Feed His Head: Reason’s presidential readinglist

From the December 2000 issue

(Page 2 of 7)

Finally, I’d suggest an indiscriminate reading of just about any Batman comic book from the 1940s until the present. (The movies are OK, too.) Bruce Wayne is this guy with loads of money, a pre-Internet billionaire with a private jet and a personal cave. But he’s not content simply to be a powerful influence on the economy. He cares about social issues, such as crime. But while Wayne is a great philanthropist, the past 60 years have taught him that it’s not always enough to use his economic weight to rid the world of the problems he sees plaguing it. Sometimes other tools yield more effective—and more undeniably satisfying—results: tools like a batarang, for example, or his fist. Batman’s long-lasting and continual cultural heft indicates that Americans admire, however wisely or unwisely, someone who recognizes the necessity of a swift kick to the nuts, in matters economic, social, and otherwise.

Joey Anuff ([e-mail]) is the co-founder and publisher of Suck.com, and author, with Gary Wolf, of Dumb Money: Adventures of a Day Trader (Random House).

Really Long-Term Health Care

By Ronald Bailey

“I don’t want to be immortal through my work. I want to be immortal through not dying,” Woody Allen once quipped. The biomedical breakthroughs that might make Allen’s wish more than an amusing aphorism are coming fast and furiously. They also raise a question worth pondering: What’s more important, “saving” Social Security or increasing human lifespans, thus making such programs irrelevant and obsolete?

To understand how to nurture this coming biomedical revolution, the president should read From Alchemy to IPO: The Business of Biotechnology, by Cynthia Robbins-Roth (2000). If he really wants to cut the costs of medical treatments, the most important thing the president can do is let pharmaceutical and bio?tech companies continue their breakneck pace of research and innovation with as little interference as possible. Pandering to seniors by promising them cut-rate drugs today means that new, more effective, and perhaps even cheaper therapies will be delayed—if not stopped entirely tomorrow.

For ethical guidance on the new technologies, he should turn to H. Tristam Engelhardt’s The Foundations of Bioethics (1986, revised 1996). Engelhardt’s book is a bit recondite, but a central point is that in our pluralistic society there is no one set of values that can be applied to evaluating and using new technologies. The moral thing to do is to let each citizen and family decide for themselves whether and how to use new treatments involving stem cells, gene therapy, genetic diagnostics, pre-implantation embryo testing, and so forth.

For a look at the longer-term future, the president might put Ben Bova’s Immortality: How Science is Extending Your Lifespan and Changing the World (1998) on his nightstand. “The first immortals are already living among us. You might be one of them,” Bova audaciously declares. He argues that within the next 50 years, bio?tech researchers may well find the cure to aging. Who then will care whether Social Security is in a “lock box” or a paper shopping bag? And here’s a novel the president can spend time with in his long retirement: Holy Fire (1996), by science fiction master Bruce Sterling. Holy Fire is a speculative and insightful story that explores how anti-aging technologies may affect scoiety.

Ronald Bailey ([e-mail]) is science correspondent for Reason.

Humanitarian Non-Intervention

By Ted Galen Carpenter

Absent a major international crisis (such as the Iranian hostage episode in 1980) or a failing war (Korea in 1952, Vietnam in 1968), foreign policy rarely plays a significant role in a presidential election. Yet the Constitution makes it clear that the president’s principal job is to direct the nation’s foreign policy. Moreover, the importance of the topic eclipses that of virtually any domestic issue. If a president blunders at home, tax dollars may be wasted and citizens may find their liberty constrained. If a president blunders in his foreign policy, innocent people may perish by the thousands or millions.  

The incoming chief executive would be wise to read David Chandler’s Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton (1999). Chandler’s detailed account of the West’s nation-building effort in Bosnia following the 1995 Dayton Accords confirms Lord Acton’s observation that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. An army of foreign bureaucrats backed by NATO troops runs Bosnia as an international colony. Media outlets are heavily censored, candidates that U.N. or NATO officials deem uncooperative are barred from the ballot, and elected officials who dare defy the colonists’ increasingly authoritarian policies are simply removed from office. Chandler’s book is a powerful rebuttal to those who say the U.S. should embark on more “humanitarian” military interventions and nation-building missions.

The president should also read Doug Bandow’s Tripwire: Korea and U.S. Foreign Policy in a Changed World (1996). Bandow’s analysis shows that what Milton and Rose Friedman called the “tyranny of the status quo” is at work in foreign as well as domestic policy. America’s military commitment to South Korea, established a half-century ago during the Korean War, persists despite vastly changed conditions in East Asia. Once weak, impoverished, and incapable of defending itself, South Korea now has twice the population of North Korea and an economy 30 times as large. Yet it remains a U.S. security dependent.

Finally, the new president should read a troubling novel, Dragon Strike, by Humphrey Hawksley and Simon Holberton (1997). Despite some all-too-trendy China-bashing, the book does a good job of showing how Washington’s East Asian security commitments could easily embroil the United States in a major war against a nuclear-armed great power. Any occupant of the White House should ponder the wisdom of a policy that might lead to such a catastrophic outcome.