Letters

From the April 1997 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

Dr. Vine asserts that the "ramifications of an addictive rate of 6 percent" would be "catastrophic and unacceptable." Does he mean that, if this rate applied to chronic pain patients, they should not receive narcotics? Depending on who's counting, 5 percent to 10 percent of drinkers are alcoholics, yet we do not therefore conclude that no one should have access to alcohol, even though heavy drinking is far more debilitating than daily opioid use (assuming a reliable supply, no drug mixing, and sanitary injection practices). Surely the reason someone in pain wants opioids is at least as compelling as the reason someone unwinding after a hard day at work wants a beer or a cocktail.

Ba-a-a-d Example

I am writing in regards to "Eternal Life," an article by Jonathan Rauch which ran in REASON back in the August/September 1996 issue. Rauch's comments about the National Sheep Industry Improvement Center were incorrect and are continuing to result in inflammatory misinformation about the U.S. sheep industry as other publications -- most recently the January 1997 issue of Reader's Digest -- print excerpts from this one-sided, erroneous article.

Rauch started his article by writing about the wool subsidy established in 1954. That program was called the National Wool Act. It was enacted solely to level the financial playing field between U.S. sheep producers and their Australian and New Zealand counterparts, who were flooding the U.S. market with their products. What Rauch didn't include in his article is the fact that the Wool Act was phased out in 1993 under the guise of budget cuts. More important, he chose to omit the fact that the Wool Act was paid for by tariffs at no cost to taxpayers.

Since the Wool Act's three-year phase-out -- which was completed last year -- an estimated 25 percent of U.S. sheep producers have gone out of business. Their sudden withdrawal from the industry has resulted in crumbling infrastructure and economic losses, especially in rural communities where individuals derive a significant portion of their income from the U.S. sheep industry.

The National Sheep Industry Improvement Center addresses the U.S. sheep industry and rural economic development. It is not a continuation of the Wool Act, which provided payments directly to sheep producers, as Rauch said. It is a rural economic development program that will help rebuild the U.S. sheep industry's crumbling infrastructure.

It is only one of many programs designed to support America's working families who raise food and fiber, pay taxes, and support their communities. It is the industry's best hope for keeping alive an industry which economists estimate contributes $6.7 billion annually to the national economy. It is a $20 million one-time appropriation with a total of $50 million allowed over 10 years -- a fraction of what's being collected through wool tariffs. It is an investment in American business and industry.

This working program for working families ought to be supported. Unfortunately, when irresponsible journalists like Jonathan Rauch start spreading misinformation and innuendos, the challenge for the U.S. sheep industry to persevere becomes unnecessarily more burdensome.

Steve Raftopoulos
President
American Sheep Industry Association
Englewood, CO

Jonathan Rauch replies: REASON readers can judge for themselves the importance of the National Sheep Industry Improvement Center. They can also weigh the rather bold argument that, because American consumers subsidize wool producers by paying tariffs, American taxpayers should also subsidize wool producers by financing a sheep industry center. But Steve Raftopoulos's sloppy letter does make me wonder whose article, if any, he actually read. He says, "What Rauch didn't include in his article is the fact that the Wool Act was phased out in 1993." I wrote: "Finally, in 1993, a Democratic Congress killed the whole thing." He says that the sheep center "is not a continuation of the Wool Act, as Rauch said." I wrote that the center is a new program enacted in 1996, empowered to "enhance production and marketing of sheep or goat products in the United States" -- a direct quotation from the law.

To call any journalist an "irresponsible" spreader of "misinformation and innuendos" requires, it seems to me, the citation of at least one contrary fact. Otherwise, to whom does the charge stick?

Gay Rites

Nick Gillespie defends homosexual marriage on the basis of "free choice" and of the inevitability that our "evolutionary" society will ratify it in his editorial "Wedding Bell News" (December). Yet he fails to recognize that one person's choice in our complex society can never occur in a social vacuum where other citizens' equal right to choice is not infringed upon, or denied outright. Homosexuals may be free to choose their lifestyle, but government is not free to coerce other Americans into legitimizing such behavior.

When government, in the name of a city council, a governor, a legislature, or the U.S. Supreme Court, attempts to coerce citizens into legitimizing, crediting, affirming, and paying for homosexual behavior, whether dressed up in wedding gowns or any other garb, it is a violation of the American citizen's fundamental right to conscience, privacy, association, and, yes, our fundamental right to discriminate among personal behavior patterns, no matter whose. It is by precisely such coercion, as manifested by the Supreme Court when it provided near protected class status in response to Colorado's Amendment 2, that government loses its legitimacy.

Gillespie is correct when he tells us that a private employer has the right to offer employee benefits to anyone it chooses to, including homosexual partners. Consumers have an equal right to take such corporate policy into account in the marketplace.