May 9, 2002 -- Why did a rule change made by one of the thousands of co-op boards in this country make national news? The association at 180 West End Avenue in New York recently decided to ban new occupants from smoking in their own apartments. Some would say that residents know ahead of time that co-op contracts give associations the right to make such rules and, in this case, no current resident will be barred from smoking. Others see the decision as a sign of growing political correctness and intolerance. Both sides are in part correct. The ostensive reason for the ban was that tobacco smoke travels through the building’s ventilation system into non-smokers’ homes. (Full disclosure here: I don’t smoke cigarettes.) This is a legitimate concern, especially for individuals who might be allergic to such smoke. Assuming that it does not violate some explicit or implicit contract right, I suspect that this decision is a proper exercise of the property rights of the association. (The same principle applies to condominiums.) A co-op association is a private club and members agree before joining to abide by the club rules.
October 31, 2001 -- Students at Liberty Middle School in Ashland, Virginia have come up with a remarkably good idea. It’s called " The Liberty Dollar Bill Act ", a bill proposed to Congress to place an abbreviated version of the entire U. S. Constitution on the back of one-dollar bills. This is a great idea because Americans don’t know their Constitution—its history, its fundamentals of checks and balances, or the individual rights secured by its protections against government power. For instance, the students cite polls showing that 62% of Americans can’t name the three branches of the federal government. And 94% of Americans don’t know their precious First Amendment rights. Can’t name them yourself? This proposal would remedy that situation, as every American handling money would have the features of the Constitution right in the palm of his or her hand. A quick and meaningful lesson in American government would be available to all.
April 16, 2007 -- Every year, it is more difficult to decide what to say about the evils of our current tax system since most of it has already been said. So let's focus instead on to whom we should say it. The presidential campaigns have already begun, and by Tax Day next year candidates for president and Congress will be seeking our votes. It's time to seek something from them. This is an opportunity to confront those candidates and politicians—in letters to the editor, on radio and TV call-in shows, at campaign rallies and town meetings—and ask them some very pointed questions:
October 5, 2004 -- On October 4, 2004, the 47th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, humanity again made spaceflight history. SpaceShipOne, designed by Burt Rutan and his company, Scaled Composites, and built with money from Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, won the privately funded $10 million Ansari X Prize by becoming the first three-passenger private vehicle to fly into space twice in a two-week period.
August 14, 2002 -- The Internet is a wonderful tool. It allows for easier research, entertainment, and better communication with friends and relatives. But it also has spam. Junk email arrives every day with promises of riches and weight loss. These really don’t bother me; it only takes a second to press delete. What bother me are the petitions, in particular the petition to save public radio. I must get this petition every three or four months. “NPR funding is in danger of being cut!” “Congress is going to end public radio!” If only such things were true. These petitions, it turns out, are just one of the many urban legends floating around the Internet. NPR isn’t in any real danger of losing its taxpayer funding. But it should be.
September 18, 2001 -- As the full impact of the barbaric terrorist attacks of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon unfolded, TV anchors, commentators, and community leaders invoked God and prayer as a means of personally dealing with all the tragedy of this attack. Communities and congregations organized prayer vigils and religious services. President Bush declared Friday, September 14, 2001, a "National Day of Prayer and Remembrance." For atheists, the call to a higher power for support or guidance is an empty one. Still, the reports of death tolls and lost loved ones leave a painful spiritual wound, even for the majority of us who do not personally know anyone whose life was stolen. We were witnesses to the worst terrorist attack in history, but now we need to rebuild and move on with our lives.
July 30, 2002 -- In the Business Ethics class I teach, my students ask, “Can a company be profitable and successful and still be moral?” My answer is always a resounding “Yes!” I explain to them that Enron and MCI Worldcom are exceptions. And they are, despite the seeming rash of such scandals recently. Business is a fundamentally moral activity. Like medicine, at its core it’s about the things most important to our lives. While the practice of medicine protects our health, business produces the rest of our values. And like medicine, business has its own version of the quack. Kenneth Lay is the business world version of the faith healer.
February 3, 2004 -- Unfortunately, the assault on science that I discussed in my January 30th commentary is not confined to bookstores at the Grand Canyon. Proposed curriculum guidelines for Georgia schools suggest that the word “evolution” not be used. It would be replaced with “biological changes over time.” The Georgia Education Department already omits much material referring to the Earth’s age and the relationship of various living organisms to one another. (Yes, if governments didn’t own and run schools, bad ideas might be better confined. But unfortunately that’s not the case.)
September 3, 2004 -- Nearly every speaker at the Republican Party convention commented on John Kerry's flip-flops; there are two Kerrys—one, for example, who votes for funding our troops in Iraq and another who votes against it. Points well taken! But we also saw at the convention two George Bushs, not flip-flopping on any single issue but, rather, taking the freedom position on one issue and the statist position on another. Depending on which half of his laundry list of recommendations you attend to, you'll think you're listening to either Ronald Reagan or Teddy Kennedy.
October 24, 2003 -- The crackle of small-arms fire that you hear about General William Boykin is the sound of the latest skirmish in America’s culture wars. Boykin is the Pentagon’s head of intelligence in the war on terrorism. He is also an evangelical Christian who has told church groups that Muslim terrorists hate the United States because it is a “Christian nation,” that our real enemy is not Osama bin Laden but Satan, and that we will prevail only if “we come against them in the name of Jesus.” It gets worse. According to the Los Angeles Times reporter who broke the story, Boykin would show audiences a picture he took in Somalia after the “Blackhawk Down” fiasco in Mogadishu. Pointing to an unnatural-looking dark streak in the sky, he said, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your enemy. It is the principalities of darkness. It is a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy.”
June 27, 2003 -- Much will be written about the legal flaws of the Supreme Court's decision on the University of Michigan's admissions policies. The court found race-based admissions in the name of "affirmative action" to be constitutional, upheld that university's law school admissions criteria, but struck down Michigan's practice of automatically awarding points to government-approved minorities for undergraduate admissions. Of course, private schools should be free to use any admissions criteria they wish, and all schools should be private. But most schools are government-operated or -funded, and when governments are involved, they should not treat individuals differently based on race. And unfortunately the Bush administration, while opposing Michigan's particular policies, supported the concept of affirmative action.
February 25, 2004 -- Denouncing special interests is all the rage on the current election landscape. Each candidate accuses the others of wanting to give benefits to some unfairly favored group at the expense of others. The sheer hypocrisy of all candidates reflects an even deeper truth about the system that they all support. Ralph Nader has entered the presidential race vowing to fight the special interest groups that pay money for special favors from Washington. Of course, Nader does not consider it a special favor to him and his Green friends when the federal government prohibits property owners from using their own land in ways they think are not friendly to the environment. Nor does he see himself as an agent of corruption when he urges the federal government to prohibit people from buying products of which he disapproves. But he denounces businesses that manufacture those products, and that hire lobbyists to keep those products legal, for subverting the will of the people.
July 18, 2003 -- The House of Representatives soon will take up H.R. 2427 concerning the re-importation of drugs from foreign countries. The policy debate over this issue seems to pit two free market principles against one another. The free trade principle is invoked by those who want to allow Americans to re-import from Canada pharmaceutical products that American companies have shipped to that country for sale. The prices for those products in Canada are generally well below the prices in the United States. But American pharmaceutical companies counter that the property rights principle means that they should be able to sell their products for whatever prices and on whatever conditions they wish to set, including barring Canadians who buy their products from reselling them in the United States.
September 30, 2004 -- Private entrepreneurs again have triumphed! On September 29, SpaceShipOne, built by Burt Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, and financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, completed its first flight in pursuit of the $10 million Ansari X Prize. The money was secured by private individuals and will be paid to the first private party to put a craft into space twice in a two-week period carrying at least three individuals. Rutan's rocket had its first test flight over the 100-kilometer limit on June 21, and with the success of the latest launch the clock is now ticking to see if his ship can do it again in a fortnight.
January 22, 2004 -- In his State of the Union address, President Bush said, “A government-run health care system is the wrong prescription.” But he also praised the new government-backed prescription drug benefit under Medicare that he championed last year. He wants to keep taxes low, but he also wants four percent more discretionary spending this year. This is down from his out-of-control spending of the past few years but still drains the taxpayers’ wallets by keeping in place or expanding most government programs. For example, he wants more federal money to help high school students who fall behind in math and science. Republicans are thought of as the guys who don’t like a lot of government. So why would Bush, as well as many other Republicans, be all over the map with their programs and policies? Simple: Bush, like so many other Republicans, acts based on sentiments or short-term pragmatism rather than on a consistent set of core principles. In other words, Bush believes that individuals should be free and unencumbered by government except where he feels that government should intervene.
July 18, 2004 -- In the mid-1990s, I used to argue against the war on tobacco as follows: Supposedly, 400,000 individuals die each year because of smoking. (It's closer to 200,000; the government fakes the numbers, but that's another story.) Since governments pick up many of the health care costs of people who are sick from smoking, governments claim the right to wage a war on tobacco. But nearly as many individuals allegedly die from bad diets and lack of exercise. By this logic, it will only be a matter of time before you're limited to two Big Macs per month, potato chips are kept behind the counter and not sold to anyone under 18, and there's a five-day waiting period to buy Twinkies so government bureaucrats can check your medical records. My reductio ad absurdum is one step closer to surrealist reality, thanks to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tommy Thompson, who has now defined obesity as a "disease" under Medicare. Thompson is on a jihad against extra pounds and expanding waistlines in this country. This change in the Medicare rules undermines freedom on four fronts.
July 31, 2003 -- The other day, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cafeteria was shut down by the Washington, D.C. Department of Health for health code violations. That’s right, the federal agency that oversees food safety, that inspects meat and poultry, couldn’t keep the mouse droppings out of its own eatery! But why should we be surprised? Various federal agencies have been raking WorldCom and Enron over the coals for not conforming to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Yet at a February 23, 2000 Capitol Hill hearing, two senators thought nothing of suggesting that Amtrak, the money-losing government passenger railroad, abandon just those principles—that would too clearly demonstrate just how poorly that railroad was being run. Can’t let the public see that!
August 6, 2003 -- August 7, 2003, marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great anthropologist Dr. Louis S. B. Leakey (1903-1973). This day deserves commemoration not just because of Leakey's achievements but also because of the political and cultural implications of his lifelong enterprise. Leakey spent his career with his wife Mary and son Richard in Kenya and in the Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, seeking fossils of man's prehistoric ancestors. Truly finding needles in haystacks, the Leakeys discovered bones of the 20-million-year-old Proconsul man, a possible link between apes and humans; the 1.75-million-year-old Zinjanthropus; and Homo habilis, which Dr. Leakey considered the first true member of the human genus and the first toolmaker.
December 29, 2008 -- George W. Bush ran for president as “a uniter, not a divider.” He only managed to unite Republicans and Democrats in disappointment—though for different reasons—with his administration. Barack Obama sounded the same theme: “We’re all in this together!” Will he succeed where Dubya failed? Divided States of Americans Many Americans have seen in recent years the culture and politics growing more mean and coarse, contentious and uncivil, malicious and malevolent. We’re bombarded by coast-to-coast bellyaching on 24-hour cable news channels where we’re likely to encounter shout-fests. Talk radio has its screamers as well—Michael Savage, Mark Levine. On websites like the Daily Kos and Huffington Post, we run into vicious personal attacks, and on almost any online discussion thread we’ll probably be burned by flame wars. Entertainers and celebrities wear their mostly nutty left-wing politics on their sleeves, while many members of their audiences want them to shut up and stick to their acting and singing. Other individuals, depending on their perspective, patronize or boycott companies—Starbucks, Ben and Jerry’s—that are as well known for their politics as their products. Will this nastiness never end?
May 9, 2002 -- Why did a rule change made by one of the thousands of co-op boards in this country make national news? The association at 180 West End Avenue in New York recently decided to ban new occupants from smoking in their own apartments. Some would say that residents know ahead of time that co-op contracts give associations the right to make such rules and, in this case, no current resident will be barred from smoking. Others see the decision as a sign of growing political correctness and intolerance. Both sides are in part correct. The ostensive reason for the ban was that tobacco smoke travels through the building’s ventilation system into non-smokers’ homes. (Full disclosure here: I don’t smoke cigarettes.) This is a legitimate concern, especially for individuals who might be allergic to such smoke. Assuming that it does not violate some explicit or implicit contract right, I suspect that this decision is a proper exercise of the property rights of the association. (The same principle applies to condominiums.) A co-op association is a private club and members agree before joining to abide by the club rules.
October 31, 2001 -- Students at Liberty Middle School in Ashland, Virginia have come up with a remarkably good idea. It’s called " The Liberty Dollar Bill Act ", a bill proposed to Congress to place an abbreviated version of the entire U. S. Constitution on the back of one-dollar bills. This is a great idea because Americans don’t know their Constitution—its history, its fundamentals of checks and balances, or the individual rights secured by its protections against government power. For instance, the students cite polls showing that 62% of Americans can’t name the three branches of the federal government. And 94% of Americans don’t know their precious First Amendment rights. Can’t name them yourself? This proposal would remedy that situation, as every American handling money would have the features of the Constitution right in the palm of his or her hand. A quick and meaningful lesson in American government would be available to all.
April 16, 2007 -- Every year, it is more difficult to decide what to say about the evils of our current tax system since most of it has already been said. So let's focus instead on to whom we should say it. The presidential campaigns have already begun, and by Tax Day next year candidates for president and Congress will be seeking our votes. It's time to seek something from them. This is an opportunity to confront those candidates and politicians—in letters to the editor, on radio and TV call-in shows, at campaign rallies and town meetings—and ask them some very pointed questions:
October 5, 2004 -- On October 4, 2004, the 47th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, humanity again made spaceflight history. SpaceShipOne, designed by Burt Rutan and his company, Scaled Composites, and built with money from Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, won the privately funded $10 million Ansari X Prize by becoming the first three-passenger private vehicle to fly into space twice in a two-week period.
August 14, 2002 -- The Internet is a wonderful tool. It allows for easier research, entertainment, and better communication with friends and relatives. But it also has spam. Junk email arrives every day with promises of riches and weight loss. These really don’t bother me; it only takes a second to press delete. What bother me are the petitions, in particular the petition to save public radio. I must get this petition every three or four months. “NPR funding is in danger of being cut!” “Congress is going to end public radio!” If only such things were true. These petitions, it turns out, are just one of the many urban legends floating around the Internet. NPR isn’t in any real danger of losing its taxpayer funding. But it should be.
September 18, 2001 -- As the full impact of the barbaric terrorist attacks of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon unfolded, TV anchors, commentators, and community leaders invoked God and prayer as a means of personally dealing with all the tragedy of this attack. Communities and congregations organized prayer vigils and religious services. President Bush declared Friday, September 14, 2001, a "National Day of Prayer and Remembrance." For atheists, the call to a higher power for support or guidance is an empty one. Still, the reports of death tolls and lost loved ones leave a painful spiritual wound, even for the majority of us who do not personally know anyone whose life was stolen. We were witnesses to the worst terrorist attack in history, but now we need to rebuild and move on with our lives.
July 30, 2002 -- In the Business Ethics class I teach, my students ask, “Can a company be profitable and successful and still be moral?” My answer is always a resounding “Yes!” I explain to them that Enron and MCI Worldcom are exceptions. And they are, despite the seeming rash of such scandals recently. Business is a fundamentally moral activity. Like medicine, at its core it’s about the things most important to our lives. While the practice of medicine protects our health, business produces the rest of our values. And like medicine, business has its own version of the quack. Kenneth Lay is the business world version of the faith healer.
February 3, 2004 -- Unfortunately, the assault on science that I discussed in my January 30th commentary is not confined to bookstores at the Grand Canyon. Proposed curriculum guidelines for Georgia schools suggest that the word “evolution” not be used. It would be replaced with “biological changes over time.” The Georgia Education Department already omits much material referring to the Earth’s age and the relationship of various living organisms to one another. (Yes, if governments didn’t own and run schools, bad ideas might be better confined. But unfortunately that’s not the case.)
September 3, 2004 -- Nearly every speaker at the Republican Party convention commented on John Kerry's flip-flops; there are two Kerrys—one, for example, who votes for funding our troops in Iraq and another who votes against it. Points well taken! But we also saw at the convention two George Bushs, not flip-flopping on any single issue but, rather, taking the freedom position on one issue and the statist position on another. Depending on which half of his laundry list of recommendations you attend to, you'll think you're listening to either Ronald Reagan or Teddy Kennedy.
October 24, 2003 -- The crackle of small-arms fire that you hear about General William Boykin is the sound of the latest skirmish in America’s culture wars. Boykin is the Pentagon’s head of intelligence in the war on terrorism. He is also an evangelical Christian who has told church groups that Muslim terrorists hate the United States because it is a “Christian nation,” that our real enemy is not Osama bin Laden but Satan, and that we will prevail only if “we come against them in the name of Jesus.” It gets worse. According to the Los Angeles Times reporter who broke the story, Boykin would show audiences a picture he took in Somalia after the “Blackhawk Down” fiasco in Mogadishu. Pointing to an unnatural-looking dark streak in the sky, he said, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your enemy. It is the principalities of darkness. It is a demonic presence in that city that God revealed to me as the enemy.”
June 27, 2003 -- Much will be written about the legal flaws of the Supreme Court's decision on the University of Michigan's admissions policies. The court found race-based admissions in the name of "affirmative action" to be constitutional, upheld that university's law school admissions criteria, but struck down Michigan's practice of automatically awarding points to government-approved minorities for undergraduate admissions. Of course, private schools should be free to use any admissions criteria they wish, and all schools should be private. But most schools are government-operated or -funded, and when governments are involved, they should not treat individuals differently based on race. And unfortunately the Bush administration, while opposing Michigan's particular policies, supported the concept of affirmative action.
February 25, 2004 -- Denouncing special interests is all the rage on the current election landscape. Each candidate accuses the others of wanting to give benefits to some unfairly favored group at the expense of others. The sheer hypocrisy of all candidates reflects an even deeper truth about the system that they all support. Ralph Nader has entered the presidential race vowing to fight the special interest groups that pay money for special favors from Washington. Of course, Nader does not consider it a special favor to him and his Green friends when the federal government prohibits property owners from using their own land in ways they think are not friendly to the environment. Nor does he see himself as an agent of corruption when he urges the federal government to prohibit people from buying products of which he disapproves. But he denounces businesses that manufacture those products, and that hire lobbyists to keep those products legal, for subverting the will of the people.
July 18, 2003 -- The House of Representatives soon will take up H.R. 2427 concerning the re-importation of drugs from foreign countries. The policy debate over this issue seems to pit two free market principles against one another. The free trade principle is invoked by those who want to allow Americans to re-import from Canada pharmaceutical products that American companies have shipped to that country for sale. The prices for those products in Canada are generally well below the prices in the United States. But American pharmaceutical companies counter that the property rights principle means that they should be able to sell their products for whatever prices and on whatever conditions they wish to set, including barring Canadians who buy their products from reselling them in the United States.
September 30, 2004 -- Private entrepreneurs again have triumphed! On September 29, SpaceShipOne, built by Burt Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, and financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, completed its first flight in pursuit of the $10 million Ansari X Prize. The money was secured by private individuals and will be paid to the first private party to put a craft into space twice in a two-week period carrying at least three individuals. Rutan's rocket had its first test flight over the 100-kilometer limit on June 21, and with the success of the latest launch the clock is now ticking to see if his ship can do it again in a fortnight.
January 22, 2004 -- In his State of the Union address, President Bush said, “A government-run health care system is the wrong prescription.” But he also praised the new government-backed prescription drug benefit under Medicare that he championed last year. He wants to keep taxes low, but he also wants four percent more discretionary spending this year. This is down from his out-of-control spending of the past few years but still drains the taxpayers’ wallets by keeping in place or expanding most government programs. For example, he wants more federal money to help high school students who fall behind in math and science. Republicans are thought of as the guys who don’t like a lot of government. So why would Bush, as well as many other Republicans, be all over the map with their programs and policies? Simple: Bush, like so many other Republicans, acts based on sentiments or short-term pragmatism rather than on a consistent set of core principles. In other words, Bush believes that individuals should be free and unencumbered by government except where he feels that government should intervene.
July 18, 2004 -- In the mid-1990s, I used to argue against the war on tobacco as follows: Supposedly, 400,000 individuals die each year because of smoking. (It's closer to 200,000; the government fakes the numbers, but that's another story.) Since governments pick up many of the health care costs of people who are sick from smoking, governments claim the right to wage a war on tobacco. But nearly as many individuals allegedly die from bad diets and lack of exercise. By this logic, it will only be a matter of time before you're limited to two Big Macs per month, potato chips are kept behind the counter and not sold to anyone under 18, and there's a five-day waiting period to buy Twinkies so government bureaucrats can check your medical records. My reductio ad absurdum is one step closer to surrealist reality, thanks to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tommy Thompson, who has now defined obesity as a "disease" under Medicare. Thompson is on a jihad against extra pounds and expanding waistlines in this country. This change in the Medicare rules undermines freedom on four fronts.
July 31, 2003 -- The other day, the U.S. Department of Agriculture cafeteria was shut down by the Washington, D.C. Department of Health for health code violations. That’s right, the federal agency that oversees food safety, that inspects meat and poultry, couldn’t keep the mouse droppings out of its own eatery! But why should we be surprised? Various federal agencies have been raking WorldCom and Enron over the coals for not conforming to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Yet at a February 23, 2000 Capitol Hill hearing, two senators thought nothing of suggesting that Amtrak, the money-losing government passenger railroad, abandon just those principles—that would too clearly demonstrate just how poorly that railroad was being run. Can’t let the public see that!
August 6, 2003 -- August 7, 2003, marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great anthropologist Dr. Louis S. B. Leakey (1903-1973). This day deserves commemoration not just because of Leakey's achievements but also because of the political and cultural implications of his lifelong enterprise. Leakey spent his career with his wife Mary and son Richard in Kenya and in the Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, seeking fossils of man's prehistoric ancestors. Truly finding needles in haystacks, the Leakeys discovered bones of the 20-million-year-old Proconsul man, a possible link between apes and humans; the 1.75-million-year-old Zinjanthropus; and Homo habilis, which Dr. Leakey considered the first true member of the human genus and the first toolmaker.
December 29, 2008 -- George W. Bush ran for president as “a uniter, not a divider.” He only managed to unite Republicans and Democrats in disappointment—though for different reasons—with his administration. Barack Obama sounded the same theme: “We’re all in this together!” Will he succeed where Dubya failed? Divided States of Americans Many Americans have seen in recent years the culture and politics growing more mean and coarse, contentious and uncivil, malicious and malevolent. We’re bombarded by coast-to-coast bellyaching on 24-hour cable news channels where we’re likely to encounter shout-fests. Talk radio has its screamers as well—Michael Savage, Mark Levine. On websites like the Daily Kos and Huffington Post, we run into vicious personal attacks, and on almost any online discussion thread we’ll probably be burned by flame wars. Entertainers and celebrities wear their mostly nutty left-wing politics on their sleeves, while many members of their audiences want them to shut up and stick to their acting and singing. Other individuals, depending on their perspective, patronize or boycott companies—Starbucks, Ben and Jerry’s—that are as well known for their politics as their products. Will this nastiness never end?