, and allocate the control of health care in the U.S.

Everybody knows the old system was a patchwork improvisation which developed over 50 years. We’ve adjusted to it over time, but it really isn’t serving us well with constantly escalating prices and 30 million uncovered. I do not pretend to know how to fix what ails the system, but I assume the new law is a mess of regulations which must be shaped by experience.

I see the health care debate now entering a new and hopefully more realistic phase of negotiation between insurance companies, big business interests, small business advocates, doctors, and patients mediated by government. Health coverage will gradually be worked out over several years with the 2012 election affecting the negotiations.

We will have theater in Congress, but the real action will be the haggling over the regulations and finding out how the insurance exchanges work in practice. The new law may be horrible or it may not be half bad. In 12 to 18 months, after hundreds of wrestling matches in private, we’ll have a better idea of what works.

Question: Are you hopeful about the outcome of the debate, or will Obamacare simply be a disaster?