Notes

This issue is our 10th annual book review issue. Once a year we devote extra space to books, focusing on some of the year's most important volumes and also permitting space for one or more essay-reviews. I'd be interested in hearing what you think—both of this particular book review issue and of the idea in general.

I'm very pleased to announce that the Reason Foundation's Instead of Regulation, has just been issued in paperback. At $12.95, the paperback edition will reach a far wider audience than the $25.95 hardcover edition (already in its second printing). It's available from Lexington Books or directly from the Reason Foundation.

Incidentally, it was because of the book that I was asked to deliver a paper on alternatives to regulatory agencies at the American Political Science Association's annual meeting in September—which was generally well received. And the book continues to be reviewed, most recently in the American Spectator.

There are still repercussions from our exposé (Nov. 1979) of the uses of federal grant funds by Cesar Chavez's United Farmworkers union. The federal Department of Health and Human Services announced in September that unless the union returned $423,000 in grant funds improperly spent on the UFW credit union (one of the subjects of our article), another grant would not be extended.

Ideas from REASON continue to turn up in other media. Our August Trends column noted the growing success of commercial farming and ranching of wildlife, in several cases saving animals from extinction. What do we find as the lead story in the September 12 New York Times Magazine but (we blush) "Preservation for Profit," a sympathetic account of game ranching in Kenya. Also, for several years both Trends and feature articles have questioned the idea of monopoly mass transit agencies. Now along comes National Journal writer Neal Peirce with a September column denouncing transit monopolies and highlighting jitneys and other forms of free-enterprise urban transit.

Finally, just another modest "I told you so." We took some criticism for announcing the demise of the OPEC cartel in our June editorial. "Over the next few years," we wrote, "we'll observe their futile attempts to enforce production quotas as, one after another, the poorer governments resort to selling oil under the table." Exactly that has been happening; an attempt to set new OPEC quotas failed in July, and since then Iran and Venezuela have been exceeding theirs by large margins. Mexico will very likely follow suit. Saudi production has been slashed to 5.5 million barrels per day, down from the 7 to 10 mbd range of a year ago. See? The market does work.

On October 19 REASON author Jan Bellamy received her $2,000 prize for winning first place in the national magazines category of the John Hancock Awards for Excellence. The award was presented at a dinner at Seattle's Rainier Club, following a luncheon addressed by futurist Herman Kahn at the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel. The winning article was our October 1981 cover story, "Two Utilities Are Better Than One."

The Reason Foundation has added six new members to our Advisory Board. The six, all of whom we've worked with in the past, are former White House policy advisor Martin Anderson, political economist John Baden of the Center for Political Economy and Natural Resources, political scientist Robert Bish of the University of Victoria, enterprise zone expert Stuart Butler, former Council of Economic Advisers staff economist Steve Hanke, and Hoover Institution transportation expert Thomas Gale Moore. All six will be involved in brainstorming, writing, and conferences.

Publicity for REASON and the Reason Foundation continues. In September I did two radio talk shows, one (on KNUS in Denver) on transit deregulation and the other (on WIS in Orlando) on privatization of local services. The International Communications Agency is reprinting Tom Bethell's recent Viewpoint column, "Plumbing the Economy." And the Journal of Civil Defense has run a piece on our August cover story, "Don't Plan to Die," by Bruce Clayton. Finally, Hillsdale College has printed my speech "Rebuilding the Private Sector" as the September issue of Imprimis. Copies are available from the Reason Foundation.