U Not Gonna Like This

From the Foundation for Economic Education (link) via the Internet Archives (link):

I, Pencil

by Leonard E. Read





I am a lead pencil — the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.



Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that's all I do.




You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery — more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, the wise G. K. Chesterton observed, `"We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders."



I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me — no, that's too much to ask of anyone — if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because — well, because I am seemingly so simple.



Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.



Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye — there's some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.



Innumerable Antecedents



Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background.



My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!



The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto? These legions are among my antecedents.



Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil- length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces. People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. How many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill's power!



Don't overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation.



Once in the pencil factory--$4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine--each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat atop--a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this "wood- clinched'" sandwich.



My "lead'" itself--it contains no lead at all--is complex. The graphite is mined in Ceylon. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships. Even the lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth--and the harbor pilots.



The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow--animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions--as from a sausage grinder--cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.



My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are. Why, even the processes by which the lacquer is made a beautiful yellow involves the skills of more persons than one can enumerate!



Observe the labeling. That's a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?



My bit of metal--the ferrule--is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain.



Then there's my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to in the trade as "the plug," the part man uses to erase the errors he makes with me. An ingredient called "factice" is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rape- seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and the pigment which gives "the plug" its color is cadmium sulfide.



No One Knows



Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?



Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn't a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field--paraffin being a by-product of petroleum.



Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.



No Master Mind



There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to which I earlier referred.



It has been said that "'only God can make a tree.'" Why do we agree with this? Isn't it because we realize that we ourselves could not make one? Indeed, can we even describe a tree? We cannot, except in superficial terms. We can say, for instance, that a certain molecular configuration manifests itself as a tree. But what mind is there among men that could even record, let alone direct, the constant changes in molecules that transpire in the life span of a tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable!



I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies--millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.



The above is what I meant when writing, "If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing." For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand--that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive master-minding — then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.



Once government has had a monopoly of a creative activity such, for instance, as the delivery of the mails, most individuals will believe that the mails could not be efficiently delivered by men acting freely. And here is the reason: Each one acknowledges that he himself doesn't know how to do all the things incident to mail delivery. He also recognizes that no other individual could do it. These assumptions are correct. No individual possesses enough know-how to perform a nation's mail delivery any more than any individual possesses enough know-how to make a pencil. Now, in the absence of faith in free people — in the unawareness that millions of tiny know-hows would naturally and miraculously form and cooperate to satisfy this necessity — the individual cannot help but reach the erroneous conclusion that mail can be delivered only by governmental "master-minding."



Testimony Galore



If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men and women can accomplish when free to try, then those with little faith would have a fair case. However, there is testimony galore; it's all about us and on every hand. Mail delivery is exceedingly simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things. Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second; they deliver an event visually and in motion to any person's home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas to one's range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard — halfway around the world — for less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!



The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.

(End of article)

by Tibor R. Machan

Across the centuries an important idea emerged as crucial for how people should live in their communities. Finally, in the US Declaration of Independence, this idea gained official recognition and, eventually, worldwide popularity.

I am talking of course, about the idea of individual rights. Although there had been rumblings about them already in ancient Greece, not until the English philosopher John Locke wrote his book, Second Treatise on Government, (link) did a full blown theory back up the idea. This was Locke's theory of natural rights. Its essence is that because of the kind of beings we humans are — because, that is, of our nature — we must treat each other without forcible intrusion. We have basic rights, among them, most importantly, to life, to liberty and to property. So, it is because of our human nature — not because we are men, women, English, French, Asian or Indian — that none may force us to live other than how we choose to live. This is true even when we choose badly, so long as the bad choice does not involve violating the rights of another human individual.

One reason this idea caught on is that most people held the view that people are free agents and have moral responsibilities they need to fulfill. They need to do this of their own free will, otherwise their dignity, their distinctive human capacity as moral agents, is defeated. So, a just or good human community had to be governed by a constitution that gave legal standing to our human rights. And that community came to be referred to as the free society.

In time, however, certain developments in how prominent thinkers thought about the world began to change things significantly. Mainly, when it became fashionable to explain everything by factors over which we, as individuals, have no control — so our own power to choose was dismissed as a myth — the idea that we have the right to live as we choose became difficult to defend. Instead another idea of rights took over, namely, the view that we all have the right to a good life, however it is secured. So that if you were poor or sick or ignorant or immoral, none of it had anything to do with you. Individuals have no such powers, namely, to choose to neglect or to improve on their lives, to be lazy or to enrich themselves, to stay ignorant or to educate themselves and so on. Everything happens because it has to happen — it's all in our genes or the stars or the contingencies of our family history. Nothing is up to us.

This idea had its origins in the fact that the natural sciences revealed that a good deal of nature is, indeed, governed by invariable laws, regularities that must happen, period. Because this idea yielded some great successes in our efforts to make things turn out as we'd like — in agriculture, transportation, medicine and computer science — many people thought it a good idea to simply apply it to ourselves. The social sciences were born this way, hoping to come up with a resulting social engineering that would set everything right, by means of the manipulations of experts, in human personal and social life.

The major task of government was then envisioned not to secure our individual rights to life, liberty and property but to provide us all with supports, those things that have come to be called "entitlements," things that would set everything right for us. The transfer society was gradually developed, so now government is far more concerned with schemes of wealth redistribution than with the provision of security! And the results are not difficult to spot — it doesn't do well at either of these tasks.

The fact seems to be clear: human beings are not just billiard balls being shoved around by impersonal forces, even if much around them is such. Indeed, technology is nothing other than people making creative, imaginative use of their understanding of how the rest of the world lawfully operates. But we are able to make use of this knowledge because we are not just being pushed around but have the free will to give direction to our own conduct and our institutions — or to fail in those tasks.

Sadly, however, the idea that we are indeed just being pushed around has given ammunition to those among us who love imposing their own ways on everyone else. The belief that we are ultimately helpless in the face of the forces of nature has provided the power-hungry with the excuse that none of us have any rights to liberty, that we can be at their disposal to regiment about as they see fit. And the further excuse they use is that since we are all helpless, without the power to redistribute wealth via entitlement programs, many of us could not succeed at living.

Never mind that this is all a ruse. If what these people believed about us were really true — indeed, if they actually believed it — they would be helpless and uninterested themselves to do anything for us or to us. Yet, clearly, this isn't so. Their choices — and they are choices they like to reserve the right to make without extending them to others — have caused havoc upon the social-political world. But because the idea that everything is moved about by impersonal forces has wide appeal — it seems like a practically useful idea — it is difficult to undercut their power, to dispute their supposed scientifically backed authority.

The sooner we understand, however, that this power to regiment others is ill founded, that it rests on a mistaken extrapolation of ideas from one field of study — the hard sciences — to all others, including politics and ethics, the more likely it is that all this power-mongering will be abated, eventually. Then we can perhaps begin to fully enjoy the idea that John Locke has developed and the American Founders set into political motion, namely, that the just and good human community is one that protects our individual rights without any compromise at all — the free society.

It will not, however, be enough to simply reiterate the Lockean theme or to shout from the hill top that we have the rights Locke helped us understand. It will also be necessary to understand and explain why there is some honest belief backing the idea that Locke was wrong and that we have no choices to make and, thus, require no rights that serve to provide us with our own sphere of authority, our own personal jurisdiction. We need to learn what supports this anti-individualist, anti-libertarian philosophy that makes it possible for power-hungry people to enjoy intellectual standing. Only if we do, can we also discover that their ideas are flawed and the policies they derive from them do violence to our human nature — meaning, to each and every one of us.

(End of article)

The above article is from the Internet Archives it was orginally posted at the The Laissez Faire Electronic Times (link).

Another aticle via the Internet Archives (link) and Foundation for Economic Education (link)



Cleaned by Capitalsim



by Donald Boudreaux



Donald Boudreaux is president of FEE.



I recently spoke in Toronto to students at a public-policy seminar sponsored by the Fraser Institute. The seminar opened with Fraser's Laura Jones reviewing the many sound reasons why environmental alarmism is inappropriate. Ms. Jones offered superb analysis and boatloads of relevant facts. Her case that the environment is not teetering on the edge of disaster was unassailable or so I thought.



During both the question-and-answer period and the group discussions that followed, the students vigorously assailed Ms. Jones's case against command-and-control environmental regulation. These assaults all sprang either from mistaken notions about environmental facts or from a lack of historical perspective.




As I listened to student after student lament the horrible filthiness of modern industrial society, my mind turned, as it often does, to the late Julian Simon. I remembered a point he made in the introduction to his encyclopedic 1995 book, The State of Humanity: almost all of the pollutants that have been most dangerous to humanity throughout history are today either totally eliminated or dramatically reduced. Here are Simon's wise words:



"When considering the state of the environment, we should think first of the terrible pollutants that were banished in the past century or so, the typhoid that polluted such rivers as the Hudson, smallpox that humanity finally pursued to the ends of the earth and just about eradicated, the dysentery that distressed and killed people all over the world."



Indeed so.



The fact that people today wring their hands with concern over the likes of global warming and species loss is itself a marvelous testament to the cleanliness of industrial society. People dying of smallpox or dysentery have far more pressing worries than what's happening to the trend in the earth's temperature. Truly, we today are lucky to be able to worry about the things that we worry about.



Our Polluted Past




I decided to work that last line into my own talk later in the day. I knew that declaring that our modern world is vastly cleaner than was the pre-industrial world would be met with astonishment, or even hostility, by the students. Such a claim contradicts all that they are taught. So I quickly assembled irrefutable facts to back my claim. Here's my partial list of the myriad, mundane ways that modern society is unquestionably cleaner than pre-industrial society.



As Simon pointed out, smallpox, dysentery, and malaria once common threats to humankind are today totally conquered in the industrial world. (Smallpox is no longer a threat even in the poorest parts of the world.) Antibiotics regularly protect us from many infections that routinely killed our ancestors.



Before refrigeration, people ran enor-mous risks of ingesting deadly bacteria whenever they ate meat or dairy products. Refrigeration has dramatically reduced the bacteria pollution that constantly haunted our pre-twentieth-century forebears.



We wear clean clothes; our ancestors wore foul clothes. Pre-industrial humans had no washers, dryers, or sanitary laundry detergent. Clothes were worn day after day without being washed. And when they were washed, the detergent was often made of urine.



Our bodies today are much cleaner. Sanitary soap is dirt cheap (so to speak), as is clean water from household taps. The result is that, unlike our ancestors, we moderns bathe frequently. Not only was soap a luxury until just a few generations ago, but because nearly all of our pre-industrial ancestors could afford nothing larger than minuscule cottages, there were no bathrooms (and certainly no running water). Baths, when taken, were taken in nearby streams, rivers, or ponds often the same bodies of water used by the farm animals. Forget about shampoo, clean towels, toothpaste, mouthwash, and toilet tissue.



The interiors of our homes are immaculate compared to the squalid interiors of almost all pre-industrial dwellings. These dwellings floors were typically just dirt which made the farm animals feel right at home when they wintered in the house with humans. Of course, there was no indoor plumbing. Nor were there household disinfectants, save sunlight. Unfortunately, because pre-industrial window panes were too expensive for ordinary families and because screens are an invention of the industrial age sunlight and fresh air could be let into these cottages only by letting in insects too. Also, bizarre as it sounds to us today, the roofs of these dwellings were polluted with all manner of filthy or dangerous things. Here's the description by historians Frances and Joseph Gies, in Life in a Medieval Village, of the roofs of pre-industrial cottages:



Roofs were thatched, as from ancient times, with straw, broom or heather, or in marsh country reeds or rushes. . . . Thatched roofs had formidable drawbacks; they rotted from alternations of wet and dry, and harbored a menagerie of mice, rats, hornets, wasps, spiders, and birds; and above all they caught fire. Yet even in London they prevailed.



One consequence is described by French historian Fernand Braudel: Fleas, lice and bugs conquered London as well as Paris, rich interiors as well as poor. (See Braudel's The Structures of Everyday Life.)



Our streets are clean. Here, again, is Braudel, commenting on Parisian streets in the late-eighteenth century: And chamber pots, as always, continued to be emptied out of windows; the streets were sewers. Modern sewage disposal has disposed of this dis-gusting pollution. And that very symbol of twentieth-century capitalism the automobile has further cleaned our streets by ridding us of the constant presence of horse dung and of the swarms of flies it attracted.



Consider, finally, a very recent victorious battle against pollution: toilets and urinals that automatically flush. Until a few years ago, every public toilet and urinal had to be flushed manually. Not so today. As automatic flushers replace manual flushers, we no longer must pollute our hands by touching filthy flush knobs.



These are just some examples of the countless ways that our ordinary lives are less polluted than were the ordinary lives of our ancestors. The danger is that people like the students I met in Toronto wrongly believe that the world is dirtier and less healthy today than in the past. And they blame capitalism. While some environmental problems still exist, they aren't dire and they are nowhere near as great as were the problems with filth that regularly harassed our grandparents and great-grandparents.



It is tragic that demagoguery fueled by misinformation leads people today to blame the free market for all real and imaginary environmental problems. In fact, the free market is the greatest cleanser and disinfectant of the environment the most successful pollution fighter that the world has ever known.


(End of article)

Read on (link):


Thursday, February 15, 2007



Women are Liars.



EDWARD BLACK



NINETEEN out of 20 women admit lying to their partners or husbands, a survey on attitudes to truth and relationships has found.



Eighty-three per cent owned up to telling "big, life-changing lies", with 13 per cent saying they
did so frequently.



Half said that if they became pregnant by another man but wanted to stay with their partner, they would lie about the baby’s real father.

Forty-two per cent would lie about contraception in order to get pregnant, no matter the wishes of their partner.



And an alarming 31 per cent said they would not tell a future partner if they had a sexual disease: this rises to 65 per cent among single women.



In the poll of 5,000 women for That’s Life! magazine, 45 per cent said they told "little white
lies" most days. The favourite untruth was "of course you don’t look fat", with "these shoes were only £10" in second place.



Jo Checkley, the editor of That’s Life! , said that while many women now lied to avoid hurting their partner’s feelings, covering up the truth about a baby could have far more damaging
consequences.



She said: "Modern women just can’t stop lying, but they do it to stop hurting other people’s feelings. It could be argued that these little white lies simply make the world go round a little more smoothly.



But to tell a man a baby is his when it’s not, or to deliberately get pregnant when your partner
doesn’t want a baby, is playing Russian roulette with other people’s lives."



The National Scruples and Lies Survey 2004 found plenty of untruths were told over the Christmas period. A total of 78 per cent said they would pass off a second-hand gift as a brand new present, while half have lied about a Christmas card being "lost in the post".



Women will also lie to save people’s feelings, with only 27 per cent saying they would tell a man if he was hopeless in bed (although a third would tell their friends all about it).



Just over half would flatter a man if he asked them about his looks and only 46 per cent would give the "brutal truth". However, 61 per cent of women would want their partners to be "brutally honest" if they asked them "do I look fat?" or "do you think my best friend’s attractive?"



Elsewhere, 54 per cent admitted stealing sweets or chocolates; 23 per cent would "sneak a bottle or two" home if they were invited to a party by a well-off friend; 49 per cent would "kiss and tell" to the media for £25,000 if they had a one-night stand with a celebrity; and 38 per cent say they would marry purely for money.



Nearly half said they had faked orgasms and 55 per cent admitted claiming they were tired, had a headache, or felt ill to "get out of lovemaking".



Nineteen per cent of women with a long-term partner said they had cheated on him, while 30
per cent of all women have had an affair with a married man. Sixty-eight per cent said they did not trust their partner.



As far as trustworthy personalities are concerned, the woman with "the most honest face" was Fern Britton, the This Morning host. She was followed by the singer Kerry Katona (formerly McFadden), Sharon Osbourne of The X Factor and the Queen.



The "most honest male face" jointly went to Ant and Dec, the presenters of I’m A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here!, with Prince William second.



The results come in the wake of the controversy surrounding David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, and his former lover, the publisher Kimberly Quinn. They had a child, but she kept details of the affair secret from her husband Stephen, even taking her son to Corfu for a week’s holiday to bond with him this year.



Mr Quinn accepted his wife’s story, but she had covered up the fact she was accompanied by Mr Blunkett.



• The survey questioned 5,000 women, average age 38, across Scotland, England, Wales and
Northern Ireland.



Top ten porkies That’s Life! magazine has carried out its National
Scruples and Lies Survey 2004 to find out the top ten lies told by women. They are:



1. "Of course you don’t look fat!"



2. "These shoes were only £10."


3. "The bus/train was late."


4. "I’ve got a headache."


5. "I’ve only had one drink."


6. "That dress looks good on you."


7. "The cheque’s in the post."


8. "You look ten years younger."



9. "You’re wonderful in bed."



10. "I love you."



(End of atricle)

From the Internet Archives (link) and the Cato Commentaries (link):

by Doug Bandow



Doug Bandow, a member of the bar in California and Washington, D.C., is a a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.




The ink was barely dry on the tobacco settlement last June, when Richard Scruggs, a Mississippi trial lawyer who represented 25 states in talks with the industry, acknowledged in The Wall Street Journal that the fees he and his colleagues would end up collecting might seem "a little obscene."




Many of the 165 or so lawyers and firms involved in the tobacco litigation have also participated in other mass torts and have grown used to fees that are "a little obscene." But with a total settlement of $368.5 billion, even an overall 3 percent payout would run to $11 billion.




The tobacco lawsuits represent the demise of traditional negligence law. Consumers eschew responsibility for their own actions, liability lawyers search for deep pockets, legislators overturn standard notions of fault and state attorneys general prostitute their offices in search of publicity. Liability, no less than war, has become a continuation of politics by other means.





One tactic has been to create faux civil rights, the violation of which incurs liability for damages. Litigation then can become a tool of extortion. Companies that depend on responsible employees will naturally shun an alcoholic or drug addict-- yet to do so now risks liability under the Americans With Disabilities Act. Walter Olson, author of "The Excuse Factory" (Free Press, 1997), points to rulings that a shoplifter was entitled to a job as a longshoreman because his thefts were minor, that a pilot deserved to be rehired after flying while drunk and that a wife-beating firefighter qualified for reinstatement with back pay after claiming to be mentally ill.




Equally pernicious has been the steady subversion of more traditional liability rules, eliminating the necessity of both requiring the plaintiff to act responsibly and finding the defendant to be at fault. Cases involving irresponsible defendants -- burglars and drunks, for instance -- have passed into legend. Now, smokers join the pantheon of those to be protected from their own foolishness.




As the risk of large, meritless judgments has risen, so has the incentive to settle, rewarding plaintiffs who file suit merely in hopes of being bought off.




The pervasive belief in victimhood has led to excessive judgments even when defendants have only been slightly at fault. Juries act as if they were politicians, promiscuously giving away other people's money. Many apparently believe that their job is not to assess fault and harm but to redistribute wealth. The law has become yet another program of the welfare state.




The pervasive belief in victimhood has led to excessive judgments even when defendants have only been slightly at fault. Juries act as if they were politicians, promiscuously giving away other people's money.




Most serious are the cases in which juries impose liability despite no demonstration of fault. Lawsuits involving asbestos and so-called multiple-chemical sensitivity have proved to be enormously successful for creative legal minds. It's not that the plaintiffs aren't sometimes really hurting, but that they have no proof-- at least not in the common meaning of the term-- that the individuals or companies being sued are responsible for their ills.




This is evident in the case of silicone breast implants. For years, there was no claim of harm. But as the country's liability sweepstakes picked up, some women with implants suffered health problems.




Dr. Marcia Angell, executive editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, explains in her book, "Science on Trial" (W. W. Norton, 1996), that "any woman over 25 could develop" such symptoms. But the drumbeat of publicity, inflamed by the trial bar, convinced many women that breast implants were to blame.




The havoc wreaked by the ensuing legal deluge exceeds that of the tobacco litigation. The silicone implant industry has been destroyed. Producers of other silicone-based products, like pacemaker wires and artificial joints, became more cautious. Frightened women had their implants removed.




Yet evidence continues to mount that implants do not cause disease. The latest finding, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in May, indicated that women with implants generally engaged in riskier behavior than did women without implants. Such factors, the study said, "potentially make these women more or less likely to develop certain diseases." This means that even a correlation between implants and ill health would not demonstrate causation.




But there is no correlation. In 1996, a Federal District Judge in Oregon dismissed 70 claims, concluding that the case purporting to show a link between implants and systemic illnesses did not meet a sufficient scientific threshold to warrant presentation to a jury. Numerous studies have found no or minimal connection between implants and disease. And most court cases have found no liability.




A market system will work only if people who have been injured by the negligence of others are able to receive redress. But that doesn't mean turning American courtrooms into legal lotteries, where fault need not be shown in order to win a big prize. Legislators need to insure that damages are awarded based on probabilities, not possibilities, and that the system rewards injured parties rather than entrepreneurial lawyers. Congress shouldn't approve the legislation that's necessary to implement the abusive tobacco settlement.




Policy makers must also revisit laws that have created new causes of action, penalizing morally blameless and often socially beneficial conduct. The law must be rescued from activists who have turned it into a tool of politics.

(End of Article)

This article comes to you from the Internet Archives (link) it's a piece from the Upstream web site (link) :


What moderate feminist?


By Carol Iannone

Carol Iannone, a frequent contributor, teaches at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study.




Vol. 99, Commentary, 06-01-1995, pp 46.




To judge by a spate of recent books and articles, there is a new willingness even among self-proclaimed feminists to speak frankly about the errors and excesses of their movement. Christina Hoff Sommers's Who Stole Feminism,[a] for example, is an excellent analysis of the damage feminism has wrought in the academy as well as in the culture at large. Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge's Professing Feminism (1004) is an even more ringing indictment of academic feminism, insofar as both Patai and Koertge, unlike Sommers, actually taught in the field of Women' s Studies for many years themselves, and have now defected in disgust- -something, they tell us, that more and more women's-studies professors are doing. And even the well-known feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum has recently shown a readiness to retreat from the most extreme pronouncements that her academic colleagues have been making over the past years, and to declare at last that the Western philosophical tradition is not hopelessly misogynist but, indeed, the only basis on which feminists themselves can rest their case for greater freedom and equality.






The assumption behind all these reconsiderations is that there is a sound and healthy feminism which has somehow gotten sidetracked, derailed, misappropriated, hijacked by fringe zanies willing to promulgate "falsehoods and exaggerations," in Sommers's words, in order to gain certain political or personal goals.





Thus, Sommers draws a distinction between what she calls equity and gender feminists. Equity feminists, deriving from the "classically liberal" tradition, offered "women a liberal version of consciousness- raising whose aim was to awaken them to new possibilities of individual self-fulfillment." Sommers argues that the contemporary women's movement in its earliest days was built on this model. But, she writes,



by the mid-70's . . . . the old style of consciousness-raising . . . rapidly gave way to one that initiated women into an appreciation of their subordinate situation in the patriarchy and the joys and comforts of group solidarity.



These new gender feminists, who now rule the movement, "believe that all our institutions, from the state to the family to the grade schools, perpetuate male dominance," and their view that the "personal is political" makes them "impatient with piecemeal liberal reformist solutions and leads [them] to strive for a more radical transformation of our society than earlier feminists had envisioned."



This is a nice, neat formulation which at the very least serves the purpose of allowing some criticism of some aspects of a movement whose fundamental premises--that our society's treatment of women was/is unfair, unjust, inequitable, and that the standard feminist remedies were/are self-evidently right and proper--no longer seem even to be a matter of debate. The problem, however, is that the idea that the contemporary women's movement began in moderation and was then deflected and corrupted by a turn toward radicalism cannot survive critical scrutiny.



Take Betty Friedan, the "godmother" of equity feminism for Sommers and many others. Looking back at her writings, and especially her most famous and influential book, The Feminine Mystique (1963), we soon see that Friedan "godmothered" the movement in more ways than one. While it is true that she did not deploy the quasi-Marxist jargon of oppression, gender antagonism, and patriarchy that would later dominate feminist discourse, she did inaugurate the pattern of hyperbole that came to fuel the movement after her. It was she who managed to make the condition of the postwar American woman seem one of soul- strangling asphyxiation and spiritual death. Indeed, for Friedan, submitting to the traditional feminine role was nothing less than an embrace of nonbeing:



It is urgent to understand how the very condition of being a housewife can create a sense of emptiness, nonexistence, nothingness, in women. There are aspects of the housewife role that make it almost impossible for a woman of adult intelligence to retain a sense of human identity, the firm core of self or "I" without which a human being, man or woman, is not truly alive.




It was also Friedan who helped initiate the now ever-expanding tendency to blame the most personal and complex of the ills of life on social or political conditions, and to remove them from the realm of individual moral character (thereby abetting our transformation into a society of victims and "survivors"). On the basis of very little hard evidence, she identified "the problem that has no name"--that is, the malaise and discontent among some educated upper-middle-class housewives-- and blew it up into something of massive proportions urgently demanding society-wide solutions.



And it was Friedan who helped define that useful paradox so beloved by activist leaders, whereby unhappiness, anger, frustration can be seen as signs of health, inasmuch as these reflect a rejection of the status quo, in this case the bitter void to which women were consigned. (This conceit persists in a great many films and plays, like Plenty and Tom and Viv, about neurotic bitches whose very neurosis supposedly bespeaks greater authenticity than that possessed by the walking dead around them.)




From this premise, Friedan launched like a booster rocket into her biggest hyperbole of all:



In a sense that is not as far-fetched as it sounds, the women who "adjust" as housewives, who grow up wanting to be "just a housewife, " are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps--and the millions more who refused to believe that the concentration camps existed.



What follows must be quoted in all its demented detail to be believed:



In fact, there is an uncanny, uncomfortable insight into why a woman can so easily lose her sense of self as a housewife in certain psychological observations made of the behavior of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. In these settings, purposely contrived for the dehumanization of man, the prisoners literally became "walking corpses." Those who "adjusted" to the conditions of the camps surrendered their human identity and went almost indifferently to their deaths. Strangely enough, the conditions which destroyed the human identity of so many prisoners were not the torture and the brutality, but conditions similar to those which destroy the identity of the American housewife.



In the concentration camps the prisoners were forced to adopt childlike behavior, forced to give up their individuality, and merge themselves into an amorphous mass. Their capacity for self-determination, their ability to predict the future and to prepare for it, was systematically destroyed. It was a gradual process which occurred in virtually imperceptible stages--but at the end, with the destruction of adult self-respect, of an adult frame of reference, the dehumanizing process was complete. . . .



To old prisoners [those who had been imprisoned for some time], the world of the camp was the only reality. They were reduced to childlike preoccupation with food, elimination, the satisfaction of primitive bodily needs; they had no privacy, and no stimulation from the outside world. . . .




It was said, finally, that not the SS but the prisoners themselves became their own worst enemy. Because they could not bear to see their situation as it really was--because they denied the very reality of their problem, and finally "adjusted" to the camp itself as if it were the only reality--they were caught in the prison of their own minds. . . .






All this seems terribly remote from the easy life of the American suburban housewife. But is not her house in reality a comfortable concentration camp? Have not women who live in the image of the feminine mystique trapped themselves within the narrow walls of their homes? They have learned to "adjust" to their biological role. They have become dependent, passive, childlike; they have given up their adult frame of reference to live at the lower human level Of food and things. The work they do does not require adult capabilities; it is endless, monotonous, unrewarding. American women are not, of course, being readied for mass extermination, but they are suffering a slow death of mind and spirit.




Despite the qualification in that last sentence, Friedan ultimately does not shy away even from that aspect of the analogy:






If we continue to produce millions of young mothers who stop their growth and education short of identity, we are committing quite simply genocide, starting with the mass burial of American women and ending with the progressive dehumanization of their sons and daughters.



Given all this, the fact that Friedan, in a colloquy in the 70's, defended a woman's right to choose the homemaker role against Simone de Beauvoir's insistence to the contrary does not really amount to much. Indeed, what the exchange between de Beauvoir and Friedan illustrates more than anything else is the marriage of liberalism and radicalism in our time, in which liberalism offers a cover of moderation to radical ideas. While the liberal gives lip service to things he is actually if not always consciously seeking to destroy, the radical is more open and honest; at the same time, the radical's views are really what supply energy to the liberal.





So it was here: for women, the shift away from the primacy of the homemaker's role was as radical a shift as there could be, and it set the stage for all the feminist radicalism that was to follow. To those who argue that this derived from economic necessity rather than ideology, we might ask why feminists did not demand measures, like higher tax exemptions for children, which might have bolstered the homemaker role for women who wished to choose it even in the face of financial pressure. But feminism was never interested in facilitating that choice. What it really wanted was to make the full-time homemaker role seem fit only for subhumans and to force women into "careers, " or, as would be the case in so many instances, into the job market.



And here too it was Friedan who set the prescriptive tone of feminist proposals that we hear to this day:



A massive attempt must be made by educators and parents--and ministers, magazine editors, manipulators, guidance counselors--to stop the early-marriage movement, stop girls from growing up wanting to be just a housewife.



IN A recent article in Academic Questions, John Ellis points out that high infant mortality, lower life expectancy, more primitive technology, and the necessity of having children to provide for old age all acted to make motherhood the primary focus of most women in the past. As I can testify from the experiences of my own family, these conditions persisted even through much of this century. My grandmother died in childbirth at twenty-seven; my great-grand-mother lost six of the twelve children she brought to birth; her daughter, one of my great aunts, lost four of eight; another of her daughters, my step-grandmother, unable to have children herself, was grateful for her two stepdaughters, my mother and my aunt.



As circumstances changed for women, largely thanks to "patriarchal" constructs like technology and medicine that feminism often deplores, new opportunities became possible. It is Ellis's contention that these improvements allowed women more freedom from the biological role, and in this he is certainly right.



Yet, in truth, that freedom may be overstated even today. For the real reason that women seem to have so much time today to give to jobs and careers, leading them to decry what they see as female subjugation in past eras, is that as a society we have managed to convince ourselves that children no longer require the care and attention it was once thought they did. Far from being an established truth, however, the spread of this idea has been accompanied in our country by a worsening of children's lives on every count--poorer academic performance and higher rates of teenage pregnancy, venereal disease, accidents, suicide, homicide, mental illness.




If a movement begins from false premises, what else but falsehoods can ensue, together with determined exercise of power, coercion, and control--of the kind Patai and Koertge show are widespread in Women' s Studies--to keep the falsehoods going? In this light, the excesses presented by Sommers and Patai and Koertge are not at all surprising. Why--to cite only one example of many--should not people believe that 150,000 women die of anorexia every year (without proof and contrary to common sense, since such numbers would mean we would be burying a skeletal teenager every week); is this not of a piece with the rhetorical picture of women's lot painted by feminists from the beginning?



Contemporary feminism could not have worked without such falsehoods and exaggerations, for the simple reason that the situation of women in America is not that bad today and was never that bad even in the pre-feminist past. American women are not comparable to women in the third world or during the Middle Ages, let alone to inmates of Nazi concentration camps. Even at the time The Feminine Mystique was published, American women were living in a degree of freedom, comfort, and prosperity probably unequaled in the history of womankind since Eve (before her unfortunate expulsion from the garden). And today, of course, they probably have more power and privilege of various kinds than women ever commanded before.



One place where all these repressed truths seem to be surfacing-not surprisingly in a perverse form--is in recent films like Body Heat, Disclosure, and The Last Seduction. These movies suggest that women are using both feminist and feminine wiles to advance selfish and even evil agendas, to gain advantages over men in ways that are dishonest, treacherous, and hideously destructive. The appeal Of such films may lie in the opportunity they offer to see the part of the picture that feminism wants to leave out--that men are not the only villains, that women too can be wicked, that men are not the only ones with power, that women have powers of their own, including the ability to prey on men's vulnerability to them.



Such films perhaps suggest an answer to some of Betty Friedan's more philosophical musings. "For human suffering there is a reason," she once pondered, and "perhaps the reason has not been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough." Perhaps. On the other hand, perhaps the questions are being pressed too far. As she herself wrote in the 1974 edition of The Feminine Mystique, "It was easier for me to start the women's movement which was needed to change society than to change my own personal life."



Indeed.

Bernard Chapin YouTube video Volume 62 of Chapin's Inferno called "Bad Boys and Women.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGWHffXhVJI

Yet another new link. This time it's a Marriage Strike focused weblog called:

Marriage Strike Central

http://marriagestrikecentral.blogspot.com