-Caveat Lector- .............................................................. >From the New Paradigms Project [Not Necessarily Endorsed] Note: We store 100's of related "conspiracy posts" at: http://www.msen.com/~lloyd/oldprojects/recentmail.html From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Fw: Fw: The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress.(Reviews) -- Virginia Postrel Date: Friday, September 29, 2000 5:43 AM http://www.dynamist.com <--- Virginia Postrel Website ============================================================= Source: Forbes, Sept 18, 2000 p108. Title: Looking Forward.(Brief Article) Author: Virginia Postrel Subjects: Medal of Freedom - Achievements and awards People: Galbraith, John Kenneth - Achievements and awards Locations: United States Full Text COPYRIGHT 2000 Forbes, Inc. The U.S. government's highest civilian award is the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It goes to people the President believes have made "especially meritorious contributions." Why, then, did President Clinton recently give this prestigious award to John Kenneth Galbraith? The official citation says it's because Galbraith "has made complex economic theories and processes comprehensible to a wide audience and highlighted the social and ethical impacts of economic policies." In fact, Galbraith has spent his career peddling nonsense. His work, long scoffed at by serious economists of all political stripes, has been utterly discredited by the experience of the past several decades. His influential 1967 book, The New Industrial State, declared that Western corporate managers and Soviet planners were doing basically the same thing: maintaining the economic certainty that large-scale investment requires. Market competition is dead, he said, killed by technology and large-scale development. "The enemy of the market is not ideology but the engineer," he wrote. "In the Soviet Union and the Soviet-type economies, prices are extensively managed by the state. Production is not in response to market demand but given by the overall plan. In the Western economies, markets are dominated by great firms. These establish prices and seek to insure a demand for what they have to sell.... The modern large corporation and the modern apparatus of socialist planning are variant accommodations to the same need." It's as though Ronald Reagan had given a Medal of Freedom to his wife's astrologer. But Nancy Reagan presumably trusted her infamous adviser. Even the Clinton Administration does not believe Galbraith's economics. >From its earliest days, for instance, the Administration has been acutely aware of the power of international capital markets. Neither business investment nor government borrowing can escape the pressures of competition. Galbraith, by contrast, saw an easy way out for companies--just rely on retained earnings, which he considered completely under management's control. A firm that "has a secure source of capital from its own earnings" can avoid all sorts of problems, he wrote. "It no longer faces the risks of the market. It has full control over its own rate of expansion, over the nature of that expansion and over decisions between products, plants and processes." Back in the real world the Clinton Administration takes pride in an entrepreneurial boom. Along with a host of well-funded startups, today's economy is marked by mature enterprises--Microsoft, Intel, Oracle and so forth--that are still closely connected to their owners and founders. And the quality of individual leaders makes an enormous difference in how companies of all vintages perform. Impossible, declared Galbraith. A bureaucratic "Technostructure" had taken over business. The Technostructure insulated firms from competition and manipulated consumers with ease. And it had no place for entrepreneurs. They might run the corner dry cleaner, but entrepreneurs could not run any business that required capital and planning. "The entrepreneur no longer exists as an individual person in the mature industrial enterprise," he wrote. Galbraith spoke in a tone of resigned superiority, as though reciting obvious facts that other, less-sophisticated sorts were too romantic to face. "There is no more pleasant fiction than that technical change is the product of the matchless ingenuity of the small man," he wrote in his 1952 book, American Capitalism. "Unhappily, it is a fiction. Technical development has long since become the preserve of the scientist and the engineer. Most of the cheap and simple inventions have, to put it bluntly, been made." Well, that certainly explains Napster. More to the point, Galbraith could not conceive of investors spreading risk capital over numerous companies. If an invention couldn't be self-financed in a garage, he supposed, it needed a research lab in a bureaucratic monopoly. In short, the man got pretty much everything wrong. But he told mandarins what they wanted to hear--that "planning" was easy and markets a myth. That was his "meritorious contribution" to American life. Virginia Postrel ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is editor-at-large of Reason magazine and the author of The Future and Its Enemies, recently published in paperback by Touchstone. ============================================================= Source: Reason, May 2000 v32 i1 p42. Title: Laboratory Rats. Author: Virginia Postrel Subjects: United States - Politics and government Books - Criticism, interpretation, etc. Locations: United States Nmd Works: Laboratories of Democracy (Book) - Criticism, interpretation, etc. Full Text COPYRIGHT 2000 Reason Foundation What should state governments do about the new economy"? Back in 1988, when Democrats and faddish business pundits believed in a "Massachusetts Miracle" created by state economic policy, "reinventing government" guru David Osborne published a book called Laboratories of Democracy. It argued that activist governors were creating a new sort of economic role for government--not "negative," like the Reaganite emphasis on lowering taxes and cutting regulation, but not the musty old bureaucracy of New Deal days either. This "emerging paradigm" was cool. It was up-to-date, it was pro-business, and it was proactive. Its emphasis on decentralization, information, innovation, and "tripartite business-labor-government boards" was just the thing for the "microelectronic age." Its governor-heroes were Michael Dukakis, Chuck Robb, Richard Thornburgh, Bruce Babbitt, Mario Cuomo (!), and, of course, Bill Clinton. Although its rhetoric foreshadowed much about the current administration, nobody talks about Laboratories of Democracy these days. How much long-term praise can you expect for a book that made an economic hero out of Mike Dukakis? More important, the "competitiveness" argument to which Laboratories of Democracy contributed now looks wrong-headed. In the late 1980s, the political intelligentsia was convinced that America's economy desperately needed more government help: more subsidies for important industries, more protection from international competitors, more government guidance. The U.S. economy was too unruly, we were told, too unlike the well-managed Japanese industrial state. Osborne argued that pragmatic state officials were doing the right thing, while the ideological feds ignored reality: "While the states have concentrated on microeconomic concerns, such as new business formation, regional capital markets, and labor-management relations, the federal government has remained preoccupied with macroeconomic issues: monetary policy, fiscal policy, and tax policy.[ldots]In an economy under siege by foreign competition, macroeconomic adjustments are simply not enough." Twelve years later, the country is enjoying a stunningly good economy, and the only government policies to which it owes credit are the ones Osborne scoffed at: reasonably sound macroeconomic policies and a hands-off approach to "competitiveness" in the late 1980s and early '90s, which allowed restructuring to improve old industries and entrepreneurship to create new ones. As that noted right-winger Bill Bradley explained in a recent TV interview, "The thing that caused [the economic boom] is not government[ldots]but really the dynamism of our private sector." The job of government, he said, is to "get the big things right in terms of a prudent fiscal policy, open markets, the free flow of capital, the lowest possible tax rate for the greatest number of Americans, and investment in education and research." [Graphic omitted]Of course, Bradley didn't push that line very hard in his failed presidential campaign, and it still has too few adherents within government. Activist governors are still trying to attract press kudos by injecting themselves in the middle of the "new economy." In late February, the National Governors' Association met in Washington, contemplated state government's role in a post-industrial world, and released a big report called "Governance in the New Economy." The report starts with a governors' daydream that updates Osborne. In an imagined future, federal economic development funds come pouring into state government, which must "design and implement a plan that will achieve measurable results." Then comes the vague consultant babble: "State and local leaders will be able to comprehensively and strategically plan for revitalized local economies." Those plans are straight out of 1988, imagining no functioning capital markets, no variety among state economies, and no unexpected economic paths: An economic development "grant will provide funds to retool outdated manufacturing facilities to accommodate new, high-technology business as well as to train workers to prepare for the new high-technology jobs." We know the one best future, and it is "high-tech." Every wide place in the road will be the next Silicon Valley. All we need is that comprehensively and strategically planned push. The governors' subsidize-and-plan approach captured the imagination of reporters covering the conference. An Associated Press story cited Illinois Gov. George Ryan's plans for $1.9 billion in spending on education, "government services," and venture capital, California Gov. Gray Davis' proposal to give state universities another $75 million for research on new technologies, and New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman's proposed $165 million for technology initiatives. "You can't just let it happen," said Whitman. "You've got to be driving it." So much for the dynamism of the private sector. As for getting the "big things right" at the state level, the governors' report has good points, bad points, and mainly a lot of confusion. It says that states should "reshape the economic environment to facilitate business expansion and eliminate market distortions caused by outmoded taxes and regulations," even as it implies new market distortions in favor of information industries. It says, "It will no longer be practical or advisable to have a system replete with exceptions to general rules" but also repeatedly supports "flexible" government--both worthy-sounding ideas, but not necessarily compatible ones. All this business babble fails to distinguish between two distinct roles of state governments: that of rule maker and that of service provider. As rule makers, states need to provide simplicity and certainty, so that private actors can make and execute their own plans without tripping over unpredictable and potentially arbitrary state regulations. "Flexible" rules sound good, because they take into account special circumstances, but in practice they tend to be unpredictable and subject to political manipulation. The goal instead should be "simple rules for a complex world," rather than complex regulations designed to make the world simple. Keeping the rules simple and predictable, but not so restrictive that they prohibit private innovation, can be difficult for state governments. It means living with surprises and diversity, and it definitely implies tolerating results that may not fit a comprehensively and strategically planned vision for local economies. Who planned for Starbucks? For nail salons? And, let's be honest, who planned for dot.coms and the warehouses and shipping infrastructure that serve them? Simple rules don't give favorable tax treatment to some businesses and punish others. They don't prescribe detailed categories for land use--retail stores, but no restaurants, "beverage houses" but no health clubs or storefront churches--as many localities do. They don't declare that the one best future must be a row of antique stores, or an enclave of computer companies, regardless of what entrepreneurs and their customers might prefer. Simple rules for a complex world are all the more important in the Internet age, when states face competition that challenges the legitimacy of their regulations. Consumers can now leap borders at almost no cost, and businesses are eager to serve them. The governors' report admits that companies usually prefer uniform standards to a patchwork of different regulations, which may imply a federal standard, preempting state prerogatives. But the report does not fully acknowledge that consumers themselves may deliberately bypass the laws supposedly designed for their protection. "The diminishment of borders makes the cost and capacity to protect consumers more problematic," states the report. "A criminal or fraudulent business in one state can victimize consumers in a different state. The sale of prescription drugs, pornography to minors, and cigarettes and alcohol over the Internet illustrates how information technology is breeding new federal-state regulatory issues and tensions that challenge existing regulatory regimes." Of course, the Internet consumers who buy Viagra or Chardonnay across borders do not feel like victims of criminal businesses. They think their states' "protective" laws stink. And their actions challenge the laws' legitimacy. They force states' regulatory monopolies to face competition. Competition is what "laboratories of democracy" are about. In a federal system, smaller units of government can try different approaches. That allows both diversity--people in one state may not have the same values or preferences as people in another--and discovery. States can experiment, and good ideas can spread. This process is most valuable when states are functioning as service providers. Contrary to Osborne's industrial-policy emphasis, the real state-level innovation of the past decade have been in such area as welfare reform--in services, not regulations. States have also learned how to tap the competitive discovery process within the private marketplace, by contracting out functions and, in some rare cases, simply giving citizens vouchers with which to purchase services. But both state roles, as rule maker and as service provider, also raise a fundamental question: Is this a proper task for government at all? The governors never ask, "What business are we in?" What are we supposed to be delivering? Liberty, order and justice? Or any good, service, or restriction that sounds attractive and has an effective lobby? This is the question that determined "pragmatists" like Osborne consistently dodge. As leftist political writer Harold Meyerson correctly observed of the 1996 Reform Party convention, Perot-style technocrats imagine that there are no substantive disagreements between the followers of socialist Michael Harrington and the followers of libertarian Friedrich Hayek. It's simply a matter of getting the "best experts" in a room, stamping out corruption, and finding efficient techniques. The governors' report takes a similar attitude. The inevitable result is a mandate to do just about anything, and to focus more on the states' powers and prerogatives than on the freedoms of the citizens they serve. The report asserts, for instance, that state and federal policy makers must not let their turf battles deter them from "jointly shouldering the responsibility to shape the future and frame the questions that must be answered." That line may be federalist boilerplate. But it says a lot about what the nation's governors really think about innovation, decentralization, and all the other characteristics of the "new economy." They're great, as long as they're under government control. We wouldn't want the future to take a surprising shape. Editor-at-Large Virginia Postrel (vpostrel@ reason.com) is the author of The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, recently published in paperback by Touchstone. =========================================================== Source: Forbes, March 20, 2000 p142. Title: We Are Not All Hayekians Now. (philosophy of Friedrich Hayek) (Brief Article) Author: Virginia Postrel Subjects: Nobel laureates - Philosophy Economists - Philosophy People: Hayek, Friedrich A. von - Philosophy Locations: United States Full Text COPYRIGHT 2000 Forbes, Inc. LAST YEAR THE GERMAN NEWSWEEKLY DIE ZEIT asked Berkeley philosopher John Searle to single out a "book of the century." He chose Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. With its argument that socialist planning would inevitably collapse into stagnation and oppression, it was a prophetic work--remarkable for 1944. "When I was an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1950s," Searle said in a recent Reason interview, "the conventional wisdom was that capitalism, because it is so inefficient and so stupid, because there's not a controlling intelligence behind it, cannot in the long run compete with an intelligently planned economy." Searle's professors mocked Hayek, who argued just the opposite, for clinging to long-refuted theories. "Because everybody spoke so badly of him," Searle says regretfully, "I never took Hayek seriously until after he was dead." Searle wasn't the only one ill-served by an elite education that scorned Hayek's work, nor is he alone in his new admiration. John Cassidy, economics correspondent for The New Yorker and another Oxford grad, published a paean to Hayek in that magazine's Feb. 7 issue. Hayek, writes Cassidy, "was vindicated to such an extent that it is hardly an exaggeration to refer to the 20th century as the Hayek century." The scholarly work of Hayek, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974 and died in 1992, spanned not only economics but political and social theory, psychology and cognitive science. He also worked diligently, as a polemicist and an organizer, to preserve and extend classical liberal principles of economic and personal freedom. Milton Friedman once called Hayek "the most influential person" in spreading libertarian ideas. Cassidy focuses on what he calls "Hayek's most lasting contribution to economics: The notion that free markets and free prices are a means of conveying and exploiting information." We are all Hayekians now, he proclaims. Everyone "from Bill Gates to Jiang Zemin" agrees that competition is good when you can have it. But Cassidy tries hard to rescue Hayek from his libertarian followers, whom he terms "the far right." He wants to save government intervention in education, health care, retirement planning and finance from Hayekian criticism. To accomplish this trick, he combines a truth- -that Hayek did not oppose on principle all forms of government action, including minimal social programs--with significant distortions and omissions. The thesis of The Road to Serfdom, for instance, is not simply that central planning is inefficient because it blocks the flow of information. Rather, Hayek argues that substituting government plans for individual plans requires imposing a single hierarchy of values and overriding the diverse tradeoffs individuals would prefer. "One best way"--even for education, retirement saving or health care--is a prescription for tyranny or vicious political conflict. Hayek preferred competition to collective decision making, and diversity to forced uniformity. He worried about the desire of "specialists," or special interests, to impose their preferences on everyone. He insisted on the rule of law: that "government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand--rules that make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one's individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge." That formula is incompatible with the regulatory state as we know it. So it may be, as Cassidy writes, "quite possible to be a Hayekian and still believe in active government." School choice requires activist government; so does mandatory retirement saving in personally controlled accounts; so do disclosure requirements for selling securities. And these programs arguably meet Hayek's requirements. But most contemporary law honors neither competition nor diversity. It is not possible to be a Hayekian and believe in government prescriptions for uniform entertainment ratings, or in complex tax codes that favor some family structures or income uses while punishing others, or in static, bureaucratically determined allocation of the broadcast spectrum. Nothing in the current political debates suggests that we are all Hayekians now. Copyright Forbes Inc. 1999 March 20, 2000 ======================================================== Source: Forbes, March 20, 2000 p142. Title: We Are Not All Hayekians Now. (philosophy of Friedrich Hayek) (Brief Article) Author: Virginia Postrel Subjects: Nobel laureates - Philosophy Economists - Philosophy People: Hayek, Friedrich A. von - Philosophy Locations: United States Full Text COPYRIGHT 2000 Forbes, Inc. LAST YEAR THE GERMAN NEWSWEEKLY DIE ZEIT asked Berkeley philosopher John Searle to single out a "book of the century." He chose Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. With its argument that socialist planning would inevitably collapse into stagnation and oppression, it was a prophetic work--remarkable for 1944. "When I was an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1950s," Searle said in a recent Reason interview, "the conventional wisdom was that capitalism, because it is so inefficient and so stupid, because there's not a controlling intelligence behind it, cannot in the long run compete with an intelligently planned economy." Searle's professors mocked Hayek, who argued just the opposite, for clinging to long-refuted theories. "Because everybody spoke so badly of him," Searle says regretfully, "I never took Hayek seriously until after he was dead." Searle wasn't the only one ill-served by an elite education that scorned Hayek's work, nor is he alone in his new admiration. John Cassidy, economics correspondent for The New Yorker and another Oxford grad, published a paean to Hayek in that magazine's Feb. 7 issue. Hayek, writes Cassidy, "was vindicated to such an extent that it is hardly an exaggeration to refer to the 20th century as the Hayek century." The scholarly work of Hayek, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974 and died in 1992, spanned not only economics but political and social theory, psychology and cognitive science. He also worked diligently, as a polemicist and an organizer, to preserve and extend classical liberal principles of economic and personal freedom. Milton Friedman once called Hayek "the most influential person" in spreading libertarian ideas. Cassidy focuses on what he calls "Hayek's most lasting contribution to economics: The notion that free markets and free prices are a means of conveying and exploiting information." We are all Hayekians now, he proclaims. Everyone "from Bill Gates to Jiang Zemin" agrees that competition is good when you can have it. But Cassidy tries hard to rescue Hayek from his libertarian followers, whom he terms "the far right." He wants to save government intervention in education, health care, retirement planning and finance from Hayekian criticism. To accomplish this trick, he combines a truth- -that Hayek did not oppose on principle all forms of government action, including minimal social programs--with significant distortions and omissions. The thesis of The Road to Serfdom, for instance, is not simply that central planning is inefficient because it blocks the flow of information. Rather, Hayek argues that substituting government plans for individual plans requires imposing a single hierarchy of values and overriding the diverse tradeoffs individuals would prefer. "One best way"--even for education, retirement saving or health care--is a prescription for tyranny or vicious political conflict. Hayek preferred competition to collective decision making, and diversity to forced uniformity. He worried about the desire of "specialists," or special interests, to impose their preferences on everyone. He insisted on the rule of law: that "government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand--rules that make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one's individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge." That formula is incompatible with the regulatory state as we know it. So it may be, as Cassidy writes, "quite possible to be a Hayekian and still believe in active government." School choice requires activist government; so does mandatory retirement saving in personally controlled accounts; so do disclosure requirements for selling securities. And these programs arguably meet Hayek's requirements. But most contemporary law honors neither competition nor diversity. It is not possible to be a Hayekian and believe in government prescriptions for uniform entertainment ratings, or in complex tax codes that favor some family structures or income uses while punishing others, or in static, bureaucratically determined allocation of the broadcast spectrum. Nothing in the current political debates suggests that we are all Hayekians now. Copyright Forbes Inc. 1999 March 20, 2000 ========================================================= Source: Reason, March 2000 v31 i10 p4. Title: Prescription for Trouble.(online pharmacies and regulation) Author: Virginia Postrel Subjects: Pharmaceutical policy - Cases Electronic commerce - Laws, regulations, etc. Locations: United States Full Text COPYRIGHT 2000 Reason Foundation Online pharmacies challenge traditional medical models, and the regulatory backlash threatens broader Internet freedoms. Ah, the Internet! A new world of pure thought, free of the limits and coercion of the physical world. "Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live," wrote John Perry Barlow four years ago in "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace." Barlow had no monopoly on Internet euphoria--the idea that cyberspace is too intangible, too slippery, too ubiquitous to be controlled by government. Even today, sober analysts make much the same argument in less hyperbolic language, and technologists talk about "building the future" to bypass political barriers. But human beings do not exist apart from their bodies. We are matter-bound creatures. And given a tool as powerful as the Internet, we soon turn it to the service of our physical selves. Hence the latest clash between Internet dynamism and government controls: the regulatory attack on online pharmacies that don't honor traditional gatekeeping procedures. Over the past year, attorneys general and medical regulators in several states have gone after online pharmacies that allow customers to obtain prescriptions by filling out a questionnaire rather than seeing a doctor in person. They've obtained injunctions and levied fines, driving such online pharmacies out of their states or even out of business. In one case, the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation temporarily revoked the license of a physician, Robert Filice, who reviewed questionnaires and issued prescriptions for Viagra without seeing patients. In response to the state's action, Filice issued a statement saying that he was guilty only of "being a pioneer in a new and unexplored area" and that regulators had taken his license "with the hope and intention of crushing innovation and seeing to it that as a result of his experience no other qualified, competent and caring physician will dare enter the area of online medicine." (Filice was eventually fined $1,000 and given two years' probation for "unprofessional conduct.") Now President Clinton is calling for new federal laws to require pharmacy Web sites to get licenses from the Food and Drug Administration before they can go online--a chilling precedent. He's also proposing large new federal fines, up to $500,000 per sale, for selling prescription drugs "without a valid prescription." To enforce these new rules, the administration would give the FDA subpoena powers and $10 million in fiscal 2001. The same desires for independence, expression, and identity that cyberutopians like Barlow celebrate in the world of bits operate in the world of cells. People want control not only of their words and thoughts but of their bodies. We're a long way from having such control--our bodies have a nasty habit of failing us--but biology is clearly the next great technological frontier. Already, medicine has gone beyond the traditional realm of curing illnesses to give us tools for enhancing our capabilities. Rather than hewing to a clear-cut model of "disease," we are increasingly changing biological conditions we simply don't like. Sometimes we treat these conditions with pharmaceuticals, such as birth control pills, hormone replacement therapy, or Viagra. In other cases, we just wax our eyebrows or dye our hair. Once we leave the disease model, the doctor-patient relationship changes. When a condition does not require a diagnosis, there is less detective work involved, and hence less expertise. Certainly, physicians usually know more than patients about possible treatments, just as hairdressers know more about color combinations. But the Internet makes medical information accessible and abundant, and in many cases patients would rather take care of themselves. They may have already seen a physician and just want more of what was prescribed at that time. Or they may prefer the privacy and convenience of a Web-based medical consultation to the invasiveness and hassle of a physician visit. Although regulators tend to idealize in-person exams, there are undoubtedly risks to buying medicine without one. But physicians don't have perfect foresight, nor do they necessarily get full information from their patients. And they are often rushed. A standard "well woman" checkup can last as little as 10 minutes, hardly time for any in-depth discussions. There are also dangers to health and happiness in not letting people buy drugs without a doctor's intervention. How many people kept smoking because nicotine patches or gum were available by prescription only? How many agonizing attacks of arthritis or menstrual cramps did people endure because ibuprofen wasn't available without a doctor visit? Prescription contraceptives mean more unwanted pregnancies. And even a pure paternalist ought to acknowledge that dispensing real Viagra based on a questionnaire is a lot less dangerous than creating a street market in the stuff, complete with counterfeit pills and turf battles among dealers. Many different relationships among patients, doctors, and drugs are possible and desirable. As in so many other areas of life, the Internet encourages experimentation. Questionnaire-based pharmacies operate between the traditional prescription and over-the-counter models. As technology advances further, enabling physicians to do Web camera exams, for instance, more new methods will emerge. Rather than serve patients, however, technocratic gatekeepers seem mostly determined to protect the regulatory status quo--to dictate a single relationship and method of practice for all time. Government officials claim that any pharmacy site that deviates from the traditional model is a rogue that victimizes customers. This attitude means that Internet pharmacies are more dangerous than they need to be. State enforcers have made it clear that above-board physicians like Dr. Filice and established pharmacies like The Pill Box, a five-store San Antonio chain whose Web site sells several popular drugs, including Viagra and Claritin, will be the first targets of attack. Fly-by-night operations are hard to identify and prosecute. It's easier to make examples of dissidents who operate in the open. Regulatory threats also discourage information that would benefit consumers, such as the names and verifiable qualifications of physicians and pharmacists. Keepers of the conventional wisdom have reacted with horror to questionnaire-based prescriptions. But these upstart pharmacies in fact return to consumers the choice promised by supporters of the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. That law established federal requirements for drug safety and labeling but exempted prescription medicines from the labeling rules. The bill was sold as a way to help consumers make informed choices about their medications, not to transfer those choices to physicians, drug makers, and regulators. The goal, W.G. Campbell, then head of the FDA, told a Senate committee, was merely "to make self-medication safe." The government broke that promise. As MIT economist Peter Temin recounts in Taking Your Medicine, his 1980 book on drug regulation, "The agency moved within six months of the bill's passage to curtail self-medication sharply and thereafter used a substantial and increasing proportion of its drug resources to enforce its imposed limitations." The agency created a new class of medicines that could be sold only by prescription--a category that has greatly expanded over the succeeding decades. It "appointed doctors as the consumers' purchasing agents," writes Temin. When people are sick, they're often perfectly happy to have an expert make such decisions for them. But the new world of medicine means that "patients" aren't necessarily sick, and the Internet offers them the chance once again to choose how to buy their medications and from whom. Instead of trying to stamp out online experiments, the government should use the opportunity to start keeping its promises. ========================================================== Source: Reason, Dec 1999 v31 i7 p40. Title: Exploring creativity, enterprise, and progress. (Dynamic Visions Conference) (Brief Article) Subjects: Dynamic Visions Conference - 1999 Forecasting - Conferences, meetings, seminars, etc. Creative ability - Conferences, meetings, seminars, etc. People: Postrel, Virginia - Philosophy Locations: United States Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Reason Foundation Where do new ideas come from? What environments encourage creativity and progress? And what, if anything, can we do to find, build, or nurture such environments? Come hear an exciting group of original thinkers - and pioneering doers - explore these questions from a wide range of perspectives. This is no ordinary conference. It offers a "banquet of ideas," as one of last year's guests put it. You'll hear leading experts from biology, technology, management, ecology, media, public policy, education, and design - lots of intellectual heft, with minimal hype. You'll learn from them, and they'll learn from you. The emphasis will be on accessibility, cross-fertilization, and "serious play." You'll get insights you can use in your work, your home, your civic life, your future. You'll also have fun. At the Dynamic Visions Conference, the focus will be on stimulating your imagination, not selling you consulting services. In her acclaimed and controversial book, The Future and Its Enemies, conference founder Virginia Postrel lays out a dynamic vision of human progress: a process of open-ended, trial-and-error evolution and competition. At the heart of that process are creative people who come up with new combinations - of things, ideas, and practices. Finding promising combinations is one of the greatest creative challenges, a task that requires serendipity and freedom as well as imagination. An environment where different sorts of things, ideas, practices, or people frequently bump into each other can encourage that process. Such areas of encounter, where something meets something else, are "verges." A verge can be a city, a cafe, a frontier, or a multidisciplinary problem. This year's Dynamic Visions Conference will explore these special literal and metaphorical places - past, present, and future. Our topics range from the encounter between news media and information technology to America's ethnic future, from business collaboration to the Martian frontier, from the verge between home and work to the verge between nature and civilization. The Dynamic Visions Conference itself is a fertile verge, where people from different backgrounds can come together, spark one another's creativity, and provide new perspectives to each other. You will have the opportunity to meet other interesting and intelligent people at meals and receptions and to participate in open-mike discussions and informal breakout groups. The program and schedule are designed to enhance interaction, with frequent breaks to permit conversation, a single track of presentations, and a broad range of speakers and topics. During the breaks, we will have a special selection of books by the speakers and others available for browsing and purchase. We look forward to seeing you Presidents' Day Weekend. Confirmed Speakers: * Jhane Barnes, designer, "Mathematics, Computers, and the Art of Textile Design" * Gregory Benford, UC-Irvine astrophysicist, "Thinking Long in the Millennium" * Daniel Botkin, UC-Santa Barbara ecologist, president, Center for the Study of the Environment, author of Discordant Harmonies, "The Future of Nature: How to Have Both Civilization and Nature in the 21st Century" * Charles Paul Freund, senior editor, Reason, "Dark Verge? The Uneasy Case of Vienna 1900" * Neil Gershenfeld, leader, physics and media group, MIT Media Lab, author, When Things Start to Think, "Things that Think" * Nick Gillespie, executive editor, Reason, "Popular Culture on the Verge" * Lisa Graham Keegan, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction, "Innovations in Education" * Grant McCracken, Harvard Business School, author, Plenitude and Culture and Consumption, "Verge of Verges: Sir Francis Bacon at the Gates of Gilbraltar" * Christena Nippert-Eng, sociologist, Illinois Institute of Technology, author, Home and Work, "Home and Work: Drawing the Boundaries" * Daniel Pink, Fast Company contributor, "Free Agent Nation" * Steven Postrel, UC-Irvine Graduate School of Management, "The Geek and the Dilettante: Sharing Knowledge Across Specialities" * Virginia Postrel, editor, Reason, author, The Future and Its Enemies, "On the Verge: Exploring the Frontiers of Creative Encounter" * Adam Clayton Powell III, vice president, technology and programs, The Freedom Forum, "Culture and Collision" * Richard Rodriguez, author, Days of Obligation and Hunger of Memory, "Some Thoughts on the Burrito and the Browning of America" * Lynn Scarlett, executive director, Reason Public Policy Institute, "Can Industry Save the Planet? The Rise of Industrial Ecology" * Michael Schrage, columnist, Fortune, senior associate, MIT Media Lab, author, No More Teams! and Serious Play, "Serious Play" * Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for Mars, "Mars Direct: Humans to the Red Planet Within a Decade" To read descriptions of the talks, please visit our Web site at www.reason.com/dynamic/dynamic2000.html. ============================================================ Source: Reason, Nov 1999 v31 i6 p4. Title: External Cost.(extreme regulation of consumer purchases has economic ramifications) Author: Virginia Postrel Subjects: Cost (Economics) - Analysis Consumption (Economics) - Analysis Toleration - Social aspects Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Reason Foundation The dangers of calling everything pollution Pollution is a growth business. All over America, intellectuals and policy makers are busy discovering, or inventing, new toxic spillovers in desperate need of stringent regulation. Consider a few recent examples: * In Portland, Oregon, the problem is aesthetic pollution - specifically, ugly houses. As City Commissioner Charlie Hales wrote in response to a letter from the Portland Metropolitan Association of Realtors, "Nearly every day, I or someone in my office hears a complaint from a citizen about the poor quality of design of new construction.... I want to encourage you and your members and your colleagues in the development industry to propose something - anything - that will put a stop to the ugly and stupid houses that we see going up." To control Portland's architectural pollution, the city council recently voted to regulate the facades of new houses. Windows and doors must take up at least 15 percent of any new house's front. The garage cannot occupy more than half the facade and cannot stick out unless it is less than 40 percent; smaller garages can protrude only six feet. These rules represent a compromise from a proposal that would have also regulated trims, siding types, and roof pitches. * In his much-touted book, Luxury Fever, economist Robert Frank revives the anti-consumption arguments of Thorstein Veblen and John Kenneth Galbraith, with a new twist: He declares the purchase of increasingly nice goods a form of pollution - a "negative externality," as economists put it. If you see that your neighbor has a fancy barbecue grill, argues Frank, you'll want one too, and you'll make yourself miserable working to get the money to keep up with the Joneses. That you might just think the grill is really cool, that owning one might give you genuine pleasure, is beyond Frank's ken; all he can see is destructive one-upsmanship. "The same arguments that have persuaded economists that effluent taxes are the best way to curb excessive pollution suggest that consumption taxes are the best way to curb conspicuous consumption," he writes. Frank acknowledges Milton Friedman's argument that consumers know better than bureaucrats how best to spend their money. But, he says, "even Friedman concedes that at least some decisions are not best left in the hands of individuals - again, the most commonly cited examples being those with respect to activities that generate pollution. Yet ordinary consumption spending is often precisely analogous to activities that generate pollution. When some job seekers buy custom-tailored interview suits, they harm other job seekers in the same way that motorists harm others when they disconnect the catalytic converters on their cars." * In an August Weekly Standard cover story called "The Case for Censorship," political scientist David Lowenthal invokes the pollution analogy to justify government controls on the mass media: "As a nation we are concerned about pollution, about pure air and water, about the prevention and cure of disease in all its forms. Is there no such thing as moral pollution?" The Lowenthal article attracted attention because it advocated full-blown, prior-restraint censorship. But the "cultural pollution" metaphor has been buzzing around Washington for some time. At May Senate hearings on media violence, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kans.) and Bill Bennett both used the term, and Rowell Huesmann, a University of Michigan psychology and communications professor, drew a Frank-style analogy. He declared that media "producers can ignore what economists might call negative externalities" and called for a tax to offset the profitability of violent programming "much as you might do the same to encourage pollution controls, or other kinds of environmental controls." Everyone, it seems, has learned one lesson from Economics 101: Some activities have negative spillovers whose full costs aren't borne by the beneficiaries. As Paul Samuelson put it in my old econ textbook (1976 edition, emphasis in the original), "Wherever there are externalities, a strong case can be made for supplanting complete individualism by some kind of group action.... The reader can think of countless other externalities where sound economics would suggest some limitations on individual freedom in the interest of all." Samuelson had no idea how big "countless" could become. His book is silent on garage doors, fancy barbecue grills, and action movies. The current rage for externality arguments may seem like a victory for economic reasoning - at least people are taking the idea of markets into account - but it actually has little to do with the economic world of trade and tradeoffs. The appeal of the externality claim to anti-market ideologues is that it has absolutely no stopping point. It sees anything that affects anything else as fair game for regulation; any side effect can be called "pollution." Since every action affects people other than the actor, anything someone doesn't like can qualify. The old adage that "your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins" suddenly applies to a world of noses that put Pinocchio to shame. All this economistic blabber about externalities conveniently ignores one of the central scholarly insights about spillovers and their regulation. Even Frank, with his showy 21 pages of tightly spaced bibliographical references, manages to omit the most cited paper in all of economic literature, an article directly relevant to his topic. That is a telling oversight. The paper in question, Nobel laureate Ronald Coase's 1960 article, "The Problem of Social Cost," begins with a shocking observation: "Externalities" are reciprocal. They aren't a matter of physical invasion, with good guys and bad guys, but of unpriced impacts of any sort. We may recognize that an action inflicts a spillover harm, but stopping that action inflicts a different spillover harm. If I build an ugly house, your aesthetic sensibilities may be offended. But if, to keep the neighborhood to your taste, you stop me from building my house, I lose the benefit of living in it. If I buy a cool barbecue grill, you may feel pressure to do likewise. But if you keep me from buying the grill, or take my money in a consumption tax, I'm hurt by your efforts. The same is true for classic externalities: If a steel mill pollutes the air, it harms those who breathe the pollution. But to shut down the mill (or require controls that increase its costs) harms those who buy and sell steel. In all these cases, an externality exists either way, regardless of who has to bear the costs of adjustment. (There are other aspects to Coase's paper, including, famously, the important issue of transaction costs.) To deal with externalities, therefore, Coase argues for putting the burden where the cost is least. In a Coasian world, people who don't like other people's garages avert their eyes. People who do not approve of violent movies do not buy tickets for them and, perhaps, do not socialize with others who do. People who covet other people's nice possessions get therapy or religion. In a Coasian world, you cannot simply yell "externality" and get the government to stamp out anything that offends you. You cannot declare that conjectural, unquantified costs, such as aesthetic considerations, are infinite, but real, private market costs, such as more expensive houses, don't count. The burden of proof for regulation is not infinite, but it is high. By contrast, one reason for regulating stationary sources of gross air pollution, such as steel mills circa 1969, is that such regulation offers large benefits at relatively low costs. It would be extremely difficult for individuals to avoid inhaling the dirty air, compared to the relative ease with which the factory could install smokestack scrubbers or use cleaner coal. Coase's reasoning is obviously not an absolutist argument for freedom of action. As Frank notes, even strong libertarians usually make exceptions for some sorts of externalities. By clarifying the issues, Coase's utilitarian insight helps separate serious spillovers from mere excuses for bossing people around. There are certainly other arguments against the infinitely elastic notion of externalities, which, as a theoretical matter, is a prescription for totalitarian control. But Coase's insight explains in a nutshell why peaceful social life, in which all actions are necessarily interconnected, must include a large measure of tolerance - and why spouting economic jargon is no substitute for thinking clearly. ========================================================= Source: Reason, Nov 1999 v31 i6 p33. Title: After Socialism. Author: Virginia Postrel Subjects: Sweden - Economic policy Soviet Union - Economic policy Socialism - Analysis Locations: Sweden; Former Soviet Union Organizations: Mont Pelerin Society - Economic policy Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Reason Foundation Now the greatest threats to freedom come from those seeking stability and the "one best way." In 1947, small group of classical liberal intellectuals gathered in the Swiss Alps to form an international society whose purpose was "to work out the principles which would secure the preservation of a free society." Named for their meeting place, the Mont Pelerin Society was the brainchild of Friedrich Hayek, the economist and social philosopher whose popular book The Road to Serfdom had been a sensation only a few years earlier. The 39 founding members included future Nobel laureate economists Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and Maurice Allais (and Hayek himself) as well as such luminaries as philosophers Karl Popper and Michael Polanyi and Hayek's mentor Ludwig von Mises. Through intellectual camaraderie and rigorous discussion, they sought to achieve "the rebirth of a liberal movement in Europe" and, by implication, the rest of the world. Fifty-two years later, both the society and the world have changed. Liberal ideals of free minds and free markets have indeed enjoyed a rebirth, not only in Europe but throughout the world. And Mont Pelerin now boasts a membership of nearly 500, including scholars, journalists, think tank researchers, and business people. In late August, those from the Americas met in Vancouver to take up the question, "Are we experiencing 'creeping socialism?'" In 1947, socialism's growth was obvious. In 1999, it was a matter of much debate. In one of the opening talks, REASON Editor Virginia Postrel argued that "socialism" is no longer the major challenge to markets and economic freedom and that classical liberal ideals face opponents with new arguments and different values. The following is a slightly adapted version of her speech. The theme of this conference is "Are we experiencing 'creeping socialism,'" and I am supposed to provide the optimistic answer to that question. The format presumes, however, that it is the right question, which I don't believe it is. But I'll start with the official question. It immediately raises the issue of what we mean by socialism, creeping or otherwise. As a good journalist, I'll begin with an anecdote: The week of our graduation from college in 1982, my husband (who was then my boyfriend) participated in a debate between two teams of graduating seniors. The resolution was something like, "Resolved: Socialism is better than capitalism," and Steve, not surprisingly, was on the anti-socialism side. One of the critical terms of that debate was the definition of socialism. Steve's team argued that socialism was the Soviet Union, and therefore guilty of the terrors of the Soviet system, while the opposing side argued that socialism was Sweden, and therefore innocent of eroding political freedom. Seventeen years later, we are gathered to examine whether socialism is expanding - and I would argue that the terms of that debate suggest quite clearly that it is not. Neither the Soviet system nor the Swedish system is on the march. That does not mean we don't have to worry about threats to liberty. It just means we don't have to worry very much about socialism. The issues that define our political, intellectual, and cultural coalitions are changing, and we ignore those changes to our peril. Socialism is not simply a synonym for a large state or for government regulation of the economy. In both the nasty Soviet model and the nice Swedish one, it is particularly concerned with some issues and less concerned with others. It may be a fuzzy term, but, like an electron's quantum field, the fuzz forms around some places and not around others. The goal of socialism is a fairer allocation of economic resources, which its advocates often claim will also be a less wasteful one. Socialism is about who gets the goods and how. Socialism objects to markets because markets allocate resources in ways socialists believe to be unfair on both counts: both the who and the how. In its pure form - what Hayek in The Road to Serfdom called "hot socialism" - socialism essentially turns the economy into a government monopoly, either through direct state ownership of the means of production or through complete state direction of economic life. Socialist governments nationalize industries. They set up boards governing wages and prices. They direct supply and demand. Until the mid-1980s, this sort of socialism was common, not only in communist countries but throughout the free world - which is why it made for a good debate topic in 1982. During my teenage years, the American economy itself was marked by wage and price controls and complex schemes to allocate energy supplies; in the 1970s, you could call for the U.S. government to nationalize the oil industry and not be dismissed as a nut. (I would argue, and do in The Future and Its Enemies, that the U.S. regulatory system is better understood as technocracy, which substitutes the judgments of supposedly efficient experts for diffuse market decisions, than as socialism. But from time to time, the U.S. government did adopt both the methods and the goals of socialism.) Today, the remnants of hot socialism exist in the very few countries with deliberately socialist regimes, of which North Korea is the purest example, and in a few industries within otherwise nonsocialist countries. But few remnants remain. Hot socialism disappeared so quickly, both as a policy and as an ideal, that we have forgotten how utterly common its assumptions used to be. That's one reason we can seriously debate whether our contemporary situation represents "creeping socialism," a term that dates back to the 1950s, when socialism really was on the march. The other sort of "socialism" is what I, like Steve's debating team, would more properly call "social democracy," or the redistributive state. This is the Swedish model, which uses massive redistribution through taxation and subsidies to rearrange economic outcomes. The goal is the same as for hot socialism - a fairer allocation of resources - and the animating ideology is economic egalitarianism. Having spent some time recently in Sweden, I find it hard to imagine that Swedish socialism is creeping anywhere, except possibly under a rock to hide. The Swedish system is in serious trouble. The Swedish economy is no longer creating jobs - private sector employment has been shrinking for decades, and the public sector can no longer absorb more workers. The country is facing a brain drain. A backlash is developing against refugees and immigrants, who once represented Sweden's commitment to human rights and now are increasingly seen as outsiders consuming a fixed welfare pie. Many Swedes are pessimistic about the future, in large measure because they cannot imagine how their system can survive, yet cannot overcome the political obstacles to changing it. The "social democracy" form of socialism is difficult to maintain because it runs head on into the political pressure of democracy - which replaces abstract issues of "fairness" with the practical calculations of interest-group politics - and the economic pressure of open markets. The Western democracies, Sweden among them, have not been willing to sacrifice their political freedom or their general prosperity to maintain ever-expanding socialism. They haven't, for instance, kept their people from leaving the country or even, in most cases, from sending their money abroad. That freedom has maintained the political legitimacy of social democracies, but it has undermined their ability to stay socialist. As Hayek noted in The Road to Serfdom, "Many kinds of economic planning are indeed practicable only if the planning authority can effectively shut out all extraneous influences; the result of such planning is therefore inevitably the piling-up of restrictions on the movements of men and goods." The flip side of Hayek's observation is that countries that allow the more or less free movement of products, people, and financial capital will find that socialism cannot be sustained. A socialist regime depends on monopoly power that cannot survive the pressures of competition from outside. In the postwar period, a combination of liberal idealism, economic pragmatism, and Cold War calculation led not to Hayek's "piling-up of restrictions" but to increasingly free international markets, greater freedom of movement, and, most recently, ever freer capital flows - all enhanced by advances in communications and transportation. We are not experiencing "creeping socialism." That is not the challenge we face. If you are used to fighting socialism, and have developed your arguments, tactics, and alliances accordingly, it's tempting to define any form of redistribution or regulation as creeping socialism and therefore to declare the expansion of any and all government programs to be socialism. But that sweeping definition leads to political and economic confusion: It destroys the ability to detect threats early, to form alliances and perceive enemies, and to hone arguments. We must keep in mind what socialism is, and therefore what it is not. Socialism, creeping or galloping, is an ideological concept with a particular sense of what is important. What distinguishes socialism is its appeal to economic fairness. It declares that markets do not allocate wealth and power fairly, and that political processes will do a better job. Socialism is not simply about moving money from the powerless to the powerful - a goal as old as politics - but about flattening the distribution of income and wealth. Pork-barrel spending is not socialism. Farm subsidies are not socialism. "Corporate welfare" is not socialism. These programs are not ideological in nature. They are about competing interest groups. Socialism is about claims of justice, and it is also about money: about wealth, income, physical and financial capital. It is an ideology based on allocating economic resources. It may try to achieve that goal by nationalizing assets, by command-and-control regulation, or by taxation and redistribution. But the goal is the same: to rearrange society's wealth, generally from the "haves" to the "have nots." Rearranging wealth (or income) is not the only possible ideological goal of economic regulation. It is merely the goal we have become accustomed to since the late 19th century. Market processes do more than determine who winds up with which resources. That means that socialism is not the only conceivable ideology that might launch an attack on markets and, conversely, that anti-socialist conservatives are not the only possible allies for classical liberals in defense of economic freedom. Markets have many characteristics. They serve and express the individual pursuit of happiness. They spread ideas. They foment change in the ways people live and work, and in what character traits are valued. They dissolve and recombine existing categories, from artistic genres to occupations. They encourage the constant search for improvements, and they subject new ideas to ruthless, unsentimental testing. Markets evolve through trial and error, experimentation and feedback. They are out of anyone's control, and their results are unpredictable. It is this dynamism of markets - their nature as open-ended, decentralized discovery processes - that attracts the greatest ideological opposition today. The most potent challenge to markets today, and to liberal ideals more generally, is not about fairness. It is about stability and control - not as choice in our lives as individuals, but as a policy for society as a whole. It is the argument that markets are disruptive and chaotic, that they make the future unpredictable, and that they serve too many diverse values rather than "one best way." The most important challenge to markets today is not the ideology of socialism but the ideology of stasis, the notion that the good society is one of stability, predictability, and control. The role of the state, in this view, therefore, is not so much to reallocate wealth as it is to curb, direct, or end unpredictable market evolution. Stasists object to markets because the decentralized evolution of market processes creates not just change but change of a particular sort. By serving the diverse desires of individuals and by rewarding the innovators who find popular improvements, markets constantly upset unitary notions of what the future should be like. Markets don't build a bridge to the future - a path from point A to point B across a scary abyss; they continually add nodes and pathways in a web of many different futures. Market processes make it impossible to make society as a whole adhere to a static ideal - whether that ideal is a traditional way of life, the status quo, or a planner's notion of the one best future. As a result, we find stasist enemies of markets arrayed across the old left-right spectrum, which we may define by its relation to socialism. Consider CNN's Crossfire, a show whose entire premise is the sparring of left and right. In denouncing the dynamic economy, the show's right-wing host, Pat Buchanan, has joined forces on one occasion with left-wing technology critic Jeremy Rifkin and, more recently, with corporate gadfly Ralph Nader. All agree that international trade, technological innovation, global financial markets, corporate reorganization, the expansion of some industries and the contraction of others - and just about every other manifestation of economic competition or creativity - portend a terrible future. They also agree, in principle at least, that the government should do something to curb market dynamism. This is not a socialist call for regulation. It is a stasist one. The stasist attack on markets, regardless of what part of the old spectrum it may come from, applies two common tactics that are very different from the old arguments for socialism. First, it argues that we should not let people take chances on new ideas that might have negative consequences. This "precautionary principle" is particularly well developed - and increasingly enshrined in policy - in the environmental arena. (See "Precautionary Tale," April.) But it can crop up anywhere. I recently read an article in Policy, the magazine of the Centre for Independent Studies in Australia, in which the author distinguished between conservatives like himself and classical liberals on just these grounds: He criticized the Tory government of London for deregulating the color of buses. "The gain remains potential, and this is the key word," he wrote, while the loss of uniformly red buses is guaranteed. The precautionary principle counts only the downside of new ideas, not their potential benefits - the potential doesn't count - and it ignores the costs of maintaining the status quo. It puts no value on discovery and learning, either as social processes or as means to individual satisfaction. Market processes simply cannot survive this standard of judgment. It outlaws their inherent uncertainty. The second stasist attack on markets has equally devastating potential. This is the argument against externalities. Most of us have been willing to grant the problem of externalities in such areas as air pollution and to look for ways of addressing it with minimal disruption of market processes. But it's not that hard to declare that every market action has potentially negative spillover effects. The infinitely elastic version of the externality argument turns the language of market-oriented economics against the essential nature of commerce. Indeed, we increasingly see the externality argument aimed not at producers, the traditional target, but at consumers. My choice of which movies to watch creates cultural pollution. My purchase of convenient packaging produces environmental waste. My house color or garage facade does not please the neighbors. My purchase of consumer goods leads to "luxury fever" that hurts everyone. We are all connected in the marketplace, and therefore, in this view, our actions must be tightly regulated to contain spillovers. Stasists do not just make tactical left-right alliances on specific issues; they share a worldview and similar rhetoric. On the left, stasist critiques of markets are increasingly replacing traditional distributional arguments. Green demands for "sustainability" and a "steady-state economy" have supplanted socialist concerns for fairness. Critics like Juliet Schor and Robert Frank attack markets for encouraging ever-expanding yuppie consumption, not for immiserating the poor. The sociologist Richard Sennett, who was raised on children's books from the Little Lenin Library, attacks today's "flexible capitalism" not for exploiting the workers or paying poorly but for fostering instability and rewarding personal adaptability. Today's jobs, Sennett complains in The Corrosion of Character, do not tell workers who they are and thus threaten "the ability of people to form their characters into sustained narratives." Egalitarian bioethicist Daniel Callahan attacks the push for medical progress, which he finds expressed in the dynamic interplay of markets, technological innovation, and individual patients' desires. He calls for "steady state medicine" and "finite health goals." Although socialized medicine might provide a regulatory vehicle for achieving his goals, Callahan is not making a socialist argument. Turning to the center of the old spectrum, we find stasists who are, if anything, even more upset about market dynamism than their counterparts to the left and the right - because decentralized discovery processes cannot coexist with technocratic, political control. There are many examples of such objections, which are particularly virulent when Europeans start denouncing the "American" openness of the Internet, but one of the best is from Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who defined the postwar "vital center" in the United States. Writing in the 75th anniversary issue of Foreign Affairs, Schlesinger condemns the "onrush of capitalism" for its "disruptive consequences." He warns of dire results from the dynamism of global trade and new technologies: "The computer," he writes, "turns the untrammeled market into a global juggernaut crashing across frontiers, enfeebling national powers of taxation and regulation, undercutting national management of interest rates and exchange rates, widening disparities of wealth both within and between nations, dragging down labor standards, degrading the environment, denying nations the shaping of their own economic destiny, accountable to no one, creating a world economy without a world polity." Meanwhile, over on the right we find two major objections to market dynamism. Like their counterparts on the left, some on the stasist right attack trade, immigration, technology, large-scale retailers like Wal-Mart, and other elements of market dynamism that upset "settled ways." In these attacks, stasist conservatives often make alliances with environmentalists pursuing the same goals. Sometimes it's easy to apply the old left-right distinction - Pat Buchanan is clearly a man of the right - but not always. I would certainly put Prince Charles on the right - he's a hereditary aristocrat, after all - but many people consider his stasist views, especially his views of technology, to be versions of left-wing environmentalism. At least in the United States, however, the more common right-wing objection is that by serving diverse individual desires, markets undermine a central notion of the good. Thus some conservatives, notably David Brooks and Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, have called for federal programs to serve the ideal of a "national purpose." More often, we hear markets subjected to conservative attack when they produce goods or institutions - from violent movies to domestic-partner benefits to in vitro fertilization - that do not fit conservative goals. Even on education policy, where the conservative "line" is support for school choice, there are signs of disquiet. Choice is a useful political tool against the teachers unions tied to the Democratic Party and against secular public schools, but its premises of variety, competition, and tolerance cut against many conservatives' views of good education. When California conservative Ron Unz editorialized against vouchers in the left-wing Nation, he shocked many on both the left and the right. But he was only expressing a worldview he absorbed over years of reading neoconservative publications: We know the right answer already; there is no need for a discovery process in education. The good news is that just as the breakdown of socialism has created new alliances against markets, it has also created new alliances in support of them. The idea that markets produce not chaos and disruption but positive, emergent order has become common in the same circles where a generation ago socialism, or at least technocratic planning, was all the rage. Some of you may have seen, for instance, this endorsement of market dynamism from a noted economist: "What's the single most important thing to learn from an economics course today? What I tried to leave my students with is the view that the invisible hand is more powerful than the hidden hand. Things will happen in well-organized efforts without direction, controls, plans. That's the consensus among economists. That's the Hayek legacy." The source of that upbeat assessment of markets was Larry Summers, now U.S. secretary of the treasury and the epitome of a Cambridge economist. If Schlesinger's hysteria exemplifies the attitudes of centrist stasists, Summers' optimism represents a new centrist coalition on the side of dynamism. That does not mean that Summers is a classical liberal, of course. It simply makes him, and other centrist dynamists, the sort of ally on behalf of markets that antisocialist conservatives were in an earlier time. The American center (and, I suspect, Britain's New Labour) is full of chastened technocrats who have come to accept the practical limitations of state action and the practical advantages of economic freedom. There are also many political "moderates" - journalists, scholars, technologists, scientists, artists, and business people, all far less famous than Summers - whose intellectual appreciation for self-organizing systems has come from outside economics: from complexity theory, from the decentralized evolution of the Internet, from the process of scientific discovery, from ecological science, from cross-cultural exchange, from organization theory. These centrist dynamists share an appreciation for dispersed knowledge and trial-and-error evolution that spills over into their attitudes toward markets. They do not always prefer markets to government, but they usually do. They lack the reflex that says a single, government-imposed approach is the best solution to public problems. They are more concerned with finding mechanisms to encourage innovation, competition, choice, and feedback. One thing that makes our political discourse confusing is that the term moderate does not distinguish between those whose moderation implies an appreciation for market processes and those whose moderation suggests just the opposite - a long list of schemes for small-scale government tinkering. Even more striking is a profound split on what used to be the left. While leftists like Sennett are attacking economic dynamism, their erstwhile allies are finding in markets the values of innovation, openness, and choice. The counterculture has morphed into the business culture - to the consternation of both commerce-hating leftists and cultural conservatives. The left that gave us socialism is not the left that gave us personal computers and Fast Company magazine. Yet both the PC and America's hot new business magazine were unquestionably created by people who, by both personal history and political agenda, saw themselves as left-wing critics of establishment institutions. Individuals who would have no great love of "markets" if that concept implied static, hierarchical, bureaucratic corporate structures have embraced the idea of markets as open systems that foster diversity and self-expression. The very characteristics that make stasists wary of markets lead an emerging coalition of dynamists to defend them. On the old political spectrum, socialism defined the left. That meant that the more you opposed socialism, for whatever reason, the further right you were. On the old spectrum, therefore, classical liberals were on the right, which makes us the right wing of the dynamist coalition. It matters a lot whether we define our central challenge today as opposing socialism or as protecting dynamism. If we declare "the left" our enemies and "the right" our allies, based on anti-socialist assumptions, we will ignore the emerging left-right alliance against markets. We will miss the symbolic and practical importance of such cutting-edge issues as biotechnology, popular culture, international trade, and Internet governance. We will sacrifice whole areas of research and innovation to stay friendly with people who'll agree to cut taxes just a little bit, and only for families with children. We will miss the chance to deepen the appreciation for market processes among people who lack the proper political pedigree. We will sacrifice the future of freedom in order to preserve the habits of the past. So, yes, I am an optimist about creeping socialism. We must always be vigilant, of course, and we still have many socialist legacies with which to deal - legacies that can provide powerful tools for the partisans of stasis. But socialism is dead as an ideal and dying as a policy. The challenges of the 21st century will be different: They will be to defend the virtues of dynamism and to rally a new coalition on its behalf. How we rise to those challenges will determine whether the next century will mark a new flourishing of liberalism, or yet another long era of twilight struggle. Editor Virginia Postrel ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is the author of The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress (The Free Press). ========================================================== Source: Reason, August-Sept 1999 v31 i4 p1(2). Title: Creative matrix.(regulating the entertainment industry) Author: Virginia Postrel Abstract: US Pres Bill Clinton intends to regulate the products of the entertainment industry for he believes that it is responsible for the increasing violence among children and crimes committed by teenagers. However, this move will limit the creativity and the innovativeness of the industry. Subjects: Entertainment industry - Laws, regulations, etc. Violence in children - Laws, regulations, etc. People: Clinton, Bill - Laws, regulations, etc. Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Reason Foundation What we lose by regulating culture "Whereas the distracted state of England, threatened with a cloud of blood by a civil war, calls for all possible means to appease and avert the wrath of God, it is therefore thought fit and ordained by the Lords and Commons in this parliament assembled that, while these set causes and set times of humiliation continue, public stage plays shall cease and be forborne." - Parliamentary edict, September 2, 1642 In the United States, Congress does not close the playhouses. It just holds periodic hearings to bully the people who produce popular entertainment. They bow and scrape and halfheartedly apologize for their audience-pleasing products, usually by vague reference to unnamed works that go too far. Then everyone goes back to their business until the next time a committee chair decides the nation's distracted state warrants an attack on its favorite arts. All of which happened, pretty much according to script, in response to the murders in Colorado. The Senate Commerce Committee convened its show trial in early May. The agenda was to make popular art into the equivalent of cigarettes: a demon drug sold by greedy liars to corrupt our youth. "Joe Camel has, sadly, not gone away," said Sen. Joseph Lieberman (R-Conn.), the committee's most eager attacker. "He's gone into the entertainment business." Bill Bennett, described as "the conscience of America" by committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), came prepared to name works deserving censure, and possibly censorship. He showed clips from Scream and The Basketball Diaries. "Can you not distinguish between Casino and Macbeth, or Casino and Braveheart, or The Basketball Diaries and Clear and Present Danger?" Bennett said. "I can make that distinction." Despite some chilling moments, the hearings flopped. Executives from the movie studios and record companies declined to come and cooperate in their own denunciation. Deprived of dramatic confrontations or lying CEOs, reporters and the nation yawned. A month later, the House soundly defeated two bills to regulate entertainment products - one through outright bans, another through cigarette-style labeling. A significant, bipartisan majority disagreed with Bennett that "in the matter of the protection of our children, nothing is off limits." Not so the Clinton administration. It acted unilaterally to appease the soccer-mom gods. Adopting the tobacco model, the president ordered the Federal Trade Commission to investigate "whether and how video game, motion picture and recording industries market to children violent and other material rated for adults." The commission will exercise de facto subpoena power, demanding proprietary memos, private e-mail, and internal marketing studies. The attack on Hollywood is now part of the Clintonite campaign to restore the FTC's pre-Reagan punch; the issue is not free speech but free markets. The president is embracing Bennett's belief that "this is predatory capitalism." If you want to eliminate a product from the American marketplace, this is the way you do it - not by act of Congress, but through administrative agencies helped along by liability suits. Clinton has unleashed the regulators, and, as Jesse Walker discusses below, the lawsuits have begun. But what does it matter? Suppose all violent movies vanish from the theaters, made uneconomic by regulatory burdens, unpredictable lawsuits, and congressional harassment. Who cares? The audience, for starters. Tens of millions of people saw The Matrix, a blockbuster hit and one of the recent movies most often attacked as a blight on our culture. Most of those moviegoers, including me, think The Matrix is a fine film whose existence is a positive good. It is visually striking, well acted, and intelligently written. It explores classic themes, arguing that it is better to face reality and struggle for freedom than to accept comfortable slavery and live in illusion. It is not Great Art, but it is good art, and good entertainment. We, its paying audience, would not want to see it destroyed. This raises the problem that so annoys Bennett: the subjectivity of distinctions. Any objective standard that would censor The Matrix (or Casino) as too violent would have to curb Macbeth and Braveheart as well. Shakespeare's Scottish play is horrifyingly violent - Akira Kurosawa's retelling is aptly called Throne of Blood - and so is Mel Gibson's Scottish movie. Braveheart depicts torture and celebrates warfare. You cannot ban Scream, The Matrix, and Casino and make an exception for Bill Bennett's bloody favorites. The distinctions required are too fine, and a different critic would cut things differently. I do sympathize with Bennett on one point: It is tiresome and cliched to keep invoking Shakespeare, whom no one would dare ban today. But there's a reason the Bard keeps coming up, and it isn't that everyone in Hamlet ends up dead. That reason is seared in the consciousness of every English-language player, right. down to the members of the Screen Actors Guild: You can ban Shakespeare. It happened. In 1642, the greatest period of English theater was ended by an act of Parliament. The milieu that had produced Shakespeare, and that continued to perform his plays, was destroyed. Those theaters were full of sex, violence, and special effects - and of poetry, ideas, and creative promise. English drama never fully recovered from the loss. Had the closure come a mere 50 years earlier, we would have lost Romeo and Juliet and everything that followed. Loss and near loss haunt last year's Shakespeare in Love, Hollywood's fondest vision of itself and its art. A Puritan preacher appears early on, denouncing the theaters as "the devil's handmaidens," and the authorities are always closing the playhouses. Romeo and Juliet barely finds a stage. "I would exchange all my plays to come for his that will never come," says Will Shakespeare when Kit Marlowe is killed. We modern moviegoers are presumed to know better. But it is not that easy a call. Marlowe's small oeuvre is extraordinary, all written before he was 30. Who knows what might have been his Hamlet? Loss is at the heart of the argument against regulating creativity, whether in art, technology, or enterprise. The innovative process is a fragile one, dependent on a complex, often messy interplay of imagination, competition, and exchange. Curbing new ideas hurts not only individual creators but the audience for which they create and the posterity that inherits their legacy. Regulators destroy some goods directly, and we can count the cost. Other losses, like Marlowe's never-written plays, we can only imagine. This not simply a matter of great work but of the milieu from which it springs. To get the good stuff, you have to put up with the experiments that fail and the junk produced to pay the bills. Alongside the hack work of Greene and Dekker, even Shakespeare wrote some dogs. But crush Titus Andronicus, and you will lose King Lear. The same process produced them both. How does it matter that in the 15th century China turned its back on exploration and innovation, that the world's most technologically creative nation became a backwater by decree? We cannot know for sure. But the loss, to the Chinese people and to the world, was surely significant. When congressional pressure and anti-competitive opportunism created the Comics Code, declaring American comic books an inherently childish medium, EC Comics' horror tradition was destroyed and its readers bereft. That was the short-term effect. The larger loss was in the stories untold, the techniques unexplored. We can infer something of its magnitude by looking at the development of graphic storytelling in Europe and Japan. But we can never know what might have been. In The Future and Its Enemies, I argue that individual creativity and enterprise are not only personally satisfying but socially good, producing progress and happiness. For celebrating creativity and happiness, I have been called a fascist by critics on both coasts. It is a peculiar charge, since fascism entails subordinating the individual to the nation - hardly a recipe for either self-expression or joy. But the charge expresses a coherent worldview, one that imagines freedom as the will to power and the good life as docile obedience. This view quite naturally leads to crusades against popular art, particularly American art, since our native culture is anti-authority. Writing in The American Spectator, movie critic James Bowman denounces The Matrix, whose science fiction setting he clearly does not understand, for teaching "kids contempt for the values of work and sobriety and conformity to social norms." This critique condemns not just the movie but the inventiveness that made it possible. It is a prescription for the death of creativity and an attack on the American spirit. By this standard, Hamlet is safe. But what about Huck Finn? ========================================================= Source: Reason, May 1999 v31 i1 p4(2). Title: Source code.(Vice-President Al Gore's claim of creating the Internet)(Editorial) Author: Virginia Postrel Abstract: Al Gore became the target of media and political mocking because of his claim that he initiated the creation of the Internet. However, his boast is partly true since his support for the National Science Foundation Net in 1987 has spurred the development and the public acceptance of the Internet. Subjects: Internet - History People: Gore, Albert, Jr. - Attitudes Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Reason Foundation Al Gore says he invented the Internet. What does he mean? It was a gaffe worthy of Dan Quayle, but with Clinton-style grandiosity. In a March 10 interview with Wolf Blitzer of CNN, Al Gore bragged about his record. "During my service in the United States Congress," he said, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Wow. Al not only writes turgid environmentalist tomes, he also writes computer code. He created the Internet. What a 21st-century guy! By the next day, the ridicule was flying - mostly through Gore's supposed brainchild. Declan McCullagh broke the story in the online Wired News and his Politech e-mail news service, pointing out that Gore was just 21 years old when the Defense Department commissioned the original ARPANET in 1969. By the time Gore got to Congress in 1977, wrote McCullagh, "Email was flourishing. The culture of the Internet was starting to develop through the Jargon File and the SF-Lovers mailing list." Republicans jumped to mock the veep. "If the Vice President created the Internet, then I created the Interstate highway system," said Dick Armey, the House majority leader. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, a notorious neatnik, claimed to have invented the paper clip. Lott's press release included his supposed early designs and a final version dated April Fool's Day, 1973. But Al Gore was not lying to Blitzer. The vice president almost certainly believes that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet." His claim reflects a particular understanding of the world and of recent technological history. As such, it reveals more than mere grandiosity and spin. To understand Gore's bizarre boast, you have to know a lot of details about the history of the Internet. It's not enough to say that ARPANET started in 1969. A self-contained network for Defense Department researchers would be of interest only to military historians and a few techno-geeks. The Internet grew beyond ARPANET because of two related developments. First, the Internet community developed the underlying programs - the "protocols" known as TCP/IP - that allow wildly different computers to communicate with each other. This programming infrastructure was what let "the Internet" evolve to encompass a bunch of independent networks, both public and private. TCP/IP's creators wisely left those protocols very generic, enabling future innovators to build other structures, including those that made the World Wide Web possible, on top of them. ARPANET itself converted to TCP/IP in 1983. Second, in 1985 the National Science Foundation agreed to fund a "backbone" network among five supercomputer sites. Academic institutions could connect to the backbone if they organized regional networks of their own; the NSF provided two-year grants to cover the regional networks' startup expenses, after which universities paid their own way. Combined with the communications power of TCP/IP, this NSFNet boosted the number of interconnected computers to critical mass. It displaced ARPANET as the driving force in the development of a worldwide network of interlinked computers. In this important sense, "the Internet" dates not to 1969 but to the early 1980s. Gore enters the picture a bit later - in 1987, when he supported a drive by universities to expand funding for NSFNet. That drive became law in the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, which gave about $1 billion to high-performance networks and computers; about $150 million of the funding was new money, with the rest consolidated from other programs. "Gore gets credit for cheerleading on networking from '87 on, and for getting the agencies to get off their behinds and coordinate things a bit," says Mike Roberts, who lobbied for NSFNet funding as vice president of networking at Educom, an association of universities. "But [he's] not exactly the father of the Internet." So Gore was there in 1987, long before most politicians had any notion that the Net existed. But the basics - the software and hardware infrastructure on which the Internet grew - were already in place. His "initiative" (which wasn't actually his idea) may have speeded its development a tad, but Gore's work did not create the Internet. Yet the vice president thinks it did, and Blitzer, a top political reporter, saw no reason to question his boast. It's as though an important technological development does not really exist until it has been ratified by lavish subsidies and an act of Congress - until it has come to the official attention of people like Sen. Albert Gore Jr. "Creating" the Internet from Capitol Hill means ignoring the incremental, relatively small-scale way it really evolved, as well as the unsung people who developed it. The Internet unquestionably began as a government program, a tool first for Defense Department researchers and then for scientists elsewhere. Its early development was paid for with tax dollars (in much more modest sums than Gore's later largess). But the Internet's gradual, open-ended development bears little resemblance to the grand schemes that move the vice president's technocratic imagination. The Net worked because it fit into the technological ecology. It began modestly, as a way of connecting specific researchers, not a vehicle to remake the economy. It did not, therefore, create big distortions in science, business, or technology, or suck huge portions of the total funds available into one giant project - a la the Superconducting Supercollider or the space shuttle. The people involved knew each other and the problems at hand, and they proceeded incrementally. They also had the wisdom to interpret the charge to "communicate" in an open-ended way. They adopted technical standards that enabled ideas no one had yet thought of - from e-mail to the Web - to be added to the network later. And they let different standards compete for dominance, rather than picking a winner in advance. The Internet thus evolved from the bottom up. It was not designed by a committee of experts as a perfect system whose every use was anticipated in advance. Rather, it was improved over time, through trial and error, collaboration and competition. As a result, the Net became a model of spontaneous order and decentralized governance - of the way simple, underlying rules can permit enormous creativity and complexity. This dynamic, open-ended vision does not fit easily with the technocratic models that dominate the political world. The history of the Net thus captures a tension in contemporary American life: Government is so pervasive that almost every development, positive or negative, can be tied in some way to government - to subsidies, to tax-code distortions, to regulations. Politicians can claim credit for innovations they did little to create; people who want an even more activist government can point to those same inventions as evidence that government is just dandy; and pork-seeking industries can claim that subsidies and tax credits will make America rich. (Silicon Valley is now demanding that the federal government double spending on research and development.) The history of the Internet is not, as some people have tried to make it, a libertarian just-so story. It is a messy tale in which the government played a significant role. That role was, however, far more subtle than the plans of industrial policy gurus or techno-boosting politicians. In fact, we have a pretty good example of what sort of Internet we would have gotten if Al Gore, or someone like him, had created an "information superhighway" on his own initiative. It's called Minitel - the French state phone company's system of terminals. In true French fashion, Minitel was grand, comprehensive, and carefully planned. It was state-of-the-art in the mid- 1980s. And it has barely changed since then. ======================================================== Source: Commentary, April 1999 v107 i4 p62(1). Title: The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress.(Review) Author: Daniel Casse Subjects: Books - Reviews People: Postrel, Virginia Nmd Works: The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress (Book) - Reviews Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 American Jewish Committee The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress by Virginia Postrel Free Press. 272 pp. $25.00 As the editor of Reason magazine and the author of a consistently spry column in Forbes, Virginia Postrel has been an original and unrelenting critic of the politicians, bureaucrats, and self-appointed social guardians who put more faith in their own meliorative powers than in the wisdom of free markets and individual choice. In so doing, she has helped to rescue libertarian thought from the margins of American politics and the uncrowded corners of economics and philosophy departments. But Postrel's new book is no mere brief for the ideas of such leading lights of libertarianism as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The Future and Its Enemies is an ambitious work of political and cultural commentary. Casting aside the ideological labels that have long dominated our public discourse, Postrel aims to do nothing less than redefine how we see American politics--a goal, alas, that she falls decidedly short of reaching. In recent years, according to Postrel, the line separating liberals and conservatives has been blurred to the point of irrelevance. The issues and controversies of our day have sparked surprising new alliances that defy the familiar divide between Left and Right. Erstwhile political opponents now often find themselves on the same side of the barricades. The source of this shift, Postrel argues, is a deepening conflict in American society between two basic outlooks on the future. Arrayed on one side are the villains of her account: those who fear and resist change, seeking "stability and control" in a "regulated, engineered world." These "stasists," as she calls them, run the political gamut from Right to Left, from cultural reactionaries to technocrats, but increasingly they form a common front. Curtailing immigration into the U.S. has thus become a priority not only for right-wing populists like Patrick J. Buchanan but also for left-wing environmental groups like the Sierra Club. Likewise, the new coalition against free trade embraces such disparate types as New Right organizer Paul Weyrich, consumer-movement founder Ralph Nader, and the anti-technology activist Jeremy Rifkin. The white hats in Postrel's account sit atop the heads of those who, by contrast, celebrate the future in all its promise and uncertainty. Counting herself among these "dynamists," Postrel follows Hayek in calling them "the party of life." Believers in the possibility of progress, they are devoted to learning and experimentation, free markets and technological innovation. "Dynamists," Postrel writes, "do not expect, demand, or desire a world that stands still." How this disposition works out in political terms is clear enough. Dynamists are advocates of limited, decentralized government, and they resist all but the most essential regulation of the private sector. They endorse schemes of privatization for Social Security, education, and even the national parks. And they are deeply suspicious of moralizing politicians, believing, for instance, that Congress has no business mandating V-chips to screen out objectionable television shows or passing laws to curb Internet pornography. For Postrel, however, dynamism represents far more than a set of public policies or attitudes toward government. It is a philosophy of life, reflecting the fact that "change and self-transformation are among the truest expressions of our enduring human nature." The key to happiness, according to the "dynamist moral vision," thus lies in endless opportunities "to stretch ourselves" and "to try new things." This life-affirming ethic can be seen, Postrel maintains, in everything from the spontaneous emergence of beach volleyball as an Olympic sport to the widespread use of new technology like in-vitro fertilization to the complex evolution of reggae music. Such developments may be greeted by stasists with indifference or alarm, Postrel observes, but dynamists rightly see them as evidence of society's astonishing variety and resilience as well as of history's ultimate purpose. "We live in an enchanted world," she concludes, "a world suffused with intelligence, a world of our making. In such plenitude ... lies an adventurous future." What is one to say of this sweeping analysis and the agenda that goes with it? First and most obviously, there is the problem of labeling. It is not just that Postrel's clumsy coinages are unlikely to find their way onto the Sunday political talk shows. More fundamentally, her division of the political world into stasists and dynamists is misleading, even--one suspects--intentionally diversionary. The Future and Its Enemies seems like nothing so much as an attempt to repackage libertarianism, giving it the appealing name of "dynamism" while throwing together into one "stasist" camp those who happen to oppose it in some way, however different their grounds for doing so. This may explain why Postrel's taxonomy is so unhelpful once one looks beyond the handful of highly contested issues, like immigration and free trade, on which some elements of the Left and the Right have indeed come together in recent years against mainstream "dynamist" opinion. As any reasonably informed observer knows, these coalitions have been temporary and tactical, and have reflected no sort of fundamental consensus. When it comes to the great majority of our most divisive issues--abortion, affirmative action, military spending, gay rights, school prayer, the scope of free speech, medical ethics, the role of the courts--the supposed unity of Postrel's stasists and dynamists vanishes. As for dynamism itself, Postrel's error, like that of libertarianism more generally, is to assume that the same principles of change and absolute openness must apply across every realm of life. By this logic, if dynamism deserves to be celebrated when we see it at work in the entrepreneurship of Silicon Valley--as surely it does--then it must be no less desirable in our families, our culture, and our politics. This is, to say the least, an exceedingly superficial philosophy. Is one really an "enemy of the future" for wanting public authorities to limit access to Internet pornography, or for thinking that assisted suicide and human cloning are bad ideas, or for resisting the campaign to legalize drugs? For Postrel, any impediment to these developments--and thus to the fullest possible range of individual choice--is immediately suspect. For most other people, the fruits of "progress" have to be sorted with care, and sometimes demand that we exercise a measure of collective moral and political judgment. Postrel's failure to make such distinctions gives The Future and Its Enemies a deeply unsettling quality. Beneath the book's free-market enthusiasm lurks a strongly relativistic view of American life. For Postrel, change often appears to be an end in itself. She seems to care little about the actual content of American character, so long as it is "dynamic." Amid page after page devoted to spontaneity, imagination, and creativity, one finds next to nothing about such bedrock American values as self-restraint, moderation, and patriotism, or how we might go about cultivating them. By failing to give credit to these "stasist" qualities, Postrel offers a crude picture of contemporary society, missing its many subtle tensions and ambiguities. Indeed, it is precisely because Americans maintain a richer, more complex view of the changes swirling around them that the future remains in far less peril than Virginia Postrel would have us believe. DANIEL CASSE is a senior director of the White House Writers Group, a public policy communications firm. =========================================================== Source: Forbes, March 22, 1999 p88(1). Title: Raise your hand if you hate traffic.(reducing sprawl priority issue in Austin, Texas)(Brief Article) Author: Virginia Postrel Subjects: Austin, Texas - Traffic Traffic congestion - Texas Quality of life - Texas Locations: Texas Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Forbes Inc. THE 360.ALPHA SUMMIT was a big, flashy conference featuring the cream of the Austin, Tex. high-tech community--several hundred top executives and venture capitalists. Dedicated to the broad topic of improving Austin for technology business, the January gathering was well financed, well attended, and well intentioned. The summiteers stood up and told high-tech Austin that it's virtuous to be civically involved. America Online cofounder Marc Seriff, now an investor in local startups, said to the Austin American-Statesman: "That's a new message that has just begun to spread in the past 12 months." Indeed it has--not only in Austin, but throughout the high-tech world. The Silicon Valley-based Technology Network, a political action group, has grown from 12 founding members to more than 100. Last year these executives held 90 meetings with officeholders and candidates, including 35 fundraisers. Politics has become cool among high-tech leaders. The trend is encouraging to politicians and policy wonks. High-tech endorsements offer clean money and cutting-edge cachet. If the technology community supports a proposal or candidate, the reasoning goes, that proposal or person must be good for the economy and just plain smart. After all, those high-tech people are millionaire brainiacs. Unfortunately, earnest technologists can easily be manipulated. They're suckers for the myth of neutral technocracy--think of Ross Perot's "best experts"--that promises solutions with no messy conflicts of interest or values. Eager to seem civic-minded, they often don't ask tough questions or challenge policy proposals couched in positive rhetoric. These traits were on display in Austin. I spoke at the conference but felt out of place--a rude messenger from the land where political ideas clash, buzzwords have concrete legal meanings and economic policy entails tradeoffs. The conference, by contrast, assumed that smart, well-meaning people will agree on the right set of policies. "Quality of life" is a prime concern in Austin, since local high-tech leaders know they're not going to lure employees from Silicon Valley with better weather. To protect quality of life, environmentalist Robin Rather told attendees, Austin must contain "sprawl." She rallied them to endorse "transportation and mobility measures that reduce sprawl," a sentiment that won 89% support in an instant poll. Rather did not specify what measures she had in mind. She was thus able to smuggle a lengthy policy agenda into some well-chosen vague language. Vice President Gore, who has made opposition to sprawl a defining issue of his nascent presidential campaign, defines the problem as building "flat not tall"--letting houses and office parks spread into the countryside. Sprawl means spacious houses with yards and flexible drives to work. Sprawl is, in other words, exactly the sort of suburban life that attracts families to Austin. Rather's "transportation and mobility measures" would increase housing density and traffic congestion. Her agenda is controversial, not simply a matter of good intentions and smart planning. The vague polls didn't fool everyone. "They asked these questions and took great joy in the answers of the audience, but the questions were terrible," says former Microsoft applications honcho Mike Maples, who has retired to a ranch outside Austin. "You didn't have to do any thinking. It was, 'Do you like motherhood?'. . . I didn't think they learned anything." But you don't ask questions like those to learn anything. You do it to get the high-tech community's imprimatur on policy proposals. Whether they know it or not, Austin's high-tech leaders have gone on record: They're against new roads, suburban housing and office parks, and for mass transit, mandatory carpooling and high-density apartments and condos. There are genuine arguments for those proposals, which reflect a particular vision of community life. That vision is too static and intolerant in my view, but it deserves debate--the sort of examination the Austin summit was too friendly to conduct. Like financial capital, political capital is a precious commodity. Investing it wisely requires not just good intentions, but due diligence. Virginia Postrel is the editor of Reason magazine and a columnist for Forbes ASAP. Her book, The Future and its Enemies, was published in December by the Free Press. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ========================================================= Source: Inc., March 1999 p951(1). Title: Book Value.(Review) People: Kawasaki, Guy Moreno, Michele Hill, Sam Rifkin, Glenn Sharma, Poonam McQuown, Judith Orloff, Judith Bograd, Larry Postrel, Virginia Rodin, Rob Hartman, Curtis Nmd Works: Rules for Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services (Book) Radical Marketing: From Harvard to Harley, Ten Who Broke the Rules and Made It Big (Book) - Reviews The Harvard Entrepreneurs Club Guide to Starting Your Own Business (Book) - Reviews Inc. Yourself: How to Profit by Setting Up Your Own Corporation (Book) - Reviews The Accounting Game (Book) - Reviews The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress (Book) - Reviews Free, Perfect,and Now: Connecting to the Three Insatiable Customer Demands (Book) - Reviews Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Goldhirsh Group Inc. Challenge your thinking with the wisdom in these books If I can't sell, you can keep your revolution Rules for Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services, by Guy Kawasaki with Michele Moreno, $25 Radical Marketing: From Harvard to Harley, Ten Who Broke the Rules and Made It Big, by Sam Hill and Glenn Rifkin, $36.50 (both from HarperBusiness, 1999) The oldest come-on around is the one that promises something new. How many times have your eyes skidded over book jackets that insist, "Everything you know is wrong"? Or, "Throw away the old rules--these are the new rules!" It's too bad, because the best books are often the ones that go back to basics. Take, for example, Guy Kawasaki's Rules for Revolutionaries or Sam Hill and Glenn Rifkin's Radical Marketing. Despite the breathless titles, there's nothing really radical or revolutionary about either one. They're essentially books about how to be a smart marketer. Radical Marketing is built around 10 company examples and what the authors describe as the 10 rules of radical marketing. Among them: "The CEO must own the marketing function," "Get out of the head office and face-to-face with the people who matter--the customers," "Use market research cautiously," and "Hire only passionate missionaries." It sounds like a lot of standard consultantese, but don't let the insights into the obvious fool you. Although some of the company cases will be familiar (the Grateful Dead, Boston Beer Co., Harley-Davidson Motor Co., Virgin Atlantic Airways), others offer stories you may not have heard anywhere else (like those of Snap-On Inc., Iams Co., Providian Financial). All are solid case studies full of useful stories of smart marketers. The chapter on Snap-On's history, for example, lays out a brilliant, counterintuitive strategy. Rather than using traditional distribution channels, the company has built a mobile-dealer network. Instead of sitting on a phone in a warehouse, each of the Snap-On guys drives around in a van full of tools, bringing the goods right to the customers. Each van visits 200 to 3,000 customers every week and produces about $400,000 in annual revenues. Using that tactic, the company grew to $1.7 billion in revenues and $150 million in earnings in 1997 and captured a 60% share of the mobile-van automotive-tool market. Compared with Radical Marketing, Guy Kawasaki's book takes a more tip-filled, cheerleading approach, with chapters broken into sections enjoining readers to "Create like a god," "Command like a king," "Work like a slave," and other crackerjack bits of strategic advice. But there's good stuff here too, including Kawasaki's guide to becoming a company evangelist (as he was for Apple Computer). He also gives a brief primer on finding market-research information relatively inexpensively on the Internet. And there's a chapter subtitled "Ne Te Terant Molarii," which translates as "Don't let the plodding millers grind you down." It is Kawasaki's entreaty not to let the naysayers keep you from driving on toward success. (He includes a copy of a rejection letter he received in 1982 from a Microsoft recruiter.) Kawasaki writes frequently about his own trials and tribulations with technology, including an episode in which his E-mail system got corrupted and deleted a slew of his unread messages. To his surprise, no one ever wrote him back to find out why he hadn't responded to his E-mail messages. He now recommends that others practice the mass-delete tactic occasionally to manage their information overload. He's a practical guy and presumably is putting his tactics to work at Garage.com, his Silicon Valley company, which helps start-ups find seed capital. I know what you read last summer The Harvard Entrepreneurs Club Guide to Starting Your Own Business, by Poonam Sharma et al. (John Wiley & Sons, 1999, $14.95) Inc. Yourself: How to Profit by Setting Up Your Own Corporation, ninth edition, by Judith McQuown (Broadway Books, 1999, $27.50) The Accounting Game, by Darrell Mullis and Judith Orloff, with Larry Bograd (Sourcebooks, 1999, $16.95) What is it with Jennifer Love Hewitt? First she stars in teenage slasher movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer, and now she's an icon for college entrepreneurs. That revelation is the most curious thing about The Harvard Entrepreneurs Club Guide, which turns out to be a fairly standard how-to-start-a-business tome. The book covers all the basics, from marketing and finance to writing a business plan, without ever actually saying whom the authors are targeting--college students or anyone else who might want to start a business. The how-to advice is solid, but then there's the Jennifer Love Hewitt stuff. One of the contributing writers calls her his "inspiration," and the book ends by citing her motto--"Always follow your heart"--as the best advice any entrepreneur can receive. Whatever. If you're contemplating incorporating your business or know someone who is, take note of the ninth edition of Judith McQuown's Inc. Yourself. First published in 1977, the book is a solidly researched and written classic on the topic of starting a corporation. Previous editions have sold more than 500,000 copies, and there's a good reason for this book's success: it's reliable. The new edition is updated to reflect all the changes in corporate structure, taxes, and pensions that have occurred since the last edition came out. The Accounting Game is more of a workbook than anything else. Built on the premise that you learn best by doing, the book is designed to teach you everything you need to know about creating and understanding financial statements by having you set them up for an imaginary lemonade stand. The whole exercise is based on the highly successful seminars run since the early 1980s by an outfit called Education Discoveries. It's unlikely that the book version can achieve the same energy as the actual seminars, but it's written as a straightforward, interactive, and lighthearted romp through LIFO/FIFO, retained earnings, accounts payable, and the rest of that zany accounting lingo you're dying to learn. As an oversized paperback, it's a great value. Plus, if you work through the book, you really do come away with a basic understanding of accounting fundamentals. Conflict-of-interest department The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, by Virginia Postrel (Free Press, 1998, $25) Free, Perfect, and Now: Connecting to the Three Insatiable Customer Demands, by Rob Rodin, with Curtis Hartman (Simon & Schuster, 1999, $25) Two notable books written by former Inc. staff members are now on the market. In The Future and Its Enemies, former Inc. writer Virginia Postrel (who appeared in the magazine from 1984 to 1986; her name was Virginia Inman then) makes a reasoned and passionate argument that a natural evolution of ideas usually leads to better problem solving in a company than centralized, technocratic planning does. Postrel, now editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, argues that our notions of work and play affect everything we do, from starting a business to running a government. "It is in curiosity, problem solving, and play that we discover who we are," she writes. Curtis Hartman, a senior editor at Inc. from 1982 to 1990, collaborated with Rob Rodin, CEO of billion-dollar electronics-parts distributor Marshall Industries, to produce Free, Perfect, and Now. Under Rodin's watch, over the past six years, Marshall Industries, founded in 1947, grew from $500 million to $1.7 billion in revenues. But don't let the size of the enterprise scare you off. The book is full of practical, hands-on advice that is as useful for a start-up as it is for a company of Marshall's girth. "If your company's critical capabilities aren't accessible to customers 24 hours a day, you aren't designed to meet the future," Rodin warns. Most chapters end with a "manager's workbook," and while such a device can seem tired and trite in some books, it's executed with aplomb here. The result is advice that reads like the best of Inc.'s Hands On section. "Experience your own service," Rodin advises at the end of one chapter. "No matter what you sell, you have no idea how your customers feel about your service or product until you order it, buy it, eat it, use it, or call for help with a problem." The rest of the book is devoted to telling his own story at Marshall and offering one management gem after another. In one section, for example, Rodin observes that information-technology people speak only technobabble because at most companies they're "herded into one isolated department." He argues: "The best IT professionals live with the business units. They spread out across the company and work side by side with the business folks." It's smart advice to make IT truly useful rather than designate it as the place where everyone goes to gripe. Free, Perfect, and Now is a fascinating collection of one CEO's lessons in how to get customers what they want at the lowest cost, at the highest quality, and as soon as possible. Along the way, Rodin and Hartman offer a great deal of hands-on advice about the ways in which any business owner or manager can try to do the same. ============================================================= Source: Reason, March 1999 v30 i10 p4(2). Title: The Pleasantville solution: the war on "sprawl" promises "livability" but delivers repression, intolerance - and more traffic.(Editorial) Author: Virginia Postrel Abstract: The anti-sprawl campaign being waged by Vice Pres Al Gore is questionable from a social and political point of view since the federal government is not responsible for city planning. The campaign is about coercing Americans on how they should live and to sacrifice their individual values. Subjects: Community development - Social aspects City planning - Social aspects Quality of life - Social aspects Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Reason Foundation If Bill Clinton and Al Gore denounced soccer morns, told us everything was better in the good old days, and demanded that we let their friends redesign our lives to fit their sense of morality, you might think they'd thrown away their political ambitions and joined the religious right. You would, however, be wrong. Welcome to the war on "sprawl" - otherwise known as the suburbs. Gore described the problem this way in a much-praised September speech: "Acre upon acre of asphalt have transformed what were once mountain clearings and congenial villages into little more than massive parking lots. The ill-thought-out sprawl hastily developed around our nation's cities has turned what used to be friendly, easy suburbs into lonely cul-desacs, so distant from the city center that if a family wants to buy an affordable house they have to drive so far that a parent gets home too late to read a bedtime story." It's a bizarre tale, raising many questions: How exactly did those houses in "easy suburbs" catapult themselves miles away to become "lonely cul-de-sacs" reachable only by hours on the road? Why did that transformation make housing more expensive? How early do those kids go to bed? (The average commute remains no more than 20 to 30 minutes.) Gore is clearer on one thing: The problem is that "we've built flat, not tall," putting houses and offices on inexpensive outlying land instead of packing them tighter and tighter in crowded, expensive cities. "Flat, not tall" is in fact the definition of "sprawl." The anti-sprawl critique is that houses with yards, shopping centers with ample parking, and commuters who drive to work are ruining the country. "In too many places across America, the beauty of local vistas has been degraded by decades of ill-planned and ill-coordinated development," Gore said in January. "Plan well, and you have a community that nurtures commerce and private life. Plan badly, and you have what so many of us suffer from first-hand: gridlock, sprawl, and that uniquely modern evil of all-too-little time." (The breathtaking conceit that "all-too-little time" is a "uniquely modern evil" simultaneously exhibits great insight into baby boomers' psychology and gross ignorance of history and literature - the perfect combination, perhaps, for a Gore 2000 campaign.) "Sprawl" is a strange issue with which to launch a presidential race: City planning is not a constitutional responsibility of the federal government, much less of the chief executive. And most voters prefer living in the suburbs. Yet Gore thinks he can win the White House on a platform that calls for the government to force everyone to live in townhouses and take the train to work. All he has to do is stick to the right rhetoric. If no one pays attention to the programs behind the slogans, the plan might just work. After all, this moral crusade isn't plagued by peskily telegenic intellectuals who say what they mean. Its crusaders deliberately use phrases, such as "quality of life" and "livability," that mean one thing to them and something entirely different to the general public. If you listen only to Gore's speeches, you'd think that the anti-sprawl campaign is about magically making all the nasty tradeoffs in life go away. Abandon "ill-planned and ill-coordinated development," and houses will be cheap everywhere. No one will ever sit in traffic. By reducing commuting costs, we'll even have more money to send those once-neglected kids to college (a point the vice president includes in every speech). We will all enjoy "quality of life" and "livability." Who could be against that? Attacking "sprawl" is a way of blaming an evil, impersonal force for the tradeoffs individuals have made in their lives - -most prominently the choices to work long hours and to buy elbow room. The anti-sprawl campaign simultaneously indulges baby boomers' guilt and excuses their life choices, treating them as victims rather than actors. It tells voters that they're bad parents who are destroying the earth, but then says that it's not their fault. The problem is "sprawl," which can be prevented by better planning. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, who is always looking for ways to rehabilitate technocracy, explains the issue this way: "Advocates of unplanned growth cleave to the idea of 'spontaneous order,' the view that the sum of all our individual decisions creates a better, more interesting and more exciting life.... The alternative view is that a slew of individual choices taken together can create circumstances few of us like. Many move to the suburbs in search of larger, more affordable homes with yards and, often, better schools. Yet when so many people make the same decision, the suburban dream gives way to those choked roads, crowded schools and the loss of the very green spaces that inspired the journey beyond city limits.... Smart-growthers argue that better planning might get individuals more of what they want." To paraphrase the president, Dionne's conclusion depends on what the meaning of "they" is. If "they" are the individuals who moved to the suburbs, then Dionne's "smart-growthers" are engaging in the Big Lie. Proposals to slash road building, require denser construction, and punish private auto commuting will leave suburbanites with more traffic congestion and less chance for private green space. There are no "affordable homes with yards" in the smart-growth utopia. If "they" refers to "smart-growthers" themselves, however, then Dionne's argument is accurate. They will get more of what they want: more multiunit housing, more traffic congestion, more collectively owned open land, more fixed-rail transit. "Smart growth" means confining family life to dense cities with little privacy so that the countryside can be left open for wildlife, recreation, and a few farmers. At a recent conference of high-tech executives in Austin, Texas, local environmentalist Robin Rather attacked sprawl for degrading the area's quality of life, threatening its ability to compete for employees with such "hell holes" as Los Angeles, Boston, and San Jose. "Sprawl is the number one enemy of the environment," she declared, rallying attendees to endorse "transportation and mobility measures that reduce sprawl." It was clear from the conference, as it is in Gore's speeches, that what listeners really want is less traffic congestion. Austinites are unhappy that their 15-minute commutes have stretched to 30 minutes as the city has grown. And I know enough people who've moved from California to Austin to know what "quality of life" means to the transplants Austin businesses are eager to attract: Austin isn't boring, like a lot of other small cities, but you can still buy a big house for around $200,000, compared to $750,000 or more in Silicon Valley or Los Angeles (where the yard will be much smaller). That means, among other things, that it takes only one professional income to support a family in a comfortable suburban lifestyle. The anti-sprawlers have something entirely different in mind when they talk about dealing with traffic or protecting quality of life. They want to pile everyone on top of each other, make traffic as slow and congested as possible to discourage driving, and keep housing out of farmland. Such anti-sprawlers want everyone to live the way I do: in an urban townhouse off a busy street, with no yard but plenty of shops and restaurants within walking distance. (Portland, Oregon's Metro planning authority, among the most influential "smart growth" authorities, has in fact acknowledged that Los Angeles "displays an investment pattern we desire to replicate," with its high density and low per capita road mileage.) That lifestyle appeals to cosmopolitan professionals with no kids and no particular desire for peace and quiet, but it is not how most Americans want to live. To anti-sprawl technocrats, the single-family home is almost as evil as the automobile. Thus a study highlighted on the Sierra Club's smart-growth Web site, "The Conservation Potential of Compact Growth," celebrates multiunit housing: "Sharing walls shares and saves heat. Exposing less wall and roof area to the sun reduces summer air conditioning loads.... The single family houses consume 4 times as much land for streets and roads and 10 times as much for the houses themselves. The single family houses use nearly 6 times as much metal and concrete, the mining of which threatens many of our natural areas." The study's ideal city is San Francisco, with densities of 50 to 100 units per acre, but it also praises the wonders of New York City, which "even with its bright lights and cold climate...uses half as much energy per capita as the US average." This conflict is not, as Dionne would have it, simply a matter of unintended consequences. It is a conflict of visions. Smart-growthers have no sympathy for suburban family life, which they find wasteful and sterile. They disapprove not merely of the congestion generated when people flock to a new area, but of the reduction in congestion in the city created at the same time. And they hate the automobile, which they view more as a source of sin than as a mode of transportation. Rather than reduce traffic, they seek to increase it, blocking new roads and putting transportation money into unused mass transit, especially rail. Given enough pain, they hope, people will get out of their automobiles. "As traffic congestion builds, alternative travel modes will become more attractive" is how Minnesota's Twin Cities Metropolitan Council put it, justifying a decision not to build any roads for the next 20 years. Congestion "signals positive urban development," notes Portland's Metro. (See "Dense Thinkers," January.) "Smart growth" encourages transportation priorities set by noisy political action groups, with no consideration of demand. The pressure works. "We expect a 100 percent increase in our population by 2020, but our plan calls for only a 33 percent increase in highways," brags Texas state Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos, chairman of the Austin Transportation Study, which has developed a 25-year plan for the area. Responding to a Sierra Club critic, he says ATS has also "set aside 15 percent of our discretionary funds for bicycle and pedestrian projects although only 5 percent of the adult public reports using those methods to get to school or work." The anti-sprawl campaign isn't just a bunch of slogans. It's a vision of one best way to live, and the determination to impose that way by political action. Like the black-and-white establishment in the movie Pleasantville, the anti-sprawlers are upset with the changes unleashed by other people's choices. And as in the movie, they intend to convene the right sorts of people to pass "democratic" regulations to keep everything "pleasant" - with no room for deviation. Instead of banning double beds and colored paint, as the movie's establishment did, they'll ban free parking and new single-family houses. They, too, will make sure there's nothing "outside Pleasantville," no homes outside their jurisdiction or control. William McDonough, dean of the University of Virginia school of architecture and a leading advocate of"smart growth" planning, describes an example of the process. In Williamsburg, he had "140 citizens working at 10 different tables to articulate 10 different plans.... The plan that we ended up with is their plan.... You now have 150 citizens who are key players in each sector walking around with the same mental image of what the plan is. If somebody says, 'What's the plan?,' they can say, 'Well, that's going to be our night life center and this is going to be a place for a series of nice five-minute walks and here's our transportation system.'" In other words, well-connected "key players," with the time and patience to sit in meetings, will decide just what the future will look like. The other 12,000 or so residents of Williamsburg have no say in the matter. The anti-sprawl campaign is about telling Americans how they should live and work, about sacrificing individuals' values to the values of their politically powerful betters. It is as coercive, moralistic, and nostalgic as anything Bill Bennett, Robert Bork, or Gary Bauer ever proposed. It is just a lot less honest. For more background on the sprawl debate, see the new Breaking Issue on Reason Online, at www.reason.com/bisprawl.html. ========================================================= Source: Reason, Feb 1999 v30 i9 p4(2). Title: Rumor mongers: "neutral" technocrats sign on to anti-technology smear campaigns.(Editorial) Author: Virginia Postrel Abstract: Technocrats in the government are being used by those who hate technology to enhance the credibility of their stance and smear campaign against innovation. They make the public believe that these technocrats are neutral besides being expert in their fields of endeavor. Subjects: Technology - Social aspects Technocracy - Science and technology policy Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Reason Foundation If you want to hurt an upstart product, one of the most effective techniques is to start an unfounded rumor - to play on public suspicions and force the maker to prove its innocence. You can start spreading the word, for instance, that urine got into the beer or that the soda pop makes black men sterile. You can taint your target even among people who don't quite believe the allegations. Why, after all, should they take a chance? Such rumors have hurt actual products; the beer and soda examples are real. But those rumors have gotten harsh treatment in the press. Debunkers attack the stories as malicious and paranoid. And any competitor caught spreading such falsehoods would be subject to serious civil action. If, however, you are attacking not just a single product but a whole technological category, everything changes. Then you're an idealist. You don't have to keep to the shadows. You can take out full-page ads in newspapers and plant stories with TV news magazines. You can block innovations you dislike by falsely accusing them of terrible dangers. And you can get the government to help you. Back in 1970, that's what people who hated the birth-control pill did. Under the leadership of Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisc.), an anti-technology ideologue now known primarily as the father of Earth Day, the Senate held hearings that scared the hell out of American women. Their message was that the pill was highly dangerous, a threat to women's health, even to their lives. The lead witness, Dr. Hugh J. Davis of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, denounced oral contraceptives as a "medically unsound" interference with nature: "The synthetic chemicals in the pill are quite unnatural with respect to their manufacture and with respect to their behavior once they are introduced into the human body....It seems to me extremely unwise to officially license, sponsor, and encourage a long-range experiment such as we have now in progress on the effects of chronic ingestion of synthetic hormones by millions of women." In particular, he invoked "the nagging specter of cancer," breast cancer in particular. Use of the pill plummeted overnight. Today, about a third of women tell pollsters that they associate oral contraceptives with increased cancer risk - although the link to breast cancer has never been proven, and oral contraceptives actually prevent ovarian and endometrial cancer. By avoiding the pill, American women are increasing their cancer risk. And because they believe the pill is far more dangerous than it is, they undergo sterilization surgery at a much higher rate that their European counterparts. A generation after Nelson's hearings, the pill still suffers a stigma. Few people remember the source of that stigma, or the role that an anti-technology senator played in fostering it. Fewer still know that Davis, the medical professor who did so much to smear the pill, was the inventor of the Dalkon Shield. That's the great thing about rumors: Once they're loose, their propagators don't have to bear any responsibility for their consequences. Innuendo means never having to say you're sorry. Plus, the stigma is likely to be permanent. Your target can never prove a negative; there's always another possible study that might finally find that cancer link. Today's anti-technology crusaders are a lot savvier than Nelson and Davis were in 1970 - the pill, after all, is still on the market. Nowadays, rumor mongers don't settle for mere defamation or rely on inconclusive congressional hearings. Instead, they turn to the supposedly disinterested technocrats in federal agencies. These officials have the aura of neutral expertise and the executive power to act. Their mere suggestions carry enormous weight. Enlist such an agency in spreading a malicious rumor, and you can destroy just about any innovation, either through direct bans or subsequent litigation. Consider two remarkable scientific reports released in early December. Each examined the factual basis for a campaign to smear a technology. The first was a comprehensive analysis of the research on silicone-gel breast implants. The report was prepared by a science panel appointed by the judge coordinating the class-action suits against three implant makers. Both sides in the litigation agreed on the panel's members, who are specialists in epidemiology, immunology, and toxicology. Both sides furnished them with information and studies. Yet the panel's conclusion entirely favored the defense: There is no credible evidence that silicone-gel breast implants cause disease. The claim that they do has all the foundation of an urban legend. The damage, however, has been done. The three implant manufacturers have already agreed to pay out huge sums to settle the suits: $5,000 to $100,000 per plaintiff, with tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of women signing on. The only remaining issue is how many plaintiffs will take the settlement cash instead of trying to win more money at trial. A few weeks before the report was released, a fourth manufacturer, Dow Corning, proposed a $3.2 billion settlement plan in its separately consolidated case. Most significantly, silicone-gel breast implants are essentially off the market in the United States, made illegal for most purposes by the Food and Drug Administration. Even if the FDA changes its mind, it's unlikely that any company would take a chance on reintroducing this once-popular product. Women who want silicone-gel implants are out of luck, unless they leave the country. The campaign against the technology worked. The second study covered a more recent rumor: allegations by Greenpeace and others that a plastic used in squishy children's toys causes kidney and liver damage, including cancer, when ingested. High doses of the chemical, diisononyl phthalate, have been shown to cause tumors and other organ damage in rats and mice. Since kids tend to chew these toys, some of which are designed as teethers, the charge is a serious one. And, like the campaign against silicone-gel breast implants, it turns out to lack foundation. On December 2, the Consumer Product Safety Commission released a huge, eye-glazing study demonstrating that the amount of chemicals children ingest by chewing on these toys is way, way below anything approaching a dangerous dose. Kids simply can't get enough of the chemical into their system to cause any damage. A child is about as likely to be seized by evil spirits in the Teletubby doll he's chewing as he is to absorb enough diisononyl phthalate to create health problems. The international campaign against the toys spreads superstitious anxieties about synthetic chemicals and, by extension, about industry and technology in general. Fear, not health, is the point. And despite the CPSC's report, the anti-phthalate campaign has won. Even as it released the study showing that the campaign is hooey, the CPSC asked toy makers and retailers to take the toys off the market. The agency suggested that parents of infants throw the toys away. It asked for further study. The message was clear: Scientists say the toys are safe, but we disagree - why take a chance? The CPSC joined the defamation campaign. As a result, no manufacturer or retailer can afford to keep the toys on the market. Once a government agency has suggested that a product is dangerous, the litigation risk is simply too high to keep selling it. In fact, every child who comes down with kidney or liver disease and who has ever chewed a phthalate-containing rattle - a category that includes most kids - now has an innuendo-based case to bring against the rattle maker. There are few plaintiffs more sympathetic than sick children. Consider what happened with breast implants. There was no serious evidence against them when FDA Commissioner David Kessler declared a moratorium, pending further studies. But his action suggested danger, and the implants were doomed. As Joseph Nocera wrote in Fortune. "In a less litigious society, a government official would be able to say out loud that a medical device needed further study, and that's what would happen: There would be further study. Instead, Kessler's call for an implant moratorium became the spark that finally lit the blaze. Within weeks, 100 lawsuits had become 1,000 lawsuits. The stampede had begun." The administrative state promised us government by neutral experts, wise men who would consider the facts and issue rational regulations based on science, efficiency, safety, and the public good. All we had to do was surrender political accountability - independent agencies report neither to Congress nor to the president - and individual liberty. It was always a bad bargain: Technocracy is by nature hostile to diversity and freedom. Its goal is control - a uniform future shaped by experts. It recognizes only one best way. So it overrides the judgments and desires of individuals, curbing choice, experimentation, and learning in the name of "scientific" wisdom. Now, however, our technocrats aren't keeping their side of the bargain. They're destroying not only choice but progress, attacking not only liberty but truth. They have joined forces with those who seek to quash technology, innovation, and "unnatural" inventions - to create a static society by defamation and decree. By attacking the innocent and emboldening the malevolent, spreading rumors and defying their own experts, they have betrayed the public trust. ============================================================= Source: National Review, Dec 31, 1998 v50 i25 p46(1). Title: Fast Forward.(Review)_(book reviews) Author: John Derbyshire Subjects: Books - Reviews People: Postrel, Virginia Rev Grade: A Nmd Works: The Future and Its Enemies (Book) - Reviews Full Text COPYRIGHT 1998 National Review Inc. Mr. Derbyshire, an NR contributing editor, is the author of Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream (St. Martin's). The Future and Its Enemies, by Virginia Postrel (Free Press, 272 pp., $25) THE invention of the personal computer brought in one of those brief periods of explosive creativity when twenty-year-olds with no paper qualifications could make fortunes by inventing useful goods. Being a software developer in 1980 was like being a steam-locomotive engineer in 1820, or an aircraft designer ninety years later. Nowadays, of course, you need four graduate degrees and a king's ransom of liability insurance before anyone will let you design a plane. This has good and bad results. Good: planes are much safer than they were in 1910. Bad: nobody with the least flicker of imagination or creativity makes a career designing planes-which is why planes look just the same now as they did thirty years ago. Soon, no doubt, you will need a Commerce Department license to write computer programs. There you have the trade-off between security and freedom, which every parent of small children wrestles with daily on a more intimate scale. In The Future and Its Enemies Virginia Postrel makes the case for "dynamism"- freedom, risk, and an "open" future, unplanned and unknown, emerging from the unfettered creativity of the human mind. The other side of her dichotomy is populated by "stasists"-reactionaries who dislike or fear change and technocrats who believe they can manage and direct change by dint of planning and social engineering. Ross Perot, with his charts and graphs and teams of experts ready to descend on and solve every one of our problems, is a stasist. So is Pat Buchanan, dreaming of a return to the 1950s. So is our next President, Al Gore, whose dim-witted technocratic power fantasies are quoted in Mrs. Postrel's book to hilarious effect. Mrs. Postrel is the editor of Reason magazine, flagship of the libertarian movement; but she makes a point of saying in her book that "dynamists aren't just libertarians with a new name." It seems to me, however, that the difference sets-dynamists who are not libertarians and vice versa-must be very small, so this is for the most part a libertarian tract. Still, The Future and Its Enemies is an ideas book, not an issues book. There is almost nothing here on those knotty topics that separate libertarians from the rest of the intellectual Right-immigration, for example, or drug legalization. Mrs. Postrel's aim is only to provide a defense of adventurous, optimistic attitudes to social and technological change. That she has done very admirably, with passion and vigor. If the book has a fault, it is that Mrs. Postrel underestimates those enemies in her title, and the power of their appeal to our baser natures. Human society is nothing but the human soul at large, and we humans are very slothful creatures. A survey of those parts of the human race who have been given the opportunity to spend their whole lives doing nothing useful-the British aristocracy, for example-shows that the overwhelming majority embrace that opportunity with enthusiasm. So with our institutions. Every culture, in every age, has thrown up mechanisms to thwart and deny the potential of the gifted and energetic minority, from the trade guilds of medieval Europe to today's National Education Association. It is not difficult to see why this happens. As Mrs. Postrel herself writes, "A dynamist world is not a place of hedonistic lotus-eaters, but of continual striving-not simply to survive, but to improve." It all sounds so strenuous. What, no lotus-eating at all? I like Mrs. Postrel's book, and agree with her larger thesis; but I hope she will not mind my saying that she has been spending too much time with software entrepreneurs-people who work twenty- hour days and build fortunes doing something they love to do. She might try strolling round the back offices of the large company I work for, where the item of software most commonly to be seen running on employees' workstations is solitaire. It should be heartening to read an author like Mrs. Postrel, one who speaks out clearly against the thickening tangle of laws and regulations that reaches ever deeper into our personal lives and private exchanges. Yet The Future and Its Enemies, though very worthy in itself, left me feeling glum. We are not short of books advocating liberty, wealth creation, and open- mindedness. What we are short of is public sentiment in favor of those things. I agree with Mrs. Postrel that we currently have too many laws, and way too many lawyers; but how many of our fellow citizens are of the same mind? In the recent elections in my state, Chuck Schumer, one of the candidates for U.S. Senate, boasted-boasted! in paid ads on prime-time television!-that he was a man with "a passion to legislate." He won handily. ============================================================ Source: Reason, August-Sep 1998 v30 n4 p4(2). Title: Post-crisis politics: why investigative reporters and political activists seem so depressed. (post-Cold War era) Author: Virginia Postrel Abstract: American journalists and political activists are having difficulties in rallying the public towards any type of crisis in the post-Cold War era. Contented with the state of economy, the public largely ignores media's discussion of sex scandals, public health costs and other issues. Subjects: Press and politics - Analysis Press and propaganda - Analysis Public opinion - Analysis Journalism - Political aspects Full Text COPYRIGHT 1998 Reason Foundation At a recent convention for investigative journalists, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd found a lot of unhappy reporters. They're digging up tons of dirt - the Clinton scandals alone can fill several pages of every day's newspaper - but the public just won't get hysterical about it. "We live in this bland yuppified era when people just care about fresh-squeezed orange juice and watching the stock numbers in the paper," complained Charles Lewis of the Center for Public Integrity. Conservative political activists are equally depressed. They can't muster any public enthusiasm about their issues - from restricting the political use of union dues (an embarrassing loser in the California primary) to the danger of popular music to those same Clinton scandals. Meanwhile, the Reagan coalition is falling apart, riven by serious disagreements about governing philosophy. At a recent social gathering, I heard an honest conservative intellectual say what a lot are surely thinking: We miss the Cold War. We wish we had a big, bad enemy to rally against. Conservatives are down in the dumps, but their counterparts on the left haven't exactly gained momentum. Ralph Nader tried to make the evils of Microsoft a popular rallying point and got nowhere; techies and lawyers may care, but the general public just wants computers that work. The Atlantic Monthly is on a crusade to convince us that environmental catastrophe looms, but again, no public outcry has ensued. This isn't 1970, or even 1990. News magazines have increasingly abandoned politics and foreign affairs for cover stories on health, wealth, and science. Dr. Laura Schlesinger's relationship advice has replaced Rush Limbaugh's politics in the top slot not only on talk radio but in the hearts of some conservatives. Meanwhile, the Clinton administration survives because it cares mostly about surviving. Having lost the Democratic Congress to its health care ambitions, the administration now contents itself with small stuff: cigarette billboards, day care, tax credits for college. The president still musters the rhetoric of crisis, complete with the appropriately trembling lip, and the media dutifully record the story. But the public yawns. Welcome to the post-crisis political world. It's a strange place, not at all like the one we're used to. It's not "the end of history," but it is definitely a different era. It requires a new approach to both politics and political discourse. Since the turn of the century, our politics and media have followed a pattern. News, as Paul Weaver observed in News and the Culture of Lying (1994), has been defined as a story about "crisis and emergency response - about the waxing and waning of urgent danger to the community and about the actions of responsible officials to cope." Something terrible is happening, and immediate, dramatic action (mostly by the government, but sometimes by its opponents) is necessary to prevent disaster. That's the news - and hence, the politics - of crisis. That's the world to which we've grown accustomed. Everyone in politics, regardless of ideology, has been shaped by that world and its assumptions. Everyone resorts to the rhetoric of crisis and emergency response: If you want to enlarge government, you find a crisis that demands a program, from Medicare to Clinton-Care. If you want to shrink it, you find a countervailing crisis that demands deregulation, tax cuts, or fiscal austerity. Ross Perot made the budget deficit the Republicans' favorite crisis. It helps that the 20th century has been full of genuine crises: two World Wars, a Great Depression, the Cold War. No sooner had we gotten over the Cold War than we faced the one-two punch of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, leading to the Gulf War, and then a recession. The politics of crisis thus survived most of Bill Clinton's first term, well into the new Republican Congress. A supposed emergency fed Clinton-Care, and the threat of that economic takeover itself created a sense of crisis. From the high-turnout election of 1992 through at least 1995, Americans were terrifically engaged in political life. And then they turned it off. The general public just stopped paying attention, stopped caring, stopped believing that any domestic problem was so urgent that politicians in Washington needed to Act Now! to solve it. Amid peace and prosperity, Americans decided they could solve their own, relatively manageable problems. They stopped expecting crises. And they stopped trusting the people who told them to see that emergencies loomed everywhere. Without a genuine threat - war, natural disaster, economic collapse - crisis politics demands some sort of consensus, usually enforced by a formal or informal information cartel, that such and such is the pressing issue of the day. That consensus no longer exists. Wise to the manipulative ways of politicians, sophisticated about media conventions, and able to get information from a host of different voices, the general public has stopped believing in the politics of crisis. Hence, the investigative journalists are down in the dumps. So are officials of both parties. So are pundits and activists and analysts. They keep casting about for crises that will engage the public imagination, that will command attention, that will make them look like heroes. Emergencies are good for business - for vote getting, for direct mail, for ratings. Emergencies help cut through clutter; they tell the public that this issue, this politician, this pundit, is too important to ignore. So people who make politics their business are always looking for emergencies. Health care is a perennial favorite. "Voters' Anger at HMOs as Hot Political Issue," reads a typical headline in The New York Times. Politicians at both the state and national levels rush to address the presumed crisis with gobs of legislation. But it's an empty ritual, left over from an earlier time. It serves no real need. Pollster Everett Ladd, writing in IntellectualCapital.com, points out the inconvenient truth: The number of Americans who see health care as "the most important problem facing this country today" is in single digits, with the public about evenly split on whether any new regulation is justified. And depending on how the question is worded, either a plurality or a majority prefers regulation by an independent nonprofit organization to government oversight. "Americans are not content with the health-care status quo," writes Ladd, "but they are not angry either, and they are not seeking a significantly expanded federal regulatory role." No crisis there, just normal discontent. HMOs are not an isolated example. Again and again, in "this bland yuppified era," issues get headlines but don't draw public attention or support. Americans are not clamoring for V-chips. They do not think Bill Clinton should be impeached. They're tired of term limits. They aren't afraid of the greenhouse effect. They don't believe the "year 2000" problem will crash every computer in the country. They have even stopped worrying so much about crime and drugs. And while nobody much likes the tobacco companies, there is nothing more boring to the general public (except possibly campaign-finance reform) than the constant nattering about smoking. In post-crisis America, politics has not, of course, disappeared. Nor should it. But it has changed. And those who care about the proper relationship between government and society must change with it. Unless they want to be thought hysterical maniacs by a public tired of phony crises, they must learn a different, more honest, and more satisfying way of talking about issues. (None of this precludes using the rhetoric of crisis and emergency response in a genuine emergency - if, to take the summer's favorite movie scenario, a large heavenly body is about to hit the earth, or if the Chinese seriously threaten to nuke Los Angeles.) In its public, high-profile form, post-crisis political activity has two main functions: cleaning up chronic problems and helping shape interpretive worldviews. When there are no immediate dangers, addressing long-term problems becomes more feasible. It's possible to invest the time necessary to draw public attention to such nagging issues as out-of-control entitlements or a deranged tax code. (For a discussion of Social Security reform, for instance, see page 56.) In dealing with chronic problems - which, by definition, are not momentary "crises" - how you understand the world matters a lot. Consider the terrible state of the public schools, the chronic problem that looms largest in the public imagination. If you believe that educational quality is simply a matter of will and thus something that can be decreed, you will look for a central education czar and charge him with establishing standards. If you think quality is something that can easily be bought, you will simply spend more money. But if you believe that competition, experiment, and feedback lead to improving quality, and that diversity can be both a source of important innovations and a good in and of itself, you will look for ways to increase those factors. The spread of this dynamic understanding of progress has, in fact, changed education policy. So it is that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs recently used the threat of a well-funded initiative campaign to get the legislature and governor to open California's educational marketplace to many more charter schools - a sharp contrast to the more-money-plus-harder-tests approach usually favored by business lobbyists, including many technology enthusiasts. Elsewhere in the country, philanthropists are injecting competition into moribund school systems through direct action, by funding scholarships that allow kids in the worst schools to opt for private alternatives. And many school reformers now advocate testing mostly as a source of valuable feedback for parents and communities, rather than a good in and of itself. For such feedback to work, however, choice, competition, and innovation must also be possible - which implies a whole different approach to founding, funding, and running schools. Crises, real or imagined, are useful political tools. By making political change an imperative, they help break what Milton and Rose Friedman have called the "tyranny of the status quo." But relying on crises to drive change simply won't work any more. The public no longer believes the rhetoric of crisis and emergency response, at least not in times of peace and prosperity. A different sort of persuasion is necessary. Politics is no longer like swatting a mosquito-see a problem and whack it down; it is gradually becoming more like tending a garden, which grows mostly on its own. So how we understand those "natural" social processes matters a lot. Political action in a post-crisis age, then, demands not only that we address chronic problems but that we explore and analyze, champion and explain a broader worldview. And it requires a different sort of political person, one less caught up in the drama of emergencies, more satisfied with enabling the wonders of everyday life. After a century of crisis-and-response politics, such people may be hard to imagine. But so is a general public that will continue to fall for overhyped crises. The politics of emergency has run its course. ========================================================== Source: Reason, March 1998 v29 n10 p4(2). Title: Let's pretend: the "pageant" masquerading as environmental debate. (publication of the Unabomber manifesto leads to arrest of hermit Theodore Kaczynski)(Editorial) Author: Virginia Postrel Abstract: Hermit Theodore Kaczynski was arrested for the publication of the Unabomber manifesto. Observers, however, believe that the arrest was immoral and illogical since the manifesto hardly mentioned global warming and could be considered the harmless rantings of a lunatic. Subjects: Global warming - Laws, regulations, etc. People: Kaczynski, Theodore - Investigations Full Text COPYRIGHT 1998 Reason Foundation There is something weirdly appropriate about beginning the Unabomber trial a few weeks after the Kyoto summit to craft a global-warming treaty. The shack-dwelling, potato-grubbing hermit Theodore Kaczynski seems to have nothing in common, of course, with the jet-setting power brokers who descended on one of the world's most beautiful cities to debate (or agitate for) treaty provisions. Lifestyle aside, the Unabomber "manifesto," whose publication led to Kaczynski's arrest, hardly even mentions global warming. And while pundits took Kyoto with chin-pulling seriousness, there is near-universal agreement that it is irrational, and possibly immoral, to treat Kaczynski's ideas as anything other than the deranged rantings of a lunatic. But we can in fact learn a lot about the state of the environmental debate by taking both Kyoto and Kaczynski seriously. And the most important thing we learn is that much of the time that debate is deeply dishonest and quite detached from logic and reality. It is less a debate than - as Robert DeNiro's character in Wag the Dog might put it - a pageant, something staged for the masses and assumed by its participants to be unreal. Except that this pageant has real-world consequences. Consider Kaczynski. Over his objections, his lawyers tried to mount a "diminished capacity" defense, arguing that he was too mentally ill to form the legally required intent for murder. Having failed to exclude mountains of evidence, notably Kaczynski's written musings on bombings past and planned, they had no other defense. Many experts opined that the "he's too crazy to be culpable" approach just might work, even after Kaczynski blocked psychiatric witnesses. Family members and other lay witnesses should be enough, said Leslie Abramson, the lawyer famous for defending the Menendez brothers. "The point they want to make is that it's obvious he's crazy," Abramson told the Associated Press. "You don't need an expert to say that.... You have to show the jury he's extremely weird. Look at his lifestyle.... He lived a hard and unnatural life." This sentiment has been echoed again and again: Kaczynski's lifestyle alone proves he's too nuts to be responsible for murders and maimings. As Reuters correspondent Michael Miller put it: "Legal analysts say the defense's strongest argument that their client is mad may be the 12-by-10 foot...plywood shack without electricity or running water and with only a small wood stove to stave off the bitter cold of the Rocky Mountain winters.... Experts expect the defense to argue that only a madman would voluntarily endure those conditions, cycling five miles (8 km) through snowdrifts to get provisions from the nearest town and roasting squirrels and porcupines for supper." This argument is very, very interesting. It says that someone who writes lucidly, who cared for himself for two decades with virtually no outside aid, and who articulates the planning of his crimes and the reasons behind them cannot possibly be sane simply because he lives the way popular, respected, best-selling environmental theorists say we should all live. Unlike the president of the United States and a wide range of statist pundits, I do not believe that peaceful people are implicated in the violent deeds of strangers who happen to share some of their political views. (See "Fighting Words," July 1995, available at www.reason.com/9507/VIPedit.jul.html.) E.F. Schumacher never blew anyone up to enforce the message that small is beautiful. Jeremy Rifkin files lawsuits; he does not murder scientists. Kirkpatrick Sale, the Unabomber's leading rationalizer, stops at apologizing for other people's violence; he doesn't do the deeds himself. Even as a soldier in Vietnam, Al Gore wielded only a pen and notebook. Political theory is not violence. But neither is it supposed to be escapist fantasy. When theorists like Schumacher, Rifkin, and Sale write books celebrating a world without trade, specialization, or industry, they presumably intend for their ideas to be taken seriously. In Earth in the Balance, Gore says his message is urgent, that "we must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization.... Minor shifts in policy, marginal adjustments in ongoing programs, moderate improvements in laws and regulations, rhetoric offered in lieu of genuine change - these are all forms of appeasement, designed to satisfy the public's desire to believe that sacrifice, struggle, and a wrenching transformation of society will not be necessary." This imperative statement certainly sounds serious. When Gore writes that "we have been so seduced by industrial civilization's promise to make our lives comfortable that we allow the synthetic routines of modern life to soothe us in an inauthentic world of our own making," the clear implication is that there is something wrong. When he continues, "Life can be easy, we assure ourselves. We need not suffer the heat or the cold; we need not sow or reap or hunt and gather," the intended irony is obvious. We are, Gore suggests, deeply deluded. This drive to overcome the pains inflicted by nature is a sign of"a laziness in our spirit." We should live differently, more authentically. We should live more like Ted Kaczynski. Gore is not alone in that suggestion - or in his failure to confront its implications. Like Earth in the Balance, Bill McKibben's The End of Nature was a bestseller. Describing the world he'd like to see, McKibben imagines smaller wardrobes and communal washing machines: "If we reached that point the point where great closetfuls of clothes seemed slightly absurd - unnatural - then we might have begun to climb down from the tottering perch where we currently cling." Obviously the man of the house, McKibben fails to realize that fewer clothes mean more washing, unless you plan to go the stinky Kaczynski route. A similar failure to connect the dots marks another McKibben observation: "My wife and I just acquired a fax machine...on the premise that it makes for graceful, environmentally sound communication.... But if communication prospered in a humbler world, transportation might well wither, as people began to live closer not only to their work but to their food supply. Oranges all year round - oranges at any season in the northern latitudes - might prove ambitious beyond our means." A world without the transportation for out-of-season oranges is unlikely to deliver fax machines to writers in the Adirondack Mountains. Electronic equipment does not grow on trees. Such fantasies would be of no more consequence than bodice-ripping romance novels if their authors would stick to peddling pornography for puritanical intellectuals, and their readers would understand it as mere entertainment. A world without consequences or cause and effect makes for many a pleasurable fantasy, and even greens like to have fun. Unfortunately, however, these particular pageants get played out on a world stage, where laws get made and people's real lives are at stake. That is where Kyoto comes in. The summit was supposedly about something real - reducing global warming. But it looked an awful lot like a pageant. For starters, there was a lot of explicit pageantry: To portray fossil fuels as "the technology of the past," Greenpeace erected a 20-foot metal dinosaur made from old cars, gasoline pumps, and other detritus. Another green group seized a Kyoto gas station. Ice-sculpture penguins melted in the sun. And, of course, Gore jetted in at the last possible moment, playing Superman as negotiations broke down. Negotiators then proceeded to work without sleep for several days, a showy way to make good feature stories and bad policy. No one seemed much interested in the scientific questions, many of which are still in play. You could pretty much predict what people would say about science by finding out what they thought about completely unrelated questions: about markets, about industrial civilization, about America, about oranges in the winter. The whole thing was very disquieting, a struggle between competing world views decked out as a way of solving a technical problem. The diplomats provided the technocratic cover, pretending that "sacrifice, struggle, and a wrenching transformation of society will not be necessary." All the while, Greenpeace and its fossil-fuel enemies were arguing the opposite point. In the end, the sleepless delegates came up with a treaty whose consequences are murky, to be determined in a later round of negotiations and, as important, by the actions of the U.S. Senate. The treaty takes the advice of economists, who, accepting the goal as problem solving rather than social transformation, recommended a trading program that lets advanced countries buy emissions credits from less-developed nations. The idea is that it's more efficient to bring well-understood emissions-reducing equipment to, say, China, which is still using highly polluting technologies, than it is to invent brand-new equipment and processes in the United States. This practical approach was immediately denounced as "immoral" by environmental puritans and anti-market technocrats. Even on economics, a lot of pretending went on in Kyoto. It was common to hear that the United States can cut carbon-dioxide emissions without hurting economic growth, that the benefits might even outweigh the costs. The rest of the story was omitted: Those rosy projections assume a carbon tax to deter emissions offset by a huge reduction in taxes on capital. Dale Jorgenson, the Harvard economist who rallied economists to the no-cost side, writes that "reducing the tax burden on capital by substituting other forms of taxation would produce similar [growth] effects with no effect on emissions of greenhouse gases." In other words, cutting greenhouse gases is in fact expensive. The whole cost-free approach depends on a tax cut the Clinton administration would never in a million years support. Of course, quibbles like these don't matter when you're putting on a pageant. The whole point is to look and sound good - to seem concerned about the urgency of the "environmental crisis." The last thing you want to do is take environmental rhetoric seriously. That would be crazy. ============================================================ Source: Reason, Dec 1995 v27 n7 p36(8). Title: The contents of our character. (can anyone, anywhere learn how to be an American?) Author: Brink; Lindsey, Andrew; Ferguson, Gary Alan; Fine, Joseph Epstein, Charles Paul Freund, Steven Hayward, John Hood, Marcus Klein, Chavez Linda, William Barclay Allen, Paul Rahe, Virginia Postrel and Jonathan Rauch Abstract: Thirteen writers and scholars were asked to recommend three books that would clearly portray American character and culture to an immigrant. Selected were those that showed work ethics, adventurousness, exuberance and wit, the capacity to dream The American Dream, and the essence of the starship 'Enterprise.' Subjects: America - Moral and ethical aspects Personality and culture - United States Full Text COPYRIGHT Reason Foundation 1995 Current debates over immigration pivot on the notion of the distinctly American character and culture: Can anyone, from anywhere, learn how to be an American? REASON asked a number of writers and scholars to recommend three books, with a couple of restrictions: one had to be a work of fiction, and one had to have been written in the past 50 years. We were seeking the books that would be most instructive to a new immigrant on those vexing questions: What is the American character? What defines American culture? * Brink Lindsey What has always been best and most distinctive about the American character is its sense of adventure. The immigrant knows this: That is what brought him here. Willingness (even eagerness) to take risks, to depart from old ways of doing things, to try the unknown - these represent the ideal of American dating. This adventurous spirit achieved its best-known expression in the conquest of the Western frontier. An appreciation of this episode must transcend caricatures, whether of today's P.C. demonizers or yesteryear's whitewashers. A good place to begin is Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove (1985), the story of two former Texas Rangers who lead a cattle drive from Texas to Montana. It is a beautiful, funny, and immensely entertaining book, and it captures perfectly the reckless, rambunctious vitality that led the Western expansion. In particular, the richly realized character of Augustus McCrae is my idea of what a great American should be: lighthearted, good at his work, sociable but independent, practical but a dreamer. The primary outlet for American adventurousness today is the workplace. Snobs of both the left and right deny that commerce allows for any largeness of spirit, but they could not be more wrong. Daring and competitive striving were traditionally aristocratic virtues; capitalism democratized them, and capitalism's development spreads the opportunities to practice them ever more widely. An adventure does not require gun-fire or death-defiance; it needs only a formidable challenge, and the boldness to take it on and meet it. Richard Preston's American Steel: Hot Metal Men and the Resurrection of the Rust Belt (1991) tells the adventure of a steel mill - specifically, Nucor's opening of the first flat-rolled minimill. The drama of the story grips like a novel. Read this book to experience capitalism at its best. Americans are the great pioneers and defenders of a social order based on capitalist-style adventure. And the growth of this order - the integration of millions of dreams and risks taken through the coordinating forces of the market - may itself be seen in the larger view as a grand collective adventure. The prize of this quest is described in Max Singer's remarkable Passage to a Human World (1987): the transformation of the normal human life from one mired in ignorance and poverty to one broadened by the possibilities of affluence. In creating this new world, we are exploring the unknown - human beings have never lived like this before. It is a world well suited to American adventurousness. * Andrew Ferguson It's a sad fact that most great works of American literature are anti-bourgeois, anti-small town, hence, in some way, anti-American. A newly arrived immigrant unlucky enough to read, say, Sister Carrie or Main Street or Winesburg, Ohio, would take away an unmistakable message: "Go back!" This doesn't make our great works of literature any less great, though, so choosing from them almost at random I would hand our new immigrant a copy, well-thumbed, of Spoon River Anthology (1915). This is Edgar Lee Masters's collection of poems about a small valley in Western Illinois, pre-World War I. Taking names from the headstones of a local cemetery, Masters wrote a poem for each townsman, and as you read along the tales interweave and overlap and fold back upon one another, exposing the inevitable small-town lies and hypocrisies but also - and this is crucial instances of grace and nobility and redemption. If nothing else, the book shows why Americans were so in a rush to urbanize. If we'd all had to stay in a small valley in Western Illinois, we would have gone crazy. I would also force upon our immigrant friend a load of Mencken (probably the Second Chrestomathy, edited by my friend Terry Teachout and published in 1995), so that he might begin to glimpse the exuberance and wit the American language is capable of expressing. Along with the singular quality of his prose, Mencken's habits of mind - the skepticism and hardheadedness and unfailing sense of appreciation and pleasure - are good habits for anyone caught up in the raucous carnival of American life. And last I would hand him a copy of Wealth and Poverty by George Gilder (1981). I haven't yet decided whether I agree with Gilder about the altruism that he believes lies at capitalism's heart. But I probably should, for no one shows such an understanding of. both the mechanics and the morality of the marketplace. And as our new immigrant would soon discover about the American marketplace, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. * Gary Alan Fine Ever since Adolf Hitler and his cronies wrecked the legitimacy of assessing the traits of peoples, writers have been properly wary of embracing too tightly the belief that nations have "character." Yet, despite the mischief that some have made of it, a common-sense perception exists that different societies are fundamentally distinctive. National character feels right, even if definitive proof is difficult to come by. We Americans treasure what has come to be called "American exceptionalism" - those features of who we are that we believe distinguish us from others: those nasty un-Americans. Dismiss any biological basis, any American gene; we have been melted in the same pot. In recommending books that reveal this character one is tempted to name two distinctively American popular genres and leave it at that: science and Westerns - literatures that look forward and back. These literatures enshrine the American reverence for technology and for the land, and both within the context of a rugged individualism. Beyond those categories, three volumes stand out for me as guides to what it means to be an American: for good and for ill. Perhaps we should junk our current citizenship tests, and merely insist that all prospective citizens read Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Each applicant could be required to explain how Huck Finn moved them. Any number of explanations would validate one's Americanism. Set within a crucial period of American history, capturing the American tragedies of slavery and racial bigotry, depicting the importance of both community and individual initiative, and set on the intersection of regional cultures of the Midwest, South, and West, Huck Finn confronts the reader with the questions of what American society is and what it should and could be. Further, if one believes that one cannot truly understand a people until one can laugh at their jokes and cry at their sorrows, Huck Finn, alternatively raucously funny and mordantly sad, provides a test for becoming an American in one's emotional response. My second selection is a bit of a cheat. Trying to decide whether to chose Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854) or his lecture/essay "Civil Disobedience" (1848) was eased by the fact that I have an edition that includes both. As readers of REASON recognize, the latter is a grand, radical libertarian paean to freedom - an American political tract that stands up against Marx and Engel's contemporaneous Communist Manifesto. The former defines individualism in practice. If we do not choose to retreat to our own Walden, we experience the awareness vicariously through Thoreau's clean prose and wild life. Could such an essay be written anywhere but America? Our wilderness is our freedom. As a practicing sociologist, I cannot resist including a volume by a colleague: Joseph Gusfield's classic and spirited study, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (1963). Gusfield takes as his case the battle over Prohibition laws: a lengthy straggle, unimaginable in many other industrial nations. For Gusfield, temperance is not really about alcohol, but about class, ethnicity, gender, and moral discipline. Lines are drawn between female, rural, Protestant residents of Anglo-English descent and more recent migrants to these shores: Catholics, urbanites, males, and "ethnics." The battle is not over the bottle, but over the ballot and the economy. Significantly, Prohibition was enacted at about the time that immigration was sharply curtailed: The first experiment lasted barely a decade, while the latter exercise in exclusion lasted 40 years. The battles over immigration are as American as the battle over slavery. The Statue of Liberty may reflect a cherished American ideal, but statues don't vote or march. * Joseph Epstein Democracy in America, the first book I would have our new American read, is one that surprises me afresh whenever I return to it by its powers of penetrating beyond the surface of social and political life. It was published in 1835, when its author was 30, and is based on information and observations he acquired when sent to this country to study penal reform in 1831, when he was 26. Tocqueville, though not himself an immigrant, provides a matchless model for anyone newly arrived in our country of the possibilities of astute social observation. Henry James advised that one try to be a person on whom nothing is lost. The young Alexis de Tocqueville was such a person and Democracy in America proves it beyond any question. Chapter 19 of Part II of Tocqueville's book begins: "The first thing that strikes one in the United States is the innumerable crowd of those striving to escape from their original social condition; and the second is the rarity, in a land where all are actively ambitious, of any lofty ambition." Ambition, or perhaps following Tocqueville one does better to say "personal aspiration," which for so long has been at the heart of American life, dictates my choice of a second book for my new immigrant: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925). What Fitzgerald's novel ought to make plain to the new American is that Americans, at their best, have been a nation of dreamers. Yet he or she should also know that these dreams frequently carry a price. Poor Jay Gatsby's dream of recapturing and revising the past may not qualify as a "lofty ambition" in the Tocquevillian sense, but it has its own kind of grandeur. "Gatsby," this novel's penultimate paragraph reads, "believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther....And one fine morning - " The third book I would recommend is Independence Day, a novel by Richard Ford that is less than a year old and that I myself have not even finished reading. But unless Ford blows it badly, his book seems to me to fit in handsomely with my other two suggestions, in being a work about American ambition, aspiration, and dreams. Its unlikely hero is a divorced father of two, of all unromantic things a real estate salesman, and the book is about what America does to dreams - not all of it, by any means, very nice, but much of it useful to know. It is a novel about life in this country at a time when the notion of progress that has for so long propelled so many American actions and beliefs has to be significantly qualified without being altogether jettisoned. To an attentive immigrant - or, for that matter, American-born - reader it has a vast amount of important information about the way Americans live now: about our hopes and fears and what it means to be an American at the end of the 20th century. * Charles Paul Freund The landscape of the American character is rather broad for the three small structures this assignment allows me to build on it. Let's build then with three novels of this century: They throw big shadows. If Americans are part cowboy, an important reason is Owen Wister's 1902 novel The Virginian. Wister's tale of cowboy life in Wyoming created the essential American myth - and hero - we have been revisiting ever since. Americans know this book whether or not they've read it or even heard of it. Unlike his garrulous, socially humble dime-novel predecessors, the never-named hero of Wister's novel is important for. his code, not his birth: His family is irrelevant to his character, as is his meager education. He is a man of deeds, not words, ideas, or culture, and he acts out of a powerful sense of duty. Never seeking violence, he must do what honor and justice demand. The trail runs true from The Virginian to Tom Mix, Gary Cooper, and John Wayne; even to Herb Jeffries, the Bronze Buckaroo of '30s all-black movies. When The Virginian appeared, Frederick Jackson Turner had already declared the frontier closed; the age of cities and consumerism had begun. What Wister shaped from a fading past was a folk-epic West where a man could mold himself free of artificial restraints: our American dream. His book, set amid the infamous Johnson County Wars, is also unalloyed propaganda for cattlemen; the 1980 film Heaven's Gate told the story in class-struggle terms. Different audience. By 1939, when Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep appeared, open trails had become mean streets, and down them walked private eye Philip Marlowe, maintaining his honor in a corrupt world. Chandler's debt is to Hemingway and Hammett, but the spectacular world of American noir owes its greatest debt to Chandler. Tough, mistrustful, knightly, Marlowe's is the most distinctive of American voices, the clean if smoke-coarsened music behind a world of garish neon, too much booze, and dreams gone sour. A man of deeds, as is the American style, Marlowe is also a man of words, which he wields like bullets. That voice lives: You still hear it in Blade Runner and in William Gibson's Neuromancer, the basic text of cyberpunk. The Big Sleep isn't Chandler's best book (Farewell, My Lovely is), but it's a more revealing combination of American toughism and our cultural ambivalence toward cops, power, and wealth. It's hard to mold yourself in an American city: They're big, dirty, and full of phony restraints. You've got to know how to slip those restraints and still be able to look at yourself in the mirror when you snap your hat brim. Marlowe could. That's why we still hear him. Truman Capote once sniffed famously that On The Road by Jack Kerouac wasn't writing at all; it was "just typing." True, Kerouac's 1957 book about his travels around the country is shapeless and undisciplined. But Kerouac wasn't offering American picaresque. On The Road is a work of sensibilities: wild, cool, and beat. Kerouac was typing spontaneously amid a rising storm of generational discontent and self-absorption, characteristics that came to dominate postwar American (and not only American) culture and character. Kerouac invented neither '50s beat culture nor '60s counterculture, though On The Road heralded the prose arrival of the former, and was an essential text of the latter. Indeed, the work of the beats must stand in for the largely missing literature of their hippie offspring, who channeled their juices into music. On The Road isn't a bad stand-in. Kerouac and his traveling buddies make their own highway frontier where they slip restraints Owen Wister never dreamed of. Melding with many Americas, black and Indian as well as white mainstream, they are the cool, slang-talking, bebop-thumping, messiah-dreaming products of what we now call cultural discourse. Cultural cousin to the young Brando and the thin Elvis, and a buzz in the ear of Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison, Kerouac's book implies the technologically possible placelessness that is the final American frontier: in his case, cars; in ours, satellites and computers. Beyond that, there is no national culture, and you're not an American anymore. * Steven Hayward In one of his many encomiums to the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln hit upon the chief reason why it is possible for anyone from anywhere to become an American, while it is nearly unthinkable for an emigre to become a Frenchman or a German: One becomes an American by adopting its principles, especially the principles of equal rights expounded in the Declaration. But the political principles alone are not the sum of the matter. The "American Dream," which connotes something more than merely political character, is similarly exceptional: The mere mention of the possibility of the Canadian Dream or the German Dream elicits a smile. Hence, an immigrant to America should start with something like A. J. Langguth's Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution (1988), which offers vivid portraits of the main figures of the revolutionary generation. In a more contemporary vein, Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1981) offers a stirring account of the necessary but often brutal process of becoming an American. The American Dream is in the end bound up with the nation's principles, in ways which can be hard to discern today. All regimes are vulnerable to a kind of corruption specific to their principles: in our case, the attenuation of the idea of rights, along with an apolitical liberalism that overemphasizes comfortable self-preservation, constitutes a corruption of the civic virtue at the heart of the American Dream as the Founding generation understood it. There are a variety of difficult nonfiction books one might punish an immigrant with, but for a better impressionistic look at several aspects of these problems, a new immigrant would do well to read Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities (1987). * John Hood New Americans deserve to know what they've gotten themselves into - not simply a country with defined borders and a common national culture, but a two-centuries-old experiment whose boundaries have yet to be determined and for which tumultuous change is itself a tradition. The American Experiment is unique in world history, but its goal is to satisfy a universal desire for human freedom and dignity. To a great and unprecedented extent, the experiment has proved a success. But the intervening struggle has often been a difficult one. New Americans - who in the future may well be called upon to defend and expand the freedom that is their bequest today - need to learn more about it. The novels that make up James Fenimore Cooper's The Leatherstocking Tales (1823-41) are an excellent introduction to the important American heroic concepts of personal freedom, audacity, and individual responsibility. That America is a frontier society has long been (correctly) taken as a given, and used by the modern left to justify abandonment of the country's original political and economic principles - since, they say, the frontier no longer exists. That is absurd, of course, as any biotechnology executive or cybersurfing teenager can attest. The Tales also help to chronicle the days of rebellion against oppressive government, an American Revolution that didn't just end with the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. Contentious debates continued about how far government power should extend over money, trade, and the freedom of millions of human beings, culminating in 19th-century war and tragedy. At the same time, entrepreneurs such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, James J. Hill, and John Rockefeller faced enormous challenges and government-erected hurdles - in the form of subsidized and protected competitors - in their efforts to build a modern industrial economy. On these two subjects, I'd put a good history of the Civil War (say, by Shelby Foote) and the thin but indispensable volume Entrepreneurs vs. the State by Burton W. Folsom Jr. (1987) on any new American's reading list. (Folsom's book is also available in a 1991 expanded version titled The Myth of the Robber Barons.) The 20th century has seen great tragedy as well as great accomplishment. For many Americans, the promise of freedom remains unfulfilled. Nevertheless, the amount of progress would be hard to overstate. Henry Grady Weaver, in his classic 1947 work The Mainspring of Human Progress, explains how the concept of freedom created the American society so many immigrants seek to join: "Why did men, women, and children eke out their meager existence for 6,000 years [of recorded history], toiling desperately from dawn to dark - barefoot, half-naked, unwashed, unshaved, uncombed, with lousy hair, mangy skins, and rotting teeth - then suddenly, in one place on earth there is an abundance of things such as rayon underwear, nylon hose, shower baths, safety razors, ice cream sodas, lipsticks, and permanent waves?" Immigrants, perhaps more so than natives, intuitively understand why Weaver's simple question is so provocative. When they can answer the question as easily, their journey to America will be truly complete. * Marcus Klein America is the one nation in the world that is defined not for its immigrants but by them - and not simply as they might contribute one ingredient or another to the great American bouillabaisse, but by record of the adventure in itself of their finding a place in 20th-century America. It is an odd but demonstrable fact that in modern times the most subtle of definitions of American tradition and culture have come from the pens of those who have had that adventure or from their first-generation American children. Therefore for the new immigrant the most instructive books might well be accounts of his predecessors, and among such accounts it would likely be works of fiction that would be most instructive because fiction allows for complicated and sometimes contradictory feeling, for tentativeness of discovery and judgment. For a hundred years and more the immigrant to America has been confronted by a country that is at once beckoning and hostile, at once welcoming and demeaning, at once a guarantor of liberties and a restrictor of the same, and which at once promises material opportunity and denies the same. Add to such bafflement of day-to-day life the drag, moral and familial, of the culture that is being abandoned and the sheer necessity of surviving in the new - there is material here for a rich and enlightening literature. The new immigrant might well consider Abraham Cahan's novel of 1917, The Rise of David Levinsky. The title character, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, works hard and rises to become a wonderfully successful businessman, and does not thereby lose his soul. David Levinsky is a very long novel that is instructive because it is true to its ambiguities. Levinsky becomes sly and occasionally is brutal in his rise to riches, as is not an unlikely price of character for the sake of success in America, while at the end he is nevertheless faithful to his beginnings, balancing pride and guilt, with no clear end to his adventure in sight. No end, in fact, to this literature that records the making of Americans, and therefore the making of America. But one might make special mention of Henry Roth's novel of 1934, Call It Sleep, which illuminates the adventure by presenting it through the eyes of a child. For that matter the black experience in modern America is not essentially different from that of the immigrant, and an account of it might provide him with another kind of illumination. The novel he should look at, without doubt, is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, published in 1952. While it is an angry novel, it, too, straggles with the guilt of abandonment of a prior culture. "I yam what I yam," says the hero, to speak of more than his dietary traditions. But America nonetheless is this hero's fatality, and his adventure consists of his becoming the American. "Who knows," this narrator famously says to white America, "but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you." Which is what our new immigrant will be doing, too. * Linda Chavez "Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history." Thus begins The Uprooted by Oscar Handlin. The Pulitzer Prize-winning book, first published in 1951, turns the romantic story of our immigrant nation on its head, telling the turn-of-the-century immigrant story as it was actually lived, full of alienation and despair. The catastrophic journey to America severed the immigrants' ties to a familiar world and dropped them in a place they could never fully understand, and which never fully understood them. But their pain was our gain. Their journey made us a far less parochial society and helped create the American Dream. How The Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis is another classic of the immigrant experience in America. First published more than one hundred years ago in 1891, the book remains a powerful indictment of the slum conditions in which most immigrants lived at the turn of the century. Riis wrote the book while he was a New York police reporter. Although the book is often credited with sparking the first "urban renewal" project that removed the worst tenements, Riis's main interest was in transforming the immigrants themselves into Americans. He was an early champion of teaching immigrants English, which he believed was the key to Americanization. Next Year in Cuba by Gustavo Perez Firmat (1995) chronicles the bittersweet Cuban-American experience. Perez, like most of his compatriots, came to America as a refugee, not an immigrant. But because he was a child when he arrived, he could never fully identify either with his parents' generation, who dreamed of returning to Cuba, nor later, with his own American-born children, who can imagine no life outside the United States. Perez is a man caught between two worlds, at home in neither. No matter how hard he tries to become an American - majoring in English in college and becoming an English professor in North Carolina, marrying an American woman, playing Bob Seger records and eating frozen yogurt - he still feels guilty when he plans to cast his first vote in a U.S. election. Next Year in Cuba doesn't fit our sentimental wish to recast the immigrant's story as one of unalloyed joy and quick assimilation, but it does provide insight into what Perez calls the one-and-a-half generation: "Wedged between the first and second generations, the one-and-a-halfer shares the nostalgia of his parents and the forgetfulness of his children." * William B. Allen The first American to address the question of American character, in a context in which the separate existence of the United States was assumed, laid it out as a project of formation in accord with standards of liberty. That was George Washington, and no one can do better than to begin a study of America with a study of his extremely important writings. They are available in many forms, but perhaps that which is both most accessible and best calculated to offer a comprehensive picture is my own volume, George Washington: A Collection (Liberty Press). In it one meets only the first real American but the first America. In the century after Washington many works labored at constructing the ideal picture of American character, many very worthwhile. None, however, contributes so meaningfully and constructively as Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which shows character in the crucible of straggle and moral uncertainty. Harriet Beecher Stowe stole a conceit from Alexis de Tocqueville (namely the contrasts on opposite banks of the Ohio River) and turned it into the quo warranto of the nation, to be redeemed in its great War of American Union. Let no one deny: The story of America is the story of the ouster of slavery. America became what she was prior to that time, but she was unable to trust what she was until that matter was resolved. And no one else but Stowe made equally clear and compelling how America needed to resolve that question. Finally, in our time, many elegiads, many screeds, and many anathemas contend for the prize of authoritative interpreter of America. But Americans require not so much secondhand interpretations as genuine challenges to take the question in hand themselves. Of contemporary works, none has worked that charm so well for me as Peter Brimelow's Alien Nation (1994), which evoked from me the scream, "I was just joking (in my modern skepticism); please give us our old (American) man back!" For any who dream that a mere philosophical predisposition ("open immigration") suffices to respond to the fundamental question - Is the American merely the human localized? - needs to suffer a little in thinking through how much America is worth to him. That is character building! * Paul A. Rahe The United States of America is not a nation in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Nationhood traditionally implied a common natality - that the nation's citizens were somehow of common birth. But, as Americans, we cannot even pretend a common descent: We hail from every corner of the globe; we exhibit every human feature; we come in every shade; and the naturalized are no less fully our fellow citizens than those born Within the fold. If the citizens of this country sometimes speak of the nation's Founding Fathers, they do so by analogy: They do not trace their genetic or biological lineage to Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, John Jay, James Madison, and the like. If our nation's progenitors fathered a people, they did so by fathering an idea. This is not a nation of blood and soil; it is a nation of principle. As a people, we stand or fall by our adherence to the understanding of justice enshrined within the Declaration of Independence and reiterated in Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. We are less an imagined community of blood than a genuine, if contentious, community of faith. That fact poses a problem for immigrants. They have to cross a great cultural divide separating the world that understands nationality in terms of birth and the world that understands it in terms of adherence to common first principles. To help them make that crossing and to instruct them in our peculiar ways, I would suggest the following three books: my own Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (1992); Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, tr. George Lawrence (1969); and Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels (1975). My own great tome may not be the best recent work on the American Founding, but it is, weighing in at 1,200 pages, the most comprehensive account. It sets the Revolution, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and the quarrels that they inspire in the context of the history of self-government in the West, emphasizing what we owe to the ancient Greeks and Romans, what in our polity is peculiar to modernity, and what was achieved for the first time on these shores. Tocqueville's wondrous book was written by a foreign visitor to the United States for the edification and instruction of his own countrymen, and it has served for many generations to explain America to the Americans as well. It surveys virtually every aspect of American life - our Constitution, our laws, our customs, and our beliefs. It situates the myriad details within an understanding of the whole, and it analyzes dangers inherent within our regime that are far more ominous today than they were in the Jacksonian period. Where Tocqueville's description no longer fits, it is generally because we have undergone a decline explicable in terms of his analysis. Finally, Michael Shaara's stirring novel, in relating the story of the battle of Gettysburg, brings home to its readers just what was at stake in our greatest. and most important war. No one can understand America without paying attention to the racial tensions that bedevil us, and no one can understand these without reflecting on the legacy. of slavery. Moreover, it is only with regard to our failure as a people to come to grips with the dilemmas imposed by the attempt to found and sustain a multiracial society that one can understand federalism's demise and the difficulties that we now face in our quest to restore a semblance of local self-government. There are finer American novels than The Killer Angels - but I know of none better suited to the purposes of teaching our immigrant what makes us many and what makes us one. * Virginia I. Postrel The paradox of America is that we have built a history and tradition, a national culture, on the defiance of history and tradition, From William Penn, who would not take off his hat, to Rosa Parks, who would not give up her seat, we teach our children the stories of stiff-necked heroes. We make them read Romeo and Juliet, lest they overvalue ancient feuds. Hollywood's greatest cliche is the cop who breaks rules in the interest of justice. Rhett Butler, not Ashley Wilkes, is the hero of Gone With the Wind. Nobody thinks Huck Finn should return Jim to slavery or stick around to be civilized. We' re not a by-the-book country. This culture has political consequences; you can read about them in the first few paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence. But for the immigrant, the personal will be more important than the political. Huck had no parents, no one who tied him to history and tradition, no one to question or grieve when he went his own way. Huck Finn is the great American novel, but it's not on my list (in part because I know it is on others). Start, instead, with a less-great novel, but a more relevant one: Chaim Potok's The Chosen (1967), a tale of clashing cultures and a son's choice of truth over tradition. (That the truth in question is Freudian psychology dates, but does not undermine, the story.) The milieu is Jewish the exotic world of the Hasidim and the more familiar one of the modern Orthodox - but the story is more generally American, limited to no particular religion or ethnic group. In her novels of Chinese mothers and American daughters who love but do not understand each other, Amy Tan plays off the immigrant experience, while capturing universals. Every parent has a history, and every child a new life, that the other cannot truly grasp. America, with its defiance of history and tradition - its emphasis on individual life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness - makes the chasm between generations deeper and wider. The Kitchen God's Wife (1991) suggests what one gets for that price: a place of hope and second chances, in which even daughters are precious. America beams itself to the world from Los Angeles and Atlanta, my actual and ancestral homes - complicated, rambunctious, racially mixed cities grown by sheer will and ambition. They, and the vast regions of which they're the capitals, are more characteristically American than the whitewashed, orderly New England popular with historically inclined pundits. The Puritans came from England; Pentecostalism was born in the U.S.A. The South and the West are the wellsprings of American culture. So I exercise the editor's prerogative to cheat, suggesting two wise observers of America from California and the New South: Richard Rodriguez, in Days of Obligation (1992), and John Shelton Reed, in My Tears Spoiled My Aim (1993). "Some migrants to the South," explains Reed, "make the South more Southern." By defying their own history and tradition, leaving their homelands behind, immigrants reaffirm America, make it more American. Yet, Rodriguez warns, "Our parents came to America for the choices America offers. What the child of immigrant parents knows is that here is inevitability." Come to America, and you will have American children. They, too, will defy history and tradition - will defy your expectations - without thinking twice. It's the American way. * Jonathan Rauch If I try to be honest rather than cute, all of my books for immigrants - Tocqueville, Emerson, Huck Finn, Mencken or King or JFK's speeches - are too obvious to be interesting, and I have nothing new to say about them except that they are magnificent and essential. So the editor has given me an indulgence to say this: I would very much like to advise an immigrant to watch Star Trek. Not - of course! - the emasculated Next Generation, but the simpler, less self-aware, much finer original. I can think of nothing that says more, more succinctly, about who the Americans believe themselves to be, or wish they were. The gleaming ship is the Enterprise, though not (quite) the Free Enterprise. Its captain is authoritative but not authoritarian, grand but never above dirty work; he knows the rules as well as any lawyer, but he knows, too, how to run rings around Federation bureaucrats when a job needs to be done. On the Enterprise (what else would it be called?), there is no problem which ingenuity cannot crack. When other ships would be blown to dust as shields fail and engines strain, Captain Kirk and his crew bring off just a bit of the impossible by thinking fast and showing pluck. They have that most American of traits: the serene confidence that in the last extremity their luck will hold. God smiles on drunkards, America, and the Starship Enterprise. The Enterprise is lucky because it is morally worthy, and morally worthy because it is innocent. Inside, the ship is the model of multiculturalism as multiculturalism was supposed to have been. People of every nationality and of several planets, united by the Federation's creed, form a community naturally, painlessly, with no hint that quotas might be required to bring enough Asians or Vulcans aboard. Outside, distant star systems are populated by diverse peoples most of whom, if you just scratch the surface, are American or wish they were. The starship and its Federation have a foreign policy: tough but tender, engaged but not imperialist. Explore but do not conquer, says the Prime Directive; engage but do not interfere. Captain Kirk is as Captain Columbus ought to have been. Yet noninterference does not for a moment mean nonintervention; staying out does not mean staying away. Contradiction? What contradiction? Where aliens can be enlightened in the ways of equality and justice, so they should be: preferably by example, rather than by force. True, the Enterprise is strong, bedecked with phasers and photon torpedoes. But its real strength is not its weaponry but its mercy. No matter how vicious the provocation, the captain chooses mercy for his enemy; faced with a seemingly murderous alien, he applies understanding and modern medical care. Thus does the Federation earn its moral hegemony. Although the Enterprise holds the steel of science (Mr. Spock), it beats other corners, in the end, because its hard logic is subservient to its good heart. And so the universe makes way before the Enterprise' as the world should have made way before Christ. What is America, after all, if not the light unto nations? I am not sarcastic, not for a moment. The universe of the Starship Enterprise is silly but also exalted. Ronald Reagan thought that if the Soviet rulers could only see America up close, they would come around to its superior virtue. That is naive, yes; but also rather grand, and utterly American. The barrel-chested culture of Victorian Britain, brilliant though it was, could never have produced a Star Trek; neither could the scintillating, cynical culture of ancient Greece, or the bluntly brutal culture of imperial Rome, or any other imperial culture before America's. I predict Star Trek will be watched 50 and 100 years from now. More than most books I can think of, it embodies the American aspiration: or, if you prefer, the American myth. It captures us, perhaps, embarrassingly well. Contributing Editor Brink Lindsey practices trade law in Washington, D.C. Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard. Gary Alan Fine ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is a professor of sociology at the University of Georgia and author of Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work (University of California Press, 1995). Joseph Epstein is editor of The American Scholar. Charles Paul Freund is a Washington. D.C., writer. Contributing Editor Steven Hayward ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is research and editorial director for the Pacific Research Institute, a San Francisco-based think tank. Contributing Editor John Hood ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is on leave from the John Locke Foundation, a state policy think tank in North Carolina, and is a Bradley Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Marcus Klein is a professor of English at he State University of New York at Buffalo and author of, most recently, Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eyes: American Matters 1870-1900 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). Linda Chavez ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is president of the Center for Equal Opportunity. William B. Allen is dean of James Madison College at Michigan State University. Paul Rahe ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is Jay P. Walker Professor of American History at the University of Tulsa. Virginia I. Postrel ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is editor of REASON. 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