This week “Obamacare” (the Affordable Care Act, or ACA) enrollment begins.  Briefly, how did we get here?

The core of “Obamacare,” the requirement that individuals purchase health insurance, traces back to Stuart Butler at the conservative Heritage Foundation in the late 1980s.  This can be seen in a 1989  Heritage monograph (p. 51).  Ezra Klein points to University of Pennsylvania economics professor and conservative Mark Pauly as the father of the individual mandate based on Pauly’s co-authored 1991 Health Affairs paper (p. 8, item 3) supporting the idea.

Two years after Pauly’s paper, and using the same argument Pauly made about mandatory auto insurance, conservative Republican Newt Gingrich appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press enthusiastically supporting the mandate.  (Gingrich re-endorsed the mandate on the same program on May 15, 2011, then recanted the next day after a firestorm of criticism and ridicule.)

A Republican governor, Mitt Romney, signed the mandate into law in Massachusetts in April of 2006.  Barack Obama, as a presidential primary candidate in 2008, firmly opposed the mandate but as president signed it into U.S. law on March 23, 2010.

In danger of being overturned, in June of 2012 conservative Republican Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, came to the mandate’s rescue, providing the critical fifth vote to the court’s progressive judges in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius to cement the mandate in place as supposedly constitutional statute.

Why review this torturous history?  Because if you think a requirement to purchase health insurance is the worst health-care related mandate that could be inflicted on you and your children in your lifetimes, you are in for a rude awakening.  And what is so amazing (or maybe not) is that some of the same players  seem to be at it again.

Mark Pauly is back, this time in the form of his Health Affairs co-author John Goodman, president and CEO of the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) and the current leading light among conservatives on health-care reform.

Goodman’s latest book, Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, was published in June of last year to uniform fanfare across the right political spectrum.

It was no surprise to see glowing reviews in The Washington Times, The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard, and a favorable plug at the Heritage Foundation.  Libertarian reviews were just about as glowing.  Even the publisher is libertarian.  Google around and you’ll be amazed.

Let’s take a look at some of the “free-market” proposals in Priceless:

1. Goodman, the “father of health savings accounts (HSAs)” is disappointed with them.  Now he has a new idea: Roth HSAs (RHSAs).  The Mark Pauly-inspired plan would combine the RHSAs (holding after-tax dollars and allowing tax-free withdrawals) with fixed-sum tax credits (p. 152).

[Never mind the implausibility of RHSAs, given the limitations that Goodman concedes exist on current HSAs, and never mind that there would be no role for HSAs in a real free market anyway.]

2. Resurrecting fee schedules (p. 181).

[In other words, returning prices to medicine to fix them.  Never mind that “fees” replaced prices in the U.S. as one of a number of anti-competitive actions by organized medicine to significantly boost revenues and physician incomes.]

3. Health insurance retirement accounts (HIRAs) funded by a new 4-percent payroll tax split between workers (2 percent) and employers (2 percent).  With the Chilean social security system as a model, the revenue would be invested by “private security agencies” [read: Wall Street] (p. 242).

[The crony capitalist tax-supported Chilean social security mirage will not seem to die.  It was a Cato Institute favorite in the 1990s.  Returns have been good for some participants, just as they were in the late 1990s U.S. stock bubble.  (One trader in the fever of the 1990s bubble told me just months before the crash, that 77% NASDAQ returns would never end.)  It’s a mystery what so many analysts think they see in still-developing Chile.  Its 2012 population was about 17 million compared to the U.S.’s 300 million.  Recent real GDP has been about $341 billion vs. the U.S.’s $15 trillion.  A 4% payroll tax to be sent to Wall Street sounds as if the lessons of 2008 have been very quickly forgotten.  Yes, what could possibly go wrong with the crony capitalist likes of Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers investing billions of HIRA money?  Hint: Lehman is gone.  Research the others.]

HIRA holders would “own” their accounts, but if they die before becoming Medicare-eligible, their HIRA gets redistributed to other HIRA holders.  HIRAs with high account balances would be taxed to pay risk-adjusted premiums for HIRA holders with low account balances (pp. 242-243).

At retirement, HIRA holders would have to choose one of three options: surrender their HIRA to the government in return for Medicare, exchange their HIRA for an annuity, or keep their HIRA but be subject to an annual withdrawal limit set by the government (p. 243).

4. Goodman has three options for Medicaid (p. 244).  The first one is to abolish it and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP, a.k.a., children’s Medicaid) and place their members into private plans with tax credits/government vouchers of $2,000 per person.

[This seems to be Goodman channeling Stuart Butler.  Butler proposed health-insurance vouchers in the 1989 Heritage monograph linked above (p. 51).]

What is Goodman’s response to critics who object that $2,000 is arbitrary or too low?  Gotcha.  Goodman would not abolish Medicaid after all!  He would keep it around as a “stopgap” (p. 253).

The second alternative for Medicaid is a “public option” that would open the program up to all households regardless of income.  The $2,000-per-person tax credits/government vouchers would apply (pp. 254-255).

Goodman, incredibly, is a fan of food stamps, calling them “a highly successful poverty program that now reaches 60 million people” (p. 256).  Hence his third and last solution to replace Medicaid with “health stamps,” which would operate like food stamps in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) but be used for primary-care purchases (pp. 255-256).

[Unlike some food, primary health care is not cheap, especially as it adds up.  Imagine the expense of the current food stamp explosion, but in a new health-stamp program.  You can also imagine the new windows and levels of fraud opening up in such a program.]

John Goodman seems like a nice and well-intentioned guy, who even took the trouble to come down to PaulFest to share his ideas.  The problem with good intentions, though, is that they can open up a freeway to Hades.

THE END.

I was glad to hear that your very recent knee-replacement surgery went well.  Now you have my letter to read during your recovery.  It’s only posted on Lew Rockwell, which might force you to finally acknowledge its existence.  I won’t send any, but expect your inbox to be filled with more than a few forwards.  While I wouldn’t describe myself as a fan, I usually find it hard to resist tuning in to NBC Nightly News, which you anchor, to digest what the blue-state faction of the War Party is up to these days. While it seems that the program is a little less bellicose since Comcast bought out GE’s stake in NBCUniversal, I’m betting that’s just my imagination.  War makes for great ratings.  This embassy-closing stuff is boring.  What is Bam-O thinking on that one?  And The Tonight Show?  So meh, even if it helps the network.

Luckily we only have Bam just a little longer.  “We came, we saw, he died.”  Remember who uttered that sexy line?  I saw it just about the time she touched back down in D.C. on her broom.  That’s who’s on deck for 2016, and I’m sure a lady after your own heart!  It might take a village to raise a child, but as we also learned, that village needs a good, hard bombing now and then too–followed up with some care packages (as good, progressive, Democratic compassion demands).  A three-year-old girl who has her arms blown off and the rest of her family crushed to death under rubble will gladly forget it all for a Pez dispenser.  (And UNICEF pitches 50 cents per day!  What rubes!)

A couple more points on St. Hillary, Brian.  I can’t wait to see the upcoming NBC movie on her, although trust me, Diane Lane is so not the one.  Get them to cast Courtney Love, Brian.  Priceless!  If you want to brush up on Courtney, catch The People vs. Larry Flynt.  It’s a pretty wholesome movie, well, by the standards of Fox Television these days.  And be sure to get the director to cast Larry Flynt in there too–the real one.  He could play multiple parts: Bill, George Stupidopoulos, Ken Starr, Monica, Huma Abedin, Anthony the Weiner.

(Though I would watch out on the scenes involving the Weiner character.  Mr. Flynt may go overboard on that, and you could get a XXX rating, but even that’s no biggie.  Money in these days of quantitative easing is meant to be flushed.  Jeff Bezos just toileted about $200 million on WaPo.)

Lastly, on your gal: this business of her very fitful brain flatulence in coming right out and admitting that the U.S. government created Al-Qaeda (here and here).  She would do well to zip it on that, pronto.  It’s just not very presidential.  In fact, kind of Ron Paul-ish, which is a huge no-no.

A few more housekeeping points on some of your on-air colleagues and reporters, and then the bone I have to pick with you.

First, extend my condolences to Mrs. Alan Greenspan (a.k.a., Andrea Mitchell).  I know she must be seething that the filthy traitor she was reporting on, Edward Snowden, wasn’t returned to the U.S. by the Russians and sent on to Guantanamo to ride The Rack.  I can feel her disappointment.  Say, “Hi,” to her hubby Al too, and thank him for that thrilling rollercoaster ride in housing prices right before he gave up the throne to Helicopter Ben.  It’s worth some future articles.

And then there’s my favorite, your chief medical correspondent, Nancy Snyderman, M.D.  (Did you know Brian, that M.D. stands for “monopoly on drugs?”  Well, certain patented ones, anyway.)  Back when Rick “Merck” Perry, the Governor of Texas, issued an executive order requiring sixth-grade Texas schoolgirls to get the Gardasil vaccine, I was really worried for Brave Nancy.  Where would she come down on this?  We had a moron Republican male governor of Texas ordering women what to do with their bodies, even worse, forcing them to be injected with a vaccine that was by some reports not only of unproven efficacy, but potentially dangerous in term of some of its side effects.  Plus it was pointless for girls not yet sexually active. When you brought Nancy on to give her verdict, I waited with bated breath.  It was music to my ears to hear Nancy opine that, yes, eleven- and twelve-year-old girls needed to be dragged by their hair kicking and screaming to practices and clinics, gotten into headlocks, and forcibly injected with Gardasil.  Their very lives were at stake!  What kind of toothless, uneducated, hayseed hicks could disagree with it?  You go, girl!  Even better was her report last Tuesday on Shrub getting a stent.  Stents happen when you eat too much fat and aren’t on statins.  Home run!

Now finally here’s the bone, Bri.  Last week Lew Rockwell republished a 101-year-old test for Kentucky eighth graders.  The re-run made it around the Web.  Jezebel discussed it and linked Lew twice.  The Daily Mail apparently picked it up on Jezebel but still gave the hat tip to Lew.  It drew my interest when you highlighted it on your last segment on August 2, but curiously and inexplicably, only gave credit to Jezebel.  Here you are:

I sense a bit of a snub, Brian.  Nothing against Jezebel, but I seriously doubt that it propagates any ideas that you would find the least bit objectionable.  However, it’s pretty clear that there are all sorts of ideas on Lew’s site that are better kept away from your viewers.  Sure, the test and others like it have been around in previous iterations, and you/your staff could have covered all bases by leaving it at that.  What gives?  Just curious.

You see, your ilk (if not you individually and explicitly, although I’m pretty sure of where you stand) in the mainstream media scoffed that Matt Drudge and a host of lesser uppity rabble (Web writers, bloggers) were invading the majestic Fourth Estate like a bunch of uncouth Huns.  The news was best left to the properly educated and trained pros, such as you.  And yet recent events don’t seem to reinforce this very well.  And this is apart from that fiasco of the re-edited Zimmerman 911 call that your network will undoubtedly be settling out of court.

Do try better, Brian.  The Democratic faction of the War Party needs you at your best.  Bombs away!

Free-market medicine did not begin in the United States in 1776 with the Revolution. From 1830 to about 1850, licensing laws and regulations imposed during the colonial period and early America were generally repealed or ignored. This was brought about by the increasing acceptance of eclecticism (1813) and homeopathy (1825), against the mainstream medicine (allopathy) of the day that included bloodletting and high-dose injections of metal and metalloid compounds containing mercury or antimony.[2]

Eclectics emphasized plant remedies, bed rest, and steam baths, while homeopaths emphasized a different set of medicines in small doses (letting the body heal itself as much as possible), improved diet and hygiene, and stress reduction. The worst results these treatments produced were allergic reactions to no improvement. Hence it’s not surprising they began to be preferred over the ghastly bleeding and metal injections of allopathy, which killed large numbers of patients.

By 1860, there were more than 55,000 physicians practicing in the United States, one of the highest per capita numbers of doctors in the world (about 175 per 100,000).[3] By 1870, approximately 62,000 physicians were in practice in the United States,[4] roughly about 5,300 of which were homeopathic and about 2,700 eclectic.[5] Schooling was plentiful and inexpensive, and entry to the most acclaimed schools was not exceedingly difficult. Most schools were privately owned. Licenses to practice were not required or enforced, and anyone could establish a practice.[6]

Like the mythical Hollywood portrayal of the American "Wild West" as a place in which the denizens of every town were killing each other in gunfights every minute of the day, the free-market period in American medicine has also been distorted as one in which towns were mobbed by traveling quacks prescribing dangerous treatments that killed the townspeople in droves. Organized mainstream medicine concocted this myth, and as previously noted, it was they and not the homeopaths and eclectics who were killing large numbers of people via bloodletting and metal poisoning.[7] This is why it took time and effort for any caregiver to win the widespread trust of a typical community in 19th-century America. The public en masse blindly lapping up snake oil dispensed from the dirty travel trunks of carnival-tent quacks is wild legend.

Even though they were only about 13% of physicians in practice,[8] eclectics and homeopaths did damage to the incomes of the allopaths. The allopaths began organizing at the state level to use the coercive power of government to not only severely restrict (if not outright ban) eclectics and homeopaths, and the schools that trained them, but also restrict the number of allopaths in practice to dramatically increase their incomes and prestige.[9]

The American Medical Association (AMA) had already been formed in 1847 by Nathan Smith Davis. Davis had been working at the Medical Society of New York with issues of licensing and education. While the pretense was always more rigorous standards toward the supposed end of effective treatments, exclusion was the reality. Hence it was no surprise that in 1870, Davis worked successfully to prohibit female and black physicians from becoming members of the AMA.[10]

The AMA formed its Council on Medical Education in 1904 as a tool to artificially restrict education.[11] However, the AMA’s conflict of interest was too obvious. This is where Abraham Flexner and the Carnegie Foundation entered the picture. Flexner’s older brother Simon was the director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and he recommended his brother Abraham for the Carnegie job. Abraham’s acceptance of the role was the perfect special-interest symbiosis. Carnegie’s desire was to advance secularism through higher education, thus it saw the AMA’s agenda as favorable toward that end. Rockefeller’s benefactors were allied with allopathic drug companies and hated for-profit schools that couldn’t be controlled by the big-business, state-influenced foundations. Last of all, the AMA got an objective-appearing front in Carnegie.[12]

Not only was Abraham Flexner not even an allopathic physician; he was not a widely known authority on education,[13] never mind medical education, as he had never even seen the inside of a medical school before joining Carnegie. His report was already effectively written, since it was essentially the AMA’s unpublished 1906 report on US medical schools. Furthermore, Flexner was accompanied on his inspection by the AMA’s N.P. Colwell to insure the inspection would arrive at the preordained conclusions. Flexner then spent time at the AMA’s Chicago headquarters preparing what portion of the final product was his actual work.[14]

Regardless of these scandalous circumstances, state medical boards and legislatures used the report as a basis for closing medical schools. Around the time of Flexner, there was a high of a 166 medical schools; by the 1940s there were just 77 — a 54 percent reduction.[15] Most small rural schools were closed, and only two African-American schools were allowed to remain open.[16] By 1963, despite advances in technology and a huge growth in demand, one effect of the report was to keep the number of doctors per 100,000 people in the United States — 146 — at the same level it was at in 1910.[17] Of the approximately 375,000 physicians in practice in 1977, only about 6,300 or 1.7% were African-American.[18]

While physician incomes and prestige dramatically increased, so did the care-giving workload. Wolinsky and Brune (1994) report that doctors were firmly in the lower middle class at the time of the AMA’s founding and made about $600 per year. This rose to about $1,000 around 1900. After Flexner, incomes began to skyrocket such that a 1928 AMA study found average annual incomes reached a whopping (for the time) $6,354.[19] Even during the Great Depression, physicians earned four times what average workers did.[20] A 2009 survey put family-practice doctors (on the low end of the physician income range) at a median of $197,655 and spine surgeons (at the high end) at a median of $641,728.[21] These figures are mind boggling to ordinary Americans, even in good economic times. In addition, the cyclical unemployment that throws workers out of jobs in almost all other industries with the arrival of recessions or depressions became nonexistent among physicians after Flexner.

However, not even Flexner could repeal the laws of economics: the physician workload in certain areas became backbreaking to impossible, such that some physicians no longer accept new patients. Some primary-care physicians today are booked solid for at least two months, and unless you have some sort of connection to get in before that or pay for concierge care, your alternative for urgent care is the same as everyone else’s on a weekend: the emergency room where you’ll wait for hours, or a walk-in where you’ll see one or two MD names posted on the building, but wait for hours for a nurse practitioner.

Hospitals

Of course it wouldn’t make sense to restrict physician services without restricting hospitals. For-profits were the first to go, and where they were not outright prohibited, they faced a number of regulatory burdens that nonprofits escaped — such as income and property taxes. Nonprofits received generous government subsidies, tax-deductible contributions, and local planning agencies working in their favor to keep for-profit competitors from expanding. This state-sponsored discrimination against for-profit hospitals took its toll: at the time of Flexner, almost 60 percent of all US hospitals were for-profit institutions. By 1968, only 11 percent were for-profit institutions with about an 8-percent share of hospital admissions.[22]

Eliminating most for-profit medical schools and hospitals made sense for the AMA and the rest of organized mainstream medicine, since they were controlled by owners or shareholders who had the incentive to control costs in order to maximize profits. Nonprofits were free to pursue the political goals that organized mainstream medicine favored, especially the goal of a much more lengthy and costly education, which served as another barrier of entry to the profession. (Especially amusing was a 2004 article by two Dartmouth physicians arguing for maintaining restricted entry because of high costs.[23])

The Rise of Health "Insurance"

In the early 1900s, prepaid health plans were created for the timber and mining workers of Oregon and Washington to help offset the inherent risks of those industries. Within a free-market, for-profit insurance system, claims were closely monitored by adjusters. Fees, procedures, and exceptionally long hospital stays were monitored and subject to challenge. A physicians’ group in Oregon that resented this type of scrutiny created a plan where procedures were reimbursed and fees paid with few questions asked. Plans with similar structures began dominating the market in other locations because of government-provided advantages.

By 1939 these loose-cost containment plans began to be marketed under the Blue Shield name. That same year, Blue Cross was endorsed by the American Hospital Association. Already in existence for ten years, Blue Cross had begun as a hospital insurance plan for Dallas school teachers that allowed them to pay for up to three weeks of hospital care with low monthly payments.

After this, organized mainstream medicine waged an intense war on non-Blue plans. Goodman (1980) contends that some physicians lost hospital privileges and even their licenses for accepting non-Blue plans.[24] The Blues also gained government-supplied advantages not available to non-Blue plans. In many states, they paid no or low premium taxes and sometimes no real-estate taxes. They also weren’t required to maintain minimum benefit/premium ratios and could have no or low required reserves. With government advantages, the Blues steadily came to dominate the industry. By 1950, Blue Cross held 49 percent of the hospital insurance market, while Blue Shield held 52 percent of the market for standard medical insurance.[25] They merged in 1982 and today cover one of every three Americans.[26]

Blues-created "insurance" was anything but true insurance.

• Hospitals were paid on a cost-plus basis. Insurers paid not a sum of prices charged to patients for services but artificial "costs" that bore no necessary relationship to the prices of services performed.

• Insurance of routine procedures. This converted insurance to prepaid consumption that encouraged overuse of services.

• Insurance premiums based on "community rating." The word "community" meant that every person in a specific geographic area regardless of age, habits, occupation, race, or sex was charged the same premium. For example, the average 60-year-old incurs four times the medical expense of the average 25-year-old, but under community rating both pay the same premium (i.e., young people are overcharged and the elderly undercharged).

• A "pay-as-you-go" system. Unlike genuine catastrophic hospital insurance that placed premiums in growing reserves to pay claims, the new Blues’ "insurance" collected premiums that only covered expected costs over the following year. If a large group of policyholders became ill over several years, the premiums of all policyholders had to be raised to cover the increase in costs.

These traits spell cost-explosion disaster, so naturally they were incorporated into the federal government’s Medicare and Medicaid programs when they were created in the mid-1960s to address the problem of healthcare being unaffordable for the poor and elderly — a problem the state and federal governments created!

This only leaves the mystery of how health insurance became attached to employment. The answer is found two decades before Medicare and Medicaid. Wage and price controls the federal government enacted during World War II prevented large employers from competing for labor based on wage rates, so they competed based on the quality of benefits. The most effective benefit for luring labor to large employers was generous health-insurance policies.

The decision by the federal government to allow large-employer benefits to be obtained tax-free while effectively taxing plans purchased by small businesses and the self-employed created a system where medical insurance became not only perversely tied to the size of a worker’s employer but to employment itself. The price of health insurance for many self-employed workers and small businesses became unaffordable.

Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs)

Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) were prepaid practices that began mainly on the US West Coast in the early 1900s. Western Clinic in Tacoma (1910) and Ross-Loos in Los Angeles (1929) were among the earliest. (Ross-Loos eventually became part of Insurance Company of North America [INA], which merged into CIGNA in 1982.) Kaiser Permanente began with a clientele of shipyard workers during World War II. After the war, it had hospitals and physicians, but no more worker clientele, so it started marketing to the wider public and by the 1970s had more than 3 million enrollees in five states.[27]

Still, HMOs had limited appeal. By 1970, Kaiser was the only major HMO in the United States, with most of its enrollees forced to join through their labor unions.[28]

Much more about HMOs will be covered in a forthcoming review in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. The purpose here is to emphasize that, despite some assertions to the contrary, HMOs are anything but free-market firms. The Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 made federal grants and loans available to HMOs, removed certain state restrictions if HMOs became federally certified, and required employers with 25 or more employees who offered standard health-insurance benefits to offer federally approved HMO plans.

"Obamacare," or More Accurately, ConservativeRepublicanCare

When you actually look at the bill itself, it incorporates all sorts of Republican ideas … a lot of the ideas in terms of the exchange, just being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market, originated from the Heritage Foundation. (Barack Obama, NBC’s Today Show, March 30, 2010)

The latest chapter in US healthcare is one of the most surreal. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 was signed into law by Barack Obama on March 23, 2010. Among many provisions, the act includes expanded Medicaid eligibility, prohibiting denials of coverage for preexisting conditions, and a requirement to purchase federally approved health insurance or pay a fine.

While the content of the Act is summarized in myriad places, much more interesting is its conservative Republican origins. The Heritage Foundation’s Stuart Butler, the intellectual behind urban enterprise zones, in Senate testimony in 2003 proposed a plan for universal healthcare coverage.[29] Here’s one surprising portion of the testimony that sounds like it was uttered by a European socialist:

In a civilized and rich country like the United States, it is reasonable for society to accept an obligation to ensure that all residents have affordable access to at least basic health care — much as we accept the same obligation to assure a reasonable level of housing, education and nutrition.

Keep in mind that Butler is the conservative Heritage’s current vice president of domestic and economic policy. No wonder Butler seems to have found a new admirer in New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Butler again:

The obligations on individuals does not have to be a "hard" mandate, in the sense that failure to obtain coverage would be illegal. It could be a "soft" mandate, meaning that failure to obtain coverage could result in the loss of tax benefits and other government entitlements. In addition, if federal tax benefits or other assistance accompanied the requirement, states and localities could receive the value of the assistance forgone by the person failing to obtain coverage, in order to compensate providers who deliver services to the uninsured family.

Now "Obamacare" is certainly more than just a mandate, but the mandate is certainly what has conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, both of whom have connections to, if not sponsorship by, the Heritage Foundation, screaming bloody murder the most. There’s no doubt that these ideas influenced Mitt Romney’s healthcare plan in Massachusetts.

Romney subjected himself to a recent interview by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly that can only be described as a disaster.[30] O’Reilly dwelled on the fact that outside tax dollars funded half of the plan, and Romney agreed, adding that the funding was approved by two conservative Republican HHS secretaries, Tommy Thompson and Mike Leavitt. In response to a question, Romney admitted that he didn’t know that emergency-room costs in Massachusetts had increased 17% over the last two years. He repeatedly asserted that the plan solved a problem, but he couldn’t specify what it was since Massachusetts had the highest per capita costs both before the plan and after.

As far as other conservative Republicans go, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee has repeatedly stated that he sees "some good things" in Obamacare, especially the expanded use of Medicaid.

Voters naïve enough to think they will get a complete repeal from the Republican Party appear to be in for a major disappointment. "Obamacare," with its continuance of socialized costs for private gains in American medicine, was the treatment that the conservative Republican doctor had in mind for some time. The problem is that the Democrats were the first to implement it.

Notes

[1] Flexner, Abraham. "Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching." Bulletin IV. Carnegie, 1910.

[2] Hamowy, Ronald. "The Early Development of Medical Licensing Laws in the United States, 1875—1900." Journal of Libertarian Studies 3, no. 1.

[3] Census data. See also Hamowy.

[4] Census data. See also Hamowy.

[5] Chaillé, Stanford E. "The Medical Colleges, the Medical Profession, and the Public." New Orleans Medical and Surgical Reporter, May 1874, pp. 818—19. See Hamowy, p. 105, note 4.

[6] Hamowy, p. 73.

[7] While the founder of eclecticism, Samuel Thomson, was a farmer, homeopathy’s founder Samuel Hahnemann was an actual physician, some of whose insights ended up being incorporated into mainstream medicine.

[8] Chaillé.

[9] The other view, by sociologist Paul Starr in The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982, Basic Books, 1982) is that eclectics and homeopaths committed career suicide by joining with allopaths in the campaign to re-secure licensing. Starr does not see Flexner as decisive in killing medical schools. Compare to Reuben Kessel, "Price Discrimination in Medicine.," Journal of Law and Economics 1 (Oct. 1958), pp. 20—53: "If impact on public policy is the criterion of importance, the Flexner report must be regarded as one of most important reports ever written."

[10] Link, Eugene Perry. The Social Ideas of American Physicians (1776—1976): Studies of the Humanitarian Tradition in American Medicine. Associated University Presses, 1992. See chapter 4.

[11] A recent article notes a supposed recent increase in schools and students undermined by an undersupply of Medicare-funded resident positions.

[12] Rockwell, Llewellyn H., Jr. "Medical Control, Medical Corruption." Chronicles. June, 1994.

[13] His first book, The American College: A Criticism, was published in October 1908, yet he joined Carnegie that same year.

[14] Goodman, John C. and Gerald L. Musgrave. Patient Power. Washington: Cato, 1992. See pp. 137—61.

[15] See both Rockwell and Goodman and Musgrave (especially chart on p. 145).

[16] Beck, Andrew H. "The Flexner Report and the Standardization of American Medical Education." JAMA, May 5, 2004. Html

[17] Goodman and Musgrave, p. 145.

[18] Goodman and Musgrave, p. 147.

[19] Very roughly, almost $80,000 2009 dollars.

[20] Wolinsky, Howard and Tom Brune. The Serpent on the Staff: The Unhealthy Politics of the American Medical Association. Tarcher Putnam, 1994. See "Rags to Riches" in chapter 3.

[21] AMGA Medical Group, 2009. Html.

[22] Goodmand and Musgrave, p. 156.

[23] Weeks, William and Amy Wallace. "Weakness in Numbers," Barron’s, June 14, 2004.

[24] Goodman, John C. The Regulation of Medical Care: Is the Price Too High? Washington: Cato, 1980. See also Patient Power, p. 159.

[25] Goodman and Musgrave, p. 160.

[26] See this BCBS page.

[27] Dranove, David. Code Red: An Economist Explains How to Revive the Healthcare System Without Destroying It. Princeton, 2008, p. 61.

[28] Holleran, Scott. "The History of HMOs." Arizona Republic. Nov. 1, 1999.

[29] Butler, Stuart. "Laying the Groundwork for Universal Health Care Coverage." March 10, 2003. Html.

[30] The O’Reilly Factor, episode April 12, 2010.

Reprinted from Mises.org.

Dale Steinreich [send him mail] is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

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On June 28, 1934, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the National Housing Act (NHA) of 1934. Hugh Potter, president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) called it "the most fundamental legislation … ever enacted affecting real estate and home ownership." While federal intervention in housing had begun in 1932 under the supposedly laissez-faire Hoover, Potter’s assessment was correct in the sense that the act broke new ground in terms of the range of public-private collaboration — and the unintended destructive consequences of such.

Let’s get the boring housekeeping facts out of the way first: NHA 1934 created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which insured private lenders against losses on loans; made loans to lenders; "insured" lender mortgages meeting certain criteria (including much longer loans up to 20 years in length, periodic payments by a borrower "not in excess of his reasonable ability to pay," and interest ceilings); established national mortgage associations that purchased and sold mortgages and issued securities funding such activity; and created the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC), which insured savings and loan (S&L) deposits. (Recall that FSLIC — pronounced Fizz’-lick in the industry — after repeated bailouts, fizzled into insolvency for the last time before being abolished in 1989.)

The insuring of much longer mortgage loans is key here. In 1930, about 33% of American households owned their own homes and by 1990 that figure had risen to about 67%. The typical mortgage was 5 years in length ending in a balloon payment (principal plus interest). Even though these loans were usually renewed for another 5-year term and were a better reflection of natural scarcity, the system still drew accusations of favoring the upper middle class and the wealthy. The government solution, beginning with NHA 1934, was 20- and 30-year fixed-interest-rate mortgages repaid in small amounts over time to greatly boost house affordability.

This writer, who studied the private-interest dynamics of the time in graduate work, found little evidence, to his surprise, that the class-based criticism of the old mortgage system came predominately from progressives. All the evidence examined clearly revealed progressives desiring more state intervention in terms of housing for the poor, but none asserting that the only suitable dwellings for the poor and lower middle classes were detached houses and some sort of government-given right of affordability to such. (Of course today’s progressives in the Obama administration and the Heather Booths of groups such as ACORN are a different matter. Some of them certainly do assert beliefs bearing some resemblance to the latter.)

The most powerful interests pushing the bill were the usual selectively free-market Republican-leaning bankers, realtors, builders, building-materials manufacturers, and even some architects. One of the most powerful interests at the time was the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB). Leonard Freedman wrote that

these antigovernmental crusades [waged by NAREB against public housing] were hypocritical. No industry has received more help from government than the business of housing. NAREB had advocated a federally chartered mortgage discount bank in the 1920s and early 1930s and was strongly supportive of the Federal Housing Administration and other agencies which employed the resources of the federal government to underwrite the credit structure of the housing industry. To the Home Builders, FHA was indispensable. They were also firm believers in the Federal National Mortgage Administration and the VA mortgage program. While the savings and loan leagues had no use for most of these programs, they had promoted and supported the Home Loan Bank in the 1930s, and it became one of their main props.

While the S&L leagues may not have had much use for some federal programs, the S&L industry would eventually come to be destroyed by the replacement of the 5-year mortgage with the artificial 20-year amortized mortgage, plus regulatory and tax incentives that encouraged S&Ls to load over 80% of their asset portfolios with the new longer-term mortgages.

It is amazing how long the system remained stable before calamity struck. In legend at least, from the end of World War II to about the mid-1960s, the sleepy and idyllic world of the S&L executive conformed to the rule of 3-6-3: pay your depositors 3%, earn 6% on their home loans, and be on the golf course by 3:00 p.m. Even though it was released early during this period, the 1946 movie It’s a Wonderful Life and its beloved protagonist George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), who operated an S&L in the fictional Bedford Falls, propagates this wholesome apple-pie, church-steeple, red-white-and-blue small-town narrative. While there could have been at least a little more than a grain of truth to this story, Martin Mayer reveals the part that resembles Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery:

[d]espite its lovely reputation … the old fashioned S&L was a nest of conflicting interests that squawked for sustenance from the customers’ deals. On its board were the builder, the appraiser, the real estate broker, the lawyer, the title insurance company, and the casualty insurance company. (Also the accountant: One mutual S&L in Ohio that lost virtually all of its depositors’ money was audited by an accountant who sat on the board, and nobody thought there was anything wrong with that.) Plus there was somebody from the dominant political party and from one of the churches. Many little mouths to feed. It is not unfair to say that nobody controlled what this board did.

The beginning of the end came in about 1965. The rise in interest rates in the two decades after World War II posed little threat to S&Ls. The interest rate on 10-year T-bonds was 2.8% in 1953 and 4% by 1963. The yield curve remained normal throughout this period (i.e., short-term rates were lower than long-term rates). The years between 1965 and 1982 were a different story. By 1982, the rate on 10-year T-bonds was 13.9% and, even worse for S&Ls, the rate on 1-year T-bills was 14%. Not only had rates risen dramatically; the yield curve had inverted as well. The Fed had struck again. For S&Ls, the rule of 3-6-3 had turned into 8-6-0, quickly sinking them into heavier and heavier losses.

Read the rest of the article

Dale Steinreich [send him mail] is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

The Best of Dale Steinreich

Into the Blue: A Father’s Flight and a Daughter’s Return

You: The Owner’s Manual: An Insider’s Guide to the Body That Will Make You Healthier and Younger
Michael F. Roizen, M.D., and Mehmet C. Oz, M.D.
New York: HarperResource
May 1, 2005

Okay, it’s two weeks into the New Year and your resolutions to eat healthier and exercise more are now thoroughly shot to pieces. (In fact, by the first weekend after January 1 they were pretty much on life support anyway.) Sure, you were eager to turn over a new leaf. Then the work week began, you got home late a few times, then opted for some quick junk food. You watched some DVDs, and then it was too close to bedtime again and again, too late to go out and walk or you’d get your heart pumping fast and lie awake all night. You conclude that you’re stuck in an unconquerable rut forever, and will never change.

Well, not so fast. Getting out of a well-worn rut can take some serious work, but once the hard turn is made, you’ll never feel better about yourself and desire to return to the old ways. Right now you’re bummed out and need some inspiration. These two volumes couldn’t be a better place to get it. The first one describes the plight of a man that could eventually be yours if you don’t work to change your bad habits. The second is a practical guide to changing your life and the rewards you will receive for doing so.

Into the Blue

Susan Edsall’s father Wayne Edsall is such a fanatically devout builder and flyer of antique airplanes that if he reached a point in his life where he could no longer pursue his hobby, he would no longer want to live. Saturday March 25, 2000 is the day where both his hobby and life almost ended for good. Four days after undergoing heart-bypass surgery he suffered a debilitating stroke which crippled his ability to speak and move on his right side. Thus began the odyssey of this exceptional father and his tenacious daughter to recover his physical faculties.

The stroke occurred on a Saturday morning, yet Wayne’s doctor showed no interest in returning to the hospital before Monday. This indifference was a shock for Susan: Her father couldn’t talk, could barely move his limbs on his right side, was pouring water from a pitcher into his room telephone, and no one could or would give her or her family a prognosis.

Susan’s sister Sharon, so upset at the sight of her newly discombobulated and drooling father, begins to cry and a doctor sternly lectures her to “get her act together.” On her first visit to the hospital in Bozeman, Montana, the information clerk couldn’t even muster the energy to give Susan clear directions to her father’s room. Wayne’s costly room was appallingly ugly and austere in decor, and wreaked of sweat and urine. How bad was her dad’s stroke, Susan asks the nurses. Answer: it’s too early to tell, ask Dr. Lilly who won’t be in until Monday.

Monday rolls around, and Dr. Lilly doesn’t know anything. His specialty is rehabilitation, not neurology, so ask the neurologist Dr. Moore. What Lilly is able to tell her is incomprehensible gibberish, and he doesn’t have the time to make it intelligible to a layperson. He looks for a brochure but there are none. “But I’m not asking general questions here. I’m trying to find out specifically about my dad,” pleads Susan. Answer: ask Dr. Moore the neurologist he says, before whirling around and walking down the hall.

It’s not until the next day that Susan is able to track down Dr. Moore, and of course he knows nothing about Susan’s dad, and is busy with other things, thank you very much. When asked about specific rehab treatments, Dr. Moore urges Susan to contact Dr. Lilly, the rehab specialist who already said that he didn’t know anything about her father’s rehab. Next stop: the hospital library, where there’s nothing beyond Stroke 101. Dumbfounded, she suspects that the hospital staff couldn’t really be this ignorant and callous. Surely they knew the true, bleak prognosis and were hiding it from patients and families out of a sense of compassion.

The days between Wayne’s stroke and rehab are surreal. Dr. Lilly, the “rehab specialist,” comes by every day to hold a pen in front of Wayne’s face and ask him what it is. Wayne rolls his eyes at the perfunctory exercise. After six days Wayne is finally transferred to a rehab center, but the initial elation quickly disappears. In the catacombs of the hospital, the center reeks of stale basement air and is filled with dirty old appliances, ugly furniture, and old worn-out boxes of Scrabble and Monopoly.

As if the homeless-shelter atmosphere weren’t bad enough, there’s then an insufferable procession of young, hyper-enthusiastic physical-therapy flunkies. First Paul, with spiked blond hair and a snake tattoo circling his waist, whose greatest ambition for Mr. Edsall is to get him to play solitaire and send e-mails. Then “tactful” Cowboy Frank, who told Wayne, “I heard you used to be a pilot! Well, you’ll never be able to do that again.” Then the unforgettable Ann:

She sprang into the room as if propelled by a slingshot. She was tall and athletic, wearing red sport pants with a white racing stripe down the side, white tennies with souls that wedged out at the bottom for a good solid grip, and a T-shirt tucked into her elastic waistband. A thick elastic band held her long dark hair and a high ponytail that bounced and swung when she walked. Her cheeks were naturally rosy, her lips soft. I could just tell she ate a big bowl of cereal for breakfast, plunging her oversized spoon into it with gusto and slurping. I imagined there would be lots of jobs she’d be perfect for — doggie day care, summer camp for overweight children, handing out food samples at Costco…”Patients like us to be peppy and encouraging!” Ann chirped. “It gives them a shot in the arm!” She bounced up and down on her toes, grinning.

It quickly became apparent that the hospital’s real intent for rehab was to get patients to accept their disabilities as fait accompli, then pass them off onto someone else. Mr. Edsall would just have to find happiness making peanut butter sandwiches, and if he really made phenomenal progress, popsicle-stick birdhouses. Susan concludes that this is why the doctors, nurses, and rehab staff didn’t have answers to the simplest questions, e.g., how long on average do patients improve before they level off? There weren’t answers because complete restoration wasn’t a real goal. Susan would have to take matters into her own hands if Wayne was ever going to fly a plane again.

Susan and her sister Sharon planned to alternate two-week periods of supervising their father’s rehabilitation for three months, then assess their progress toward their goal of having Wayne return to the skies in a year. It was a bold objective in uncharted waters, especially for a father who could no longer “read, write, speak, add, subtract, reason, or even reliably remember [their] names.”

Sharon drew up specific goals for her father, e.g., reading aloud at 110 words per minute and naming items in a category at 16—20 per minute. Every morning Wayne would review a series of alphabet flash cards, read newspaper headlines in the local paper, and read one very short story. Writing began with word games: first phrases, then short sentences. Then there was the problem of acknowledging progress. Wayne was improving impressively, but couldn’t see it through his own impatience. Wayne’s first readings, at 25 words per minute, eventually reached a speed of 93. Then there was his long struggle with math; never good with numbers, he nevertheless made steady improvements under his daughters’ relentless drillings.

The most triumphant and damning moment of the book is when Wayne returns to the hospital for a follow-up. By the first of June (two months after his stroke), Wayne’s recovery is phenomenal. He stammers little and reads aloud at 110 words per minute, average for a normal adult. He walked without any noticeable disability on his right side and had been driving his truck for a month. Surely the hospital staff would marvel at such a miraculous transformation.

Cheri, Wayne’s first hospital therapist, last saw him when he couldn’t even complete a sentence. Surely she would flip when she saw Wayne’s stunning progress. When Wayne approached her and spoke flawlessly, and his performance only elicited a slight smile and then an abrupt dismissal from Cheri, the family was stunned.

Thinking this was an anomaly, the family moved on to Wayne’s follow-up with Dr. Lilly. To help other families cope with the sparseness of stroke recovery information, Susan compiled a list of addresses, phone numbers, and Web sites where the family members of stroke victims could find material on stroke recovery. Susan is stunned when Lilly tosses it aside on the counter. After Wayne almost flawlessly reads two paragraphs from a Time magazine article, Lilly assesses his reading skills as only “acceptable” before adding, “But you did substitute a word. I’d like to put you on Ritalin.” Lilly explains that some research suggested that stroke survivors on Ritalin can retrieve words easier. Susan, who had read voraciously about stroke recovery, had never heard of such research.

Susan: Do you know anything about who did the study? My husband is a medical librarian. I could have him do a literature search.

Lilly [without making eye contact]: No. I don’t. It [Ritalin] can’t hurt him, and I think it would be worth a try.

Susan is surprised to be going around in circles yet again:

I had this funny feeling that Dr. Lilly wanted to bless me with his disappeared gun. Maybe it was the funny way that he wouldn’t look me in the eye. It was as if he wanted to give us a refresher on the rules, the first one being “Doctors are right, so you don’t need to ask pesky questions.”

Lilly then asks Wayne if his sex life has resumed. Susan simmers at the question:

Ten minutes later we climbed back into the car without having heard a single “Congratulations” or “Good job” or “How wonderful,” but knowing, straight from the horse’s mouth, that mom and dad were back at it in bed. There was sullen silence.

Stunned by the hospital staff’s hostility, the family didn’t utter a word to each other for almost the entire two-and-a-half-hour drive home. Then:

“They’re just jealous,” Sharon said, as if the bats had finally cleared out of her belfry and she’d had a sudden blinding insight. “Well they sure as hell ought to be,” I agreed, my eyes still closed. “Those pr-cks.”…[Sharon to her father:] “Next time we should wheel you in there in your pajamas with your tongue hanging out of your mouth and baby food smeared on your shirt. Maybe that would make them happy.”…”They are so f—ing parochial that they can’t bear it when somebody else does something better than they do,” I rail. “Those pigs.”

Heart attack, heart-bypass surgery, and stroke require a pilot’s license to be surrendered. Pilots then have to wait six months before reapplying for their license, plus another six months for the application to wind its way through the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) bureaucracy. The first week of March the following year, it had been nearly a year since Wayne’s stroke. The long-awaited letter from the FAA finally arrived, but Wayne couldn’t find the strength to open it. Susan read him the letter. Miraculously, the FAA bureaucrats allowed him to fly again.

Six weeks after receiving the letter, it was late April. Flying his Fleet Series 9 would be the ultimate test; a Cessna required skill, a Fleet seasoned mastery. If he could fly the Fleet, then Wayne Edsall knew that his old pre-stroke self was back again. One day in late April he gave it a try. Mustering up all the courage he could, Wayne wedged himself into the pilot’s seat, and in minutes was up in the air. It was the greatest gift a daughter, against so many formidable obstacles, could give him.

You: The Owner’s Manual

Of course better than a miraculous recovery like Wayne Edsall’s, is not to be in need of one in the first place. Ariel Sharon, if he ever wakes again, would surely agree. Following Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet C. Oz’s advice should put you in good stead, and they make it clear that when it comes to longevity and health, genes aren’t everything.

In fact, according to Roizen and Oz, just five adjustments can have a dramatic effect on your life expectancy: controlling blood pressure, quitting smoking, exercising a minimum of 30 minutes per day, controlling stress, and following a healthy diet. If you make those five adjustments, then in the next 10 years you have just a 10% chance of dying or having to suffer disability compared to a typical person your age. You control more than 70% of how well and long you live. By age 50, your lifestyle dictates 80% of how you age, the rest is genetics.

I had been told that ideal blood pressure is 120/80. Roizen and Oz (hereafter, R&O) say 115/76. Although an atypically low blood pressure doesn’t add much in years to your life, even slightly higher numbers can be bad news over the long run. R&O point out that over 50% of heart attacks can be attributed to blood pressure readings between 125/80 and 140/90. A third of heart-attack victims die, and 50% of that one third are dead on arrival to the hospital. Half of the people who have heart attacks never feel a single symptom, and it’s not unusual to feel anomalous symptoms. The authors cite the case of CNN’s Larry King, who felt a sharp pain in his right arm — left is more typical — and only reluctantly went to the hospital at the urging of a friend. King was surprised to learn that he had a massive heart attack.

Leg pain when you’re walking can be a sign of arterial disease. The understandable tendency is to avoid pain and stop walking, but that can make the problem worse. Continued walking stimulates the body to make new paths for blood to get to blood-starved tissue. R&O recommend at least 60 minutes per week of cardiovascular activity that elevates your heart rate to 80% or more of your age-adjusted maximum (find this by subtracting your age from 220).

What’s nice about the authors is their recognition of negative returns. Sixty minutes per week of stamina training is good, but more not only adds nothing to longevity, it can even decrease it through additional wear and tear on the body. If exercise is alien to you, start walking and slowly add in some weight lifting. Too many impatient people go from walking to running, but that stretches the joints too much. Instead, go from walking to either cycling, swimming, or an elliptical trainer. R&O report that a balance of stamina and strength training will make the average 55-year-old eight to nine years younger in real age.

In terms of blood cholesterol, losing even 10 pounds of weight, avoiding white bread, sugar, and pasta, and keeping saturated and trans fats to under 20 grams a day will lower bad LDL cholesterol. To increase your good HDL cholesterol, get one tablespoon of olive oil, 4 ounces of fish, or 12 walnuts a day; walk or engage in any physical activity for at least 30 minutes a day; take niacin; and have at least a drink of alcohol every night. (Careful, though, while alcohol reduces inflammation, more than 2.5 drinks per day for men and 1.5 for women speeds up aging of the immune system.)

Part of the reason to keep the heart healthy is to keep the mind healthy. A study of physician IQs beginning in 1950 showed average declines of about 5% each decade. However some increased their IQs as they aged; decreases in brain function aren’t inevitable with age. A study of retirees showed that those who were sedentary got no smarter, while those who walked 45 minutes at least three days a week improved their IQs. Increased activity improves cardiovascular function and this in turn improves brain function. Keeping mentally active also prevents memory loss. Avoid the same routine day after day. Learn a new language, musical instrument, or new skill. Rearrange your daily routine week by week as much as possible, at work and home.

Drinking 24 ounces of coffee per day decreases your risk of Parkinson’s disease by 40% and your risk of Alzheimer’s by about 20%. It appears that caffeine has a beneficial impact on neurotransmitters and can make you three to six months younger in real age, however it is not for everyone. Stress reduction can improve mental health (no surprise there). Daily hassles such as deadlines and getting the kids to school on time do not age the brain. The danger comes from “Nagging Unfinished Tasks” that continually aggravate and major life events such as moving, dealing with financial burdens, and the death of a family member. Laughing can make you up to eight years younger in real age and meditation can not only help maintain brain cells and preserve memory but reduce stress to prevent depression and anxiety.

A chapter on digestive health is interesting. It turns out that good tooth-brushing and flossing habits are good for your heart. Gum disease has links to heart disease; the same plaque that creates tooth decay can add plaque to your arteries leading to anything from heart attacks to erectile dysfunction. (Taking good enough care of your arteries is the best way to stave off any need for Viagra which has been linked to partial blindness.)

Speaking of embarrassing subjects such as erectile dysfunction, R&O point out that the best solution for diarrhea, contrary to urban legend, is not sitting on the can and waiting it out. It’s chicken soup with rice or calcium tablets. The former protect the cell lining of the intestines while the latter control muscular movements that propel the runs. While you’re on the can, be sure to replace your dry toilet paper with wet wipes or wet the paper before you wipe. Dry toilet paper is ineffective, irritating, and increases the likelihood of hemorrhoids. Okay, that’s enough of that subject.

For those concerned with weight control, R&O suggest eating off 9-inch plates instead of traditional 13-inch ones. The smaller plates hold less in calories, but still psychologically bring the same feeling of satiety as larger dishes. Smaller portions reduce arterial and immune aging. The most fascinating suggestion it to eat a little fat before each meal to prevent your stomach from emptying quickly. Tea and unbuttered toast for breakfast leaves a stomach in about 30 minutes, increasing the odds of a midmorning snack binge. However, with peanut or apple butter spread on the toast, the same process takes 3.5 hours.

Finally, in a chapter on the immune system, R&O recommend staying clear of government tap water. You can get low-grade infections from it that lead to bloating, itchy eyes, stomach cramps, and fatigue. Most people have no idea what’s happening to them or what the cause is. Although Evian water is a bit pricey, at least use a filter, the simplest being the charcoal type on water pitchers.

All these are just a few of the abundant number of tips that R&O dispense, in addition to a healthy diet outlined at the end of the book. You is a good harbinger for the future of American medicine as well. While being M.D.s schooled in an allopathic system that sees drugs and surgery as knee-jerk solutions to most problems, R&O write, “we believe that food is the next frontier in medicine — by studying how food can be used for healing.”

Pom Power

The only disappointing aspect of R&O’s book is the inexplicable lack of mention of the super antioxidant of 2005 — maybe Twenty-First Century — pomegranate juice. At first, for some reason, this one scared me. I saw the dark red bottles in the grocery store, had never seen or had a pomegranate in my life, or ever even heard anyone talk about them. Like most health food, I figured no news had to be bad: healthy, but probably nasty to the taste buds. Jeff Tucker urged me on, telling me it was as good as any bottle of fine wine, but good grief, this is a guy who doesn’t seem to mind cod liver oil that much.

I very gingerly tried the POM Wonderful pom-blueberry mix. Delicious! Next, pom-mango, then pom-tangerine, and then pom-cherry. Excellent. Then pure pom itself. Not bad at all.

The POM Wonderful brand has a definite plantlike, tart taste to it but this is a cinch to tweak. One nice combo is filling a large glass or tumbler a third of the way with crushed ice, adding a third bottled water, then topping of with pom juice. Adding a dash of orange juice is nice. If you want a nice little spike beyond that add some vodka or Sutter Home Moscato. Do your own experimenting. Two a day — in addition to a healthy diet and exercise — should keep the cardiologist away.

The benefits of pom juice? Even the usually very skeptical Consumer Reports was impressed. It conceded that it was rich in polyphenols, “antioxidant compounds linked to a variety of disease-fighting benefits.” One study in 2000 found that pom juice had three times more antioxidant activity than red wine or green tea. Another study found that the juice exceeded blueberry, cranberry, and orange juices in antioxidant activity in terms of suppressing damaging free-radical molecules. A Clinical Nutrition study found that drinking a glass a day for one year reduced blood pressure, decreased the oxidation that causes harmful LDL cholesterol to stick to artery walls, and reduced the clogging of neck arteries which can lead to stroke. Consumer Reports also noted that pom juice had less sugar than grape juice and none of the unhealthy fat of dark chocolate.

Pom juice is pricey, the 46-ounce bottle of POM Wonderful running anywhere from $8.99 to $9.99 in my neck of the woods. The Frutzzo organic variety, though not as full bodied, is a bit cheaper and better tasting. I had no problem drinking it straight from the bottle, as it has a more mild, sweet, and fruity taste than POM Wonderful. Unfortunately it’s much harder to get in my area.

Diminishing returns again: pom juice is great but more is not better. It packs some carbs, so more than a large glass per day of just the pure juice is probably not a good idea. Eating pomegranates directly is an interesting experience, but can make a big mess of your kitchen. The juice form seems to be the way to go.

So cheer up, resurrect those resolutions, get back on your feet and exercising, and have a safe and healthy 2006!

Dr. Dale Steinreich [send him mail] teaches economics in Missouri, is a contributor to the investment advisory AgainstTheCrowd.com, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

The visit to Huntsville was a bit of a homecoming for Rogers who grew up in Demopolis, Alabama where he became acquainted with the world of business very early in life. His first job was picking up bottles at baseball games at age five. About a year after that the young business prodigy secured the concession to sell soft drinks and peanuts at Little League games. He went on to finish at the top of his class at his small Alabama high school and win a scholarship to Yale.

During his four-year stint at Yale, Rogers fell in love with Wall Street in the summer of 1964 while working for Dominick & Dominick, an investment bank. He then served in the army for a few years where he invested the savings of his post commander and earned a sizable return. Rogers then returned to New York in 1968 with only $600 in savings to eventually become partner in a hedge fund. He retired twelve years later at age 37 a multimillionaire, ready to travel the world. His first journey, chronicled in his 1994 book Investment Biker: On the Road With Jim Rogers, took him from Dunquin, Ireland to San Francisco across fifty-two countries and over 65,000 miles in two years’ time.

On his recent visit to Huntsville, Rogers’ presentation was a visual supplement to his excellent 2003 book Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip. Between 1999 and 2002 Rogers set a Guinness record driving across 116 countries in a modified Mercedes SLK 230 powered by a 177 hp 6-cylinder diesel engine. For the full flavor of his adventure there’s no beating a read of his book. Of relevance to LRC readers are his political and economic observations about the U.S. and his investment advice for the near future.

Rogers took care to emphasize to the Alabama audience that it’s not so much Americans that are hated around the world as it is their government’s policies. Even the peoples of the Islamic Middle East like Americans and aspects of American culture but hate belligerent American foreign policy. While most of the audience got the gist of what Rogers was saying, I think this assessment of his was more true during his 1999—2002 travels, especially right after September 11. Today, I think it’s a different story given different accounts and recent measures of opinion in various parts of the world.

After civilian deaths began to mount in Afghanistan and the Iraq conflict began in late March, admitting you’re American today in parts of Europe, the Middle East, Asia, or Africa formerly thought to be pretty safe for Americans can get you belligerent postures and insults at best, torture and death at worst. This has been one of the worst side effects of the U.S.’s neocon foreign policy: it has made world travel for business, leisure, or educational purposes much more perilous. I think that the reception Rogers received in certain parts of the world from 1999—2001 would likely be more hostile and confrontational today.

In terms of investment advice, Rogers recommends avoiding U.S. stocks over the next five to ten years. He sees the strong rise of China and predicts that areas of the world with abundant natural resources will provide healthy returns over the coming years. Hence he’s bullish on countries such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and different nations of Asia. Even states in the U.S. with greater natural resources such as Alabama will provide healthier returns than states with less natural resources such as Massachusetts. Rogers is bearish on Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union; I would agree on Russia, although there might be hope for a couple of the other republics.

I think Rogers is on to something here in terms of cautious global diversification. I would emphasize (and I don’t think that Rogers would disagree) that natural resources, although they might be a necessary condition for healthy returns down the road, are hardly sufficient. The continent of Africa has always been endowed with an abundance of natural resources but like certain nations of South America, it has had difficulty converting those abundant resources into final goods. The underlying problem of course is the failure to effectively establish/protect property rights which give rise to a reliable and efficient production structure. So, abundance of resources doesn’t necessarily imply anything.

Regardless of fleeting appearances, flexibility is key. Like China looming large today, I remember up until the early 1990s the dire warnings from so many professors and "experts" of how the Japanese would soon own and control America lock, stock, and barrel through our capital-account surpluses. (Speaking of trade follies, see the most recent installment of proposed idiocy from Warren Buffett in the November 10, 2003 issue of Fortune.) Japan lacked institutional flexibility with its neo-fascist policies of protectionism and keiretsu combined with central-bank meddling, and hence the Japanese missed the boat. Who can predict what can befall the now-seemingly invincible Chinese?

As to the U.S., just as no nation has ever taxed itself to prosperity, not a single one has ever protected its way to prosperity either. What’s so difficult to get the likes of Patrick Buchanan to understand is that manufacturing jobs where workers without high-school diplomas earned fifteen to twenty dollars an hour were an historical fluke and confluence of union controls pushing the wages of some jobs above market levels (while eliminating others), world and other wars which took their toll on foreign infrastructure and stability (and hence competitive imports for decades), and some under-developed countries only very recently and effectively implementing their natural advantage in manufacturing.

(To get a good grasp of the type of thinking out there, note Bob Samuelson’s recent column in Newsweek where he cites credible research showing that Bush’s steel tariffs eliminated as many as 43,000 non-steel jobs in order to save 3,500 in the steel industry. Talk about negative-sum game — but wait, Samuelson concludes that the tariffs "worked" in the sense that they spurred consolidation and closings in the industry with the taxpayers picking up the tab for pensions. Bob, exactly how would this have never occurred, much quicker and more efficiently, without the tariffs and net job losses they created?)

Contra Rogers, I have some doubts about large long-term investment returns coming from Canada. Its population is growing but under an umbrella of costly entitlements. These entitlements have to be supported by higher future taxes and borrowing. While the U.S. fiscal and trade picture doesn’t look bright at the moment, we are not yet burdened with a full-blown national health system as Canada is, although we’re certainly on course to get one.

Rogers predicts that there will be more corporate and mutual-fund scandals to come. I’m not aware that he has any underlying theory as to why the corruption wave appeared in 2001 and will persist, but I certainly do. When the federal government in the late 1960s (through the Williams Act) and state governments (through control-share acquisition and merger-moratorium laws, etc., in the 1980s) made it increasingly difficult for shareholders to throw out crooks such as Dennis Kozlowski and Andrew Fastow, the crooks became increasingly entrenched and emboldened in their scams. Add the early 1990s changes in the tax treatment of executive options and the timing of the scandal wave is hardly a surprise.

Rogers thinks former New York Stock Exchange chairman Dick Grasso should go to jail. I wouldn’t shed a tear if he did but I’d be happy if he returned the $140 million he effectively stole and disappeared. I would have to agree with Rogers that last quarter’s growth of 7.2% is effectively quite a sham. The recent drop in the unemployment rate from 6.1% to 6% being treated as great news by the Bush administration is also amusing, especially given that (as Richard Nixon found out) the rate can increase as more people, thinking the economy has revived, start looking for jobs and don’t find them.

Interesting for LRC readers, Rogers is no fan of the current war in Iraq and accurately predicted some of the trouble we’re now seeing. On September 11, 2002 he wrote that "[a]ttacking Iraq would be madness." Lack of popular world support would pose problems. (Earlier this year we saw the Bush administration asking Germany and France — after it dismissed their concerns at the U.N. — to help with troops and funding, to no avail.) Rogers also makes the point that, as far as deposing evil rulers goes, some of the world’s worst (e.g., General Pervez Musharraf) have the U.S.’s full support. Rogers’ most prescient argument was the threat to Saudi stability — the kingdom recently turning into a bubbling cauldron of terrorism.

Where LRCers would probably most part company with Rogers is on immigration. Rogers is an intransigently open-borders guy. His arguments are similar to those made on the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page: people who risk so much to come here will by definition be an asset to the country, immigration is a founding principle of the country, immigrants work jobs Americans won’t, immigrants will insure the solvency of Social Security and Medicare, and labor mobility inside the U.S. and E.U. has helped those two areas.

Of course immigrants (legal and illegal) don’t face equal risks or costs; Mexicans who enter the U.S. from Tijuana do so at much less average cost than any Haitian. Social Security and Medicare have traded away savings and investment (read job creation) for the FICA tax, so it’s a very curious free-market concern that they should be saved. The problem is that there are other things that can attract migrants besides market opportunities: for one, the welfare state. The welfare state also explains why many Americans of even meager means think that certain jobs for which they’re qualified are nevertheless beneath them. If California is our empirical evidence, serious immigration reform seems to be needed. The idea that the solution should take the form of open borders is a hard sell to most Americans, especially after 9-11.

I found Rogers to be one of the nicest and warmest people I’ve ever met. His prognostications about the future look sound and I recommend his books and Saturday installments of wisdom on Fox News Channel highly.

Dr. Dale Steinreich [send him mail] teaches economics in Missouri, is a contributor to the investment advisory AgainstTheCrowd.com, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Dale Steinreich Archives

~
Bill O’Reilly; Fox News Channel; May 22, 2003

Since
the Iraq conflict began on March 20, Fox
News has been on a mission to legitimize it.  One problem
for Fox’s protracted apologia is that despite promises
of evidence of current weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) by the
Bush Administration, the evidence has been ambiguous at best. 
Unfortunately for the network, I’ve been keeping a scratch
diary of their reports since the war began.

Keep
in mind that in the first three weeks of March, before the bombs
started officially dropping, Fox was spreading all sorts of Pentagon
propaganda.  Iraq had "drones" that it could quickly
dispatch to major U.S. metropolitan areas to spread biological agents.
 Saddam was handing out chemical weapons to the Republican
guard to use against coalition troops in a last-ditch red-zone ring
around Baghdad.  Given what we now know about Iraq, these reports
seem to be laughable fantasies, but they were effective in securing
public backing for the war.  The following is a short
chronicle of lies, propagation of lies, exaggerations, distortions,
spin, and conjecture presented as fact.  My comments are in
brackets [ ]s.

March 14:  On The Fox Report
anchor Shepard Smith reports that Saddam is planning to use flood
water as a weapon by blowing up dams and causing severe flood damage.

March 19:  Fox anchor Shepard Smith reports
that Iraqis are planning to detonate large stores of napalm buried
deep below the earth to scorch coalition forces.   Fox Military
Analyst Major Bob Bevelacqua states
that coalition forces will drop a MOAB on Saddam’s bunker [!!] and
give him the "Mother of All Sunburns." 

[After
my last
article, one sniveling neocon after another wrote me to tell
me I was unqualified to assess defense matters because I wasn't
a "defense analyst" (never mind that the article wasn't
on the war, and the "real" defense experts made one wrong
prediction after another on this war).  It's interesting how
these sniveling Frumsters cheer on the college-uneducated Hannity
and Limbaugh when they make defense analyses supporting the neocon
view.  I do know enough to say that the informed Bevelacqua's
suggestion that a MOAB would be used on a bunker was puzzling to
say the least (given the reports of less-than-dazzling performance
of daisy cutters outside caves in Tora Bora).  Anyway, later
reports confirmed that GBU-28 bunker busters were used during The
Decapitation That Apparently Failed.]   

March
23: The network begins 2 days of unequivocal assertions that
a 100-acre facility discovered by coalition forces at An Najaf is
a chemical weapons plant.   Much is made about the fact that
it was booby trapped.  A former UN weapons inspector interviewed
on camera over the phone downplays the WMD allegations and says
that booby-trapping is common.  His points are ignored as unequivocal
charges of a chemical weapons facility are made on Fox for yet another
day (March 24).  Only weeks later is it briefly conceded that
the chemicals definitively detected at the facility were pesticides.

[Jennifer Eccleston has to be the worst reporter employed by any
network.  She began one segment with a "Hi there!" – in
no response to any segue from the relaying anchor at Fox headquarters
in New York.  Her bangs are long and constantly blowing in
her face in the wind.  Her head wobbles from side to side with
her nose tracing out a figure 8 all the while arbitrarily syncopating
a monotone voice with overemphasis on the last syllables of different
words (e.g., Bagh-DAD’).  The old, white-haired
flag-waving yahoos like her not for her professionalism – she has
none – but because of her innocent Britney Spearsesque beauty; i.e.,
she's a typical young piece of meat which dirty old men with too
much time on their hands fantasize about.]

March
24:  Oliver North reports that the staff at the French
embassy in Baghdad are destroying documents.  [How could he
know this?] 

March 24: Fox and Friends. Anchor Juliet Huddy asks Colonel
David hunt why coalition forces don’t “blow up” Al Jazeera TV. [The
context of the discussion makes it clear that she doesn't know the
difference between Al Jazeera and Iraqi TV!!!! Juliet Huddy is a
beautiful woman but not very bright.]

March
28:  Repeated assertions by Fox News anchors of
a red ring around Baghdad in which Republican Guard forces were
planning to use chemical weapons on coalition forces.  A Fox
"Breaking News" flash reports that Iraqi soldiers were
seen by coalition forces moving 55-gallon drums almost certainly
containing chemical agents.

April
7:  Fox, echoing NPR, reports that U.S.
forces near Baghdad have discovered a weapons cache of 20 medium-range
missiles containing sarin and mustard gas.   Initial tests
show that the deadly chemicals are not "trace elements."

[In
the coming weeks, this embarrassing non-discovery is quickly stomped
down the Memory Hole.  The missiles were never mentioned again.]

April
9:  The crowd around coalition troops toppling the Saddam
statue in Baghdad looks strangely sparse despite the network’s assertions
to the contrary.  The perspective is always in close and even
then there is no mob storming the statue to hit it with their shoes.
Just a handful of people.  It’s constantly asserted that there’s
a huge crowd.  [I'm perplexed.  Where's the huge crowd?!]

April
10:  Fox "Breaking News" report of weapons-grade
plutonium found at Al Tuwaitha.  [In the coming weeks this
"discovery" was expeditiously shoved down the Memory Hole
as well.]

April
10 (2:59 EDT):  A report noting with surprise "how
little" the Iraqis were celebrating the coalition invasion. 
[An interesting contradiction of the allegations of widespread celebration
just the day before with the toppling of the Saddam statue.]

April
10 (3 p.m. EDT: Reporter Rick Leventhal)  Fox "Breaking
News" report:  A mobile bioweapons lab is found. 
Video of a tiny tan truck—about the size of the smallest truck
that U-Haul rents – which had its cargo bed and fuel tank shot up
with bullets after a looter tried to drive it away. Repeated assertions
that this is most definitely a "bioweapons" lab. 
A graphic sequence is shown of a large Winnebago-type vehicle that
is massive compared to the tiny truck found.  The irony of
this escapes the Fox newscasters and defense "experts." 

[This
was the first "bioweapons lab" found, not the larger one
later found in Mosul.  A week later it is briefly conceded
that the tiny truck was probably never a bio weapons lab, but promises
that real ones will pour forth from the landscape continue. 
The second phantom lab, a large tractor-trailer truck was discovered
around May 2 by Kurdish fighters.]

April
10:  To show that France is in bed with
Saddam Hussein, Fox begins running old footage of Saddam Hussein’s
September 1975 trip to Paris to meet with Jacques Chirac and tour
a nuclear power plant.  [Because Fox strives so hard to be
"Fair and Balanced," it's all the more curious how it
fails to inform its audience about another trip four years later,
this one to Baghdad on December 19, 1983 made by Reagan envoy and
then former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld (see pic below). 
The network again, because it's so very "Fair and Balanced,"
also inexplicably forgot to tell its audience about another trip
by Rummy to Baghdad, this time on March 24, 1984, the very same
day that a U.N. team found that Iraqi forces had used mustard gas
laced with a nerve agent on Iranian soldiers.  Rummy obviously
wasn't too concerned about the charges of gassing, as in 1986 when
he was considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination
of 1988, he listed his restoration of diplomatic relations with
WMD-using Iraq as one of his proudest achievements. 

But
all that's an eternity ago for Imperial Conservatives with a 20-second
attention span.  The Fox newscasters rename Jacques Chirac
"Jacques Iraq"(yuk, yuk, yuk – what a side splitter!)
and keep going.] 

April
7:  Repeated ominous footage of barrels buried in a below-ground
shed near Karbala.  The implication is that the Iraqi landscape
is replete with these types of shelters, all of them brimming with
evidence of chemical weapons.  [These were revealed to be agricultural
chemicals as well.]

April
13:  Fox Graphic:  "Bush:  Syria Harboring
Chemical Weapons."

[My favorite Fox war commentator is definitely Colonel David Hunt. 
From my canvassing of all the cable network war coverage, it's hard
to find an analyst who is more dogmatic.  When coalition forces
weren’t greeted with hugs and kisses like he predicted and
instead encountered stiff resistance from Iraqi forces in Basra
and other places, Davey was all denial.  Everything’s
going perfect.  Rummy is God, hallelujah and praise Dubya! 
There's not a problem in Iraq that can't be solved by blowing some
Iraqi's brains out.]

April
15:  Fox analyst Mansoor Ijaz claims
that the top 55 Iraqi leaders (along with the whole stash of chemical
and biological WMDs they have taken with them) are now living it
up in Latakia, Syria.  [This is the same 55 that appeared on
the deck of cards and is still being captured – far from all living
it up in Syria.]  On The Fox Report anchor Shepard
Smith completely breaks with any pretense of objectivity and openly
mocks actor Tim Robbins after playing an excerpt of Robbins’ speech
to the National Press Club.  "Oh, that was so powerful!"
Smith mocked.  [Impressive objectivity there, Mr. Smith.]

April 16:  Fred Barnes on Special
Report with Brit Hume blames the looting of the Iraqi National
Museum on the museum staff.  [Right now there are so many claims
and counterclaims about the looting it's hard to tell what happened. 
In a Fox segment on May 19 a coalition official asserted that 170,000
items were definitely not missing.  Of course he refused to
give a ballpark estimate of what was missing, which he'd surely
have in order to plausibly deny that the original estimate was wrong.] 
 

April
18:  Bill O’Reilly opens his show calling Iraqis "ungrateful." 

April
21:  Bill O’Reilly opens his show calling Iraqi
Shiites "ungrateful SOBs" and "fanatics." 
He concludes that "[we] can’t tolerate a fundamentalist state"
in Iraq. 

[Whoa,
O'Reilly.  I thought we promised the Iraqis that we were going
to implement democracy, not democracy that gives the U.S. the election
results it wants.  That's not democracy, now, is it? 
By now it's quite clear that despite the spinning on The No Spin
Zone, Iraq is descending into chaos.]

April 22:  Lt. Colonel Robert Maginnis states on The
O’Reilly Factor that the probability of finding WMDs is a 10
out of 10.  [This is the same Robert Maginnis who predicted
a double-ring defense of Baghdad in the Washington
Times on January 7.]  O’Reilly states
that if no WMDs are found within a month from today, then that spells
big trouble.  O’Reilly promises to explore the issue a month
later.   [Cool, let's hold his feet to the
fire on that promise.  On an earlier show he said that U.S.
credibility would be "shot" if no WMDs were found. ]

May
8: Fox News Military Analyst Major General Paul Vallely
states on The O’Reilly Factor that "Middle East
agents" have told him that Iraq’s WMDs along with 17 mobile
weapons labs (1 of which was captured around May 2) are now buried
in the Bakaa Valley in Syria 30 meters underground.  He also
claims that France helped Iraqi leaders escape to Europe by providing
them with travel papers [a charge that even the Pentagon later denies
although it's apparent that's where Vallely got his information].

May
11:  On The Fox Report with Rick Folbaum it is conceded
that the nefarious captured trailer contains not a shred of evidence
of WMDs, but Folbaum hints that what’s important is that the
trailer could have been used to make them.  [Hmmm. 
I thought we went to war for actual WMDs, not for the ability to
make WMDs.]

May
16:  Special Report with Brit Hume. 
Muslims, citing Islam’s ban of alcohol, are torching liquor stores
and threatening their Christian owners.   Under Saddam’s secular
regime, Christian names were banned and schools were nationalized,
but guns and alcohol were freely available; there was tolerance
for Iraq’s 1 million Catholic and Protestant Christians.  In
New and Improved Neocon Iraq, there’s a letter circulating in Baghdad
threatening violence to even the families of women who refuse to
wear the traditional Muslim head covering.  [The report is
yet another interesting and reluctant concession of unintended consequences.]
               

May
19:  O’Reilly discusses a number of inflammatory and
bogus charges that were floated in the U.S. media about France (e.g.,
France supplied Iraq with precision switches used in nuclear weapons,
French companies sold spare parts to Iraq for military planes and
helicopters, France possessed illegal strains of smallpox, France
helped Iraqi leaders escape to Europe by providing them with travel
papers).  Recall this last charge was made by Major General
Paul Vallely on May 8 on The O’Reilly Factor.  Again,
the Pentagon denies all such charges although much of the Beltway
thinks it’s obvious that the Pentagon is the source of them. 
O’Reilly claims that Vallely is only irresponsible if the charges
don’t turn out to be true.  O’Reilly refers to documents that
prove that the French government was briefing Saddam right until
the war started. [Briefed on what?]

May
20:  O’Reilly concedes that the Private Jessica Lynch
rescue story could be a fraud, as asserted by the BBC and Los
Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer.  "Somebody
is lying," he states.  He says that if the U.S. military
has concocted a fraud, then it will be a terrible scandal but if
the BBC and Scheer are wrong, nothing will happen to them. 
He says he is skeptical of the BBC and Scheer. 

To prove his point he brings on no other than Colonel David Hunt. 
[Geez.  Transcript here.] 
Over and over, Hunt calls the allegations of staged rescue an "assail
on the finest soldiers in the world."  He claims that
the ambulance with Lynch in it that drove up to a Marine checkpoint
was never shot at, its drivers demanded $10,000 for information
on Jessica, Saddam Hospital was guarded by uniformed Iraqi soldiers
and Fedayeen, Jessica’s life was saved, and coalition forces didn’t
trash the hospital.  What were his sources for this information?
 The special ops members on the raid, some of whom are his
friends and former colleagues.  Over and over Hunt kept saying,
"They’re the best soldiers in the world, they’re the best in
the world.  Why would they make this up?" 

[What
followed next was an exchange that's priceless and one of many that
goes by far too un-analyzed on Fox every day:]

Hunt:  In my opinion it’s an assault, an effrontery to the
finest men and women in our service, it’s an assault on Jessica,
it’s an assault on these great guys, these great special operations
guys … at a minimum we should no longer buy the L.A. Times, no
longer buy the Toronto Free Press, and shut the BBC off.  It’s
a government to government issue…this is calling into question
the veracity of the finest soldiers in the world and it’s uncalled
for, it’s absolutely unbelievable."

O’Reilly: 
If you [Hunt] turn out to be right, nothing will happen to Scheer…he’ll
just go along blithely printing his lies and living his life and
getting paid for it.

[To the Colonel:  U.S. special ops soldiers may be the best
in the world at what they do, but how does it logically follow from
that assessment that particular actions taken during the raid were
not excessive and unjustified?   How is the BBC's story an
assault on Jessica?!  What do you mean when you mention a "government
to government issue" given that the U.S. government now controls
Iraq?!  Is the Pentagon the most effective check on its own
possible misdeeds?   How convenient if you're suggesting that
it is.  Who is your source that Iraqi doctors were trying to
ransom Jessica?  Why hasn't this allegation made its way into
any other news reports?]

[To
O'Reilly:  If the raid does turn out to be mostly staged, there'll
be no terrible scandal precisely because you, Fox News, and the
Pentagon will assert just the opposite and allow yet another embarrassment
to slide into the Memory Hole.  This is exactly why your demand
for accountability from the BBC and L.A. Times is so hollow and
hypocritical.  Instead of plumbing the U.S. military to investigate
itself, why don't you interview Iraqi doctor Harith al-Houssona
as the London Times did on April 16 (where the story was first broken,
not by the BBC or Robert Scheer) who actually saved Lynch's life
instead of the U.S. special ops who could have jeopardized it? 
The doctor testifies that all Iraqi forces left the day before
the raid and that Jessica was delivered by an ambulance that had
to return to the hospital because it was shot at by Marines. 
Why would he lie?  You say you automatically trust the Pentagon.
  Why, when tales of Lynch's heroics in fighting off 500 Iraqi
soldiers with one hand while severely wounded and tales that she
had amnesia have already been proven bogus?]

May
22 (5:54 a.m. CDT):  Richard King, a military doctor,
appears on Fox and Friends with promises by the show’s
hosts that he will verify that the Jessica Lynch rescue wasn’t staged. 
King doesn’t prove anything.  He states that he arrived at
Saddam Hospital the day after the rescue, concedes damage and mal-treatment
of doctors at the hospital, and that he "was told " that
the hospital was guarded by hostile forces but doesn’t specify who
told him.  [The testimony of the hospital staff contradicts
this last hearsay.]                     

May
22:  O’Reilly fails to live up to his promise to make
a big stink if no WMDs are found by today.  In his Talking
Points Memo he wonders why the U.S. has caught such informed
Iraqis as Dr. Germ and Ms. Anthrax and has gotten no leads. 
He states that more time is needed [contradicting what he said more
than a month ago, when he said that if no WMDs were found after
2 months U.S. credibility would be "shot" and there would
be big trouble].   He ends his Memo saying Bush
must candidly address the situation soon. 

June
2:  [Unfortunately for O'Reilly, Bush isn't candidly
explaining anything.]  A video clip on Fox and Friends
is shown with Bush in Poland claiming that "[w]e
found" weapons of mass destruction.  His evidence? 
Two trailers found near Mosul that were supposedly used as mobile
bioweapons labs.  [A
June 7 article by the Times' Judith Miller reports
serious doubts by some analysts that the two trailers were used
as mobile bioweapons labs.   Said one senior analyst about
the initial CIA report, it "was a rushed job and looks political."
  Yes, they violated U.N. resolutions but this is another red
herring to suggest WMDs.]      

June
4:  O’Reilly’s Talking Points Memo: 
[Surreal.]  O’Reilly says that the WMD issue has now
been politicized [!!].   The war was a just war because there’s
now great progress between Palestinians and Israelis and that alone
made the war worthwhile [?!!].  Also the mass graves and other
horrors discovered add to the case for war.  The intelligence
was either wrong or more time is needed to find the WMDs. 
[Again contradicting what he said on and before April 22.]

June
11:  Fox reports a bus blast in Jerusalem caused by
Hamas, killing 15 and wounding at least 100.  [Looks like the
real reason for war according to O'Reilly (Israeli-Palestinian peace)
has also disintegrated, but don't expect O'Reilly to admit it.]

June
13, 2003

Dr.
Dale Steinreich [send him mail]
is an adjunct scholar
of the Mises Institute and a
contributor to AgainstTheCrowd.com.

We will
export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in
defense of our great nation.

~
George W. Bush quoted in Bob Woodward’s Bush
at War

The
work of brilliant visionaries is rarely understood or fully appreciated
until long after their deaths.  In the social sciences, economist
Ludwig von Mises certainly falls into this category.  In cinematography,
not only was Stanley Kubrick a genius with few approximate equals
across a wide range of genres and settings, he is and will likely
remain the greatest antiwar filmmaker of all time.  Today (March
7, 2003) marks the fourth anniversary of his untimely death at 70
years of age.

Kubrick
was born in New York City on July 26, 1928.  His skill in capturing
stirring visual images first appeared at age sixteen when one of
his photographs was published in Look magazine.  Look’s
editors were so impressed with his work that he became one of
their freelance photographers.  Kubrick used his modest income
from this and other work to fund a documentary short on boxing named
Day of the Fight (1950).  After completing two more
documentaries, Kubrick borrowed money from relatives to fund Fear
and Desire (1953), an hour-long feature that was his first war
film.  The plot involves four soldiers trapped behind enemy
lines who try to escape to safety only to find that their worst
enemy is themselves.   

After
about a four-year hiatus independently making two low-budget crime
features, Kubrick returned to the war genre in Paths
of Glory (1957), his first major studio release.  After
Spartacus
(1960) and Lolita
(1962), Kubrick returned to the war genre again with Dr.
Strangelove or:  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Bomb (1964).  Kubrick continued to churn out magnificent
films such as 2001: 
A Space Odyssey (1968), A
Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry
Lyndon (1975), The
Shining (1980), Full
Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes
Wide Shut (1999) which was completed only just before his
death. 

Kubrick’s filmography of only ten major studio releases over forty-two
years is considered modest in the industry but reveals his emphasis
on quality over quantity.  Kubrick had a definite vision of
his end product and his skill in successfully bringing his visions
to form in such a unique and inimitable style was his greatest and
lasting genius.  The following are three of the greatest antiwar
films of all time.

Paths
of Glory (1957)

Based on Humphrey Cobb’s 1935 novel of the same name (which
Kubrick read when he was only fourteen years old), the setting for
Paths of Glory is France 1916, two years after the beginning
of hostilities with Germany.  Although early in the conflict
the German army had advanced to within eighteen miles of Paris,
the French successfully repelled it and formed a new front. 
For two years, though, the contest between the two armies remained
a stalemate and the French military leadership became impatient. 
Thus the film’s central conflict between the top military brass
and the 701st regiment over what turns out to be an impossible mission.

Paths of Glory, if nothing else, is Kubrick’s expos of the
treacherous politics inside defense establishments which lead not
only to the destruction of lives in other lands, but the obliteration
of lives and careers in their own ranks.  The perfidy begins
at the office of General Paul Mireau (George Macready) which has
the opulence of Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles with cathedral
ceilings and floor spaces, huge paintings, and beautiful furniture
courtesy of the French taxpayers.  This is driven home by Mireau’s
statement to General Broulard that he’s done little of his own decorating
to his new office since he recently took possession of it. 
When Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) attempts to tell Mireau that he has
a secret plan, Mireau guesses exactly what Broulard wants to discuss: 
a heavily fortified German position in his sector known as The Ant
Hill.  Broulard is surprised that Mireau has read his mind,
but Mireau conveys that the brass are awful at keeping secrets.  

Sure enough, Broulard wants Mireau’s regiment to take the Ant Hill,
but it must be within two days!  Mireau replies that this is
ridiculous, his battle-weary regiment is in no shape to hold, never
mind win, such a hardened position.  Both officers know the
impossibility of the mission but Mireau, not yet corrupted by his
own ambition, is the only one of the two who cares about the consequences. 
Broulard belittles Mireau’s concerns and slyly mentions that Mireau
is being considered for a promotion and can earn another star. 
Broulard implies that Mireau’s acceptance of the daunting Ant Hill
mission will greatly help his chances at promotion.  Mireau
protests that he’s responsible for 8,000 men.  What is his
ambition and reputation against that?  His men come first. 
Broulard turns to leave but Mireau (sensing that his promotion is
slipping away) drags him back and agrees to take the Hill.

The
great Kubrickian moment comes next with Mireau in the field touring
the trenches.  A shell-shocked private can’t answer Mireau’s
small-talk questions.  The private completely breaks down and
Mireau gives him a Pattonesque slap and ships him out, saying that
cowardice is contagious.  Mireau then visits Colonel Dax (Kirk
Douglas).  Dax lets Mireau view the Ant Hill through a periscope. 
As if on cue, a huge explosion from enemy fire blows Mireau back
into the trench.  Unfazed, Mireau tells Dax his regiment is
going to take the Hill tomorrow, estimating troop losses at about
60%.  When Dax expresses his doubts about not only the casualty
estimations but the fantasy of taking the Hill, Mireau threatens
him with an indefinite furlough.  The formerly practical Mireau
has now become a fanatic transformed by the lust of his ambition.

The attempt to take the Hill is of course disastrous.  The
weather is clear, Dax has no support from other regiments, and the
German fire, already overwhelming when the troops leave the trenches,
handily mows down Dax’s already meager force.  Kubrick unveils
a spectacular tracking shot in his portrayal of Dax’s unsuccessful
attempt to take the Hill.  The production design is particularly
good in showing the thorough destruction of war upon the land. 
Troops navigate the horrifically scarred terrain strewn with corpses,
mangled trees, and scorched ruins of buildings. 

Watching
Dax’s failure unfold, Mireau is infuriated and orders an artillery
commander to fire at Dax’s men.  When the commander refuses,
Mireau tells the commander he is under arrest.  Mireau then
orders Dax to his headquarters.  For their failure to take
the Hill, one hundred men from Dax’s regiment will be tried under
penalty of death for cowardice.  If Dax resists, he too will
be arrested.  Dax offers himself as a scapegoat since "the
logical choice is the officer most responsible for the attack." 
Both Mireau and Broulard are horrified at this suggestion as they
quickly see that this logic leads right back up the military hierarchy
to them, the true instigators of the plan.  Broulard quickly
shuts off this line of thinking, concluding that the issue is "not
a question of officers."  Mireau settles for three men
in Dax’s regiment to be made scapegoats.  After the meeting
is adjourned, Mireau catches up with Dax and threatens to ruin him. 
Mireau’s ambition has now transformed him into a complete monster. 

The selection of Mireau’s scapegoats is interesting:  Corporal
Paris (Ralph Meeker) is chosen by Lieutenant Roget (Wayne Morris)
because Paris is the only living witness to Roget’s recent, criminally
negligent murder of a fellow soldier.  Private Arnaud (Joe
Turkel) is chosen by lot, Private Ferol (Timothy Carey) because
he is a "social undesirable."  All three have proven
themselves brave in past battles yet all three are tried for cowardice,
found guilty, and sentenced to death.  The night before the
execution Arnaud falls back against a wall and fractures his skull. 
Barely conscious, he’s strapped on a stretcher and still executed
(right side up) with the two other prisoners before a firing squad. 

The
hallmark of any Kubrick production is of course unforgettable dialogue. 
As Dax tries in vain to save the three doomed men, Broulard tells
him that the executions will be a "tonic for the entire division
– there are few things more fundamentally encouraging and stimulating
than seeing someone else die…You see, Colonel, troops are like
children.  Just as a child wants its father to be firm, troops
crave discipline.  One way to maintain discipline is to shoot
a man now and then."  Broulard, after dismissing Mireau,
doesn’t see the irony in his own declaration that "France cannot
afford to have fools guiding her military destiny."  Mireau
describes the execution of the three soldiers as filled with "splendor…the
men died wonderfully."     

One
last interesting note concerns what E.M. Forester called "flat
characters" that Kubrick has inserted into this film. 
Of particular interest is the smarmy Major Saint-Auban (Richard
Anderson), the consummate military bureaucrat who is stupid, has
rarely (if ever at all) seen actual combat, but lives for political
maneuvering.  Early in the film Saint-Auban is quick to tell
Dax that one of his missions was a failure given the large amount
of casualties.  Dax, in so many words, tells Saint-Auban that
he is ignorant and that such unfortunate outcomes often occur in
war.  Saint-Auban is next seen in the courtroom as the prosecutor
in the kangaroo court martial.  Here he looks confident, relaxed,
and in his element operating in a rigged system which smears and
destroys people with false charges.  The last time the audience
sees Saint-Auban is when he reads the execution order.  He
looks noticeably uncomfortable getting his hands dirty in the field
and anxious to return to his natural element of serpentine political
betrayal. 

Dr.
Strangelove or:  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Bomb (1964)

The screenplay for Strangelove is an adaptation of Peter
George’s 1958 novel Red
Alert.  Kubrick and comic writer Terry Southern re-worked
George’s serious novel into a black satire that begins with the
Soviets at work on a doomsday machine in the Zhokov Islands. 
After the opening credits the perspective then cuts to Burpelson
Air Force Base and the office of General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling
Hayden).  Ripper phones Colonel Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers)
and informs him that Burpelson is being put on Condition Red. 
Further, Ripper wants Mandrake to transmit Attack Plan R to a wing
of B-52 bombers flying only two hours away from their assigned Russian
surface targets.  Last of all, Ripper orders that all privately
owned radios be confiscated as they could be used to issue instructions
to saboteurs.

Mandrake has no qualms about the general’s orders until he stumbles
on a private radio and finds entire frequency bands broadcasting
music – an impossibility during a nuclear attack.  Mandrake
confronts Ripper who then reveals that he unilaterally ordered the
attack so that once the U.S. President and Joint Chiefs realize
they can’t recall the 843rd bomber wing, they’ll have to completely
commit to a war with the Soviets.  Mandrake is horrified but
can’t recall the wing because only Ripper knows the three-letter
code that will bring it back.  He remains in Ripper’s company
to see if he can get Ripper to reveal the code. 

Meanwhile at the Pentagon, President Merken Muffley (Peter Sellers)
and General "Buck" Turgidson (George C. Scott) agonize
about how to stop the wing attack.  At this juncture the plot
gets interesting.  Turgidson points out that the Attack Plan
R disaster now unfolding was implemented after a squabble started
by a senator trying to paint his opponents as soft on the Soviets. 
Ordinarily, only the president would be allowed to order the use
of nuclear weapons but Plan R allows a lower-level commander to
order their use if the Commander in Chief and top military brass
are eliminated in a surprise enemy attack.  President Muffley
is infuriated at the usurpation of his authority, but Turgidson
points out that it was Muffley himself who approved Plan R without
understanding all its provisions and their ramifications. 
One provision is that once the B-52s move beyond failsafe, to prevent
the enemy from issuing fake recall orders to the planes, the planes
cannot be recalled by any means but a three-letter code known only
by the lower echelon general who ordered Attack Plan R.  In
other words, the current wing can only be recalled by the utterly
mad Ripper.

The two issues deftly explored in Strangelove are the consequences
of militaristic paranoia and the strange love of death and destruction
shared by the defense establishment and its ideological entourage. 
Paranoid delusions about an alleged communist plan to adulterate
the U.S. water supply drive General Ripper mad and motivate him
to implement Plan R.  Plan R in turn was the result of needless
paranoia whipped up by a Senator Buford angling for political advantage
by portraying his opponents as soft on communism.  Militaristic
paranoia is thus interlocking and permutative.  When Soviet
Premier Kissov complains to Muffley that all but one of the thirty-four
planes has been successfully recalled, Turgidson smells "a
big fat commie rat." 

When the War Room at the Pentagon realizes Kissov is right and Soviet
air defense might not completely neutralize Ripper’s attack, Dr.
Strangelove (Peter Sellers, again!) suggests hiding a human colony
deep in a mineshaft away from harmful radiation for 100 years. 
The idea seems promising until paranoia rears its ugly head yet
again.  Turgidson wonders about the Russians secretly saving
a bomb to ensure their military dominance after 100 years in hiding. 
Another general speculates that the evil Russkies wouldn’t need
to wait:  they’d detonate the bomb to take over U.S. mineshaft
space immediately, and on and on.  The Soviets are paranoid
as well:  they construct the doomsday machine because they
hear (wrongly) that the U.S. is working on one.  Soviet ambassador
de Sadesky (Peter Bull) takes secret photos of the War Room twice
in the film.      

The
strange love of killing and destruction is a theme deserving of
much exploration.  The "love of the bomb" referred
to in the movie’s subtitle is embraced by some strange men indeed. 
Ripper admits to acquiring his current state of madness during the
act of sex when after climax he felt a sense of fatigue and emptiness. 
Instead of examining his guilt in light of his immoral fornication,
he concludes that the real problem is a "loss of essence." 
The solution?  He pursues women but denies them his essence. 
He is thus barren and married only to the defense establishment,
curiously comparing the surrendering soldiers at Burpelson to his
non-existent "children."  Turgidson is much the same. 
He would rather make war than love, unthinkably leaving the randy
and ready knockout beauty Miss Scott alone at 3:00 a.m. in favor
of work in the War Room at the Pentagon. 

Of
all the war eunuchs, Strangelove is the most barren.  He is
a synthesis of man and machine, moving around on wheels, suppressing
the tendencies of his wayward mechanical right arm.  Like Ripper
and Turgidson he is paradoxically single but married to the fantasy
of world domination.  The specifics of his mineshaft-colony
proposal echo Nazi eugenics and while he relates his plan he repeatedly
suppresses his tendencies to give Muffley a Nazi salute and call
him mein Fhrer .  Ripper, Turgidson, and Strangelove’s
vision is the antithesis of life-affirming conventional love leading
to the fusion of organic sperm and egg.  Their love is the
strange one leading to the fusion of inorganic atoms paving the
way to universal death and destruction.  Further, the perverse
love isomorphism is backward with its post- as opposed to pre-conception
climax. 

Strangelove, while a great and undoubtedly classic film,
is definitely one of Kubrick’s weaker outings.  The sexual
innuendo gets cloying at times:  the copulative midair refueling
of the B-52 to the tune of "Try a Little Tenderness,"
the pursuant brief cut to the phallic nose needle on the military
jet, Turgidson wanting to fully commit to Ripper’s attack to catch
the Russians with their "pants down," the many character
names that serve as sexual references (Muffley, de Sadesky, Turgidson,
Mandrake).  The film’s slapstick is too subtle to make it a
consistently effective comedy, but not subtle enough to make it
a credible warning about the adverse consequences of megalomania
and paranoia in high places.  Even in spite of these significant
weaknesses, it is still a superb work of art.  It is beautifully
photographed in black-and-white film and its many Cold War anachronisms
haven’t stopped many Generation Yers from appreciating it. 
For a Saturday-night rental with a girlfriend or wife, it beats
the other two films in this review hands down.

Full
Metal Jacket (1987)

Full
Metal Jacket is Kubrick’s adaptation of Gustav Hasford’s 1979
novel The Short-Timers.  In this film Kubrick’s commentary
on war is conveyed primarily through two devices:  duality
and paradox.  The film opens with new recruits getting their
heads shaved.  The head shaving is both a peeling away of a
first layer of humanity and a shearing of young sheep for slaughter. 
Next comes one of the most unforgettable acting performances in
the history of war film.  Gunnery sergeant Hartman (R. Lee
Ermey) introduces the new Paris Island recruits to the Marine Corps
with a vulgar, degrading, and obscenity-laced tirade.  Here
Kubrick brilliantly conveys his message through situational irony. 
The austere and immaculate barracks are a direct contrast to the
ornately foul-mouthed Hartman.  The barracks are dimly lit
only by rays of sunlight streaming in through their windows, creating
the feel of a mental ward.  The pillars and blood-red floor
evoke the atavistic madness of the Overlook Hotel in Kubrick’s earlier
film The Shining.  Hartman tells the young recruits
that he will make them "ministers of death praying for war."      

The "eight-week college for the phony tough and crazy brave"
is a steady process of dehumanization and transformation of the
young recruits into unreflective, cold-blooded killers.  The
paradoxes continue with the privates marching in meticulously neat
and carefully spaced formations while mindlessly repeating Hartman’s
crude, juvenile, and sexually vulgar chants.  Kubrick frames
the contradictions of these day sequences under a glazed and empty
azure sky – the eye of a catatonic stare suggesting the universality
of the crazed vision of war.  This universal vision is an archetype
of the Jungian collective unconscious in its struggle against its
dual and sometimes resistive personal unconscious.  The struggle
inside the Jungian dual can be seen throughout the movie before
being alluded to by Private Joker (Matthew Modine) in Act III. 
That night the apprenticing ministers of war robotically recite
"My Rifle:  The Creed of a U.S. Marine" in the manner
of the Lord’s Prayer. 

Act I is the story of Private Joker’s survival of boot camp and
the fall of Private Leonard Lawrence (Vincent D’Onofrio). 
Lawrence is naive, myopic, unworldly, and clumsy.  He runs
afoul of Hartman on his first day on Paris Island.  Hartman
re-names him "Private Gomer Pyle" and rides him mercilessly
for his mistakes.  During a drill "Pyle" puts his
rifle on the wrong shoulder.  Hartman slaps him.  Pyle
certainly knows his right from his left, but the true battle is
between the dual of his personal innocence and the primordial collective
proclivity for war.  Pyle is next seen walking behind formation
sucking his thumb with his pants pulled down to his ankles and his
underwear showing; another humiliation for a miscue.  Early
the next day Hartman yells at Pyle for not holding his rifle four
inches from his chest.  The recruits cheer as Private Snowball
(Peter Edmund) beats Pyle to a pulp with a pugil stick. 

Pyle is as inept as can be in scaling obstacles and Hartman mercilessly
berates him.  Hartman then decides to punish the platoon for
each of Pyle’s future mistakes and, having to do dozens of push-ups
for every one of Pyle’s blunders, the platoon quickly turns against
Pyle.  One night the recruits pin Pyle in his bed and viciously
pelt him with bars of soap.  Private Joker pelts Pyle longer
and harder than anyone else.  Pyle finally cracks, making no
further mistakes but now talking to himself and looking like
a dazed, rabid dog on the drill fields.  Broken of all his
humanity, the last night on the Island Pyle tells Joker he’s in
a "world of s—" before fatally shooting Hartman and
then himself.  Pyle’s statement about the world is dual in
meaning, referring to both the personal and metaphysical. 

Act
II begins in Da Nang, Vietnam to the tune of Nancy Sinatra’s "These
Boots are Made for Walking."  There’s of course duality
here too, as both the U.S. troops and their Vietnamese hosts take
turns walking on each other.  A prostitute propositions Joker
and Private Rafterman (Kevyn Major Howard).  Rafterman takes
her picture and immediately a Vietnamese youth grabs his camera,
turns to mockingly execute a few Bruce Lee karate moves into the
air, and then flees on a motorcycle.  Rafterman says to Joker,
"You know
what really pisses me off about these people?  We’re supposed
to be helping them and they s— all over us every chance they get. 
I just can’t feature that."  The cynical Private Joker
explains it’s "just business" (as the un-winnable war
is a "private joke").  Not much cynicism finds its
way into the Stars and Stripes, the spinning newspaper where
Joker and Rafterman work.  Joker’s editor explains that only
two types of stories run in the Stars and Stripes: 
stories where "[g]runts give half their pay to buy gooks toothbrushes
and deodorants…and combat action that results in a kill." 
Stories that don’t fit inside these parameters are ignored or altered
to fit them.

Act
III is where Kubrick makes his most pointed statements about war. 
Joker and Rafterman are sent to Phu Bai after the NVA advance on
Hue.  They get on a CH-34 copter where Rafterman gags in sickness
and Joker watches the copter door gunner fire automatic bursts from
an M-60 rifle into what seems like empty countryside below. 
However, empty countryside is what lies below in front of
the copter, where the camera is initially fixed.  After some
delay, Kubrick then brilliantly has the camera quickly cut level
clockwise over to the gunner’s perspective.  It turns out that
the gunner is shooting at Vietnamese civilians below who are frantically
scrambling to avoid his fire.  The gunner brags that he’s killed
"157 gooks and 50 water buffalo:"

Joker: 
Any women or children?
Door Gunner:  Sometimes.
Joker:  How can you shoot women and children?
Door Gunner:  Easy.  You just don’t lead ‘em so much. 
[Laughs]  Ain’t war hell?
     
Here Anton Furst’s otherwise excellent production design gets a
little sloppy, as the CH-34s look a little too clean and newly painted. 
At a mass grave of 20 dead Vietnamese a colonel approaches Joker
and one of the best interlocutions in the film ensues:

Colonel:  Marine, what is that button on your body armor?
Joker:  A peace symbol, sir.
Colonel:  Where did you get it?
Joker:  I don’t remember sir.
Colonel:  What is that you’ve got written on your helmet?
Joker:  "Born to Kill," sir.
Colonel:  You write "Born to Kill" on your helmet
and you wear a peace button.  What’s that supposed to be, some
kind of sick joke?
Joker:  No sir.
Colonel:  What is it supposed to mean?
Joker:  I don’t know, sir.
Colonel:  You don’t know very much, do you? 
Joker:  No sir.
Colonel:  You better get your head and your a– wired together
or I will take a giant s— on you.
Joker:  Yes, sir.
Colonel:  Now answer my question or you’ll be standing tall
before the man. 
Joker:  I think I was trying to suggest something about the
duality of man, sir.
Colonel:  The what?
Joker:  The duality of man, the Jungian thing, sir.
Colonel:  Whose side are you on son?
Joker:  Our side, sir.
Colonel:  Don’t you love your country?
Joker:  Yes, sir.
Colonel:  How about getting with the program?  Why don’t
you jump on the team and c’mon in for the big win?
Joker:  Yes, sir.
Colonel:  Son, all I’ve ever asked of my Marines is for them
to obey my orders as they would the word of God.  We are here
to help the Vietnamese because inside every gook there is an American
trying to get out.  It’s a hardball world, son.  We’ve
got to try to keep our heads until this peace craze blows over.

In Phu Bai, Joker and Rafterman join a squad whose members are interviewed
on camera by a news reporter.  The theme of Vietnamese ingratitude
reappears when a black private states, "We’re getting killed
for these people and they don’t appreciate it.  They think
it’s a big joke.  We’re shooting the wrong gooks." 
The best line of course goes to Joker:  "I wanted to see
exotic Vietnam, the jewel of Southeast Asia.  I wanted to meet
interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture and kill
them."

So
far Joker’s intelligence, smugness, and cynicism have been effective
in keeping Hartman’s indoctrination and the encroaching war madness
at bay.  He has survived boot camp, avoided an infantry assignment,
and gone to work in the clean and orderly world of Stars and
Stripes.  His insularity from the collective unconscious
and its war madness, though, is eventually broken.  In Hue
City, after three members of his squad are picked off by a VC sniper,
the squad hunts down the sniper who turns out to be a young Vietnamese
girl.  The wounded girl begs the squad members watching her
die to shoot her out of her misery.  Joker obliges by shooting
her in the face.  He has now met his rite of passage, crossing
over from ambivalent peacenik to cold killer. 

The
final scene of the movie is Kubrick’s visual brilliance at its best. 
Joker’s squad approaches the Perfume River among formations of other
marching troops singing the theme from the Mickey Mouse Club. 
They march lockstep in neat, perfectly spaced formations among row
after row of flaming buildings.  Around them the entire set
looks like a fiery plane of Hell.  The movie ends with Joker
echoing Private Lawrence’s last words:  "In short, I am
in a world of s—, yes, but I am alive and I am not afraid." 
Unlike Private Lawrence, Joker survives the breaking of his individuality
and absorption into the collective archetype of war madness. 
His futile resistance was Kubrick’s "private joke" all
along.

March
7, 2003

Drs.
Dale Steinreich and Rod Oglesby [send
them mail] are professors of business and contributors
to the investment advisory AgainstTheCrowd.com.

Many LRC writers have done a good job at pointing out how many international
problems currently finding their way to the U.S. doorstep are actually
the result of what is known as blowback (the law of unintended consequences
applied to foreign policy).  While the valuable lessons of
foreign-policy blowback remain as foreign as ever to Beltway elites,
their small culpability in the recent sniper attacks is sure to
escape their notice as well.  Let’s connect some dots.  

There’s more than a little irony in the disgust of career politicians,
bureaucrats, and law enforcement officials in their reaction to
the grotesque damage being wrought by the .223-caliber bullets that
have hit seven civilians in the sniper attacks (so far).  Once
upon a time in the early 1960s, the military-industrial complex
centered in Washington D.C. was the very institution that initiated
the practice of using relatively small, high-speed projectiles (like
the .223-caliber bullet) in infantry small arms. 

The embodiment of this initiative was the Colt AR-15 (later M-16),
which came of age and was first widely used by U.S. infantry in
the Vietnam Conflict.  It was developed from prototypes created
by small-arms designer Eugene
Stoner while he was employed at the Armalite
Corporation.  Previous infantry issue (the M-1 Garand prominent
in World War II, the M-1 Carbine, and the M-14 prominent in Korea
to name a few examples) fired relatively large, .30-caliber full-metal-jacket
bullets which (under "humane" conventions of war–the
oxymoron!) entered tissue and exited with relatively moderate damage
provided that vital organ areas were not closely broached. 
[Use of soft lead or hollow-point bullets that were designed to
hit a target, greatly expand, and rip away ounces to pounds of bone,
tissue, and internal organs was (and still is) largely avoided and
has been since international agreements at the Hague in 1899 and
1907, though these have recently been undermined by 1985, 1990,
and 1993 opinions of U.S. armed forces judge advocates general. 
See here
for a debunking of some common gun myths.] 

This all changed with the production, distribution, and infantry
use of Mr. Stoner’s Black Rifle.  As a standard, it was hated
by many troops in Vietnam.  The small, speedy bullets (muzzle
velocity approx. 3300 fps for a 55-grain bullet) bounced off of
the thick vegetation of the Vietnam jungles.  The silly looking
rifle with the built-in carrying handle and toyish, elongated plastic
hand guard was contemptuously dubbed the Mattel Special and the
Boy Scout Blaster by troops for its poor performance in hitting
Viet Cong hiding in thick undergrowth.  Thus some troops left
their Mattel Specials in the undergrowth and used old M-14s left
over from Korea or AK-47s captured from the Viet Cong.

The
military establishment stuck with the .223 round.  Though problematic
in thick jungle conditions, it was useful in open field (snow to
desert) and some urban conditions in that it was very accurate,
but better yet, when it hit human targets it tumbled forward into
tissue and shattered creating
large, internal wounds.  This was confirmed in later tests
on special gels that simulated the consistency of human tissue. 
Another "nice touch" was that the bullet would sometimes
ricochet off bone and bounce around inside the body, shattering
in tiny hard-to-remove fragments (which promoted internal bleeding)
and ripping sizable hunks of internal tissue away (for good measure). 
 

Thus what was nominally a full-metal-jacket bullet had in effect
roughly the same destructive capability as some hollow- or soft-point
bullets.  The letter of the Hague agreements (at least until
1985) was technically followed although the spirit of the agreements
seemed to have been violated. 

With the U.S. leading the way, it was only time before the rest
of the world followed.  Inspired by the .223 (or 5.56 x 45mm),
the Soviets converted their famed AK-47
in 1974 from the 7.62 x 39 mm. round to the 5.45 x 39.  The
new rifle became known as the AK-74. 
The Germans (Heckler and Koch HK-93
rifle), British (L85
bullpup), Austrians (Steyr AUG),
Italians (AR-70),
and Israelis (Galil)
all later jumped on board as well.  The militarization of what
was essentially a varmint hunting round was now complete. 

Actually, the .223′s use as a varmint round can be said to be more
"humane" (cringe!) than its use as a military round. 
A prairie dog or ground hog is ripped apart and dies quickly. 
A human being can die a slow and horrible death from internal bleeding. 
According to Bob
Tuley:

For a little
bullet, the 5.56 bullet produces quite dramatic wounds.   While
the traditional 30-06 caliber bullet of the M1 Garand and 7.62 bullet
of the M14 rifle would immediately knock a man down, the 5.56 bullet
instead enters the body, quickly turns sideways after passing through
only 4" of flesh, then breaks in two major pieces, as well
as many smaller fragments.  During the Vietnam War, soldiers
reported that shooting an enemy soldier with the M16 did not kill
as quickly as the old 30 caliber weapons. Instead soldiers would
follow a massive trail a blood a few feet away from where the enemy
soldier had been hit to find him dead from massive blood loss.

The fragmentation capacity of the.223 round was seen in the Beltway
sniper’s second most recent victim, a thirteen-year-old boy. 
Surgeons usually don’t attempt to dig out the tiny bullet fragments,
as invasive surgery can produce even more damage to the body’s vital
internal structures.  Thus surgeons attempted and were successful
in removing fragments from the recent boy victim to help further
the current investigation.     

It would be the height of absurdity to speculate that the current
Beltway sniper would be using more "humane" ammunition
in the absence of the .223.  But there’s no doubt that part
of the Beltway played a large role in standardizing the international
use of this horrible round against human targets and that the Beltway
sniper has at least partly learned by example.  In fact, his
delusion that he is "God" is eerily familiar (in deed
if not rhetoric) to many seasoned and perpetually wary Beltway watchers. 

(Also familiar is the blatantly uninformed to biased news coverage. 
An "assault rifle" is a fully-automatic weapon. 
Chances that the sniper is using such a weapon are close to nil
since such weapons have been so highly restricted as to be de
facto illegal since the passage of the National Firearms Act
of 1934.  Nevertheless, the technically misleading term "assault
weapon" has been ubiquitous in current news reporting of the
incidents just as it was during the debate over the Omnibus Crime
Bill of 1994.)   

So the .223 round (like our former allies the Taliban, Osama bin
Laden, and Saddam Hussein – we can really pick ‘em can’t we?!)
is just another tool that has come back to haunt us.  Let’s
pray the evil Beltway killer is quickly nabbed and that Beltway
elites decide to quit playing God with us and the rest of the world.
 

October
11, 2002

Dale
Steinreich [send him mail]
is an adjunct scholar
of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a consultant to the investment
advisory AgainstTheCrowd.com.

Downey’s
struggle with drug addiction is anything but new. His run-ins with
the law began on June 23, 1996, when he was stopped for speeding
and police found cocaine and heroin in his vehicle. A month later
neighbors were shocked to come home one day and find Downey inside
their house, passed out on their child’s bed. Three days after that
he was arrested for leaving a drug rehab center. In August 1999
he was sentenced to three years in California State Prison for missing
drug tests that were a condition of his probation. He was released
August 2, 2000, on $5,000 bail by a California court for showing
promising progress in drug rehab. His most recent arrest comes a
little less than four months since his August release.

Downey,
who won an Oscar nomination for his work in the 1992 film Chaplin,
was in the middle of a promising comeback. Not only did he land
a recurring role on the popular comedy Ally McBeal, he was
also set to star in a January 2001 Los Angeles stage run of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet directed by Mel Gibson. Actor Merv Griffin, the owner
of the resort where Downey was arrested, has thrown his support
to the young actor to keep him from being returned to prison.

Griffin
has Downey’s best interest at heart. Incarceration, where Downey
can be raped and beaten by actual criminals, is inhumane and has
totally failed to wean Downey from his drug addiction. Downey complained
to a bail bondsman after his most recent arrest that he had been
working 16- and 18-hour days on Ally McBeal and had been
under a lot of pressure. This suggests that Downey is having problems
managing stress and that treatment and counseling is what he really
needs instead of further incarceration. But given the current system,
it seems unlikely that he’ll avoid more prison time.

The
Downey arrest, dismaying as it is, comes amid other disturbing stories
in the news about drug use. It seems that a booming market in drugs
has broken out among 8-year-olds on America’s playgrounds. New York
correspondent James Bone of The Times of London reported
on November 28 that American public schools have mass-drugged children
with Ritalin since the early 1990s to the point where use of the
drug has jumped an astonishing 7 times to a total of 2 million users.
Accompanying the spread of Ritalin through American public schools
has been the development of a huge illegal market in the drug among
the jungle-gym set.

The
Ritalin pills, known to kids as "smarties," are traded
for Pokemon cards, Britney Spears CDs, Beanie Babies, or cash. The
cash price ranges from $2-$20 a pill. Users take the pills and crush
them either for snorting or injection and describe their pharmacological
effect as equivalent to anything from a strong caffeine jolt to
a subdued cocaine-type high.

Supply
to this market comes from children who are prescribed the drug but
don’t take it, preferring to sell their pills. A third of school
children prescribed Ritalin in Wisconsin and Minnesota were offered
money for their pills. Two children prescribed Ritalin in Chicago
had to change schools after being viciously harassed by other children
for not illegally selling their pills. The Drug Enforcement Administration
has found that as much as 50% of teens in drug rehab centers in
Indiana, South Carolina, and Wisconsin have used Ritalin to get
high.

As
if this wasn’t bad enough news for the Drug Warriors, a survey released
by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (PDFA) on November 27
shows that although teens are using less marijuana, the use of the
synthetic hallucinogen Ecstasy has more than doubled in 5 years.
A closer look at the study reveals that the rosy picture PDFA paints
about the marijuana trend is no more than spin. About 33% of respondents
had used marijuana in the past year as opposed to 36% three years
ago. About 21% had used the drug in the previous month as opposed
to 24% three years ago.

This
three-year decline is not, contrary to PDFA spin, indicative of
any long-sustaining trend, especially given the survey’s 1.5 percentage
point margin of error. PDFA also tries to minimize the Ecstasy trend
as a temporary "trial-use" fad like earlier trial-use
fads involving cocaine, LSD, and heroin.

All
this admission does is highlight the fact that the War on Drugs,
by selectively focusing on some substances to the exclusion of myriad
others, has unwittingly created a revolving and dangerous black-market
smorgasbord of choices, none of which would likely be very attractive
to potential users in its absence.

"Huffers"
buy spray paint and paint thinner from hardware stores and inhale
the toxic fumes, which can induce cardiac arrest. "Ravers,"
along with Ecstasy, buy nitrous-oxide containers and empty the contents
into balloons for quick inhalation. These "whip-its" have
caused some users to suffer blackouts and irreversible brain damage.

High
schoolers buy bottles of Robitussin from drugstores and get "buzzed"
by quickly gulping down the contents. More natural types comb fields
and forests for mushrooms and jimsonweed. The mushrooms and jimson
seeds are soaked in water to make hallucinogenic teas. Many deaths
have occurred from poisonous concoctions produced when the wrong
plants have been selected or the teas improperly made.

The
doctor’s office has been an increasingly popular place for procuring
recreational drugs. One man in my town used to be pulled over by
police for his erratic driving on the road. When police found marijuana
and heroine in his vehicle, he was quickly arrested and taken to
jail. It was only after a couple of these episodes that the man
smartened up. Faking a back injury and "horrible pain,"
he now receives regular prescriptions and liberal refills of oxy-
and hydrocodone from his doctor.

These
legal narcotics more than do the job for this man in terms of producing
a high. Nowadays, when police pull him over and see his prescription
bottles, they respectfully tell him to "please be more careful"
and send him on his way. To see the blatant inconsistency of our
"drug" laws, change the pill bottles to beer bottles and
put a whiff of alcohol on the man’s breath and the man gets arrested.
Letting him float along in a hydrocodone-induced stupor is apparently
okay. Apparently some downers are more politically incorrect than
others.

I’ve
never abused one of these substances and I think the people mentioned
above probably have some pretty shallow lives. But I also think
that a nation which turns 8-year-olds into playground Ritalin dealers
has no moral authority to continue incarcerating Robert Downey,
Jr.

Incarceration
is a particularly brutal punishment for a man introduced to drugs
at age 12 by his own father. When he ends up passed out in other
people’s homes, he should be held accountable. But when he, like
millions of other non-violent drug offenders, neither trespasses
on others’ property nor otherwise infringes on others’ rights, and
wants to continue using drugs, then he should be reminded of the
consequences and allowed to proceed at his own risk. By some reports,
he has already been warned enough about the risks of his behavior
by his friends.

Conservatives
such as William Bennett and Cal Thomas who believe that, given enough
money, they can win the War on Drugs must be resisted every bit
as much as the liberals who believe they can win the War on Poverty
by throwing seemingly limitless amounts of money at the poor. They
can’t even keep recreational drugs out of maximum-security prisons.
Bennett and Thomas’s desire to turn the entire US into one large
"drug-free" prison will fail. It will only further empower
the wiretapping, voyeuristic class of federal predators attenuating
our civil liberties while doing nothing to help nonviolent substance
abusers such as Downey.

December
30, 2000

Dale
Steinreich, PhD, is a consulting economist. He
is also a regular contributor to AgainstTheCrowd.com.

The
O'Reilly Factor

Bill
O'Reilly can be one of the most irritating people in the world.
A good example was in late December 1999 when at the end of his
nightly show on the Fox News Channel, The O'Reilly Factor,
he decided to commemorate the approach of the year 2000 by naming
Franklin Delano Roosevelt "Man of the Century." Time
magazine had considered it, but somewhat more wisely chose Albert
Einstein instead. O'Reilly should have been brighter than the editors
of Time. What gave? It turns out, nothing.

After
the broadcast I e-mailed him and to my great surprise the next night
(December 29, 1999) he read a portion of my letter on the air:

"Your
selection of FDR as u2018Hero of the Century' was astoundingly ignorant
and misguided. FDR did NOT save the nation from the Great Depression.
The number of workers unemployed when he was elected in Nov. 1932
was 11.4 million. The number unemployed in May 1938 (after $17 billion
of failed government spending) was 11.8 million."

I
wrote more of course, mentioning the havoc Social Security will
visit on today's young generation and FDR's internment of 100,000
Japanese Americans, but that's all O'Reilly saw fit to air. O'Reilly
replied that my view was "narrow" and then asserted that
FDR brought "calm" to the country after the stock market
crash, "took the country off of the gold standard," and
showed leadership in steering the country through the Great Depression.
Even if those achievements were true – except for the claim about
the gold standard, they're nostalgic fantasy – I'm still puzzled as
to how FDR, the man who appointed an ex-Klansman to the Supreme
Court and imprisoned 100,000 Japanese Americans from 1942-45, can
be given a hero's status by anyone.

This
is the problem with O'Reilly. If you're looking for a consistent
political philosophy from him, you're not going to get it from his
show or this book by the same name. But like his show, what you
will get from his book are many poignant observations and an entertaining
read.

The
first third of the book is concerned with the socioeconomic factors
(no pun intended) that O'Reilly believes are central to an individual's
life in 21st-Century America. The next fifth of the book
is comprised of O'Reilly's views of, and advice on, relationships
with friends and family members. The last half of the book constitutes
O'Reilly's thoughts on various social and cultural phenomena as
well as his lists of the "Good, Bad, and Ridiculous" things
and people in American culture, past and present.

The
book's target audience is unquestionably people who are familiar
with O'Reilly's show on Fox. Each chapter is divided into subdivisions
that match those used on his TV show: "Ridiculous Note,"
"Talking Point," "Viewer Time-Out," "Bulletin,"
and "This Just In." Paragraphs constituting different
trains of thought inside these subdivisions are separated with a
small TV icon. So many subdivisions are superfluous and become annoying
after a while. Books and television shows are different media and
conventions effective on TV aren't necessarily effective, or even
appropriate in books. Even so, O'Reilly's material is still interesting
and the big plus is that it isn't another regurgitation of material
already covered on his show. This was the eminent flaw of Rush Limbaugh's
first book outing, The
Way Things Ought to Be, a tome filled with material already
worn to pieces on his radio show.

In
the first six chapters Mr. No Spin Zone spins his theory of the
socioeconomic structure of American life. What emerges is not novel,
just pedestrian populism. O'Reilly's Fox-slogan effort to be "fair
and balanced" carries over to his book. He's not a conservative,
liberal, or libertarian because he believes that "the truth
doesn't have labels." (So how can O'Reilly's worldview then
be designated as "truth?"). Thus O'Reilly immediately
runs afoul of the Veblenian contradiction: denigrating taxonomy
only to build his socioeconomic theory around a very simplistic
one.

O'Reilly
tells us that it is "essential that we all look at American
life the way it really is today. If we don't…we're gonna
lose the battles to the frauds, fools, and thieves…" Ironic
in that he next asserts that the central unfairness of American
society stems from its rigid class structure. He then makes the
eyebrow-raising claim that "[p]oliticians don't usually talk
about class." (One wonders where O'Reilly was on Super Tuesday
1992 when Bill Clinton, with a black infant cradled in his arms,
walked the streets of New Orleans promising to get even with "the
rich who didn't pay their fair share in the 1980s." This is
the same man who just pardoned an international fugitive who owed
Uncle Sam more than $40 million in taxes.)

The
effort to bury class importance – at least to O'Reilly – is huge: not
only involving politicians but advertisers and the rich themselves.
Being quite hyperbolic, O'Reilly writes that class "is the
bottom line, in a way, for every problem I talk about in this book."
Then, in his annoyingly persistent attempt to be "fair and
balanced," he follows this subtle egalitarian cheerleading
with the surprising inference that elite attitudes are the source
of "unfair tax laws, government indifference about our terrible
drug problem, or what kind of entertainment" Hollywood puts
out. He adds that elite attitudes also contribute to lax enforcement
of drunk-driving laws and more gun controls which punish law-abiding
citizens. True, but these are hardly ever conclusions reached by
almost all social analysts who believe with O'Reilly that class
is "the bottom line" of most of America's problems. You
can almost hear the Brookings Bolsheviks hissing. Their tack is
to emphasize class differences in order to argue for wealth redistribution,
something O'Reilly largely opposes along with the current tax burden
which he deems oppressive. But he strangely emphasizes class differences
as a eminent problem of American life and offers no solution. This
begs the question of whether class differences are really as problematic
as O'Reilly claims they are. O'Reilly doesn't like the fact that
while he was a student at Marist College, women wanted to date men
from Princeton and Cornell. O'Reilly's childhood friends still live
in Levittown, NY where he grew up. He wonders how many of them would
have been much happier to go to elite schools such as Harvard and
Yale and become physicians and architects.

O'Reilly,
The Great Contradicter, can of course be counted on to undercut
his own thesis. He discusses Jacqueline Kennedy's thrill at discovering
S&H green stamps from a White House employee and buying items
left and right to get the stamps in order to trade them for "free"
goods. He also mentions Sean "Puffy" Combs who hosts parties
at his Hamptons home for the likes of Martha Stewart. "Puffy,"
you'll recall, was recently indicted on charges stemming from a
nightclub shooting. Last of all O'Reilly, Mr. Working Class from
Levittown, discusses his own stint at Harvard's Kennedy School of
Government where he undertook postgraduate study. If class structure
is really so rigid, how did Mr. Levittown get to Harvard? Or has
O'Reilly become a member of that elite he now denounces?

O'Reilly
mentions that many of his Harvard acquaintances were nice and well
intentioned. In fact, many were studying politics to help others,
but they were "generally clueless about the lives…of working-class
Americans." This would be a great theme to develop: the dangers
of single, young, clueless ivy-league wonks making social policy
for a world with which they never interact. But alas, O'Reilly isn't
the one to make it, leaving many crucial stones unturned throughout
his book.

O'Reilly
can hit the nail on the head, but it is brief and incidental. He
points out that federal, state, and local governments are part of
the American system that fight to keep Americans' hard-earned money
away from them. He points out the absurdity of a man he saw on the
Phil Donahue Show some years ago demanding that taxpayers
not pay for wasteful programs but that the government pay for it
instead. "Have we got a problem in communication here?"
O'Reilly asks.

O'Reilly's
prescriptions on sex are thoroughly modern and in strong contradiction
to his strict Catholic upbringing. One of the book's surprises is
the revelation that he is definitely no social conservative, as
most viewers of his TV show might falsely conclude. Abstinence is
"intrustive and ridiculous…Use protection. Make dead sure
that no one else is going to be hurt by this encounter. Respect
your partner before and after." How nice. Sounds just like
Planned Parenthood. He also has a message for "religious fanatics"
(read: genuine Catholics, unlike himself): Scripture is not a reliable
guide to sexual morality because it condones slavery. Huh? I've
never understood the basis of this bizarrely prevalent view. How
anyone could read 1 Cor 7:21 or understand the context of the book
of Philemon and conclude that the Bible endorses slavery is beyond
me.

O'Reilly
observes that "anyone who wants to buy illegal drugs can find
them, as the authorities freely admit." He points out that
getting drunk or high is a cheap fix for dealing with the challenges
of life, hence it's especially attractive. Having unknowingly undermined
the case for restrictions on both supply and demand, he then
proceeds to support the War or Drugs with the same old specious
arguments peddled by Rush Limbaugh. Abusers hurt other people. He
backs this up with a "child abuse agency" statistic which
claims that 75% of all physical abuse against children is committed
by drunken adults. Also, unwanted pregnancies occur and STDs are
spread when people are too drunk to remember to use protection.
O'Reilly claims that legalization failed in "Needle Park"
in Zurich, Switzerland. Last of all, the law is a moral instructor.
If drugs are legal, that sends the message that drug use is okay.

Disregarding
the surely-cooked 75% figure, the rise in unwanted pregnancies and
the spread of STDs correlate not so much to do with alcohol (re-legalized
since 1933) as they do with the beginning of the Sexual Revolution
and the introduction of "morally neutral" sex-ed programs
in the public schools. The perennial "Needle Park" argument
is full of holes as to be laughable. Imagine drugs being legalized
tomorrow, but only in Peoria, Illinois; Peoria becomes the only
legal oasis of hard-drug consumption in North America. It's easy
to imagine how the town would be quickly overrun with the worst
druggies from all over the North American continent. The same thing
happened in "Needle Park" with respect to Europe. As for
the law being a moral instructor, the effectiveness of laws hinges
crucially on the strength of a society's moral consensus. When the
law has to be used to reinforce morality (as opposed to vice versa),
society is in trouble – and ours indeed is.

O'Reilly's
magic bullet to the drug problem? Prison rehab. Since the percentage
of addicts has remained stable over the previous decade, huge inroads
could be made by seizing these people in all 50 states and committing
them to forced rehab for at least a year. This would also do tremendous
financial damage to drug suppliers. Here's O'Reilly's dandy proposal
for just cokers: "Some 7 million Americans buy a total of 331
tons of cocaine each year…[t]ake half of these users off the streets
and place them in forced rehab, and the U.S. coke market would collapse.
You can count on it."

O'Reilly's
empirical basis for believing his plan would work comes from a program
in Alabama. Arrestees are drug tested. If the offender is convicted,
he/she has two choices in terms of prison sentence: a shorter sentence
in prison rehab or a lengthier one among the general prison population.
Unsurprisingly, more than 90% of convicted offenders choose rehab.
Those who have served their time and are released have to still
submit to years of drug testing. If they refuse or test positive,
they go back to prison.

As
an Alabamian, I'm puzzled as to what O'Reilly sees in this program.
O'Reilly glows that of the 5,000 enrollees, twice as many stay off
drugs after release than those who choose the normal prison route.
But the sample size is too small from which to draw any firm and
lasting conclusions. Novice users can be weened much more easily
than seasoned veterans like the Robert Downey Jrs. The statistics
don't contain these breakdowns. Drug tests remain beatable, as workers
submit their children's urine for tests.

Even
if the figures are accurate, they hardly mean anything – the inference
that a national program would produce the same results is the classic
fallacy of composition. Alabama is a mostly rural state with a relatively
undiverse and small population. As the policy is nationalized, the
system is confronted with hundreds of thousands of harder cases
who are intent on gaming the system. Given that drugs have been
impossible to keep out of ordinary prisons, how would they be kept
out of prison rehabs? These questions don't even begin to broach
the outrageous infringement of civil liberties this Maoist policy
portends.

O'Reilly
admits to having no solution with regard to alcohol. Here it becomes
obvious to the more careful reader that his analysis heretofore
is guilty of conflating what he truly believes are
very different issues. (The 75% child abuse stat he used earlier
dealt with alcoholic intoxication, not highs or lows produced
by other drugs. He also forgets that Alabama's program is aimed
at alcohol as well as drugs.) Running aground of tautology, he says
that alcoholism is a different problem because you can't force people
into treatment that weans them away from a legal product. "[A]lcoholics
can emotionally damage their families and drink themselves to death,
but society can do nothing but watch, unless there's physical abuse
or drunk driving." Since the adverse effects of drug abuse
on innocent bystanders are his rationalization for the drug war,
why isn't the collateral damage caused by alcohol abuse a reason
to return to alcohol prohibition? O'Reilly claims that the vast
majority of Americans are able to use alcohol without abusing it.
Maybe so, but the reality of collateral damage doesn't disappear
one iota even if it occurs among a minority of alcohol abusers (who
in total undoubtedly outnumber other drug abusers). Adultery entails
collateral damage as well: assault and battery, bitter divorce and
custody battles, out-of-wedlock children (Waz up, Jesse J.?), and
jealous homicides. Why not jail adulterers and force them into rehab
at the Jimmy Swaggart Ranch? Don't tell me adultery is that different.
Many people can handle it "without abusing it" (unwanted
pregnancies, their spouse finding out). A deservedly former in-law
of mine carried on a 9-year affair with his secretary before he
was discovered. Again, consistency is not something O'Reilly is
very interested in, especially since it so effectively undermines
his arguments.

Some
other instances of questionable judgement/logic:

Abraham
Lincoln: "A deeply kind human being, he showed his concern
for everyday Americans while trying to lead this country through
its greatest crisis so far." Boy, does this guy have a lot
of real history to learn.

Religion:
"It doesn't matter what you believe – as long as you believe
in something." Of course O'Reilly doesn't believe this.
He talks about getting the creeps during a visit to Victoria Falls
in Zambia, where human sacrifices were regularly thrown into the
falls to appease tribal gods. "I got out of there quick,"
says O'Reilly.

It
might be tempting for some libertarians to write off O'Reilly as
another statist blowhard. That would be a mistake since he is a
very effective critic of the liberal press, both Clintons, Alan
Greenspan, wasteful government spending, high taxation, and Jesse
"Flim Flam" Jackson. He is almost alone in the media calling
for an investigation of Jackson's finances and business organization.
Statist lapses aside, he puts forth a lot of keen cultural observations
that ring very true, such as those on:

Today's
"experts:"

Relationship
guru Barbara DeAngelis, who has made millions from her 8-book series
and Cable TV infomercial Making Love Work, who is now "working"
on her fifth marriage.

The
ridiculous expectations today's women have of marriage:

"…a
big house, late-model cars, and expensive "with-it" clothes,
great sex between hard bodies, varied and healthful foods, separate
space but mutual interests, stimulating conversation that helps
each partner "grow," fun parties and swell vacations,
exceptional children who can be bragged about on social occasions
and at the office…" The source of this nonsense? Cosmopolitan,
Glamour and other popular supermarket checkout rags that delude
women into thinking that they can "have it all" and that
every man who can't provide like a Kennedy is a loser.

The
wasteland of Cable TV:

[On
Nick at Night] Rhoda and Mary are mad at Lou because…Click…

VH-1
wants me to understand why onetime teen idol Leif Garrett is depressed
these days. He must be watching cable. Click…

Lifetime
has brought together a gaggle of women who all hate the fact that
men alway…Click…

MSNBC,
Fox, and CNN are all covering the same tornado in Texas. On all
three channels the same fire chief is looking very grim. I sympathize
but…Click…

Bill
Kurtis [on A&E] is investigating some prisons where prisoners
are not very happy. How does Bill find these stories? Have I lost
my competitive edge? Click…

[Back
to Nick at Night] Richie and the Fonz are mad at Chachi because
…Click…

Garth
Brooks…Click…

Racing
cars…Click…

Fake
wresting…Click…

Connie
Stevens…Help!…

O'Reilly
finishes out his book with his lists of the "Good, Bad, and
Ridiculous" people and institutions of American life. O'Reilly's
choices won't be much of a surprise to people who regularly watch
his show, so I won't tediously enumerate them here. But O'Reilly
has piqued me to name one of my own choices for each of these categories,
and my choices don't overlap with O'Reilly's. Here they are:

The
Good:

John
Candy – an American treasure, this great funnyman and actor
is almost forgotten just a few years after his death. Re-rent Planes,
Trains, and Automobiles or Uncle
Buck to re-experience this great.

The
Bad:

Paul
Krugman – Every profession has its prostitutes, and this man struts
his stuff with the best of the Washington set. His recent New
York Times "article" (really a collection of baseless
claims) blaming the California power debacle on "deregulation"
was an instant bonehead classic. Not the heir apparent to Galbraith
(whose urbanity and wit the one-dimensional Krugman can only equal
with the most vulgar arrogance) but just one more sign of the intellectual
and moral bankruptcy of today's mainstream economics establishment.

The
Ridiculous:

Laura
Schlessinger – I still remember the phone call that put me on to
this contemptible fraud. It was a young teenage boy who asked Dr.
Whore-a if it was okay for him to put a poster of a bikini-clad
woman on his wall. Whore-a denounced him as a sexist pig and hung
up on him. A few days later she had this to say about Wesley Snipes:
"These muscle-bound black men are just sooo hot." So much
for her crusades against "objectification" and the evils
of lust. The idiotic gay movement protested her TV show and caused
many more people to watch it than would have otherwise. Even so,
it still bombed and thankfully will soon be off the air.

If
you're looking for a light, entertaining read O'Reilly's book is
a good candidate. If you'd like to give him a good poke in the eye
for his political inconsistencies, email him this review at oreilly@foxnews.com.
Oh yeah, don't forget your "Name and town! Name and town!"

February
2, 2000

Dale
Steinreich, PhD, is a consulting economist. He
is also a regular contributor to AgainstTheCrowd.com.

Some
background: Miami-Dade’s canvassing board refused to manually recount
its ballots but reversed itself on November 17 because of threats
of legal action by the Gore campaign. The Miami-Dade manual recount
began on November 20. The following night (November 21) the Florida
Supreme Court issued a deadline of 5:00 p.m. Sunday, November 26,
for all manual recounts to be finished. The next morning, Wednesday
November 22, the Miami-Dade canvassing board decided that it did
not have enough time to meet the 5-day Thanksgiving-weekend deadline
for hand counting 654,000 ballots. Instead, it decided it would
hand count only 10,750 votes that had been rejected by voting-counting
machines.

Keep
in mind, there had been controversy about these 10,000 votes. One
Miami-Dade poll worker insisted that these ballots had been discarded
by voters who had been at first confused by the notorious “butterfly”
ballot. These confused voters asked for another ballot, punched
the new ballot correctly, and then left. Meanwhile, the old ballots
were kept, and they accumulated into this pool of 10,000. Hence
counting these double-punched and hanging-chad ballots was not an
enfranchisement of confused voters but a double-counting intended
to favor Al Gore.

Reinforcing
this perception of a rigged process was the further decision by
the Miami-Dade canvassing board to close the manual recount to the
public. In an uncharacteristically courageous fashion, the county
Republican party swung its phone bank into action, calling all their
voters to swarm the Stephen C. Clark Government Center to protest
the venal ruling. The staunchly anti-communist Radio Mambi drummed
up an additional few hundred protesters.

The
last straw for the inchoate junta came when Joe Geller, the chairman
of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, left one of the counting rooms
with a disputed ballot in his pocket and proceeded to move behind
closed doors. He was quickly surrounded by protesters and ordered
to surrender the ballot. Police had to intervene to escort him to
safety.

Upstairs
the real revolution began. The protesters stormed the office of
the Miami-Dade supervisor of elections. It took several minutes
for sheriff’s deputies to restore order, but even they couldn’t
stop the deafening pounding and chanting on the election supervisor’s
doors: “Cheat, Cheat, Cheat, Cheat,…”

The
three members of the canvassing board were then led under heavy
police guard back to the original public recount room from the room
where they were conducting their secret tally for the minions of
Al Gore. They then voted unanimously to stop all further hand counts.
Although the Gore campaign tried to force the Miami-Dade board to
resume a hand count, on Thanksgiving the Florida Supreme Court denied
it. It was a tremendous blow from which the incipient junta could
never recover.

This
local uprising by ordinary citizens backed into a corner by an insatiably
corrupt establishment could be a valuable lesson for America’s gun
owners, the group most loathed and despised by the establishment’s
elite. Particularly backed into a corner are California gun owners.
Under the recently passed law SB23, by December 31, 2000, if Californians
own an “assault weapon,” they have to do one of three things: register
the gun with the California Department of Justice as an “assault
weapon,” sell the gun(s) to out-of-state buyer(s), or physically
remove the gun(s) from the State of California. For “assault weapon”
owners, failure to pursue one of these options is a felony offense.

Of
course SB23 is just another chapter in the campaign against semi-automatic
rifles. It was begun in January 1989 by George Bush Sr. who banned
imports of semi-automatics after a school shooting in Stockton,
California. The second major chapter was written under Bill Clinton
in Title XI of the Omnibus Crime Act of 1994, banning further production
of “assault weapons.” Gun producers found a way around the law by
manufacturing guns with American-made receivers and imported parts
sets. The price of semi-automatic rifles dropped precipitously,
with AK-47s selling for just $286.00, down from $800-$1,200 in 1994.
On August 18, 2000, a legal committee at the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, and Firearms put an end to this by forbidding further importation
of parts sets.

The
next chapter in the war on the semi-automatic rifle will likely
be written by either George W. Bush or Al Gore since neither of
them has an ounce of respect for the Second Amendment. George W.
Bush is in favor of banning importation of foreign-made, high-capacity
magazines. Al Gore, while mouthing a phony respect for hunters’
rights, would nationalize SB23. SB23 is only Title XI of the 1994
Crime Act in much more despotic garb. It even bans guns with thumbhole
stocks (an artifact of the 1989 George Bush Sr. ban) and the capability
of accepting detachable magazines. Even banned are rifles with fixed
magazines that happen to be less than 30 inches in length.

In
the most crime-ridden urban areas, semi-automatic rifles have never
been involved in more than 2% of shooting deaths. Study after study
has shown that the recent drop in violent crime has no correlation
with recent gun control efforts, yet the campaign against semi-automatic
rifles continues unabated and at a fanatical pace.

The
ultimate intellectual origin of this push to completely ban the
semi-automatic rifle is federal law enforcement agencies, most notably
the US Marshalls, FBI, BATF, and DEA. The continued push to ban
semi-automatic rifles by these agencies signifies a very sinister
future they (and the elite they represent) have in mind for the
rest of us.

Which
brings us back to the Miami-Dade rebellion. California gun owners
shouldn’t obey the registration requirements of SB23. Who owns which
particular guns is none of the government’s business and registration
is only a prelude to confiscation. In deference to states’ rights,
California gun owners should vote with their feet, not just storing
their guns at warehouses in Nevada or Arizona, but moving there
as well.

The
real problem is when the complete ban on semi-automatic rifles moves
to the federal level. A George W. Bush presidency would help the
process along while a Gore presidency would quickly complete it.
Like the Miami-Dade rebellion showed, the solution is at the local
level. Local officials must be made to understand that if they genuflect
to the totalitarian agendas of outsiders they will pay a price.

Freedom-loving
Americans in local communities must form a united front in large
numbers to consistently impart this lesson to local officials.

Even
citizens of other local communities could help out a community under
siege. Quick mobilization efforts could take place over cell phones,
faxes, e-mail, and local talk radio as happened in Miami-Dade. It’s
doubtful that the 1993 federal massacre of 86 people at Waco or
the wanton murder of Randy Weaver’s wife and son could have occurred
with such impunity in an environment of quick and heavy local mobilization.
Indeed, the feds and their propaganda arm in the national media
could have been handily run out of town.

Three
cheers to the patriots of Miami-Dade. Hopefully their model will
inspire the rest of us.

November
25, 2000

Dale
Steinreich, PhD, is a consulting economist. He
is also a regular contributor to AgainstTheCrowd.com.

The
demonstration seemed to be proceeding without a hitch until Glendening
attempted to remove the lock. On his first attempt, he inserted
the key, turned it, and attempted to pull the lock out of the magazine
well. It wouldn’t budge. He tried again and again and again. Calling
Maryland National Capital Park Police Sergeant Jeff Pauley to his
side for assistance, Glendening continued. After 54 attempts to
remove the lock both Glendening and Pauley gave up.

(It’s
too bad Glendening and Pauley didn’t have the agility of the 12-year-old
Ohio boy who took his classroom hostage with a gun the following
day. The boy’s parents had outfitted their gun with a trigger lock,
but the boy found the key and removed it.)

One
might think that such an embarrassing episode would have inspired
a level of humility in the Maryland governor that would make him
re-think the wisdom of a state bill requiring (in the short) term
external locks to be sold with every handgun and (over the long
term) built-in locking devices on every handgun to be phased in
by January 1, 2003. Unfortunately, humility doesn’t come easy to
creepy tin-pot authoritarians like Glendening.

(Recall
that the summer prior to his gun-lock gaffe, Fuhrer Glendening had
nothing better to do than create his own statewide water crisis.
In Maryland, washing your car and adding water to your pool became
an offense punishable by fines up to $1,000. While Maryland residents–in
scorching late-summer heat–saw their lawns turn brown, their landscapes
shrivel, and water disappear from restaurant tables, even meddlesome
bureaucrats in D.C. and Virginia shook their heads in amazement
at Glendening. “It’s very difficult to understand why anyone who
is elected to serve the interests of a group of people would go
out of their way to make them miserable,” Burton Rubin, a Fairfax
County water commissioner, told the Washington Post (8/5/99).
He added that Glendening’s restrictions were “not necessary and
they don’t help anybody.” Maryland voters apparently have no problem
with their property [and now public safety] threatened for the sake
of their Almighty Governor’s insatiable lust for arbitrary power
and self-promotion. Glendening is still as popular as ever.)

Almost
three weeks after his Saf T Lok stunt, Glendening, with Saint Bill
Clinton standing behind him, signed the Responsible Gun Safety Act
of 2000. The Act, approved by the Maryland General Assembly on April
3 requires not only locks on handguns but attendance at a 2-hour
“safety course” for anyone purchasing a handgun on or after Jan.
1, 2002. The Act also requires handgun manufacturers to supply ballistics
data with each type of handgun sold in Maryland.

Now,
almost one year after the Glendening Gong Show, the wonderful Consumer
Products Safety Commission (CPSC) has come forward to “inform” us
that gun safety locks don’t work after all. The commission is now
in the process of recalling 400,000 gun locks distributed by the
National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) after a study revealed
that they could be opened (sometimes very easily) without a key.
The CPSC’s recall comes in the wake of its broader examination of
32 gun lock models which found that all but two could be opened
with “a paper clip, tweezers, a hammer or wire cutters, or by striking
them against a table” according to the New York Times. However,
admitting that the wonderful CPSC doesn’t have the ability to save
us from all the evils of “capitalism,” only NSSF-distributed locks
are being recalled. According to CPSC spokesman Russ Rader, all
the other locks “don’t have brand names. That’s why we are seeking
a safety standard for all gun locks.”

Hopefully
the effort to codify and implement this “safety standard” will go
down in flames. For decades consumers have been able to adequately
secure their guns in lockable cabinets, drawers, safes, and portable
cases. These readily-available containers and furnishings (the old
notion of adequate gun security) are not hard to find at department,
sporting goods, or gun stores. Why the fixation with a new, superfluous,
and much more intrusive level of security?

For
the gun grabbers it is another crucial step in de-legitimizing private
firearms ownership. Convincing Americans that guns will only be
secure when they are buried under layer after layer of locks effectively
propagates the notion that guns are innately evil and offensively-destructive
devices per se. Once this notion is widely accepted it becomes
relatively easy to create support for and implement further restrictions
and even wholesale bans of entire classes of handguns (“Saturday
Night Specials,” semi-automatics) and rifles. After all, if these
devices are so intrinsically evil, then why should anyone be allowed
to own them in the first place, never mind be trusted to secure
them properly? The arguments for bans and registration thus become
much more compelling, especially given the recent depressing news
that even young Catholic girls are now getting into the school-shooting
act. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010307/aponline143520_000.htm)

As
last year’s events in Canada demonstrate, the lag between registration
and confiscation can be surprisingly short. Canadian politicians
promised their constituents that registration would never lead to
confiscation. Justice Minister Alan Rock contended, “there is no
reason to confiscate legally owned firearms.” But just 10 months
later more than half a million registered handguns were confiscated.
California gun owners have taken note and many have refused to comply
with the new requirement that all “assault weapons” in the state
be registered by January 1, 2001.

If
firearms owners in the U.S. want to prevent any more infringements
on their Second Amendment freedoms they had better fight the new,
intrusive gun locks tooth and nail. What is voluntary today will
be mandatory tomorrow and politicians from Dubya (who gave gun locks
out for “free” in Texas) to Parris Glendening don’t care that these
devices are defective or a hindrance at 3:00 a.m. when you awaken
to a strange noise downstairs (“Honey, get the baseball bat. I can’t
find the trigger-lock key.”). The NRA humiliated Glendening in a
commercial containing footage from his gun lock goof-up. Instead
of hiding his head in shame, Glendening became livid and called
the adoring press to his side saying, “The fact is, the trigger
lock worked.” Really.

Even
more revealing was a story from St. Louis that was published the
day after the Glendening farce. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
reported that although St. Louis Sheriff Jim Murphy accepted a donation
to the city of 5,000 new gun locks to give away to the public, the
city’s mayor Clarence Harmon killed the plan. It turns out that
Harmon feared that the giveaway would hurt the viability of his
city’s pending lawsuit against gun manufacturers.

Mayor
Harmon says to this day that he believes trigger locks will save
thousands of children’s lives. The kicker is, even if he truly believes
this, when it came to his perceived choice between money
and saving the lives of children, he clearly chose money. This is
yet another smoking gun (pardon the pun) demonstrating that the
gun-control crusade at its core is really about nothing more than
redistributing power and wealth to an increasingly-centralized political
elite. By the way, expect to see pathological liar Sarah Brady continue
to see no irony in her complaint that pro-gun Congressmen “endanger
children’s lives for money.” It’s a luxury of thoughtlessness for
the elite who lives behind six-foot fences and security guards in
Georgetown.

March
16, 2001

Dale
Steinreich, Ph.D., is a research associate of the Mises
Institute who writes frequently for Mises.org
and the investment advisory service AgainstTheCrowd.com.