30 Years Ago in Reason

December 1977

From the December 2007 issue

“A British doctor has proposed that the ‘grossly’ overweight be involuntarily committed to ‘enclosed hospitals’ to shed their excess pounds. He justifies this on the grounds that obesity costs British socialized medicine ‘hundreds of millions of dollars.’”
—Bill Birmingham, “Brickbats”

“By August 1977 the unemployment rate for black teenagers had reached 41 percent, compared with 14 percent for white teenagers (and about 3.5 percent for white males).…Small wonder that Milton Friedman refers to the minimum wage law as ‘the most anti-Negro law on our statute books.’ ”
—Robert Poole Jr., “Legislating Unemployment”

“Jimmy Carter and his merry band of flacks at the State Department seemed ebullient with their sudden revelation in February 1977 that there was no travel ban to Communist Cuba. This initially struck me as strange, because just over 10 years before, the Supreme Court had affirmed a Federal District Court judgment stating the same thing.”
—Phillip Abbott Luce, “Why Didn’t Anyone Tell Jimmy?”