Notes

REASON authors continue to be much in demand by other media. Patrick Cox, author of our June cover story on weather-service privatization, was interviewed on the Mark Scott talk show on WXYZ-Detroit. He has also been asked to do a report on private weather services for the Heritage Foundation. Meanwhile, John Doherty, of private airport control tower fame (May), has been asked to give testimony at hearings in Washington on expansion of the Federal Aviation Administration's program to contract out the operation of control towers to private firms.

There are still repercussions from our March article on the Chrysler bailout. Author Jim Hickel has prepared an expanded version as a Heritage Foundation Backgrounder. He also appeared on Barbara Studley's talk show on WNWS, Miami's number-one radio station. Finally, frequent contributor (and Reason Foundation Advisory Board member) Steve Hanke was quoted extensively in Newsweek's July 25 cover story, "Battle Over the Wilderness," which also mentioned fellow Advisory Board member John Baden's Center for Political Economy and Natural Resources. Hanke was also interviewed recently on WCKY radio in Cincinnati on the subject of his August REASON article, "The User Fee Illusion."

Both Patrick's and John's articles were projects of the Reason Foundation Investigative Journalism Fund. In addition to doing more-traditional, exposé-style investigations, REASON uniquely assigns reporters to get the facts on little-known examples of market competence in traditionally government-run areas, such as weather and air-traffic services.

Coming up soon is an event for which I have a special fondness—the 11th Future of Freedom Conference. Like its predecessors, it will feature an impressive array of speakers and panelists, many of them known to you through the pages of REASON. Among them are Tom Hazlett, Karl Hess, John Hospers, Robert LeFevre, Lowell Ponte, Robert Poole, and Murray Rothbard (who's being honored at the banquet). Other speakers include Barbara Branden, Henry Mark Holzer, Irwin Schiff, Ben Sasway, and Butler Shaffer. The Free Press Association's second annual Mencken Awards will also be presented at the conference. It will take place October 21–23 at Long Beach City College. You can get all the details on FOF '83 by writing Larry Samuels at P.O. Box 4, Fullerton, CA 92632.

Summer has been a busy time for us here at the Reason Foundation. My own hectic pace of speaking appearances hasn't let up. In July I visited three cities, starting with San Diego where I assessed the impact of libertarian ideas at the 10th anniversary meeting of the Libertarian Supper Club. The next week found me toiling away in Honolulu (seriously, folks!). I addressed about 130 business leaders at the Jefferson Society's annual meeting, explaining how user fees could make Honolulu's public services more efficient. I also addressed the Libertarian Party's state convention and did several media interviews. Toward the end of the month I addressed two groups in Dallas. One was a forum on mass transit, at which Prof. James Ramsey of New York University (author of the proposal to sell off the New York subways) and I discussed the problems with massive new rail systems and explained the potential of free-market transit. August found me in Washington, D.C., along with John Chamberlain, Nat Hentoff, Steve Chapman, and Doug Bandow, taking part in a conference on journalism sponsored by the Libertarian Review Foundation, publisher of Inquiry.

Our Academic Program Director, Tibor Machan, has been keeping an equally hectic schedule. Recently he chaired the annual meeting of the American Association for the Philosophical Study of Society in Chicago and took part in a Liberty Fund colloquium on law and liberty. While teaching several courses in the Economics Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara and working on several new books, he also found time to give a pretrial deposition as an expert witness on business ethics in a case pitting Universal Studios against an independent producer. And he also addressed the Libertarian Law Council's monthly luncheon meeting in Los Angeles on the topic "Morality and Regulation." That, incidentally, is the subject of Rights and Regulation, coedited by Tibor and Reason Foundation trustee M. Bruce Johnson and due for release (from Ballinger) any day now.