Letters

From the October 1999 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Your clear thoughts and well-researched writing is a genuine pleasure and much appreciated. Thank you for writing about the stuff that matters.

Richard Irwin
Sacramento, CA
[e-mail]

Jesse Walker replies: I never claimed, as Mr. Skinner asserts, that ten 100-watt stations could operate in the same area as a 1,000-watt station. I said that several stations of varying power levels could fit in the coverage area of a high-power station. How many would depend on topographical and other factors, and would vary from place to place.

Mr. Marks' claim that I advocate "not elimination of legislation, nor even less legislation--just different legislation" is simply weird. My article did not endorse a single new regulation. It did, however, call for eliminating a host of restrictions on starting new radio stations.

As for my figures, I was not using them to argue that four chains had a stranglehold on all broadcasting in this country, as Marks seems to imagine. (For one thing, there are more than four significant radio groups.) I was illustrating how rapid consolidation had become in recent years.

Is conglomerate radio "bad"? To my taste, it usually is. To the FCC's, it isn't. Should free markets decide? Sure, but what we have now is hardly a free market, as I spent much of my article explaining. Either I am a sloppy writer or Mr. Marks is a sloppy reader.

Scary Enclaves

In "Crime Stoppers" (June), Jim Peron reflects a scary libertarian desideratum: protection of private property and, with it, insulation from the outside world.

According to Peron, enclaves called "resident associations" and "private urban management services" have been formed that provide their own security forces and virtually everything else an autonomous community requires. The before-and-after crime statistics cited by Peron are dramatic

The enclave creation, though in response to conditions in a newly democratic and struggling South Africa, could be proffered as real-life applications of Robert Nozick's philosophic communities in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and it also picks up on Jack Kemp's initiative, when he was HUD secretary, of encouraging the establishment of resident councils in what remained of public housing. Local residents and businesses combining to serve their own interests is laudable--up to a point. HUD's resident councils targeted drug dealing and other activities directly affecting their projects.

By championing private enclaves, Peron is shutting his eyes to the plight of most South Africans--40 percent of the blacks are unemployed--and to the enormous problems the government faces in converting from apartheid. Yes, individuals should be held responsible for their actions, including crime. But the society needs to be just and to mitigate the effects of poverty and oppression. This cannot be done by holing up and shutting out.

Denton Porter
South Long Beach, CA

Keeping Up With the Forbeses

Jack Hirshleifer's review of Robert Frank's latest book, Luxury Fever, pointed out a few of the many flaws in his argument against materialism ("Purchase Disorder," June). Libertarians might be even better off if it turns out Frank is right. If relative standards of well-being do indeed matter more than absolute standards above a certain minimum threshold, then the fundamental microeconomic assumption of diminishing marginal utility will have to be reexamined. In that case, the rationale for progressive taxation disappears.

If individuals all along the wealth spectrum measure themselves against their peers, then each additional dollar available to compete will be valued just as highly by cohorts at each level of income. In standard absolute terms, a more wealthy person would ordinarily value a dollar less than those further down on the economic ladder because the items that dollar could purchase would be further down his priority list. In Frank's relative terms, however, any status item that a wealthy person buys helps maintain his relative position. Frank provides no reason to believe that the consumption competition is any less fierce at higher levels of wealth, so keeping up with the Forbeses is presumably no easier than keeping up with the Joneses.

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