Voices of Reason

Thirty Years of Interviews

From the December 1998 issue

(Page 5 of 13)

September 1981

From "Reason Interview: Murray Weidenbaum," chairman of President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers

"The capitalist society is very disorderly. The variance is great and may be on the basis of ability, luck, all sorts of happenstance, external circumstances. That upsets people's sense of order. But this is why someone who I think is concerned to find a system that provides more discretion for the individual will put up with all that disorder and unpredictability of results. It's not just that on the average, in an economic sense, you'll do better in a capitalistic society; it's that you have more opportunities for those adjustments as an individual."

November 1981

From "Reason Interview: Mark S. Fowler," Federal Communications Commission chairman

"Why is it that we now single out one form--over-air television--and imbue it with specific social duties when we don't do the same for film, for example? Why is there this national obsession to tamper with this box of transistors and tubes when we don't do the same for Time magazine? Why don't we have a `fairness doctrine' for Time or the Washington Post, when we have one Washington Post in the city and seven television stations?...The television is just another appliance--it's a toaster with pictures...We've got to look beyond the conventional wisdom that we must somehow regulate this box, we must single it out."

May 1982

From "Reason Interview: Karl Hess," anarchist author and former Goldwater speechwriter

"The thing is, people now understand that...welfare programs are bullshit. They've had experience with them. But they have not had experience with a huge military operation for a while. And I believe there is a feeling generally that our humiliation in Iran and various other places was simply due to not spending enough money on the problem. You see, perfectly reasonable people who can tell you that you can never solve domestic problems by throwing money at them, like Reagan, are eager to tell you that you can solve international problems by throwing money at them. At any rate, what they're doing is expanding the power of the federal government, which I think is the whole idea anyway--to expand power because they want an orderly society."

Reason: What is the role of the poor and the minorities in the Reagan years?

Karl Hess: To be poor. That's what their job has always been, and until they understand that this is literally a job, I don't think they have any chance of reversing the situation. Poor people stop being poor when they lose habits, when they stop thinking poor and start creating wealth. This doesn't mean becoming rich; it just means producing wealth, working....The concerns of the poor have never been addressed by anyone. The liberals have simply said they were addressing them but kept people poor by putting them on welfare. The Republicans will say, "We're gonna keep you poor, and we won't keep you on welfare." At least that will be the implication. Unfortunately, it won't be the truth. If it were the truth, then we'd have a lot of poor people who would stop being poor.

January 1983

From "Reason Interview: Irving Kristol," neoconservative intellectual and founder of The Public Interest

"If you have standards, moral standards, you have to want to make them prevail, and at the very least you have to argue in their favor. Now, show me where libertarians have argued in some comprehensive way for a set of moral standards....I don't think morality can be decided on the private level. I think you need public guidance and public support for a moral consensus. The average person has to know instinctively, without thinking too much about it, how he should raise his children."

January 1984

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