Backed by conservation groups such as Harris's and by an international corps of business donors, Moscow State University professor and naturalist Sergei Smirenski has realized his dream of opening a private park that is simultaneously a wildlife preserve–home to such rare beauties as the red-crowned crane–and a recreation and education park. The Murovyovka Nature Park, which consists of 11,000 acres of marshes and forests along the Amur River in eastern Russia, has been leased from the government for 50 years by the Socio-Ecological Union of Russia, an environmental group Smirenski belongs to. The first $80,000 for the park was donated by the Wild Bird Society of Japan.
Although the park attracted support from around the globe, local wildlife officials in Amur sought a court order to block the project. They felt that as a public agency they could do a better job managing the lands than a private group could. The Christian Science Monitor reports that while the agency was initially successful in obtaining a court order, the local government, backed by officials in Moscow, has moved to have the decision reversed as illegal.
This power struggle reflects two different philosophies of conservation. The wildlife officials take the country's traditional wilderness approach to conservation, in which lands are off-limits to all human use except minimal scientific research. The Murovyovka Park's planners, on the other hand, believe in private management that allows for multiple land use and gives local residents and farmers an interest in the park.
"It really looks as if Russia is moving down the road to ecological property rights," says Jim Sheehan, an environmental policy analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. "This demonstrates that a country with a clean slate is better off coming up with its own innovative ideas for conservation rather than simply following what the Western countries tell them to do."
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]]>Back in 1991, superintendent Lyle Graff faced declining enrollment in Bennett Valley as parents opted to take their children to districts with few restrictions on home schooling. In an effort to keep the kids–and the tax dollars that accompany them–in his district, Graff came up with a plan to actively support, not just tolerate, home schooling: The district would help out parents financially by giving them a portion of the tax-allotment per pupil, since, as Graff has pointed out, "they are the ones doing the teaching."
The program, which enrolled just 22 students in its first year, has taken off. About 250 kids, from kindergarten through the sixth grade, now participate. In addition to reimbursing their parents up to $1,000 per child per year for purchasing books and taking field trips, the Bennett Valley school district also lets home-schooled kids use the school library and attend photo and health-examination days.
While the project has received praise from local parents and such parenting publications as Mothering, there are some critics. Cato Institute Senior Editor Sheldon Richman, who home-schools his three children, says the Bennett Valley program "is seductive–but it worries me." He is concerned that regulation will eventually follow the money into the homes and suggests a system of tax credits rather than direct subsidies. "I don't like to be an impediment to reform," he explains, "but I would be leery about accepting money from the government for my kids and then have it come back to haunt me later."
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]]>SETI uses huge radio antennas, sophisticated digital receivers, and computers to scan the radio-frequency spectrum in an attempt to detect non-random signals. The detection of such patterns would indicate the existence of a technically advanced civilization. The program was interrupted less than a year into its expected 10-year life when Congress eliminated its $12.3-million annual budget.
Within three months, the SETI Institute had raised $4.4 million–more than half of the $7.3 million needed to keep the project on schedule through mid-1995. Among the major donors (in the million-dollar range) are David Packard and William Hewlett of the Hewlett-Packard Corporation; Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft and founder, chairman, and CEO of Asymetrix Corporation; and Gordon Moore, co-founder and chairman of the board of Intel Corporation.
Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke also donated money for a public-awareness campaign about the project in England. "An international funding base for SETI is appropriate," says astrophysicist Jill Tarter, Phoenix Project manager. "A signal will have been sent to planet Earth and not just to the USA." Once the initial goal has been met, the SETI Institute will continue its fund raising to provide the $3 million needed annually for the project's scheduled decade-long run.
Because many of the project's target stars are best observed from the Southern Hemisphere, Project Phoenix will first be operated at the Parkes radio observatory in New South Wales, Australia, in early 1995. (SETI scientists need the time between now and then to upgrade the digital receiving instruments developed by NASA.) The project will then return to observatories in the Northern Hemisphere–first to the largest radio telescope in the world, the 1,000-foot-diameter telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
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]]>So if all feminists really don't think alike, where are the ones that disagree with Ms.? They've formed a new group called The Women's Freedom Network. Founded in 1993, the network publishes a quarterly newsletter and plans to hold media briefings, issue press releases, and sponsor a national conference.
Based in Washington, D.C., the WFN is dedicated to "empowering individual women rather than the state and its bureaucracies," according to the organization's statement of purpose. The WFN argues that the portrayal of women as victims is "creeping paternalism" in the guise of feminism. REASON Contributing Editor Cathy Young, one of the group's founders, and her colleagues say they "view women's issues in light of a philosophy that defines women and men as individuals and not in terms of gender."
Accordingly, the WFN does not expect uniformity of opinion among women in general or among its members–as the diversity of the group's national governing board makes clear. Members range in their political beliefs from conservative to contemporary liberal to libertarian, and in their occupations from journalism (syndicated columnist Joanne Jacobs, REASON Editor Virginia Postrel) to academia (historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and philosophy professor Christina Sommers) to business (Barbara Lydick, president of an aerospace consulting firm).
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]]>This is a social network in action. Although countless such networks operate at every level of the economy, policy makers ignore their importance in the areas where community ties are most needed: the inner cities. A recent study funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and other groups concludes that enterprise zones, which aim to provide jobs in high-poverty districts by offering tax breaks and other incentives to outside businesses that locate there, are poorly conceived because personal networks, rather than physical proximity, determine job placement.
The study's authors, sociologists Philip Kasinitz and Jan Rosenberg, looked at Red Hook, Brooklyn, an area of some 13,000 residents severed from their middle-class neighbors by concrete highways. Half of Red Hook's residents lived below the poverty level in 1989, and three-fourths called a monstrous housing project home. Although Red Hook is not an enterprise zone, it "already has the mix of low-income residents and industrial employers that enterprise zones aim to create," the authors write in their summary of the study in the Autumn 1993 City Journal. Yet even with this seemingly ideal mix of local jobs and potential workers, businesses in Red Hook tend not to hire local residents because they identify job candidates through personal connections. "The primary quality employers look for in an unskilled position is reliability, and most report that the best way to find reliable employees is by personal referral," Kasinitz and Rosenberg write. The owners and top managers of the companies with the most jobs tend not to be ghetto residents themselves. As one employer told the researchers, "We don't tend to just take people off the street, because I've had a lot of bad experiences."
Kasinitz and Rosenberg note that the networks that provide job information are not often found "in the sort of high-crime ghettos that discourage the formation of strong social ties." They argue that, rather than establishing enterprise zones, policy makers should try to foster proxy networks in poor neighborhoods.
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]]>Since the mid-'80s the number of paralegals offering assistance with such legal matters as bankruptcies, wills, divorces, and adoptions has climbed from several hundred to more than 7,000. Price is a major factor: A paralegal's charge for a personal bankruptcy might start at $200 or $300. A lawyer handling the same case would likely charge more than $1,000.
Another variation in the do-it-yourself law business are companies such as Barbara Shea's Court Coach. Shea, an attorney, provides her clients with legal advice and coaches them to represent themselves. Court Coach clients cut their costs by filing their own papers in court and doing their own photocopying.
But groups such as the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys are calling for legislation that would put many self-help legal offices out of business. A bill currently before Congress would prohibit paralegal services from using legal or paralegal in their company name and restrict them from getting paid for any services other than typing.
While opponents of the self-help law business say they want to protect clients, its supporters suggest the lawyers just want the paralegals' business. They argue that it is the working poor, who can't afford a regular attorney, who use the paralegals and other self-help law services.
"I don't think I'm hurting anybody's pocketbook," Lois Isenberg, president of the California Association of Independent Paralegals, told the Los Angeles Reader. "I think there is a need for different levels of legal access."
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]]>Rep. John LaFalce (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Committee on Small Business, heads the movement to increase the regulation of franchises at the federal level. "Many [franchise investors] find that they purchased low-paying jobs with few protections or benefits [or] lose everything in fraudulent franchise ventures," he told Success magazine. His proposed legislation would restrict the contractual relationships between franchise owners and investors. Among other things, it would require the public disclosure of detailed business information that franchise owners say their competitors could benefit from.
In addition, a December U.S. appeals court ruling in Cincinnati lends support to proposed regulations that would curb franchise owners' ability to cancel or refuse to renew contracts with investors who do not meet company standards.
Research suggests that such restrictions are unnecessary. Studies have consistently found the success rate of franchises to be much higher than that of independent businesses. A 1991 study of franchises conducted by Arthur Andersen and Co. reported that only 3 percent of franchises opened within the previous five years had folded. By comparison, over 60 percent of all new businesses between 1978 and 1988 were dissolved within the first six months of operation.
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]]>Across the country, tight budgets are leading to dramatic cuts in funding for public libraries. So many libraries have closed their doors in recent years that the American Library Association says it's no longer able to keep track of them all. The trend began in 1990, when officials in Worcester, Massachusetts, a city of 170,000, closed all six library branches. Cutbacks and closures spread quickly as other towns and cities succumbed to a weakened economy.
The Old Mill Green Public Library in Bridgeport, Connecticut, announced it would be open only on Thursdays. Bookmobiles in Fairfax, Virginia, and Syracuse, New York, were eliminated. And in Los Angeles, the county library system was threatened with the closure of about 50 of its 87 branches. New York librarians began an "Index of Misery" to record closures in the state.
Public libraries that can afford to remain open are finding their collections becoming dated, as money for new books and magazine subscriptions disappears. The materials budget for the Nevada State Library & Archives went from $153,000 in 1992 to zero in 1993. Other states have also eliminated their book budgets and have seen magazine-subscription budgets slashed by more than 50 percent. In Phoenix, library staff members were recently asked to take furloughs in order to maintain the book budget.
These funding cuts have accelerated a process that has been going on for much of this century: Libraries are losing their focus. Scrambling to justify their existence, they are taking on roles that have little or nothing to do with their central mission. Bernard Vavrek of Clarion University's Center for the Study of Rural Librarianship has said that public libraries should consider offering services such as shelter for the homeless and day care for children and the elderly. Public libraries in Seattle, Philadelphia, and Greensboro, North Carolina, already offer latchkey programs. And 39 percent of the respondents in a national telephone survey recently conducted by the library school at the University of Illinois, Urbana, said public libraries should offer safe places for children to stay after school.
But social services do not mix very well with a public library's other purposes. When the Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation Department eliminated local after-school programs in 1992, 40 or so middle- and high-school students adopted the Culver City Library as their after-school hangout. While some kids try to study, says head librarian Josie Zoretich, most are too rambunctious to sit still and keep quiet. "It's very difficult," says Zoretich. "We monitor them, we walk around. And that's the only thing we've found that works. But it's not the staff's job either. We're not recreation leaders, and we have still a whole public to serve." Memos at the circulation desk remind parents that "the library is not an alternative child care facility."
Amid the gloom, however, citizens in a few scattered towns are demonstrating another way to make libraries relevant. They have managed to create and sustain libraries without government money, reconnecting these institutions with the people they are supposed to serve. These private alternatives address both the fiscal and identity crises public libraries now face.
Palm Springs, California, has a reputation as a desert oasis for the very rich, but the vacant storefronts along the main street tell another story. Palm Springs hasn't escaped the hard times facing the Golden State, nor have its public libraries. When it came time to close the Welwood Murray Memorial Library, however, the people of Palm Springs took charge. The result was one of this country's first privatized libraries.
The city planned to sell the site of the library to a developer, but the land had been donated to the city in 1938 by the Murray family on the condition that it be used for a library. Public-library officials and the Save the WMML Committee, allied with City Council member and "reinventing government" advocate Deyna Hodges, successfully challenged the sale in court.
By the end of June 1992, city officials had removed every last book from the library and closed its doors as a public institution. The next day, the library began its new life as a private volunteer enterprise, run by WMML, a newly incorporated nonprofit foundation, and overseen by a board of seven trustees. "They left us with nothing," says trustee Jeanette Hardenburg, sitting near the glass cases of Indian jewelry and pottery now at the library's entrance. "And the building itself hadn't been properly maintained for years. Volunteers did everything you see here—refinished the ceiling, donated display cases."
And the citizens of Palm Springs gave books by the thousands; the library now has more than 8,000 volumes in its collection—5,000 more than the public library had—and more arrive every day. "Every book in our collection was given to us by the people of Palm Springs," Hardenburg says. The library plans to develop an extensive collection of documents and books, including rare and first editions, on the history of California and the West; trustee Barbara Moore, a Palm Springs native with an interest in the region's history, has already given several hundred of her own books as a permanent loan to begin the collection. Jeremy Crocker, president of the board of trustees, credits the "goodheartedness and friendliness" of the Palms Springs people with keeping the library alive.
Citizens in other towns may follow the Palm Springs model, taking their libraries private to save them. When it looked as if Grants Pass, Oregon, might be forced to close the three branches of its public library, Dan Huberty, a building contractor who had moved to Oregon for his retirement, spearheaded a grass-roots effort to privatize the library. Although city officials initially gave his idea a hearing, resistance from the library unions doomed the proposal. (The city ultimately found money to keep the library open.) And in Santa Cruz County, California, members of the Friends of the Library group are looking into privatization as a possible alternative to the threatened closure of the county's public-library system.
For advice, newly privatized libraries could look to Sedona, Arizona—home of world-class artists, New Age worshippers, red-rock cliffs, and a thriving free private library. Back in 1958, Sedona residents decided the infrequent visits from a bookmobile that began its journey in Phoenix, some 100 miles away, just weren't enough. The private Sedona Public Library was up and running within months. A Friends of the Library group was soon organized to raise funds for operating costs and to oversee the library's administration. The group's fund-raising efforts have been so successful that five of the librarian staff positions are now salaried.
The community spirit that made this library possible hasn't ebbed over the years. Although the library now receives some support from the city and county to cover basic operating costs, the library's new $3.2-million building is being constructed solely with donations from residents and free or discounted labor and materials from local businesses. The 4.2-acre plot of land was purchased with a bequest from a late Sedona resident. An early morning visitor to the building, scheduled to open in early 1994, might see a solitary carpenter high up on the scaffolding patiently staining the beams that span the cathedral ceiling, or craftsmen putting the finishing touches on the stone fireplace in the reading lounge. Signs at the site's entrance proclaim "See History in the Making!" and welcome visitors to take a tour of the magnificient building with Supervisor Steve Miller. "The magnitude of what we are doing without government funding is almost unbelievable," librarian Joan Duke told Sedona Magazine.
When it comes to starting a private library, such enthusiasm is more important than the economic status of the community. Redford, Texas, population 200, lies between ridges of volcanic rock some 200 miles southeast of El Paso in Presidio County. Life here, just north of the Mexican border, isn't easy. The county's median family income hovers around $13,000 (the national median is about $30,000), and most of Redford's inhabitants are farmers eking a living out of the dry earth. The town's private library was founded in 1979 by Lucia Rede Madrid, a former schoolteacher. The original collection of just 25 books was housed on a few shelves in her husband's general store. The collection eventually expanded to fill the store, which is now a library with more than 15,000 volumes—or 75 books for each resident. In April 1990 Madrid went to the White House to receive a presidential medal honoring her work in founding and running the library.
Point Arena, a town of about 500 people several hours up the coast from San Francisco, opened its private Coast Community Library in 1990, even as public libraries elsewhere were slashing their hours or shutting their doors for good. Local carpenters built the card catalog and tables, and other volunteers lent a hand with the renovation of a small office building rented to the library for $1.00 a year by a retired professor. Residents, whose median annual family income is $21,250, raised money to open the library by selling everything from vegetables to magazines.
The Coast Community Library's book budget is supplemented heavily by book donations: Patrons have given everything from a single volume to an entire estate. Volunteer library staffer Laura Schatzberg says her love of books and her "disappointment when I moved to Point Arena in finding out that there was no library here" led her to devote many spare hours to the library. It is the dedication of Schatzberg and the dozens of other citizens like her that keeps this private library open six days a week and two evenings—more than many public libraries are open nowadays.
"We're very proud of this little library," Elise Wainscott, a former librarian who is a fund-raiser for the Coast Community Library, told the Christian Science Monitor shortly after the library opened. "It demonstrates what can be done by people eager and determined to have reading material available to everyone in the community without charge. We have received no government funds, we're out of debt, and we've started a building fund."
Private libraries are not unique in seeking voluntary donations. About 10 percent of public libraries have fund-raising offices, according to the American Library Association. When the New York Public Library started its Adopt-a-Branch program in 1991, it immediately received two $500,000 donations for library branches in the Bronx. After fire destroyed the interior and damaged most books at the Los Angeles Central Library in 1986, the Save the Books project raised $10 million in donations, including $2 million from the John Paul Getty Trust and more than $3 million from ARCO and a telethon campaign. Developer Robert Maguire gave the city $28.2 million to help finance the building's restoration. Public libraries in smaller cities are also taking advantage of private money: In 1992 the Tucson-Pima Library in Tucson, Arizona, raised $9,000, with most donations in the $10-to-$25 range, to buy children's books and pay for interior improvements.
But while private libraries will accept all the voluntary help they can get, public libraries worry that their fund-raising programs will be too successful, prompting government to give them fewer tax dollars. Anxious librarians point to an endowment fund established at the Dallas Public Library that raised private funds, prompting the city to reduce the library's share of taxpayers' money by that amount. "It is great to get this [private] money, but there is a danger, too," Edwin Holmgren, director of branch services at the New York Public Library, told the Library Journal. "Some politicians will then try to take away public funding….But any private money given to us doesn't relieve the government of its responsibilities."
Supporters of government funding for libraries like to cite what 1991 ALA president Patricia Glass Schuman calls Benjamin Franklin's "novel idea, the free public library." Yet the library Franklin established in 1731 was neither free nor public. Franklin's Philadelphia Library was essentially a private club, or what historians call a subscription library. Franklin sought out 50 charter members, mostly tradesmen, willing to pay 40 shillings each for the purchase of books to begin the library collection. Although Franklin's idea was a novel one for the colonists, Franklin was not the first to start a subscription library. They were popular in Europe at the time, and a subscription library was operating in Edinburgh as early as 1725.
Nineteenth-century libraries, both here and abroad, were usually run by church leaders or philanthropists and were often subscription libraries. The annual dues were low and were waived for those who could not afford them. In towns without full-fledged libraries, booksellers and other merchants often filled the void. British booksellers as early as the 18th century offered books for loan, and shopkeepers operated small circulating libraries alongside shelves of liquor, shoebuckles, and hats. Although several thousand rental libraries were still operating in the United States as late as the 1960s, Harvard University urban historian Edward Banfield reports, public libraries eventually drove the commercial book lenders and many subscription libraries out of business.
One of the oldest subscription libraries keeping Ben Franklin's idea alive is the Salem Athenaeum in Massachusetts. Founded in 1760 by 30 prominent townsmen, the athenaeum welcomes all to browse among its shelves, but only the 100 shareholders (individuals paying $250 each) and subscribers may check out books or magazines. The annual subscription fee is just $35, so for less than the cost of the average hardcover book (which is $40 today, up from $19 in 1977), you can join this private library.
At least 17 other subscription libraries are still open in Boston, Newport, and other cities. New York City is home to two thriving subscription libraries, both of which have recently seen increases in subscribers: The New York Society Library (founded in 1754) has about 2,500 household memberships at $125 a year (discounts are available for students and teachers), and the Library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen (founded in 1820) has about 700 members paying $35 to $50 a year. The persistence of such organizations, in spite of government-supported competition, suggests that libraries will survive wherever demand justifies them.
In arguing that government has a responsibility to fund libraries, defenders of the current system usually claim that libraries benefit society as a whole by promoting democracy, uplift, and literacy. They also maintain that only public operation can protect library patrons from censorship. But these high-minded goals have very little to do with how public libraries actually work or the reasons people use them.
Without public libraries, warn Anita and Herbert Schiller in a 1986 Nation article, "democratic governance itself is an endangered species." Free, government-run libraries provide equal access to information, they argue, thereby ensuring an informed electorate. More broadly, public libraries (unlike academic libraries) aim not so much to preserve man's wisdom as to improve him. The terminology has changed—in the 19th century it was called uplift, and today it's empowerment—but the goal remains the same. The problem is, you can't improve people without their cooperation. And for every town like Point Arena or Palm Springs, there are others where, despite a few vocal activists, most residents don't notice or care whether the local library is open or closed.
Libraries in Massachusetts have probably taken the most severe budget cuts in the country in recent years, but Bonnie O'Brien, president of the Massachusetts Public Library Association, told City & State, "For whatever reason, the municipalities and the public don't support libraries like they used to." Speaking on a local radio show in Los Angeles, library activist Maria Stone said her group, Committee to Save Our Libraries, was sending letters to community members "so that we get rid of a little bit of the apathy that we see toward the libraries." Despite the millions of dollars spent on library-awareness campaigns, only a third of adult Americans have public-library cards.
Apathy toward libraries is not new. Historian D.W. Davies writes in Public Libraries as Culture and Social Centers that early librarians believed "there were vast numbers yearning to read and acquire culture." But "in the days of the voluntary [library] societies there was a corrective to this notion. Uplift societies and libraries founded upon the misconception [often] discovered that there was not a significant number of people interested to allow the institution to continue."
This was not the case everywhere, of course, as such centuries-old institutions as the Salem Athenaeum and the New York Society Library show. But today tax dollars provide equal support for popular and unpopular libraries alike.
Even when a library is popular, that doesn't mean it is improving people's minds or making them better citizens. As anyone who has worked in a suburban public library can attest, the most popular titles tend to be the least edifying: best sellers by Danielle Steele and Robert Ludlum, John Grisham and Stephen King. Commenting on a rise in the use of Los Angeles County's libraries during the recession, library marketing director Philip Fleming told the Los Angeles Times: "People are rediscovering the library, looking for free entertainment."
At the Matteson, Illinois, public library, Super Mario Brothers III and over 130 other Nintendo computer games are on the shelves. The children's librarian told the Chicago Tribune she has seen no correlation between use of the games and circulation of books. An ALA fact sheet boasts of the "ever-increasing variety of materials" public librarians offer for loan, including videotapes, compact disks, toys, puzzles, sewing machines, guitars, chess games, cameras, telescopes, and dog-grooming kits.
And the people who take advantage of all these services are not exactly needy. According to a 1990 Equifax-Harris survey comparing people who use public libraries to those who don't, public-library patrons are 87 percent more likely to attend the opera, ballet, or symphony; 85 percent more likely to have a personal computer at home; and 81 percent more likely to belong to a voluntary organization. These characteristics place public-library users solidly in the middle class. "Certainly no one believes that the library is now of any service to the lower class," writes Harvard's Banfield. "By and large, libraries are of the middle class and for the middle class."
Closely associated with the uplift rationale for public libraries is the argument that they increase literacy. "Librarians must assume a front-line position in the battle against illiteracy, a battle which requires inspired troops if any battle ever did," said 1990 ALA president Richard Dougherty in his inaugural address. "We must find a way to insure that all of our children learn to read, and to read well." Of course, this is what the public schools are supposed to be doing. When the National Assessment of Educational Progress finds that only 10 percent of 13-year-olds are "adept" readers and less than 1 percent are "advanced," we should look to the schools, not the libraries, for an explanation.
Supporters of public libraries also argue that government control ensures that a wide range of reading material is available. "The real strength of the public library is that it's an open forum for ideas, where every idea has equal viability and the opportunity to be read about, and learned about, and heard," Carolyn Noah of the Central Massachusetts Regional Library System said on a Boston radio show last year. "But a private library, where censorship can be unlimited, is a completely different matter."
The reality is very nearly the opposite: Censorship is more of a threat in public libraries than in private libraries. In the last 40 years, virtually all of the cases in which libraries removed books for political reasons involved public libraries. "That couldn't happen in this library," declares Gann Carter, a trustee at the private Palm Springs library. Board president Jeremy Crocker explains: "We're subject to the same market [forces] as the public libraries. If we don't have the books, people won't come." Laura Schatzberg of the Coast Community Library says flatly, "We do not censor books." She adds that books are removed from the shelves and put into storage only if they haven't been checked out in several years and the library needs the space.
At a private institution, a censorious librarian is accountable to the board of directors and the community. The financial lifeblood of a private library flows directly from local citizens through their money and volunteer time, rather than indirectly through taxes. Popular objections to a librarian who began censoring books would be felt immediately through lost donations and customers.
In fact, the main advantage of private libraries is their responsiveness to the needs and wants of users. By contrast, public funding through taxes isolates the library from the community. And if a community isn't interested in its library, all the inspiring rhetoric about enriching people's lives won't mean a thing.
Andrew Carnegie learned this lesson around the turn of the century. Carnegie had immigrated to the United States from Scotland at age 13 and built a huge fortune as the owner of Carnegie Steel. After retiring some 50 years later, he devoted the rest of his life to philanthropy. Motivated by the Progressive notion of uplifting people by providing them with free books, he donated more than $40 million ($324 million in 1992 dollars) between 1886 and 1919 for the construction of almost 1,700 libraries across the United States. The gifts came with one major condition: Each town had to promise to support its library with annual taxes equal to 10 percent of Carnegie's original investment. But the taxpayers in many towns refused to uphold their half of the arrangement—often within the first year after their libraries opened.
The experience of one Texas town, as related by historian D.W. Davies, was typical. After the citizens lost interest in the library, tramps began calling it home. The books that Carnegie thought would help people better themselves were burned for heat. The shelves went up in flames next. Left with the library's ravaged interior, the town council decided to auction the building. The only taker was a barber who wanted it for his shop. After a council member observed that the town might have to give the Carnegie Corp. any money raised from the sale, the council called off the auction and boarded up the building. Similar events happened in so many towns that, after an investigation lasting several years, the Carnegie Corp. decided that lack of interest rather than lack of money was the problem. In November 1919, it stopped the donations.
Carnegie was not the only philanthropist to overestimate the demand for libraries during the last two centuries. Davies writes: "Those interested in the establishment of popular libraries were naturally people interested in books. When they polled their friends and acquaintances, people of similar tastes, they were delighted to find that large numbers of them were also interested in books. In this way the belief was created that a considerable segment of the population was afflicted with bibliophilia."
This sort of enthusiasm can lead to failures like the many unsuccessful Carnegie libraries, but it can also sustain such institutions as Sedona's free private library. "Everyone saw the need for a library, and since it wasn't going to cost the taxpayers anything, there wasn't anything to complain about," Gene Ash, one of the library's founders, told Sedona Magazine in 1992. "After all, who doesn't like books and magazines and information? If they don't, they sure are a sorry lot."
Elizabeth Larson is REASON's production editor.
The post Library Renewals appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>With several friends, Milonoff, a former economics student who studied English for 11 years, began translating the works of Ayn Rand into Russian in the fall of 1992—just for the heck of it. Now the Liberal Club—an offshoot of Russia's Free Democratic Party established in January for young business people and students to meet weekly for coffee and discussion of news and economics—oversees the translation and publication arrangements for Rand's works.
We the Living and Anthem are ready to go to press, and eight college students are busy translating Atlas Shrugged. Fluent in English, the students are working for pocket money, earning about a dollar a page.
Milonoff says the Liberal Club also hopes to begin publishing a series of classical-liberal works in Russian, starting with Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson and then maybe Frédéric Bastiat's The Law. He estimates that translation and printing should take about two or three months for each book.
"Distribution is not a problem at all," says Milonoff, because schools, universities, and wholesalers are eager to have the books on their shelves. But money is another matter: The club planned to print 10,000 to 15,000 each of Rand's books. Yet under the agreement with the Ayn Rand Institute in Los Angeles, which owns the copyrights to Rand's writings and has extended those rights to Milonoff's group for three years, the club must print a minimum of 50,000 copies of each book—a much more costly undertaking. A spokeswoman for the institute declined to discuss the arrangement.
Nonetheless, Milonoff is optimistic about the long-term success of his group's publication venture. "In Russia right now people are interested in just one business: trade," he explains, and the business-driven atmosphere is highly receptive to what he calls the club's "free-market attack on Russia."
The post Rand in Russian appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Alexander moved to the Czech Republic from Washington, D.C., two years ago to found the European Journalism Network to help university students in formerly communist countries establish free-market-oriented newspapers. EJN-sponsored papers are now published in Budapest, Szombathely (Hungary), Kiev, Warsaw, Bratislava, and Prague. Alexander is laying the groundwork for papers in Moscow and Zagreb.
"We hope to give students a voice in the educational and political reform in Eastern Europe," he explains. Since he runs the network "as an entrepreneurial venture, ensuring that each publication operates as a successful business," the students are also learning valuable business skills.
EJN papers have already made waves. Kilátó, published at Hungary's Dániel Bercsenyi University, ran an article in March parodying Istvan Csurka, at the time a member of parliament known for his anti-Semitism, irredentism, and xenophobia. (See "Loose Cannon," Dec. 1992.) Csurka was so incensed after reading the article (all political leaders receive copies of the local EJN papers) he complained to the minister of education. To appease Csurka, the minister called the university president to Budapest.
Upon his return, the president summoned Kilátó's editorial staff to his office. "They were terrified," recalls Alexander. To their immense relief, the president greeted them with, "You're doing a great job!"
EJN has attracted notice in the United States, too. U.S. News & World Report dubbed the papers "laboratories of capitalism" for their success teaching students to participate in the free market as well as to write about it.
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]]>In the 19th century the U.S. government hoped to rid the land of Indians by exterminating the buffalo, a major source of their food, clothing, and fuel. The animals were also shot as food for railroad workers and because they were mammoth pests that obstructed the path of trains bound for the frontier. Today, Indian tribes around the country are helping bring buffalo herds back by raising the animals on their land—for their spiritual symbolism and for the money they bring in.
With 500 buffalo on 10,000 acres, the Cheyenne River Sioux in South Dakota have one of the largest such operations, reports The Arizona Daily Star. The Kalispel tribe in northeastern Washington raise about 130 buffalo on their 4,600-acre reservation, and several dozen other tribes from California to Maine want to get into the buffalo business too.
"Besides the meat, we sell everything from the hooves to the hides, the heads, the horn shells," Francis Cullooyah, who runs the Kalispel operation, told the Star. "And then we use the bones for some of our local artisans here. There's really not much that's wasted."
In Arizona, the population of bighorn sheep has grown from about 600 in the 1950s to about 6,000 today, according to the state's Game and Fish Department. The recovery is largely due to the efforts of groups such as the Arizona Desert Bighorn Sheep Society.
The society backed a 1984 law requiring the state to set aside some of its big-game hunting permits for raffle or auction by non-profit groups. Bighorn-sheep permits, which allow hunters to kill one of the animals, normally cost $153 for Arizona residents and $753 for nonresidents, money that goes directly into the Game and Fish Department's general fund. But all proceeds from the auctioned permits, which now total more than $1 million, may be used only for conservation projects, such as maintaining remote water holes, that benefit the species.
In February, a bidder paid a record $303,000 for a bighorn-sheep permit (the previous record was $67,500). "The money from this one tag is enough to finance 10 years' worth of transplanting sheep, or five years of helicopter surveys," Ray Lee, the Game and Fish Department's big-game chief, told the Tucson Citizen.
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]]>Hydrocortisone, used to treat minor skin irritations, and antihistamines such as chlorpheniramine are just a few of the more than 400 drugs switched from prescription to over-the-counter status in recent years. Drug companies are expected to ask the FDA to switch an additional 70 or so drugs, including the popular sinus medication Seldane and a number of ulcer drugs, within the next few years.
In a 1983 paper in the Journal of Health Economics, MIT economist Peter Temin estimated that the economic benefits of making hydrocortisone available over the counter "exceeded the costs by over $200 million in 1980 and $400 million in 1981."
The switch also relieved discomfort that might otherwise have gone untreated: The first year hydrocortisone was available over the counter, non-prescription sales were about double the prescription sales, which remained about the same as the previous year's. Temin concluded that "the switch apparently allowed a new class of consumers to use hydrocortisone."
Because prescription drugs are closely monitored by drug companies and health professionals, their effectiveness and safety are well documented before they are switched to over-the-counter status. Nonetheless, groups such as the American Pharmaceutical Association still worry about consumers medicating themselves without supervision. They have proposed a third class of drugs between prescription and over-the-counter, similar to categories in countries such as Canada, France, Germany, and Switzerland.
Drugs in this third class would not require a prescription but would be available only from a pharmacist, who would offer guidance about drug interactions and side effects. If no unforeseen side effects were reported by pharmacists after several years, the drug would be made available over the counter.
The FDA and the Nonprescription Drug Manufacturers Association oppose the idea of a three-class system. The NDMA's senior vice president, Jack Walden, told the Tucson Citizen that a third class of drugs would be "anti-consumer, anti-competitive, anti-convenience."
Although this proposal would not give customers complete autonomy, it might give them more freedom than the current system by increasing access to drugs that would otherwise have been available only through a doctor. And, if drugs in the third class are eventually moved to over-the-counter status as planned, customers may still consult with pharmacists. People act responsibly when it comes to self-medication, notes The Economist, because "after all, the bodies they are treating are their own."
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]]>A recent AAA report finds that government red tape is encouraging many businesses to eliminate their retirement programs. In a survey of 1,084 companies that canceled defined-benefit pension plans (those funded by tax-deductible contributions from employers) between 1988 and 1990, about half said they did so due to the burdens of regulation: excessive compliance costs, complex rules, frequent changes in requirements.
Fewer than 40 percent of those companies replaced their defined-benefit plans with a 401(k) or other employee-funded pension plans, leaving many workers without the opportunity to save for retirement through the office.
Businesses with fewer than 25 employees have suffered the most from pension regulations. At least 50,000 such companies have ended their defined-benefit pension plans since 1988, the AAA reports, and most will not offer alternative plans. Nearly 60 percent of the small businesses cited regulations as the reason for dropping their pension plans. The 1987 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, for example, reduced the amount companies are allowed to contribute per employee.
Larger companies complained most frequently about a provision of the 1986 Tax Reform Act that prohibits employers from offering different pension deals to different workers. Large firms also cited the high premiums they must pay to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federal agency that insures pensions.
"With the retirement of the baby boomers—the majority of whom do not have adequate money saved—only two decades away, we are looking at a very serious problem," says AAA Executive Vice President Jim Murphy. The AAA is calling for a moratorium on new pension-plan regulations to help stem the flood of cancellations.
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]]>More and more women have found work in recent years: Although just half of women between the ages of 25 and 44 were working in 1970, that figure jumped to 70 percent by the mid-'80s and will reach about 80 percent by 1995, reports Roger Selbert in his newsletter FutureScan. Accompanying the increase in working women are increases in wages, advancement, and training and education.
The biggest reason for the continued misunderstanding about women's economic status, Seibert says, is that women's median pay as a percentage of men's (which rose from 60 percent in 1980 to 72 percent in 1990) is depressed by including all women of all ages in all jobs. "Women under 20 already earn 92 percent as much as their male counterparts; those 21 to 24, 85 percent; and those 25 to 34, 78 percent," he writes, adding that "the wages of women who have never left the work force for any reason, including childbirth, approach 100 percent of their male counterparts."
Today more women are successfully climbing the corporate ladder. Last year the number of corporate boards appointing women reached a high of 60 percent, according to a survey by Korn/Ferry International, a recruiting firm. Feminists might argue such advances aren't good enough, but Seibert points out that "even for men it takes, on average, 25 years to reach the rank of president and 30 years to make chairman. Women have been managers in significant numbers only since the mid-1970s." He notes that today about 30 percent of working women are professionals or managers, comparable to the figure for men.
And in Our Wildest Dreams, a new book on women entrepreneurs, Joline Godfrey reports that the number of women-owned businesses increased sixfold between 1972 and 1987. They now employ as many people as the Fortune 500.
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]]>Private child-support collection companies have popped up in at least 21 states in recent years, Charles Drake, a collection-agency consultant, told The New York Times. Bill collectors such as James Jones, founder of Child Support Services in Norfolk, Virginia, are discovering that the states' dismal record for collecting child support has created a market for private collectors. In 1990, delinquent payments totaled $23.8 billion nationwide, of which state agencies had managed to collect only about 20 percent.
Jones's service, like most of the private child-support collection companies, has two important advantages over state agencies: His company will track down a delinquent dad regardless of where he moves or how often, while state collectors drop a case once the offending parent moves to another jurisdiction. And Child Support Services doesn't handle cases for families on welfare, which states tend to concentrate on.
Jones has been able to locate about 85 percent of the missing parents he has sought, reports Inc. magazine, and he receives regular payments from 35 percent to 40 percent of them: about $200 each in current monthly child support and $100 each toward arrears.
Like most private agencies, Jones requires a small application fee, which he sometimes waives, and takes 25 percent of the money collected. Compared to the cost of the private eyes and lawyers many women hire to track down their ex-husbands—usually with little success—Jones's price is cheap. His first 30-second local TV commercial brought in 9,000 calls from potential clients.
The private child-support collectors face little opposition from their competition in state bureaucracies. "Personally, I see it as the mother's choice," Ron Harris of the Child Support Enforcement office in Virginia Beach, told Inc. "There's certainly enough business here for all of us."
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]]>Last September federal regulators began enforcing the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Act of 1988, which brings all medical laboratories and anyone reading lab tests under the supervision of federal regulators. Dermatologists, for example, must demonstrate three times a year that they can tell the difference between red (positive for athlete's foot) and orange (negative).
Congress had passed the act in response to several cases in which women died of cervical cancer after getting false negative Pap-test readings from high-volume, state-contracted laboratories. At the time, cytologists (doctors certified as experts in Pap testing) had argued that none of the "Pap mills" responsible for erroneous test readings were accredited by the American Society of Cytology or the College of American Pathologists.
The ASC, the CAP, and the American Society of Clinical Pathologists all opposed CLIA. Cytologists would prefer federal regulations that simply require nonaccredited labs, such as the infamous Pap mills, to seek accreditation by the already established ASC and CAP programs. They also encourage women to take on some of the oversight responsibility by asking their doctor if the lab he uses is accredited by either association.
A survey by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons estimates that complying with the new regulations will cost doctors about $1,800 a year. All physicians with in-office labs are now subject to periodic unannounced visits by federal regulators. Anyone reading Pap-smear tests must be certified by the government and must spend one day away from the office each quarter for a review.
Cytopathologist Marshall Austin, head of the South Carolina Pathology Society, says the red tape, inconvenience, and expense will be enough to convince many doctors to eliminate in-office laboratories. Physicians who continue to provide in-office Pap-test readings will soon find that many patients can no longer afford them. Says Austin, "Low-income women, if they have to choose between buying a bag of groceries and having a Pap smear, they'll buy a bag of groceries."
The effects of regulating Pap tests are already visible in New York, where state rules similar to the federal cytology regulations have been in force since 1988. Since then, the average cost of a Pap test in New York has tripled, from $10 to $30. (With the stricter federal regulations in effect, Planned Parenthood estimates that the price could hit $50 nationwide.)
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]]>In a land where addressing even casual friends as Herr or Frau So-and-So is commonplace, the Germans' frequent rudeness in public situations where they can remain anonymous is more than a striking irony. lt is a tragic flaw in the national character. The Germans' disinclination to stand out from the crowd and stand up for their beliefs has given the world the impression that they care little about the vicious crimes neo-Nazis are committing against immigrants. Revulsed by the footage of violence broadcast regularly on TV, Americans tend to disregard the occasional news of marches protesting the violence, such as the one in Munich before Christmas and, more recently, those in Hamburg and Berlin.
The difficulty Americans have understanding how Germans could apparently begin to repeat the darkest hours of their history stems from a presumption that Germany is just like the United States: a wealthy, industrialized nation—with Hummels, great beer, and funny leather pants. Yes, they like Classic Coke and Levi's. But the Germans' understanding of government's role and the meaning of citizenship is very different from ours. And it is those differences that have sown the seeds of widespread and systematic neo-Nazi violence.
One of the basic duties of government in a free society is to protect the lives and property of its people. The German government has shirked that responsibility by largely refusing to arrest and punish the skinheads guilty of murder and arson. Why? In a country where you can be fined for making too much noise between 1:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon (naptime for the elderly and children), those enforcing laws against real criminals are paralyzed by memories of excessive police force in the past. The government's inaction in punishing serious crimes is overshadowed by the diligence with which it polices the mundane.
And enforcing the rule of law is never enough to prevent society's malcontents from acting on their beliefs. Popular opinion must be against those beliefs—but not by censoring them, for that only starts a slow erosion of everyone's rights while driving the troublemakers underground. Wicked ideas and those who spread them must be confronted, not avoided, debated, not ignored. In a free society, the onus of promoting tolerance and good will should be not on state censors but on each individual.
So the Germans must stand together as individuals and condemn the hatred fueling the neo-Nazis—a task all the more challenging because of the trust Germans place in government to solve their problems. The evening rally in Munich on December 6, the largest in that city since World War II, was a heartening first step.
"Under the motto 'A city says no' almost 400,000 citizens of Munich stood along the streets of the city center," my German friends wrote to me after joining in the December march. "There were many many young people there, and everyone carried candles, flashlights, and lanterns. Then the church bells began to ring. It was a powerful demonstration of the silent majority."
Just as important to maintaining a free society, however, is a fair definition of what constitutes that society's membership. Under current German law, it's almost impossible to become a citizen unless you are of German ethnicity. A Russian, for example, is granted automatic citizenship if he had German ancestors, but a Turk whose family has lived and worked in Germany for several generations is forever an outsider in the land of his birth. This law breeds racial tension and gives the neo-Nazis a sense of justification for their hatred of the "strangers" in their midst.
Germans made the symbolic gesture of solidarity with the persecuted immigrants by marching in the streets. But for many of the world's onlookers, that might not be enough. After all, how free would you feel in a society that forced you to embrace as compatriots neo-Nazi youths, with their complete dependence on the welfare state (down to expecting subsidies for combat boots and racist music), but not the resident aliens who've made your country their home for decades, providing the necessary work force for rebuilding your neighborhoods and city monuments after World War II?
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]]>You've come a long way, baby—from the individualist women's movement of the last century to the collectivist feminism of today. Unfortunately, many of the principles and goals of the woman's cause were compromised along the way. In Reclaiming the Mainstream: Individualist Feminism Rediscovered, Joan Kennedy Taylor argues that the 18th- and 19th-century founders of the women's movement have much to teach us today.
The Woman Movement, as it was originally known, appealed to a wide spectrum of women and men because its supporters did not argue, as feminists do now, for public-policy changes to protect the "second sex." Instead, such early feminists as Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill championed a simple principle: freedom, the freedom to pursue property and happiness without interference from the state or from fathers, husbands, and brothers.
Taylor writes that it wasn't until the Progressive era around the turn of the century that the Woman Movement began to turn its back on its individualist heritage, adopting a political platform that called for social reforms. The activists abandoned their principled stand for the extension of individual rights to women and against government intrusion into marriage contracts, birth control, and other private affairs. Soon to adopt the word feminist to describe their new goals and viewpoint, these activists called for the prohibition of alcohol and for protective labor legislation for women and children. As feminism compromised its principles of laissez-faire, the movement marginalized itself from mainstream America.
Reclaiming the Mainstream is not all history, however. Taylor devotes half of the book to contemporary women's issues: abortion and birth control, rape and sexual harassment, attempts to unify feminist and nonfeminist women's groups against pornography, and that "treasured concept of radical feminists," victimization. She asks women to become more principled and more consistent in their convictions about the role of the state in their lives when it comes to these issues, and she warns against legislation, often passed at the behest of women's groups claiming to speak for all women, that "purports to convey a benefit."
Taylor believes that, despite the collectivist mindset of contemporary feminists, the individualist spirit of the movement's early days is still with us. She argues that two of the most important feminist issues in recent decades have had individualism at their heart: the Equal Rights Amendment and the consciousness-raising trend of the 1960s and '70s. Unfortunately, she omits any discussion of the arguments against the ERA—based on predictions of how the courts would interpret the amendment—that might persuade a libertarian to oppose it.
The consciousness-raising movement also had consequences perhaps unforeseen by its instigators. While most feminist leaders hoped such groups would lead to political action, "more often the action taken was to change one's own life," writes Taylor. Women were discovering that a community can uplift the individual without requiring that individual to subvert her rights to those of the group.
Although Taylor occasionally oversimplifies the past in her discussion of what individualist feminism holds for the future, Reclaiming the Mainstream is a most welcome introduction to a historical movement with which all too few Americans are familiar. Her challenge to retie the community bonds that were so strong in the '60s and '70s while reshaping the women's movement into one that is "more self-consciously individualistic" than of late would be a difficult but rewarding endeavor for many who claim "women's rights" to be their call to battle.
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]]>Unckel was in Los Angeles in September with King Carl XVI Gustaf and several other high-ranking members of the Swedish government to hold a luncheon and seminar on privatization in their country. The downtown hotel banquet room was packed with Swedish nationals, and several times during their speeches the ministers were interrupted by loud applause for their plans to restrict and reform the Swedish state.
That's right, "socialist" Sweden is well on its way to selling some 30 government industries, utilities, and services to the private sector. Headed by conservative Prime Minister Carl Bildt, the government has also started a school-voucher system and is planning drastic cuts in the country's welfare system.
"The state is and will always be a lousy company manager," insists Unckel, explaining Sweden's reason for privatizing such government monopolies as the electric utilities, telephone company, and train service "as soon as possible."
Jan Amethier, head of the privatization unit at the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, says revenue from the sales, estimated to be 120–150 billion krona ($22.6 billion–$28.3 billion), will go to improve Sweden's infrastructure or to reduce the budget deficit.
Last spring Sweden implemented its education-voucher system. Every Swedish child may now bring 85 percent of his education funds with him to any school in the country—public, private, or religious. Unckel says that when he recently met U.S. Education Secretary Lamar Alexander, the American expressed surprise at how far along the Swedish system is compared to voucher efforts in the United States.
Sweden also plans to cut child benefits; housing subsidies; pensions; sickness and work-injury benefits; development assistance; and political party and student grants by 18.9 billion krona ($3.6 billion) in 1993 and 31.4 billion krona ($5.9 billion) by 1997. Says Unckel, "What was known as the Swedish model does not work any more."
He says the government plans to "develop the social-welfare sector by extending individual freedom of choice"—by cutting unemployment benefits and encouraging the unemployed to join temporary public-works projects.
The new Swedish government, says Unckel, hopes to make Sweden "the best home possible for individual freedom and entrpreneurship."
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]]>Modern Times provides an incisive and readable portrait of world events since World War I, a cataclysmic tableau that should be understood by anyone hoping to lead the nation toward the 21st century. What makes Johnson's work particularly compelling is his devastating critique of both relativism and statism. The 20th century has been the "age of politics," he writes, and the grand experiment has proved to be a disastrous failure. As he observes: "The state had proved itself an insatiable spender, an unrivalled waster. Indeed, in the twentieth century it had also proved itself the great killer of all time." Modern Times might help officials at all levels learn not to look to politics—and ever newer and more expensive government programs—as the solution to today's problems.
What should government do? For the answer to this question the president should peruse Charles Murray's In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government. Rather than provide a laundry list of "good" and "bad" programs, Murray delves deeper, arguing that the only appropriate role of the state is to promote people's "pursuit of happiness," that is, he writes, to enable them "to go about the business of being human beings as wisely and fully as they could." That, he finds, is most likely to occur if the government does not interfere with private economic and social interaction, especially the operation of the "little platoons" so active in America.
Indeed, he concludes that government social policy has to be ultimately judged by its impact on the functioning of private society. The state has some duty to help the "little platoons" by, for instance, preventing crime, but, Murray argues, there must be a "stopping point" beyond which government does not try to supplant private efforts. He rightly concludes that people's "satisfaction depends crucially on being left important things over which we take trouble," something recent Congresses and presidents have increasingly failed to recognize.
Also on the president's bedstand should be Richard John Neuhaus's The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. The role of religion in the United States is a controversial one; some of the bitterest issues that a president confronts involve church-state relations. Neuhaus's thoughtful analysis should help the reader avoid both extremes: the sterile, even dangerous "naked public square," with religion banned from communal life, and the incestuous, equally dangerous union of church and state, with clerics and politicians allied for any number of dubious ends. What we need, Neuhaus argues, is a rearticulation of "the religious base of the democratic experiment." The Naked Public Square will help the president understand how he can simultaneously welcome religious values in the public debate and resist clerics who reach for the levers of power.
Contributing Editor Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of The Politics of Plunder: Misgovernment in Washington and Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics. He formerly served as a special assistant to President Reagan.
Robert L. Bartley
Every president for at least two decades has been blindsided by powerful international economic forces that few of us begin to comprehend and that most of us don't even begin to recognize. To start to grasp the real meanings of global interdependence, a president ought to read Kenichi Ohmae's The Borderless World (Harper Business/HarperCollins, 1990) and Walter Wriston's The Twilight of Sovereignty (Scribner's, 1992). For a sense of what can happen if you get these matters wrong, he could dip back into the interwar period for John Maynard Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Macmillan, 1920). And he ought to ask his new treasury secretary to read all of them twice.
Robert L. Bartley is the editor of The Wall Street Journal and the author of The Seven Fat Years: And How to Do It Again (The Free Press).
Clint Bolick
Unless Frank Zappa experiences an unexpected electoral surge, it looks like our next president will need guidance not only in public policy but in the style of governance. No one personifies passionate and principled leadership better than Václáv Havel, and his Summer Meditations should top the president-elect's reading list.
Havel is the most heroic political leader to emerge on the world stage in recent years, and his life is an example of what it means to stand for something. His elegant and dignified leadership style stands in stark contrast to the frenzied arm waving and demagoguery that dominate American politics.
"Though my heart may be left of centre," Havel declares, "I have always known that the only economic system that works is a market economy," for "it is the only one that reflects the nature of life itself."
Yet the task of building a "state of ideas" is not one of ideology, Havel insists. "Something more is necessary. For the sake of simplicity, it might be called spirit. Or feeling. Or conscience." Havel's introspections could go far in helping our own president rediscover the principles and spirit that made our nation great.
Turning to policy, no issue bodes more ominously than the future of American education. With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the most brazen example outside China of unreconstructed socialism in the world today is America's public-school system. The primary victims are millions of low-income youngsters who are consigned to inner-city educational cesspools and lack access to the most basic skills necessary for responsible citizenship and productive livelihoods.
John Chubb and Terry Moe's Politics, Markets & America's Schools establishes convincingly that more spending and superficial tinkering will not cure the ails of public schooling. Rather, the flaws are inherent in a highly bureaucratic system driven not by consumer satisfaction but by special-interest politics. Nothing less than full-scale market competition and a transfer of power from bureaucrats to parents, Chubb and Moe demonstrate, will accomplish the goal of equal and high-quality educational opportunities.
But let's get real. We're dealing here with an American president. So my go-for-broke selection is The Little Red Hen, the perfect presidential bedtime story that says it all. Ms. Hen, one of the great feminist heroes in popular literature, asks her barnyard neighbors to help her harvest wheat and bake bread. "Not I!" they all respond. But in the end, they all want to share in the fruits of Hen's labor. Think again, cackles the red-feathered fowl.
Hen rivals Charles Murray's works as a scathing indictment of the welfare state and offers a stirring moral defense of free trade and private property. Eight-year-old writer and paleontologist Evan Bolick told me he was persuaded. Maybe it will persuade a president too.
Clint Bolick is litigation director at the Institute for Justice in Washington and author of the forthcoming Grass Roots Tyranny and the Limits of Federalism.
David Brudnoy
We may well never again have a president as plain-spoken, as unaffected, and as little disposed to bend with the winds (and whims) of fashion as Harry Truman, whose (very likely) definitive biography has been written by David McCullough. Truman (Simon & Schuster, 1992) is old-fashioned history, meaning that it tells us what happened, when, why, and where, and leaves to our own ruminations the deeper meanings of happenings. Truman's Fair Deal liberalism may not be everyone's idea of the perfect political philosophy, but it was grounded on a consistent theory of government as enunciated by an honest man.
Rising from provincialism to competence in personal and professional life, avoiding the taint of his machine-politics sponsors, studying the issues and concluding what by his lights was the best course, Truman did what he believed needed doing, growing nobly into the office that was thrust upon him. He was sometimes gawky in his bluntness, but he stood for something and Americans knew where we stood with him. To him, even before his victory in the great upset of all time, polls were nonsense, all save the poll on election day. To read Truman is to see what we're missing in the White House.
If we are not to be gobbled up entirely by an ever-growing fraction of the American people who are somehow on the dole, we had best get a handle both on expenditures in the "entitlements" category and on the reasoning, or lack thereof, that got us into this mess in the first place. No one has better analyzed the matter than Charles Murray, whose Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 (Basic Books, 1984) puts firmly into perspective the gross social (as well as economic) effects of the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson and its, and its successors', perhaps well-intentioned but nonetheless woeful enlargement of the proto-welfare state. A decade of intelligent analyses along similar lines has subsequently emerged; all owe their initial insights to Losing Ground.
The tragedy of what was Yugoslavia; the splintering of what was the Soviet Union; the halving of Czechoslovakia; the francophone separatism in Canada; tribalism in black Africa; and a score of other recent and hundreds of long-standing ethnic and racial conflicts worldwide demonstrate the bankruptcy of the notion of multiculturalism. Mexican irredentism in our own Southwest, the on-going crisis of Haitians seeking asylum in the United States, and the craze for Afrocentric "education," to name just a few domestic instances, signal our own suicidal path if we don't snap out of the mentality that embodies the banal truism that "we're a nation of immigrants so no limits on immigration are just."
Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints (Scribner's, 1975, originally published in French in 1973, English translation by Norman Shapiro) creates in fiction a chilling dilemma: What will the advanced portion of the world do when the Third World claims a "right" to occupy Western lands without limit? On the one horn of this dilemma is the seeming cruelty of our recent policy of turning away the Haitians; on the other, to use words from the book jacket itself, is "the end of the white world."
Romantic sentimentality notwithstanding, our current policy merely advances the date by which we will be obliged to choose. The Camp of the Saints confronts our president for the mid-1990s with the bitter alternatives. At present our immigration "policy" is inertial and our internal posture vis à vis bilingualism and multiculturalism are morosely tepid.
Contributing Editor David Brudnoy is New England's leading nighttime radio talk host (WBZ-AM) and a commentator on the region's leading TV station (WCVB-TV).
James M. Buchanan
My recommended selection emerges from an initial concentration on the issues that the incoming president in 1993 needs to understand. These issues are, first, the overextension of politics and the apparently inexorable tendencies for this extension to proceed unchecked. Although his model of politics is not fully congruent with modern public choice, Anthony de Jasay's book, The State (Blackwell, 1985) does capture the dynamics of government growth in this century. I recommend this book as a precautionary tale.
A more specific issue, which is itself derivative from the larger one, is the apparent inability of post-Keynesian Western democracies to escape from the regime of continuous, and accelerating, budget deficits. Cole Brembeck's Congress, Human Nature, and the Federal Debt (Praeger, 1991) discusses the origins, the implications, and the consequences of the deficit regime.
Any appreciation of the overreaching of politics must be accompanied by an understanding of how markets can provide nonpoliticized alternative solutions, even if, in many cases, organizational judgments must be made by pragmatic comparisons between an imperfect politics and an imperfect market. David Friedman's short book, The Machinery of Freedom (first edition, Harper, 1973; second edition, Open Court Press, 1989), should be required reading for all those whose natural proclivity is to turn to government as the solution. The president must, somehow, absorb Ronald Reagan's basic vision that politics is the problem, not the solution.
James M. Buchanan is Harris University Professor at George Mason University and the 1986 Nobel laureate in economics.
Craig M. Collins
Political "lifers" like Bush and Clinton don't need to read. Their ambition is to win elections. Having won, they do not need to know more.
To avoid dissolving completely into cynicism, however, I try to believe that mixed up with their selfish motives are traces of a desire to further the public good—so long as it doesn't hurt them politically. For those rare occasions when they have an opportunity to do good, I suggest they read Richard Posner's Economic Analysis of the Law so they will know what to do. Posner minutely details the complex interconnectedness of laws and their many unintended effects.
Richard Epstein's Takings shows how we have socialized private property into near extinction. He generally concludes this was not a good thing.
Finally, Julian Simon's The Economic Consequences of Immigration shows that it was no accident that vigorous economic growth in this country occurred coincident with a significant influx of immigrants.
Teaching politicians the right thing to do is not the same as convincing them to do it. They well know their interests are vested in the present system of buying votes by reallocating property. For that to change, the public must first become aware of the corrupting effect of this system. This public awareness will not depend on which books the president reads. It will depend on which books the rest of us read.
Craig M. Collins, a former REASON assistant editor, is an attorney in Santa Monica, California, specializing in property law.
Steven Hayward
The problem of modern democratic government is not simply a tendency to bad policy; it is also that most modern politicians do not have a sufficient understanding of or respect for democratic institutions and procedures. A deeper understanding of the principles of limited government goes hand in hand with better policy. Hence what is most needed is remedial reading.
It may be wildly naive to suppose that, at the threshold of the Oval Office, our nation's pre-eminent political figure can be taught anything meaningful, but here goes. My first book is what I call "the owner's manual to the U.S. Constitution," The Federalist. Why not? Although it is true that these essays were the product of a partisan campaign, and are written in an unfamiliar idiom, there is nevertheless a carefully worked out theory of how our constitutional form of government should work. A president will learn as much from Publius's errors of judgment as from his wisdom. The Federalist shines especially brightly on the current problems of separation of powers, legislative and executive prerogative, and judicial review.
My second recommendation is Harvey C. Mansfield Jr.'s recent collection titled America's Constitutional Soul (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). In addition to Mansfield's always learned reflections on the state of constitutionalism and party politics in America, there are chapters analyzing the last four presidential elections, from which a president will learn that the distinction between politics and policy, between campaigning and governing, is false and pernicious. Mansfield's serious treatment of and obvious respect for the political ability and achievements of Ronald Reagan are a nice antidote to the standard cliches against Reagan.
My third recommendation is Jeremy Rabkin's Judicial Compulsions: How Public Law Distorts Public Policy (Basic Books, 1989). This may seem like an odd or narrow pick for a president's short reading list. But Judicial Compulsions focuses attention on a major crisis within our government that isn't receiving adequate attention and that impinges directly on a president's ability to administer the executive branch. Administrative law has become subject to a regime of judicial activism directed chiefly by special-interest litigation. What this means is that neither the executive branch nor the legislative branch is really in control of policy. The point is, limited government and the rule of law require a properly limited judiciary, and the president who understands this and sets out to tame the judiciary will render the republic a noble service. And the judiciary will probably be easier to tame than Congress.
Contributing Editor Steven Hayward is the research and publications director of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francicso.
Thomas W. Hazlett
In the 1988 V.P. debate an uppity journalist asked J. Danforth Quayle what recent book he had enjoyed reading. A bit of tension ensued, as America experienced a collective moment of embarrassment. To his staff's credit, Quayle had the name of some erudite tome at the ready. This put that pipsqueak reporter in his place (especially since the debate format allowed no time-out in which to test the senator's comprehension coefficient). While I have no staff (not counting my laptop), I have been given advance warning of the question: Which three marvelous books should the new president read?
1. Hedrick Smith's The Power Game (1989). This artistic hunk of applied political science describes the sources and uses of political clout in Washington, revealing everything Jimmy Carter should have known but was afraid to ask about the national government. Those boneheads who believe that the pols are crazy and that things get screwed up because we don't have enough smart, good citizens in Washington simply don't see what Hedrick Smith knows: Things happen in government for good reason (even if the results for the lowly American taxpayers are ugly).
"Some like to say that the power game is an unpredictable game of chance and improvisation," writes the New York Times reporter. "But most of the time politics is about as casual and offhand as the well-practiced triple flips of an Olympic high diver." Filled with insights (example: "Congress has a stake in the inefficiency of federal bureaucrats: It lets their staffs become important fixers…."), this volume is an excellent substitute for a Ph.D. at the Kennedy School for a busy chief executive on the go.
2. Ithiel de Sola Pool's Technologies of Freedom (1984). A masterful treatise on the evolution of free speech, this book explains how the opportunities for greater liberty afforded by the revolution in computer intelligence may be sabotaged by the political ghosts of censorship past. The American tradition broke historic new ground in moving firmly away from the stultification of a government-licensed press, yet our First Amendment rights have gone into retreat with the emerging electronic communications media.
This uncivil rejection of our libertarian values is all the more ironic in light of the immense possibilities for genuinely democratic free speech that the new technology has given us. Our transition from a press of newsprint to one of electronics is now a century along; computer technologies are stupendously accelerating the passage. Yet our law and institutions have strangely afforded smaller scope for freedom to the newer forms of speech than to the old, a delineation that makes poor sense legally and no sense technically. (It makes perfect sense politically; see Hedrick Smith, above.) Pool, the late, famous professor of political science at MIT, reminds us of our magnificent heritage as the world's freest speakers nestled happily under the protections of the Constitution's First Amendment. Upholding such, Mr. President, will be your job.
3. Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson (either of the two volumes out now, or of the two due out soon). Caro's due diligence turned up the dirt on President Johnson, years after the legends (promulgated by the fearsome commander-in-chief himself) had been swallowed whole by journalists and biographers alike. Read Caro on Johnson and you will know a scoundrel. In glorious detail and riveting prose. Yeccccckkkkk! An odious perversion of public power on display for all the world to see. Can this massive dose of posthumous public shame inoculate our future president from hubris disease? Let us hope. Please read Robert Caro and remember: Someone will be watching. Closely.
Contributing Editor Thomas W. Hazlett teaches economics and public policy at the University of California, Davis.
David R. Henderson
Mr. President, you need three main things from your reading. First is a sense of what people's rights are and how a just government should treat them. Second is a basic understanding of how the world works. Third is a perspective on the 1980s. The following list meets the bill, to the extent any three books can.
1. Richard Epstein, Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain. This book by a law professor starts from each person's right to his or her own body and ends up showing, on that basis, that government has no right to take people's property without just compensation. Epstein then shows, with flair and buzzsaw logic, that the Fifth Amendment's ban on takings without just compensation invalidates most zoning laws, all price controls, "progressive" taxation, and most government spending.
2. Paul Heyne, The Economic Way of Thinking. Because understanding how the world works requires a basic understanding of economics, I recommend this introductory textbook. It lays out beautifully how cooperation among people works in a free-market economy. It gives you a basic understanding of how a price system works, and works magnificently, to turn conflict into harmony. Among other things, Heyne's book shows why free trade makes both sides better off and how price controls cause destruction.
3. William A. Niskanen, Reaganomics. You cannot understand the 1980s without understanding what economic policies were and what effects these policies had. Niskanen, even though a Reagan partisan, gives the most even-handed treatment of Reagan's economic policies available. Indeed, Herb Stein, no partisan of Reagan himself, called Niskanen's book, "a lucid analysis of Reagan's economics by that rare creature, an objective insider." Lou Cannon, a "liberal" Washington Post columnist, called Niskanen's book, "a definitive and notably objective account of administration economic policy." Niskanen tells the good—some budget cuts, large cuts in marginal tax rates, and a substantial reduction in inflation—along with the bad—failure to get spending under control, huge deficits (caused by the failure to control spending), and protectionist trade policies. Niskanen also gives a sense of the relative importance of various economic issues.
Contributing Editor David R. Henderson is an associate professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and editor of The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics (forthcoming in 1993). He was previously a senior economist with President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers.
Rick Henderson
The health of the economy will be the most important issue the next president will address. Effective economic policy is no longer a purely domestic matter. It requires a global view.
Economists Richard McKenzie and Dwight Lee recognize this. In Quicksilver Capital: How the Rapid Movement of Wealth Has Changed the World, they say that the information revolution allows nations, not just local regions, to compete for investments in capital and labor.
Fifty years ago, F. A. Hayek argued that central planners never possess enough information to efficiently direct economic activity. Back then, when planners tightened their grip on entrepreneurs and employees, those people suffered. Now, say McKenzie and Lee, capital can (and does) move faster than central planners can try to manipulate it. Policy makers who try to increase taxes and regulations will find their capital bases moving to more hospitable climes. The authors also insist that, so long as government remains intrusive, no amount of "investment" in worker retraining and public works can prevent private capital from fleeing. There's plenty here for either George Bush or Bill Clinton to chew on.
The president will also face a nation with decaying cities, disintegrating families, and a breakdown of what European liberals call "civil society"—the informal network of neighborhoods, churches, and other voluntary arrangements that (besides work) provide meaning and relevance to people in their everyday lives. Charles Murray's In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government argues that government attempts to replace that voluntary sphere in poverty-stricken areas have had disastrous consequences.
How, Murray asks, can a person with little education or few skills find fulfillment? As a good neighbor, an effective parent, or a valued friend. If the government is incapable of keeping the streets safe enough for children to walk to school, neighborhoods—in any meaningful sense—can never come into being. Government can set the conditions that allow these bonds to form, for instance, by making neighborhoods safe. Otherwise, Murray says, it should get out of the way. A president who pays attention to In Pursuit could give millions of despairing Americans a chance to start working through these difficult times.
If Charles Murray provides theoretical justification for the importance of neighborliness, John Shelton Reed tells you how much fun it is to be a good neighbor. In Whistling Dixie: Dispatches from the South, the University of North Carolina sociologist spells out why minor-league baseball games, church picnics, and fishing trips are important.
Even though he calls himself a "crypto-semi-neo-Agrarian," Reed is not an enemy of modernity, he is no apologist for the Jim Crow days, and he doesn't imagine that everything was perfect 40 years ago. But he is onto something: Not so long ago, life was more civil. And (I would argue) we've lost much of that civility because we expect politicians and bureaucrats to solve every problem that comes our way.
John Shelton Reed and Charles Murray would probably agree about many things. The next president would be wise to listen to what they have to say.
Rick Henderson is Washington editor of REASON.
Karl Hess
Because the next U.S. president will face crucial decisions about abandoning or restoring a republican form of government, it is urged that he read two current books—In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government, by Charles Murray (Simon & Schuster, 1988), and The Disuniting of America, by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (W.W. Norton, 1992)—and the somewhat older The Institutional Imperative, by Robert Kharasch (Charterhouse Books, 1973).
Murray's book can take its place as the peer of any book ever written on the nature and propriety of government—not as an ideological treatise but as a careful questioning based on only one assumption: that the pursuit of happiness, person by person, is in fact why our own government, an epic and historic innovation, was created and constitutionally constrained. Murray writes about people, not society, and makes the difference crystal clear. His book is a guide to the preservation of liberty, which, in turn, is the essential condition for the pursuit of happiness. The next president, being a representative of some faction or another of exactly the sorts warned against in The Federalist Papers, probably will find Murray's book intolerable. Alas.
Because the next president will serve during a time when the factions will have developed their own special languages—and possibly will even have been elected by echoing special vocabularies—the Schlesinger book is a superb reminder of the success up until now of the melting-pot dynamics of the country that still remains the preferred destination of so many immigrants, legal or not. When people vote with their feet, they generally vote American, no matter the politically correct position of blaming America for most, if not all, the world's ills. The Schlesinger book is particularly impressive as a counter to anti-American slanders because of the author's long and honorable representation of the modern liberal position. In this book he even sounds a bit like a classical liberal.
The Kharasch book is one of those overlooked gems that can make your day when you find a copy on a shelf of used books. It is a lighthearted but actually most serious look at how bureaucracies operate. The Iron Law: Bureaucracies exist in order to exist, no matter their publicly stated goals or roles. Because the next president will be in large part ruled by the demands of the bureaucracies, this book is an essential guide to the facts behind the factions. It also presents serious recommendations as to how the bureaucracies could be tamed. An example: No agency authorized to declare an emergency should also be authorized to manage it.
Karl Hess is a writer living in Kearneysville, West Virginia.
John Hood
Despite the pandering rhetoric of the election campaign, foreign policy remains the first and foremost duty of any president. To fulfill that duty, our new president must first have a solid understanding of the century's worldwide conflicts, both their historical roots and their significance for future policy making.
If the rise and almost-fall of totalitarianism demonstrates anything, it is the principle that "ideas have consequences," as do idea makers. Intellectuals, far from being cloistered agents of learning and discourse, ultimately determine the course of human events—by creating rabid, revolutionary movements with millions of victims, or alternatively, by constructing a philosophical framework for protecting liberty. Leaders ignore the life of the mind to their peril. Today's philosophy students can be tomorrow's Khmer Rouge or Shining Path. Today's mild-mannered professor or author can be tomorrow's Karl Marx or Abimael Guzman.
Paul Johnson's Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties demonstrates that the conflicts and catastrophes of the century have their roots in intellectual trends. The new president must understand the importance of ideas, of philosophy, and of rhetoric, if he is to lead his nation out of its current post–Cold War torpor. Ronald Reagan, despite policy miscues, will always be counted as among the greatest of our presidents because of his implicit understanding of the power of ideas (gleaned, perhaps, from his career as an actor—a field not too distant, in many ways, from that of rhetoricians and scholars).
More specifically, the new president must thoroughly understand why Marxism failed, both as a political system and as a system of economic, psychological, and cultural insights. Reading Thomas Sowell's Marxism: Philosophy and Economics would be an excellent start.
For a little light reading, I'd advise my president to read the plays of Shakespeare—particularly Hamlet, King Lear, and Julius Caesar—for their insights into human action and the nature of leadership. Both George Bush and Bill Clinton escaped the American education system before its demise and thus have no doubt read these works. But Shakespeare is best savored, not simply skimmed. And if all the world is indeed a stage, then the next president of the world's only superpower will play the lead. He had best memorize the right lines.
Contributing Editor John Hood is editor of Carolina Journal and a columnist for Spectator magazine in Raleigh.
F. Kenneth Iverson
The president should read:
Trashing the Planet, by Dixy Lee Ray with Lou Guzzo. A well-known scientist gives an even-handed, common-sense perspective on environmental issues. It avoids the distortions and hysterical rhetoric that seem to be the order of the day.
The Fair Trade Fraud, by James Bovard. The author provides an in-depth look at our chaotic trade laws, which give incompetent industries an entitlement to milk the American consumer. The Fair Trade Fraud is the frightening story of the 8,000 tariffs and 3,000 quotas that restrict foreigners' rights to sell and American citizens' right to buy, and the description of an area where clearly the government has invaded the rights of the individual.
The Next Century, by David Halberstam. A short book by a thoughtful observer of society on our problems and the changes we need to make a better tomorrow.
F. Kenneth Iverson is chairman and chief executive of Nucor Corp.
Elizabeth Larson
Set in South Africa half a century ago, Alan Paton's deeply moving tale, Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), is both a tragedy, in the classical meaning of the word, and a paean to the human virtues and dignity sadly lacking in much of American society today. Many nonfiction works have been written in recent years decrying the effects of the welfare society and the cult of victimization on personal morals and responsibility. For all their careful analysis, documentation, and statistics, however, none of those books brings home to the reader as Paton does the evil of abdicating individual responsibility and the human dignity of those who willingly live, and die, as a result of their actions.
A sidelight to Paton's central tale of a simple Zulu pastor and his wayward son is the story of the pastor's village—the land overworked and infertile and the people despondent. A wealthy white man arrives one day with plans to reverse this "tragedy of the commons" by dividing the land among the villagers. The right to private property is the subject of the other two books I suggest for our incoming president: Free Market Environmentalism, by Terry L. Anderson and Donald R. Leal (1991), and Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain, by Richard Epstein (1985).
Anderson's and Leal's environmental reader is the most important book for any political leader surrounded by aides, policy makers, and green advocates claiming that only the government can remedy environmental "crises." While other free-market environmental books are essential resources for information on specific environmental problems and why government "solutions" have made them worse, Free Market Environmentalism provides the fundamental principles used by every free-market environmental writer. Anderson and Leal explain, with many historical examples, that environmental problems can be solved by providing the right incentives to the people involved and by letting human initiative, not government mandates, take charge.
Particularly in light of recent battles between property owners and environmental activists over the "taking" of private property by restricting an owner's use of his land, Epstein's authoritative analysis of the concept of eminent domain restricted in the Constitution is the most important work on the subject available. The deceptively simple questions Epstein considers (What is a taking of property? Do current regulations—say, zoning or rent control—fall into that category?) ought to be posed to every policy maker from the president to your local zoning board—and, unfortunately for the security of property rights in America today, almost never are. A new president couldn't have a better foundation upon which to build his presidency than a profound respect for what the Founders considered one of the inalienable rights of women and men.
Elizabeth Larson is REASON's production editor.
Laura Main
Our nation's problems stem from an internal sort of cancer—call it lack of "family values" or, to be blunt, simply a lack of values. It touches every segment of our country, from crime on our streets to the well-being of our businesses, and it has very little to do with having children out of wedlock.
Even with large segments of the population receiving some sort of government aid, we still find a nation in the grips of so-called poverty. The book that blows the lid off the ineffectual hand-out system is Charles Murray's In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government. Murray quite graciously touches on every foundation that every individual needs to find true happiness—self-respect, education, a functional community, and family—and how our present system is providing everything but that. Everyone should read this book, not just the next president.
So that our president will further his understanding of the need for true self-esteem (not the pop version), I would recommend The Psychology of Self-Esteem, by Nathaniel Branden. And last, but not least, A Bend in the River, by V. S. Naipaul, to illustrate the negative effects of populating cities and towns with innumerable government employees ignorant of what a town truly is and what it means to be a citizen in one. A mere facade of freedom and prosperity, orchestrated by an irresponsible government, can only result in one thing: barely surviving in a jungle.
Laura Main, a former art director for REASON, is an artist and graphic designer in Los Angeles.
Donald N. McCloskey
If a president reads anything longer than 50 pages containing an argument, it's good news. Presidents—of universities and of companies as much as of the United States of America—have to be quick reads. But too much quick reading makes Jack a superficial boy. It makes him an arrogant boy, too, a Ross Perot, unaccustomed to the modesty of quiet listening. To read a good book with an argument you have to shut up and listen for a few hours, or you're not going to get it. The executive summary won't do. The last long-reading president was Harry Truman. Asked in his old age whether he liked to read himself to sleep he shot back, "No, young man: I like to read myself awake."
One book for the awakening would be Eric Hoffer's The Temper of Our Time (reprinted in 1992 by Buccaneer Books). Hoffer, who died in 1983, leaving 10 of these short but luminous books, was a San Francisco longshoreman and sage. He received no formal education, seizing it instead from libraries and bookstores on his way to pick fruit or offload cargo. He wrote in aphorisms, which make his books readable in rest periods from working out the schedule for the White House tennis court. Though a worker, Hoffer supported capitalism; though a thinker, he distrusted intellectuals. "In politics, the intellectual who as a 'man of words' should be a master in the art of persuasion refuses to practice the art once he is in power. He wants not to persuade but to command." A president should know that; Hoffer knew it at the height of American social engineering.
After Hoffer's aphorisms, try a sustained historical argument, from J. R. T. Hughes, a great economic historian at Northwestern who died this year prematurely: The Governmental Habit: Economic Controls from Colonial Times to the Present (new edition, Princeton University Press, 1991). From Hughes the president can learn the unhappy fact that we have always liked to interfere, we American individualists. Should "deregulation" be turned back by the new administration? Don't make me laugh. What Hughes called "the regulatory junk pile" is three centuries deep. We can crush modern economic growth with the junk pile if we try hard enough. The reborn state socialists in the environmental movement would like us to do just that. A president should know it.
And light relief: P. J. O'Rourke's A Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Tries to Explain the Entire United States Government (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991). The book is gutwrenchingly funny. Mark Twain called Congress "America's only native criminal class"; O'Rourke extends the characterization to the entire U.S. government. You can imagine the new president not joining the laughter. He should, and would gather thereby O'Rourke's serious point. It came to him in the middle of a New England town meeting: "The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it." There's something every president should know.
Donald N. McCloskey teaches economics and history at the University of Iowa. His most recent book is an edited collection, Second Thoughts: Policy Lessons from American Economic History, just out from Oxford University Press.
Michael McMenamin
Mr. President, economics has never been your strong suit. You showed no more appreciation of how to generate real growth in the economy than your opponent did. Yet if the economy in the next four years doesn't begin to demonstrate the kind of growth it enjoyed during the '80s, your party may well be shut out of the White House for the next generation.
So what books can you read during the next two and a half months that might really make a difference in your new administration? Given the constraints on your time, the books should be 1) relatively short, 2) entertaining, 3) a source of ideas for improving the economy (if not the government), and 4) written by someone who has no interest in being appointed by you to a high government office.
The three books I recommend are (in the order in which they should be read): A Parliament of Whores, by P. J. O'Rourke (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991); The Fair Trade Fraud, by James Bovard (St. Martin's Press, 1991); and For Free Trade, by Winston S. Churchill (Arthur L. Humphreys, 1906).
O'Rourke's A Parliament of Whores is the most accurate, insightful book on American government since Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Read it. Suggest to your staff that P. J. would make a fine White House director of communications. (Don't worry, he won't accept). Fire those who disagree. They have no sense of humor and you're going to need people who do in your administration.
Armed with your newfound insight into how American democracy really works, move right on to the next book. It's time to start saving the economy. The secret lies in two words: tariffs and quotas. Eliminate them. Totally. Unilaterally. The result will be a $1,200 windfall to every American family, which will return $80 billion to the private sector by lowering prices to consumers everywhere, especially food and clothing for the poor and middle class. As a bonus, you will reduce federal bureaucracy. You will not increase the deficit and you will also cut the cost of goods for U.S. industry, thereby making it more competitive in world markets. It's all there and more in Bovard's The Fair Trade Fraud. All you need is the political will and skill to bring it off.
Which leads to the third book. You and your opponent gave lip service to free trade during the campaign. Everyone does. Then they go out and vote for "temporary" quotas and tariffs in order to achieve a "level playing field" and pocket the campaign contributions from those businesses who benefit. What will you do without those contributions and how do you respond to the demagogues who claim it is unpatriotic to buy less expensive, higher-quality, foreign-made products? Study Churchill's book.
He knew more about the politics and economics of free trade by the time he was 32 (when For Free Trade was published) than any 10 politicians you will have to face in the next four years. The arguments haven't changed in 90 years, and the numbers are still on your side. There are more cost-conscious consumers and competitive U.S. companies who benefit from the lower prices of free trade than there are inefficient businesses who wrap themselves in the flag and ask the government to save them. Organize the competitive companies; mobilize consumers. Collect campaign contributions from the former and votes from the latter. Churchill will show you how. Plagiarize him. His book is in the public domain. And if the Library of Congress can't find its copy, I'll lend you mine if you promise a) not to mark it up and b) to return it in good condition in February. Good luck.
Contributing Editor Michael McMenamin is an attorney in Cleveland.
Charles Murray
Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain, by Richard A. Epstein, Harvard University Press, 1985. I grant that the possibility of George Bush or Bill Clinton actually getting all the way through Takings is, charitably, remote. But they should. Contrary to popular political rhetoric ("The United States is the only industrialized country in the world without a national…."), our country's excellence does not lie in becoming another Western European social democracy. Ronald Reagan had this one thing right: The United States is primarily not a geographic entity but the political expression of a few core ideas. The subtext of Epstein's intellectual tour de force is that those ideas are not rhetoric for the Fourth of July but are—or once were—the bones and muscle of the Constitution. It would be helpful to have a president who understood that.
Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Harper, 1935. This is not a joke. I read Little House to my youngest daughter a few months ago and was at least as engrossed as she was. Little House is not really fiction but a reminiscence of a real childhood and a common national experience. What comes home most forcibly to the modern reader is how much we once took for granted that people and neighbors could do, and would do, for themselves—and, in contrast, how pitifully small and cramped is the average politician's vision of the average citizen's capacity. We Americans like to think of ourselves this way. Perhaps we would like to live that way too.
There is also a delicious final touch to Little House, a tiny counterweight to the politically correct histories of the American West. Do you remember why Laura's parents had to abandon the farm they had carved out of the prairie? Because they had settled four miles inside lands that were granted to the Indians by treaty, and the U.S. Army forced the whites to leave.
In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government, by Charles Murray, Simon & Schuster, 1988. OK, I understand that it's unseemly to choose one of my own books. But the point of In Pursuit was to lead people to think about the question, "What do we really want to accomplish?" in rigorous ways, applying it to the practical assessment of policy, and that is what being president is all about. It is a question neither Bush nor Clinton has visibly worried about in the past. It is time they did.
Charles Murray is the Bradley Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Charles Oliver
Finding three books that distilled all of the accumulated wisdom of mankind was hard. Finding three that would also appeal to a man who has neither the time nor the inclination to read fat books dealing with difficult ideas was nearly impossible.
Obviously, the first book on the list should be about economics. Voters consistently said that the economy was the most important issue in this year's election. Unfortunately, despite occasional bows to business, the president has never demonstrated that he understands how markets work. My first thought was to recommend Ludwig von Mises's Human Action. This exhaustive work starts with the basis of economic activity—individuals acting for their own ends—and explains in detail how markets work and why government interference keeps them from working. But the book, though clearly written, is long and complicated, one the president probably wouldn't pick up, much less finish. So instead I'm advising him to read Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. The best primer on economics, this book demolishes most of the fallacies the president will hear from his advisers.
The second big issue facing the country is race; divisions among various ethnic groups threaten to rip this country apart. I was tempted to pass along various books by Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Anne Wortham, and Stanley Crouch, but instead I advise the president to read Richard Epstein's new book, Forbidden Grounds. This sweeping book begins with the basic values of liberal society—freedom of contract and freedom of association—and shows how these values foster another liberal value, racial tolerance. Epstein then demonstrates how current civil-rights policies not only undermine freedom of contract and association but also promote racial division. Epstein's book should be the basis for a reevaluation of civil-rights law.
Deciding upon a third book proved to be the most difficult. Should I recommend something to counter all of the environmental doomsaying the president will undoubtedly hear from his advisers? Should I pass along a book outlining the benefits of free trade? What about foreign policy or defense?
I decided upon none of those options. Instead, I urge the president to read Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Why? First of all, it's a damned good read, the best of Heinlein's novels, so the president won't put it down. That's good because the first part of the book paints a believable portrait of how a truly free society would work. This book isn't abstract ideas but people, albeit fictional ones, dealing with problems and solving them without the government's help. Quite frankly, this book could do more to impress the value of freedom upon the president than any other I could recommend.
Charles Oliver is assistant editor of REASON.
Robert W. Poole Jr.
What has been most sorely lacking in the Bush administration is a basic vision, a philosophy of government. The most profound and important book on this subject in many years is Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions.
Sowell's inspiration was F. A. Hayek's 1945 essay, "The Use of Knowledge in Society." Knowledge and Decisions is a book-length elaboration on that theme, drawing on the extensive body of knowledge produced during the '50s, '60s, and '70s in such fields as law and economics and public choice theory. The book's theoretical first half explains how knowledge is generated and used in society, the necessity of trade-offs (economic, social, and political), and the crucial importance of incentives in human organizations. Part II applies these principles to 20th-century trends in economics, law, and politics, showing how and why centralization of government fails to solve the problems it's intended to solve and creates a host of new ones. A thorough familiarity with these lessons would give the president a needed dose of humility about what government planning and programs can accomplish—plus a framework for shaping a new kind of presidential agenda.
Perhaps the most serious threat to Americans' well-being and prosperity today is the rise of pseudoscience—irrational attacks on foods, drugs, chemicals, energy supplies, and modern technology itself in the name of protecting us from cancer or saving the environment. The first book to document the perversion of science in the service of a new regulatory agenda was Edith Efron's vastly underappreciated 1984 book, The Apocalyptics. Efron's specific subject is cancer prevention, and she presents the book as an intellectual detective story: a journalist discovering and systematically documenting the gradual corruption of science in the service of environmental politics. The book's length can be intimidating, and its title may be off-putting. But Efron's message must be understood by policy makers, especially as the same type of pseudoscience now dominates far too much environmental and energy policy making.
Another issue high on any president's agenda must be urban policy. Yet until last year, most books about cities failed to acknowledge the profound changes that have taken place in urban form over the last two decades. Joel Garreau's Edge City is the first popular book to take seriously the shift of economic activity from traditional downtowns to suburbia. What makes Garreau's sometimes rambling account especially interesting is that he obviously began his research hostile to these changes but ended up discovering a highly decentralized market process at work—a process that reflects the way real people prefer to live and work. An urban policy based on trying to restore the predominance of traditional downtowns, served by traditional transit, is not only doomed to failure but also profoundly antidemocratic.
In recommending these three books, I take it for granted that the president-elect has already read David Osborne and Ted Gaebler's much-touted Reinventing Government. It reflects a "new paradigm" approach stressing choice, competition, cost-effectiveness, and accountability. While hardly laissez-faire, this approach would represent a welcome change of course.
Robert W. Poole Jr. is president of the Reason Foundation and publisher of REASON.
Virginia I. Postrel
Washington is a weirdly sterile place—the true home of the cultural elite, left and right—and the president is the most insulated person in America (with the possible exception of Michael Jackson). Reading should break the box and pull the president into the world where people don't all have identical suits, identical haircuts, and mostly identical ideas about what constitutes the good life.
For starters, I recommend two beautifully written books about the people who are transforming world business and world cultures: American Steel: Hot Metal Men and the Resurrection of the Rust Belt, by Richard Preston (Prentice-Hall, 1991), and The Outnation: A Search for the Soul of Japan, by Jonathan Rauch (Harvard Business School Press, 1992).
American Steel is an adventure, an absolutely riveting drama of the building of a minimill to make rolled steel with never-before-tried technology. This audacious undertaking is made all the more challenging by Nucor Corp.'s determination to do everything fast. The book has plenty to say about international and domestic competition—"man against man" in English-class jargon—but it is really about man against nature, about the joys and hazards of taming metal that's nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, "runny as water and as unpredictable as a cat."
And while Preston vividly portrays the romance of hot metal, American Steel is anything but romantic. A terrible accident destroys much of the mill and leaves a man to die a slow and painful death from burns. "Until you see the walls of a steel mill blown off and part of the roof blown away, the power of hot metal doesn't hit you." Neither I, nor I suspect the president, would be willing to take the risks that making steel requires. But some people relish them, and civilization is the better for it. The president should appreciate that. So should the risk-averse control freaks who populate Washington.
The Outnation is as tranquil as American Steel is hard driving. Less about trade, competitiveness, and international relations than about people, culture, and values, this tiny volume (180 pages, with photographs) has more insightful things to say about trade, competitiveness, and international relations than most books two or three times its length.
Those insights spring primarily from Rauch's willingness to look at Japan detail by detail instead of cramming an entire civilization—and a country of 125 million not-in-fact-homogenous individuals—into a tidy thesis for talk-show bookers. An enormously subtle book filled with well-chosen stories about real people, The Outnation appreciates and exposes the myths Japanese and Americans tell about our cultures and our differences. It is suffused with a sense of history and with a great appreciation for liberal values and why we value them. Reading it, we learn not only about Japan but about ourselves, where we come from, and, perhaps, where we're going.
Dedicated "to the unknown civilization that is growing in America," The Constitution of Liberty, by F. A. Hayek (University of Chicago Press, 1959), is three times as long as The Outnation, has no pictures, and tells no anecdotes. It is not journalism. But it is profoundly about "the real world" and, though philosophy, it is not abstract.
Hayek's is the nuanced world of history and action, in which knowledge emerges from experience and experimentation and principles are different from revealed axioms. The Constitution of Liberty is one of the wisest books ever written, the most appreciative of liberty, and the most distant from today's Washington—a place where people actually believe the man in the White House "creates jobs" and dictates culture. Entering Hayek's world, even for a chapter, would be a radical step out of the box.
Virginia I. Postrel is the editor of REASON.
Jonathan Rauch
Three books, Mr. President? I can think of three dozen, and I can think of one. High on a list of three dozen would certainly be Mancur Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations (Yale University Press, 1982), whose 10-year-old predictions today look depressingly accurate. Olson's hypothesis is that special-interest groups and their anticompetitive arrangements accumulate inexorably over time and gradually choke off economic and political vitality. Thus may postwar democracy, in America and elsewhere, seize up in much the way a man might choke on his own phlegm. Olson's hypothesis, though not uncontroversial, positively must be reckoned with, especially by a president, who needs to appreciate that pandering to interest groups is more dangerous than it seems.
Another among a handful would be Aaron Wildavsky's unheralded but fascinating The Rise of Radical Egalitarianism (The American University Press, 1991). Wildavsky looks at activists of seemingly quite different kinds, from land-use regulators to feminists to environmentalists to animal-rights advocates, and discovers a common cultural thread, namely the belief in the moral virtue of diminishing any given array of differences between people (or species). Most Americans believe in liberty and equality, but radical egalitarians are one-value people—like the antipodal radical libertarians, but much more influential."Egalitarians exist not to be satisfied," writes Wildavsky (italics his own). He will help show you what makes them tick.
But really there is only one book, on a list by itself. It was published in 1988 and has become a monument to the fact that liberalism still has millions of committed enemies, and they will hurt us if they can.
You ought to read The Satanic Verses and make sure everybody knows you are reading it. Then you should ensure that there will be no semblance of normal relations with Iran until the death sentence against Salman Rushdie is revoked. In 1989, George Bush's reply to the death sentence was of oatmeal consistency, and the White House has been silent on the matter ever since. Please do better. If the president of the United States does not stand stoutly beside those who exercise the right to criticize (as Rushdie's novel harshly and justly criticized both the Ayatollah Khomeini in particular and Islamic fundamentalism in general), then the world does not need him.
Jonathan Rauch, a contributing editor of National Journal, is author of The Outnation: A Search for the Soul of Japan (Harvard Business School Press, 1992).
Jacob Sullum
It's tempting to recommend the works of important classical liberals or summaries of contemporary libertarianism. But I'm afraid these would be too easily dismissed as outmoded or radical. Instead I've selected three books that are provocative without being too threatening or alienating. Rather than produce instant converts, they should have a more subtle, long-term impact that may result in some salutary second thoughts.
Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross's Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Prentice-Hall, 1980) is, despite the forbidding title, quite readable (for a serious psychology book, anyway). Nisbett and Ross explore how people go wrong in making judgments about themselves and the world around them, mainly by relying too heavily on cognitive rules of thumb and by failing to understand or apply principles of statistics and probability that are familiar to scientists. The book has no obvious political bent, but its implications for public policy, especially with regard to regulation and risk assessment, are profound.
Another psychologist, Stanton Peele, has built a career on challenging the conventional wisdom about addiction. His Diseasing of America: Addiction Treatment Out of Control (Lexington Books, 1989) is not a direct critique of the war on drugs, which may give his message a better chance of getting through. Like Thomas Szasz, Peele argues that the medical analogy has clouded our thinking about addiction and that we need to talk about people and responsibility rather than chemicals and diseases. He refutes many widely accepted myths about addiction, including the idea (accepted by a lot of Democrats and drug-policy reformers) that more money for treatment is the solution to "the drug problem."
Randy Barnett is not a psychologist, so far as I know. But he is the editor of and a contributor to The Rights Retained by the People (George Mason University Press, 1989), an attempt to understand the much-neglected Ninth Amendment. Although the book has a lot to say about liberty and individual rights—which you might think would be a turnoff for politicians—it draws on a wide range of perspectives, so it has a mainstream appearance.
Nevertheless, Barnett dares suggest that rights do not come from governments, that the Ninth Amendment might actually mean something, and that courts could even apply it in a principled fashion. Bold yet respectable, this book might plant a seed of doubt about the state's presumptions, or at least curiosity about our political heritage.
Jacob Sullum is associate editor of REASON.
Martin Morse Wooster
In asking this question, the editors of REASON are asking the president to do something that politicians rarely do—read for pleasure. Books are something most presidents avoid. Ronald Reagan read Tom Clancy, and John F. Kennedy enjoyed Ian Fleming novels, but Harry S. Truman was the last avid reader in the White House. Most presidents—and most politicians—subsist on a diet of words that consists of memos, government documents, and the occasional public-policy magazine.
So my first request would be that either George Bush or Bill Clinton find the time routinely to sit in a comfortable study full of books not directly related to his job. Most good writers are avid readers, and one of the reasons most politicians are incapable of giving a persuasive speech is that their "in" baskets largely consist of styleless mush. With that in mind, here are three books that will help the president sort through the issues of the day.
No better history of our sad and savage times exists than Paul Johnson's recently revised Modern Times (HarperCollins). Johnson wittily dissects the follies of dictators and statists in a stylish and decisive manner. Even though the age of tyrants has now mostly passed, Johnson's book is still essential for understanding how much of the world could have been deluded by fascism and communism.
Neither Ronald Reagan nor George Bush has done very much to alter the American welfare state, so Charles Murray's Losing Ground (Basic Books) is still essential, accurate, and necessary. Murray demolished the assumptions on which the welfare state was created, thus ensuring that welfare programs now have no intellectual base. Liberals have spent a great deal of time trying to refute Murray; they have found that his arguments are irrefutable.
Both Bush and Clinton want to reform American education, so they might learn something about how American education became as bureaucratic, sclerotic, and hierarchical as it is. There are not that many histories of education, but the best remains David Tyack's The One Best System (Harvard University Press, 1974). In this book, Tyack shows how misguided Progressives transformed American education from a decentralized system responsive to parental desires into a close-minded institution strongly resistant to change. The book is long out of print, but an enterprising reprint publisher should discover that this hard-to-find volume will have a wide audience.
Contributing Editor Martin Morse Wooster is REASON's magazine critic. His book on reforming public high schools will be published next year by the Pacific Research Institute.
The post What Should the President Read? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Richard Houser, sales manager for Green Motor Works, the country's first electric-car dealership, leads me outside to a white Ford Escort—a comfortable five-seater, he points out. "Put on your seatbelt," he jokes as we strap ourselves in. "We're going to Mach 1." I step on the clutch, shift into first, and with a gentle purr we're off, cruising the streets of North Hollywood.
There are no surprises and not much excitement either. Patrick Bedard put it well in a recent issue of Car & Driver. "Ever drive a golf cart? Well, imagine it with doors." I ask how much Green Motor Works would charge to convert my Honda Accord to electricity. About $15,000, I'm told. (Batteries included.) Even at such prices, Houser assures me, Green Motor Works has had plenty of customers since it opened on March 26, although he won't reveal how many conversions the company has sold.
The dealership hopes to get a jump on the electric-car market that the California Air Resources Board is trying to regulate into existence. California's clean-air program, which nine East Coast states, Texas, and Illinois may also adopt, sets annual quotas for the production of cars run on alternative fuels, beginning with the 1993 models. It divides "ultraclean" cars into four categories with progressively lower emission levels, determined by grams of pollution emitted per mile. "Zero-emission" (electric) vehicles must account for 2 percent of cars built by 1998 and 10 percent by 2003.
Smog-control officials and environmentalists argue that the California regulations, stricter than the 1990 Clean Air Act, are necessary to reduce urban smog and halt global warming. Instead of ushering in a new era of clean cars, however, California's plan for electric vehicles is likely to impose extra costs on consumers and automakers while doing little to protect the environment. The program provides no incentive for drivers to give up their conventional internal-combustion vehicles. Given the current state of battery technology, electric cars are much more expensive and far less practical than gasoline-powered cars—making them less than attractive to most car buyers.
Which brings us to the little flaw in the ARB's big plans: The quotas (a term board officials try to avoid) apply to the production rather than the sale of cars. How can regulators ensure that consumers cooperate with their program—that, say, 1 out of every 10 cars sold in California by 2003 is electric? Quite simply, they can't. So the onus for meeting the quotas falls on the automakers. In effect, the quotas are a tax on car production, and the car companies know it.
Although the ARB gives carmakers some leeway in meeting the production quotas for other car categories, the quotas for electric cars are mandatory. The automakers wanted it that way. "It equalizes all of the efforts within the industry, and it doesn't put one car manufacturer at a competitive advantage or disadvantage," says ARB spokesman Bill Sessa. "What the carmakers did not want was somebody building a certain number of electric cars and somebody else just kind of kicking back and not doing it at all." In other words, the car companies know a new tax when they see one. And if they can't sell all the electric cars they are required to build at prices high enough to cover their costs, they will take losses. These losses may show up in higher prices for other cars, lower wages for employees, smaller returns for shareholders, or less investment in product development.
Electric vehicles do have their strong points. They're quiet and, aside from watering and changing the batteries, they require little maintenance. But slow acceleration is a common complaint, and the batteries leave a lot to be desired. For example, G.M.'s Impact, scheduled for sale in the mid-'90s, runs on a pack of 32 10-volt lead-acid batteries that weighs 870 pounds and needs to be replaced every two or three years at a cost of $1,500 to $2,000.
The Impact's practical driving range is about 80 miles, and it takes two to three hours to recharge, says G.M. spokeswoman Lynn Pasquale, although "the best way to charge it is to plug it in at night and let it trickle charge over a long period of time, five or six or seven hours." The cars sold at Green Motor Works in North Hollywood are even less powerful: They have a driving range of 40 to 60 miles and take 8 to 10 hours to recharge. If you use your car just for short trips to work and around town, these limitations might not bother you. But if you commute a long distance, like to take road trips, or want to be prepared for unexpected travel, an electric car is probably not for you.
The need for better batteries is the main obstacle to a thriving electric-car market. Major automakers such as G.M. have been trying to overcome this obstacle for decades. Marcel Halberstadt, director of the environmental department at the Motor Vehicle Manufacturing Association, says development of batteries "has proceeded at a very slow pace not because the desire has not been there, but just because this is an extremely difficult technical problem."
Aside from their inconvenience, electric cars cost more to buy. The first electric car to roll off the mass-production line will probably be the LA301, from the small Swedish manufacturer Clean Air Transport, expected by 1993. At $25,000, the LA301 will cost about twice as much as a gasoline-powered car of the same size and class. Pasquale, the G.M. spokeswoman, says that the Impact will probably also be more expensive than a similar gasoline-powered vehicle, at least initially.
The MVMA's Halberstadt predicts that most automakers will sell electric cars below cost in the beginning just so they can put the machines within the price range of the average buyer. "It's only over a long time period that the manufacturers may recover their investments," he says.
Green Motor Works is not making a lot of money, Houser admits: "The profit margins aren't real high. There's a lot of problems starting up in this business right now in terms of actually getting these vehicles on the road at a price that the public will accept….The cost of the components is high, and in order to keep the cars at a reasonable price we're not taking a lot of profit."
Despite the higher prices and other drawbacks of electric cars, public willingness to buy them once they are built "is not a concern at all," says the ARB's Sessa. He cites polls showing enthusiasm for electric cars.
But automakers don't share his optimism. A Nissan official says car manufacturers "have no idea" how they will get consumers to overlook the money question and cooperate with the vehicle quotas by giving up conventional cars. Another industry spokesman says the impact of the production quotas on the automobile industry is "too touchy" for him to comment on.
"It may be that the advocates are right, that there are enough just purely socially conscious people out there to buy these cars," says Ted Orme, director of public relations at the National Automobile Dealers Association. "But our experience—although it's limited with alternative-fuel vehicles—has been that buyers, when it's time to part with their hard-earned money, want a car that's as good as what they can get already."
Activists and regulators argue that the disadvantages of electric cars are outweighed by their environmental benefits. Even taking into account the pollution emitted by the power plants that generate the electricity they run on, electric cars are a lot cleaner than gasoline-powered cars. The problem is, unless they are motivated by environmental idealism, consumers have no reason to care. The ARB's quotas do not change this basic fact.
And because it's relying on legal mandates rather than consumer demand to drive the market for electric cars, the ARB has no way of knowing whether its solution is more cost-effective than other ways of reducing pollution. It's true enough that substituting electric cars for conventional cars would reduce air pollution. But regulators overlook the effects of the de facto tax the quotas impose on car companies, and they ignore the possibility of getting more pollution reduction for the same cost.
For example, research by University of Denver chemist Donald Stedman indicates that a small minority of poorly tuned cars are responsible for most automotive pollution. (See "Going Mobile," August/September 1990.) By identifying these "gross polluters," a mobile emissions testing system like the one developed by Stedman could clean the air much more efficiently than electric-car quotas would. Such an enforcement system would identify and penalize polluters (and, presumably, force them to clean up their emissions). It would give drivers an incentive to pollute less—and a reason to prefer cars with lower emissions. It would make environmental friendliness a selling point.
Then, motorists might find electric cars more appealing. But most consumers probably would still prefer to maintain a well-tuned conventional car. Until carmakers crack the battery problem, all the mandates that California's regulators can dream up will not make electric cars practical or cost-effective. Says Orme of the auto dealers group, "I haven't seen an alternative-fuel vehicle out there yet that beats the good old combustion gasoline engine."
Elizabeth Larson is a REASON researcher-reporter.
The post The Environment: Green Machine appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On Monday, July 20, some 30 armed Shining Path terrorists stormed the institute's headquarters in the quiet Miraflores suburb of Lima. A fight with the security guards outside gave the institute staff time to hit the floor before the explosions began. When the smoke and dust settled, three people were dead and at least 20 wounded. But the Senderistas missed de Soto again.
Why does this Peruvian-born economist so threaten the Shining Path?
For all the Senderistas' terror, the 10,000-member group offers a haven of predictability and relative safety for Peruvian peasants otherwise caught between corrupt officials, wealthy drug kings, and the entrenched mercantilist class. De Soto's plans for establishing the rule of law and securing property rights for peasants threaten to weaken the terrorists' hold on the discontented and frightened masses—and to undermine the coca traders on whom the Senderistas depend for much of their money by encouraging coca farmers to switch to other crops.
Although the Shining Path complains that the institute's efforts are "distancing young people from participating in the popular war," suggesting that this second bombing won't be the last, de Soto is undaunted. "We will continue the fight, using democracy as our only weapon," he declares.
The post The Other Path appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The FDA has been using such scare tactics against organizations advertising the health benefits of nutritional supplements for years, but their frequency has been stepped up since David Kessler became the agency's head. Once a physician or company makes a health claim about a vitamin or other nutritional supplement, that substance falls under the FDA's definition of an "unapproved drug." Thanks to a bill introduced by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R–Utah), the FDA may soon be prohibited from carrying out raids for vitamins and minerals as if they were looking for cocaine or heroin.
The Health Freedom Act of 1992 would prohibit the FDA from calling a nutritional supplement a drug solely because it exceeds the U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance or because its labeling makes a truthful health claim—that, say, vitamin D pills prevent rickets or calcium is good for your bones. The bill would also broaden the definition of nutritional supplement to cover herbs and herbal extracts.
Steven Fowkes, president of Direct Action for Treatment Access, says the Hatch bill is "an attempt to counteract the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, which would outlaw above-RDA vitamins without prior FDA approval." The NLEA regulations will go into effect in November.
Says Hatch, "Consumers should be able to purchase any food they want—whether it is an egg, ice cream, a steak, coffee, potato chips, or a dietary supplement—regardless of whether someone in the federal bureaucracy approves."
The post Vitamin Squad appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Although FDA regulations allow patients to import only small amounts of unapproved drugs for personal use, the agency has turned a blind eye to the AIDS buyers' clubs. But the Alzheimer's buyers' club is likely to attract more attention, partly because of the enormous potential market for unapproved Alzheimer's drugs: Between 4 million and 5 million Americans have Alzheimer's. Some 200,000 new cases are diagnosed every year—more than the total number of AIDS cases in the country.
Unlike the AIDS buyers' clubs, which resemble shops, the Alzheimer's buyers' club will be a moving target. Customers will mail their orders to an address outside the United States. Saul Kent, president of the Florida-based Life Extension Foundation, which is helping to promote the club, won't say whether that address will be the point of distribution for the drugs.
"Just let the FDA try to figure that out," he says. "They're going to have a very hard time tracking these people down."
A newsletter, The Caregiver, will advertise the club and provide its foreign mailing address. Like the drug shipments, the newsletter will seem to come out of nowhere, unnumbered and with no return address. Until now, relatives have had to smuggle THA in from abroad at great personal expense and risk.
"These are just ordinary, older, conservative Americans," says Kent. "When you cause people like that to become radical, they become more radical than the young people."
The post Traveling Pharmacy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 1989, the California legislature prohibited local governments from banning manufactured homes on any land in the state already zoned for single-family housing. Since then, manufactured-housing companies have worked hard to build a new public image of the prefabricated home: not a dingy, ramshackle trailer home but a spanking new two- or three-bedroom house with oak cabinets, rock fireplace, and cathedral ceilings.
With conventional homes and condominiums priced out of the reach of many California families, these upscale manufactured-housing companies are welcome newcomers to the housing market. A manufactured home can cost half as much as a conventional home. Nine percent of single-family homes in the state are now manufactured, and new manufactured-home owners provided the industry with $556 million in revenue in 1990.
Unlike trailer homes and the older prefab houses, the new manufactured homes make just one move—from the factory to the new owner's property, where assembly of the house is completed and the building is permanently affixed to a poured-concrete foundation.
From then on, the homes blend right in. Craig Fleming, vice president of Silvercrest Manufactured Housing Inc., told the Los Angeles Times: "When people come to our factories and see our models, they're pretty surprised and impressed."
The post Homes on the Range appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Compared to Korwin-Mikke, Moscow economist Boris Pinsker is a relative newcomer to publishing. His business, Catalaxia Publishers, came out with its first book in December: The 50,000 copies of The Economic Way of Thinking, by Paul Heyne, sold out within weeks, and a second printing is under way. Backed by the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, Pinsker plans to publish The Fatal Conceit, by F. A. Hayek; The Calculus of Consent, by James Buchanan; The Firm, The Market, and the Law, by Ronald Coase; Human Action, by Ludwig von Mises; and, eventually, the entire corpus of Hayek's writings.
Policy journals and scholarly publishing houses aren't alone in spreading the word about capitalism. Novy Mir, the most respected Russian literary-political magazine, serialized Hayek's The Road to Serfdom last fall. With a circulation near 3 million, Novy Mir may have the greatest success in teaching people about limited government, property rights, and unrestricted markets.
The post The Road from Serfdom appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Fueling the movement is a recent report from the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine that the number of abortions in the United States (about half of the 3.5 million unplanned pregnancies every year) could be significantly reduced if highly effective contraceptives were more readily available.
"I don't think anybody knows how many pregnancies occur because of delayed refills, or just not getting pills on time. But it is really a lot. Anyone who works at an abortion clinic can tell you that," Felicia Stewart, a Planned Parenthood physician, told Ms. magazine.
Yet for many women's-health advocates, over-the-counter birth control raises the specter of health risks. While the only problem with diaphragms is getting the right size, the issue of oral contraceptives is trickier, they say.
Today, most physicians require an annual checkup before prescribing the Pill or renewing a prescription. Making the Pill available without a prescription would place the responsibility for preventive screening on the individual woman. Supporters of the prescription requirement argue that some women might end up with serious health problems that could have been avoided through such screening.
Opponents say that screening is a separate question and that giving women more birth-control options can only help. A Planned Parenthood task force is studying the issue and expects to make a recommendation by the end of the year.
The post Proscriptive Prescription appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Greene's 84-year-old father had Alzheimer's disease, a fatal nerve disorder that causes loss of memory and muscle function. One physician, moved by the sight of the Harvard-educated chemist unable even to dress himself or swallow solid food, suggested a promising experimental Alzheimer's drug known as THA. Unfortunately, the FDA had imposed an "import alert" on the drug in December 1988.
The agency claimed that THA "is known to be a potent hepatotoxin" (causing liver damage), despite data from an international array of doctors arguing that the drug's benefits far outweigh any risk. So Greene had to go abroad at great cost and inconvenience in search of THA: to the Bahamas, to Canada, to Belgium. Greene's father has since died, but hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other Americans with relatives suffering from Alzheimer's continue to risk arrest and prosecution for a chance to help their loved ones.
AIDS patients have it a little easier. Dozens of "buyers' clubs" throughout the United States routinely import large quantities of experimental drugs, such as Peptide T and DDC, for sale to AIDS patients. The activities of these organizations are clearly illegal under FDA regulations, which allow patients to import only small quantities of unapproved drugs for personal use. Yet the agency tolerates the buyers' clubs and equivocates when asked about their legal status.
In July 1991, during the same week that an FDA advisory committee recommended that the agency continue to keep THA off the U.S. market, another advisory committee recommended approval of DDI, an AIDS drug officially blamed for at least six deaths. That week, AIDS activists marched in front of the FDA building in Rockville, Maryland. No one marched for Alzheimer's patients.
In recent years, patients seeking access to experimental drugs have noted a double standard in FDA policy—a lenient approach for AIDS, a stricter one for other fatal illnesses. Under pressure from AIDS activists, the agency has bent and modified its rules, winking at practices that violate regulations and expediting approval of experimental drugs.
On the PBS series TechnoPolitics last May, FDA chief David Kessler explained: "The AIDS community has taught the agency about the importance of getting drugs out there as soon as there is reason to believe that a drug works and that it's safe, and unnecessary delays are intolerable when one's dealing with life-threatening diseases." In fact, the FDA seems to have learned quite a different lesson: The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
"Our older people are really getting a raw deal," says Jim Driscoll, an AIDS activist and president of the PATH Foundation. "They're treated like criminals because they don't have the ability at this point to bring political pressure on this particular issue, whereas AIDS patients do have the political power. They are younger, they can take to the streets, and they are treated much, much better than people with Alzheimer's or cancer."
Says Michael Fumento, a former AIDS analyst for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, "You don't see too many Alzheimer's quilts. You don't have Alzheimer's people chaining themselves to the FDA's doors."
On December 13 a group of Alzheimer's patients challenged the FDA's double standard in federal court. They filed a class-action lawsuit against the agency, seeking approval of THA for general use. The lawsuit notes that, unlike the nation's 4 million Alzheimer's patients, the 100,000 AIDS patients already have an approved drug (AZT). It concludes that "without question, the record demonstrates gross inconsistency in the FDA's approval and non-approval of these respective drugs." The suit charges that the FDA's treatment of THA violates the Administrative Procedures Act as well as the rights to privacy and freedom of choice in health care protected by the Ninth and 14th Amendments.
The lawsuit may have had some effect already: In February the FDA began allowing 3,000 patients access to THA in order to collect more data on the drug's efficacy. But the plaintiffs aren't satisfied: What about the other 4 million Alzheimer's patients?
It was a November 1986 paper by Dr. William Summers in The New England Journal of Medicine that first documented the success of THA in slowing the progressive loss of brain cells controlling memory and reasoning that is an early sign of Alzheimer's. Ostensibly to confirm Summers's data, in June 1987 the FDA launched a study of THA. Saul Kent, president of the Florida-based Life Extension Foundation, which is bankrolling the THA lawsuit, charges that the FDA's study was in fact "a deliberate campaign to sabotage the drug." FDA officials did not heed Summers's caution that liver damage was a potential, but reversible, side effect, and they did not allow researchers to administer the memory-enhancing nutrient lecithin along with THA, as Summers had.
In fact, Summers declined an invitation to participate in the study because, he said, the FDA had no intention of duplicating his work. But doctors in Canada, Sweden, and Britain were doing just that. Their findings, reported in the British medical journal The Lancet and elsewhere, supported Summers's conclusions.
An FDA advisory committee on THA finally met in March 1991. Researchers from the drug's sponsoring company, Warner-Lambert, presented evidence that THA was effective for more than 40 percent of the patients in the study. Nonetheless, at a second meeting in July, the committee decided the study "had failed to show sufficient clinical effect to warrant approval of THA" and expressed concern about possible liver damage.
Summers and his colleagues protested that the government-organized study hadn't administered lecithin along with THA. In The Lancet, they disputed the charges of severe liver damage: "THA has been said to be severely hepatotoxic. We disagree. Although 8 (18%) of the 45 patients had any abnormality in liver function tests, only 2 were removed from the study for this reason, and in those exposed to THA for 18 months on average there was no trend towards cumulative toxicity." Dr. William Maddray, a hepatotoxicology specialist, had testified at the FDA's hearings that, when monitored through routine blood tests, a patient taking THA was "highly unlikely" to suffer permanent damage.
Meanwhile, relatives of Alzheimer's patients who participated in the study insisted they had seen improvements in the conditions of their spouses and parents. Last April The Wall Street Journal printed messages to the FDA from some of them. One man wrote: "Get off your butt! Get on the fast track and release THA for Alzheimer's patients as you released AZT for AIDS. THA gave my wife three fairly good years before Alzheimer's gained the upper hand and I finally had to place her in a nursing home in July 1990. People with Alzheimer's are sentenced and on death row. Help them, FDA, while medical science searches for a cure."
A woman wrote: "THA did not restore [my husband] to normalcy, but he no longer walked five feet behind me, could cut his own food, feed himself, recognize me, and play limited golf. He again had hope and would smile and laugh and try! The FDA allowed us to import THA for our own use. After several months, it rescinded the permission. Under the guise of protecting us, the FDA is making a criminal of me."
The FDA ignored Summers's objections and dismissed the claims of family members as "anecdotal." At the agency hearings on THA, Kessler repeatedly asserted: "Above all, we must maintain our standards."
Those standards can be flexible, however. In 1989 the FDA began investigating Project Inform, an AIDS advocacy group in San Francisco that was conducting a secret trial of the experimental, highly toxic AIDS drug Compound Q, which the organization was importing from China. (The drug is derived from the root of a cucumber plant the Chinese have used for centuries to induce abortions and treat cancer.)
Two patients participating in the secret project had died, possibly from the drug's high toxicity, and several others had experienced seizures or severe dementia. There were rumors that the FDA might bring charges against the renegade researchers.
But by March 1990 the agency had reversed course, not only downplaying Compound Q's serious side effects but giving the researchers its blessing to continue with their work. Never before had the FDA given a community organization, rather than a medical group, full control over research involving an unapproved drug.
Since then dozens of buyers' clubs for experimental AIDS drugs have sprung up around the country, in flagrant violation of the FDA's rule that only personal quantities of unapproved drugs may be imported. The FDA has proven "completely unwilling" to crack down on their illegal activities, says Steven Fowkes, president of Direct Action for Treatment Access in Palo Alto, California. He says the agency has a "two-tiered enforcement system, because the FDA knowingly allows buyers' clubs to sell drugs illegally, and yet it's not OK for other people to sell drugs illegally."
Asked whether buyers' clubs are illegal, FDA spokesman Don McLearn is noncommittal: "We are dealing with that now. In fact, we've gone around to buyers' clubs and discussed with them where lines may be drawn. We have explained to them that if they are going over that line we may have to take some legal action."
In turning to buyers' clubs, AIDS patients take responsibility for weighing the risks and benefits of using experimental drugs. Alzheimer's patients and their families argue that they, too, should be free to choose—between the oblivion of Alzheimer's disease and the possibility of reversible liver damage.
Most Americans seem to agree. In a nationwide survey conducted last fall by the Wirthlin Group, nearly 80 percent of respondents said an individual should have the right to use an unapproved drug for treatment of an incurable illness.
"It is immoral for the FDA to deny access to drugs for life-threatening illnesses for which there is no medical treatment," says Fowkes. Fumento argues that "the information is the most important thing" in the choice to try an experimental drug. "If somebody wants to experiment with their own life, that's fine," he says. "And if a doctor, with full and informed consent, to a degree wants to experiment with somebody else's life, that's fine too."
The problem, Fumento says, is that a regulator's interests differ from those of the people he supposedly serves. "The bureaucrat's view is very simple," he says. "If I, as a bureaucrat, prevent a drug from going into use, and the prevention of that drug results in 100,000 deaths, no one will ever stick that on me. But on the other hand, God help me if I approve something prematurely and one person dies from it. Then I'm out of a job; then my name is mud throughout history."
George Rehnquist, a board member of Families for Alzheimer's Rights, is unmoved by the FDA's claim that it is only protecting the public: "The government should not be playing God with our loved ones."
Elizabeth Larson is a REASON researcher-reporter.
The post FDA Watch: Unequal Treatments appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Cities with private zoos include Fort Worth, New Orleans, Cincinnati, San Diego, Knoxville, and Jackson, Mississippi. Many others—among them, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Birmingham, Alabama—are considering privatization because of budgetary problems.
Some zoos develop co-management/ownership arrangements between government officials and private, nonprofit zoological societies. Dual administration has its pitfalls, though: The much-publicized power struggles between the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Association and the L. A. Recreation and Parks Commission resulted in the resignation last November of the association's president, Bruce Nasby, who had raised paid association memberships from 80,000 to some 135,000 during his 3½-year tenure. The lion's share of the responsibility for running the L.A. Zoo has returned to the city government.
The Philadelphia Zoo, private since it opened in 1874, is frequently lauded as an example for other cities. The Zoological Society of Philadelphia augments the $10 million generated by admission and membership fees with corporate sponsorships and fund-raising activities such as the "Run Wild at the Zoo" 10K road race, the Ben Franklin Look-Alike Contest, and the annual Zoobilee! party. The zoo's 1991 budget topped $14 million—not a penny of it from government coffers.
The United States isn't the only country with private zoos. Forced to kill their goats and cows so the carnivores wouldn't starve, officials in Buenos Aires decided to turn their century-old zoo over to a private owner last year. With private capital and admission revenue, the zoo was able to acquire over 800 new animals in a matter of months.
Director Juan Romero summed up the secret of his success in The San Diego Union: "It is faster to obtain money as a private organization. As a state operation, it would take two years to get new uniforms for the caretakers; now we have one meeting and we get what we need."
The post Animal Pragmatism appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>With the help of the Washington-based Institute for Justice, Cornrows & Co. is fighting these rules as a violation of the Fifth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1871. The outcome of the case could set a precedent for challenging licensing laws on constitutional grounds.
The cosmetology board has been hounding Cornrows & Co. because its employees are not licensed cosmetologists. In 1989, it slapped owners Taalib-Din Uqdah and Pamela Ferrell with $1,000 in fines for operating a beauty salon and training program without a license.
Last fall, after the D.C. Board of Appeals upheld the fines, the Institute for Justice filed suit in federal court against the cosmetology board and the District of Columbia on behalf of Uqdah and Ferrell. The suit argues that "the arbitrary diminution of plaintiffs' economic liberty by the imposition of these regulations deprives them of due process of law."
Rather than have prospective employees spend as much as $5,000 for a nine-month training program that wouldn't even teach them how to comb African hair, Uqdah and Ferrell train their braiders themselves in a three-month program that costs $2,400. Cornrows & Co. has trained hundreds of unskilled and unemployed young people in the art of African hairstyling.
"There's obviously a double standard going on here," Uqdah told The Capital Spotlight. "They're willing to take my $30,000 in taxes, but somehow I'm illegal. They're there to protect their own."
The post Cornrow Row appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Graham is just one of thousands of Americans serving time under federal mandatory minimum sentencing requirements. A new organization, Families Against Mandatory Minimums, based in Washington, D.C., is dedicated to fighting such disproportionate punishment.
Founded in March 1991, FAMM publicizes unjust applications of mandatory minimum sentences through newspaper op-eds and TV and radio appearances; it organizes meetings around the country to teach concerned citizens how to effectively lobby their senators and representatives to repeal mandatory minimum sentences.
Federal mandatory minimum sentences, adopted by Congress in 1986 and 1988, were intended for major drug traffickers and violent criminals. They require certain categories of offenders to spend a minimum number of years in jail without possibility of parole; judges are not allowed to consider mitigating circumstances even when faced with minor, first-time offenders.
Mandatory minimum sentences for minor drug crimes are as severe as sentences recommended by federal guidelines for major crimes against people and property: Involuntary manslaughter and possession of 11 pounds of marijuana both carry sentences of 18 to 21 months; robbery with permanent or life-threatening injury and possession of 500 grams (about one pound) of cocaine both carry sentences of 5¼ to 6½ years; conspiracy or solicitation of murder and possession of one-seventh of an ounce of LSD both carry sentences of 6½ to 8 years.
FAMM argues that "mandatory minimum sentences are unjust because first-time, minor offenders who could benefit from rehabilitative sentencing are often imprisoned for longer periods than child molesters, rapists, and murderers." The U.S. Justice Department estimates that we'll need to build four new 500-bed prisons per week in 1992 to keep up with the current rate of incarceration. FAMM questions the justice and wisdom of freeing serious criminals to provide room for first-time offenders like James Graham.
The post Long-Term Solution appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The NIJ, a research arm of the U.S. Justice Department, estimates that private law-enforcement agencies spend 73 percent more a year than the official police do, up from 57 percent a decade ago. They employ 1.5 million people and spend $52 billion annually, compared with 600,000 employees and $30 billion for public forces. The NIJ predicts that private security will grow at a rate of 8 percent annually for at least another decade—meaning that by the year 2000, private security expenditures will reach $104 billion, with public expenditures lagging behind at $44 billion.
As local governments tighten their belts, they're contracting out traffic control, animal control, special-events security, public-housing patrols, funeral escorts, and court security. Almost 75 percent of U.S. cities contract out the removal of illegally parked cars, says Nicholas Elliott of the Adam Smith Institute.
Private policing has caught on in the corporate world as well. Companies rely on private agencies to combat computer crime, industrial espionage, and other high-tech offenses. Businesses spent $148 billion on security guards alone in 1985, estimates Clemson University economist David Laband—and millions more on guard dogs, gates, and electronic surveillance equipment.
Homeowners are also eager to purchase additional security. Of the more than 90,000 homeowners' associations in the United States, the Community Associations Institute reports, 25 percent provide manned security and 15 percent electronic surveillance for their members.
The post Cops Out? appeared first on Reason.com.
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