sioner Stanford Ross conceded in 1979 that “the mythology of Social Security con- BOOKS tributed greatly to its success. . . . Strictly speaking, the system was never intended to Dependent on D.C.: The Rise of return to what they paid.” Ross said that Americans should forget the Federal Control Over the Lives of “myth” that Social Security is a pension plan Ordinary Americans and accept it as a tax on workers to provide by Charlotte Twight for the “vulnerable of our society.” St. Martin’s Press/Palgrave • 2002 • 512 pages American citizens now shoulder over $12 • $26.95 hardcover; $17.95 paperback trillion in unfunded Social Security liabili- ties. If the defenders of Social Security insist Reviewed by James Bovard that the fraud was justified, the question arises: What future limits should exist on harlotte Twight has written an excellent government’s prerogative to deceive the peo- book to help Americans understand ple? If Social Security is an acceptable fraud, C how the federal government is insidi- what would government have to do before it ously seizing control of their lives, year by was considered to have gone too far? year, edict by edict, emergency by emer- Twight vivifies how the federal control of gency. Twight provides both a solid theoret- education has been increasing for decades. ical framework and bevies of examples to Public education is the most expensive “gift” drive home the danger from Washington. that most Americans will ever receive. Gov- A professor of economics at Boise State ernment school systems are increasingly University, she highlights how, “from the coercive and abusive both of parents and perspective of ,” the students. Government schools in most areas “authority to control, not the specific con- have been taken over by unions, judges, and trols imposed at a particular point in time,” grandstanding politicians. And the worse is the key issue. Her concern is “not only the schools have failed, the more years of stu- growth of dependence but also the growth of dents’ lives they are commandeering. Unfor- an ideology of dependence—the normative tunately, regardless of the continual failures judgment that broad governmental power of Washington’s education programs, fed- creating pervasive dependence on govern- eral intervention has spread like kudzu ment is desirable.” through the nation’s schools. The author shows how politicians and One of the best parts of the book is the bureaucrats are continually slanting the analysis and revelations about federal sur- playing field against individual freedom. veillance of average Americans. Twight Twight warns, “Deliberately manipulating drives home how the feds were already stick- our ability to stop their power quest, federal ing their noses practically everywhere—even officials have used techniques that systemat- before 9/11, the Patriot Act, and Total Infor- ically increase people’s personal costs of mation Awareness. resistance.” Dependent on D.C. walks readers through Twight also shows how government how the government has acquired far more grows by deception, for example, how pres- arbitrary power in recent decades—and why idents, congressmen, and bureaucrats that power is a dire threat to the Constitu- conned Americans into accepting Social tion and Americans’ everyday life. Anything Security. The Social Security Administration that increases dependency on government for decades told people that their Social undermines liberty. How can a citizen help Security taxes were being held for each citi- steer the ship of State at the same time that zen in individual accounts; in reality, as soon he has his hand out for another government as the money came in, politicians found benefit? Once a person becomes a govern- ways to spend it. Social Security Commis- ment dependent, his moral standing to resist 55 Ideas on Liberty • June 2003 the expansion of government power is enough for many modern “liberals”; they fatally compromised. Every increase in the now wish also to regulate people’s thoughts number of government dependents means an and naturally have turned to government for increase in political power. Each increase in the necessary enforcement powers. From the number of government dependents campus speech codes in the United States to means another person who sees limits on laws like that in France under which writer government power as a threat to his own Michel Hoellebecq was recently charged for personal well-being. having written critically about Islam, we America is capsizing as a result of the vast now face a steadily increasing array of sanc- increase in the number of government tions for expressing “incorrect thoughts.” dependents and employees—a voting bloc Gottfried, a professor of humanities at that overwhelms every other potential force. Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, H. L. Mencken quipped in the 1930s that began his project of describing the growth of the New Deal divided America into “those what he calls “the managerial state” in his who work for a living and those who vote 1999 book After Liberalism (reviewed in the for a living”—a division more true now than October 2000 issue). The current book ever before. extends Gottfried’s insights to a particularly Hopefully, Americans will wake up to the troubling aspect thereof—its “therapeutic” danger of constantly growing government side, which aims at “curing” people of their power before it is too late. However, as “bad” ideas. Gottfried explains: “Our wel- Twight’s book shows, that defense is becom- fare state since midcentury has become ing more difficult with each passing year. increasingly preoccupied with modifying James Bovard is the author of Lost Rights (1994) social behavior. And while American admin- and Terrorism and Tyranny: How Bush’s Cru- istrative democracy has not gone as far eco- sade Is Sabotaging Freedom, Justice, and Peace nomically in nationalizing production [as (St. Martin’s, forthcoming September 2003). other governments], it has moved into socializing ‘citizens’ through publicly con- trolled education and wars against discrimi- nation. Such reconstructionist initiatives Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt have been taken in response to what the by Paul E. Gottfried state, the media, and ‘victim’ groups desig- University of Missouri Press • 2002 • 176 pages nate as a crisis, a surging outburst of prej- • $29.95 udice that supposedly must be contained and whose representatives need to be re- Reviewed by George C. Leef educated.” What advocates of liberty need to under- ecently the book The Skeptical Environ- stand, Gottfried contends, is that the central mentalist by Bjørn Lomborg was planners have changed their objectives. R denounced by the Danish Committee for Whereas the left has long pursued economic Scientific Dishonesty. Without offering planning to eliminate the alleged unfairness specifics, the committee said the book was of the market, its emphasis has been moving “contrary to the standards of good scientific away from economic controls and toward practice.” It hasn’t been banned or burned, behavioral controls. Politicians like Bill Clin- but here is an official body endeavoring to ton and Tony Blair understand that they tell people what thoughts are unacceptable. need the economic growth that only a rela- It is part of a growing movement, here and tively free economy provides to obtain rev- in Europe, toward government management enue for their social projects. “What distin- of people’s beliefs. In Multiculturalism and guishes third-way planners from earlier the Politics of Guilt, Paul Gottfried writes social democrats is a greater willingness to about the mega-state’s embrace of that new sacrifice economic collectivism for economic role. Controlling people’s actions just isn’t growth,” Gottfried writes. “Social control 56 Books by the state does not presuppose a socialized States in the old, purely economic kind of economy, and government interventions into socialism, Europe has gone further into the child rearing, spousal relations, and inter- therapeutic socialism about which Gottfried group dynamics can now go forward in con- writes. There, people are actually fined and junction with market forces.” imprisoned for verbal offenses against “the The big selling point of old-style socialism antifascist order.” The First Amendment still was fear—fear of poverty, of “Robber offers us protection against the worst Barons,” of the “chaos” of freedom. Like an instincts of the thought controllers, but it advertising slogan that is so timeworn that it would be good to remember that judicial no longer brings in customers, “fear” has “interpretation” that takes away constitu- been dropped by the left and replaced with a tional protection for our is nothing new hook better suited to contemporary new. conditions: guilt. People must acquiesce in A necessary and important book. the new social regulation because they have George Leef is book review editor of Ideas on to atone for a constellation of past wrongs. Liberty. Gottfried writes, “The relevant political- moral attitude is an ostentatious guilt about the historical past that the majority society is supposed to exhibit.” The state and its allies The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken parade before the public a steady stream of by Terry Teachout “politically correct martyrologies” to keep it HarperCollins • 2002 • 349 pages plus notes compliant. and index • $29.95 hardcover “By harping on the real or imagined evils of the past,” Gottfried writes, “proponents Reviewed by Sheldon Richman of state-controlled socialization appeal to the guilty conscience of their listeners.” He is early half a century since his death, surely correct in that assertion. Many col- H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) continues leges and universities now have freshman- N to fascinate. What attracts so many to orientation sessions that are reminiscent of the audacious debunker of sham, the Colos- Maoist re-education camps, where white sus of literary, political, and social criticism students are harangued and berated so they from the 1910s into the 1930s? will “understand” what it’s like to be a His latest biographer, cultural critic Terry member of an oppressed group. Yet there is Teachout, provides some answers to that little opposition to those programs, the question. While not a full-blown biography, guiltmeisters having done their work well. The Skeptic mines the most important areas Gottfried’s analysis also has its foreign of Mencken’s life and digs out much of inter- policy dimensions. If government power can est pro and con. Mencken fans, of which be used to “do good” at home, why stop there remains a legion, won’t always be there? Thus we get military interventions pleased with Teachout’s findings or judg- abroad not because there is any conceivable ments. threat to the United States, but because the As newspaperman, book author, and people just aren’t behaving nicely. As the magazine writer and editor, Mencken author puts it, “This new internationalism, courted controversy—deliberately: he cele- as suggested by Clinton and Blair, aims at brated Nietzsche in 1908; he wrote a paean nothing less than a transformation of human to the Kaiser’s Germany in 1914; he consciousness.” So allied forces go into offended Jews (though many of his best Kosovo because we have to stop ethnic friends really were Jewish); he demeaned hatreds, and European nations organize a blacks (while publishing black authors); he campaign to punish Austria for electing a derided Christianity; he promoted a literary prime minister with unenlightened views. naturalism that flaunted the underside of Just as Europe was ahead of the United life; and he daily insulted the middle class as 57 Ideas on Liberty • June 2003 the “booboisie.” He was a man full of prej- Mencken’s previous biographers, I write, udices (Mencken’s word), who could be very broadly speaking, from his point of unjust to the targets of his gleefully mischie- view,” one is hard pressed to find more than vous pen, such as William Jennings Bryan traces of empathy. More often, the reader and Calvin Coolidge. Teachout’s portrait is gets the impression that Teachout doesn’t often unflattering, and for this some much like his subject. He assuredly admires Mencken aficionados blame the biographer. how Mencken integrated style and sub- But it is not entirely Teachout’s fault. In stance. He is awed by Mencken’s prodigious many ways, Mencken asked for it. energy and output. He respects many of And yet something about him casts a spell. Mencken’s accomplishments, such as help- First, there is the quality of Mencken’s writ- ing to liberate American letters from a stulti- ing. His earthiness and gusto leave their fying and censorial Puritanism and his path- mark on all who come in contact with him. breaking description of the “American Second, he lived a life that many would language.” But he also levels serious and love to live. Seemingly carefree, daring, and even shocking criticism: that Mencken was a uninhibited, Mencken wrote what he bad magazine editor; that his literary self- wanted about anything he wanted and the education was woefully incomplete; that he consequences be damned. (Teachout shows misunderstood some of the writers he cham- us that a good deal of Mencken’s public per- pioned and panned; that he was not as dis- sona didn’t square with his private life. passionate an observer as he appeared; that Mencken was a respected man of his bour- his goring of bourgeois America wore thin; geois community and lived quietly, in his and that, most egregiously, he misperceived boyhood Baltimore home, with his mother the rise of fascism and Hitler. He goes so far until she died when he was 45. His biogra- as to blame the Mencken of the 1920s for pher believes he was a poseur in more ways helping “lay the intellectual groundwork for than this.) the America-hating adversary culture of the Third, for libertarians, Mencken was sixties.” unequaled in capturing the spirit of Ameri- Mencken is a big subject made more diffi- can . He was never a socialist cult by his confounding contradictions. No and had no sympathy with the plans and biographer of his is to be envied. Much of pretenses of American politicians. (“We suf- Teachout’s material will cause the reader to fer most when the White House bursts with grimace, but Mencken admirers will find ideas.”) He valiantly battled censorship and that after 400 pages, even if their sense of the Prohibition, the New Deal and FDR, the man is less clear, their admiration somehow burgeoning bureaucracy and its penchant for survives. smothering the creative individual. Many an Sheldon Richman is editor of Ideas on Liberty. advocate of the freedom philosophy could spend the day quoting him on the supremacy of liberty, the diabolical nature of govern- ment, and the threat from egalitarianism and Wealth and Democracy: A Political democracy. History of the American Rich Put these three together, and any mystery by Kevin Phillips concerning the Mencken allure evaporates. Broadway Books • 2002 • 472 pages For some of us, they tote up to irresistibility. • $29.95 hardcover It surely explains why Mencken was so dom- inant a cultural figure in his heyday that a Reviewed by Gregory Bresiger Hemingway character could say noncha- lantly, “So many young men get their likes evin Phillips, a Republican populist, and dislikes from Mencken.” keeps writing the same book.______The Skeptic is a hard book to get a handle K In several bestsellers in the 1990s, on. While Teachout boasts that “Unlike such as Arrogant Capital and The Politics of 58 Books the Rich and Poor, Phillips has been describ- trols, policies that gave the nation “stagfla- ing the American economy in a way that tion” after Nixon was gone. Those policies could lead readers to think America is a hurt the middle class and working poor giant Bolivia where only the superrich own more than the rich, but Phillips is blind to any property of consequence. In his depic- that reality. Nixon also created the alterna- tion of America, the rich get richer and the tive minimum tax, another soak-the-rich middle class works overtime and runs up device designed for millionaires that is now endless debts. I can hardly recognize this afflicting middle-class households. nation. Phillips has evolved into a social What is Phillips’s solution to today’s democrat whether he acknowledges it or problems of “inequality”? Unless there is not. another New Deal, another FDR, or a Pres- His heroes, or at least those he constantly ident Nader, Phillips warns, we should all quotes, are those who battle “inequality.” prepare to become serfs in a modern feudal They are mostly friends of big government. manor. One is former New York governor Mario What is one to make of Phillips’s latest Cuomo. Phillips admires him and others like quasi-Marxist appeal? Remember the Al him because their social and economic poli- Smith line about the New Dealers stealing cies are designed to knock the rich down a the socialists’ clothing? Michael Harrington, peg or two and thereby help the rest of us. the American socialist leader who saw the The only problem with Cuomo’s reign in the Socialist Party defeated again and again, Empire State is that it hurt the rest of us. once argued that the way to advance Phillips, a former Republican strategist, is American collectivism was for socialists to also a fan of populists such as Ralph Nader. join the left wing of the Democratic party. It The reader is also treated to hymns to Abra- appears that Phillips—who spends a good ham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin part of more than 400 pages praising every Roosevelt, and other such tribunes who “Republican progressive” with any socialist favored big government. impulse—is doing the same yeoman work in Phillips’s disdain for those who accumu- the Republican party. late significant wealth is made clear when he Gregory Bresiger is a business editor and writer approvingly quotes Benjamin Disraeli: “As a living in Kew Gardens, New York. general rule, nobody has wealth who ought to have it.” (Phillips doesn’t inform the reader that Disraeli was notorious for dodg- Liberty for Women: Freedom and ing people he owed money to and finally solved his money problems by marrying a Feminism in the Twenty-First Century rich woman.) edited by Wendy McElroy The attentive reader should therefore not Ivan R. Dee • 2002 • 353 pages • $30.00 be surprised that Phillips also praises a hardcover; $18.95 paperback politician, Richard Nixon, who admired Disraeli and wanted to outflank the left by Reviewed by Bettina Bien Greaves becoming a twentieth century “Tory Demo- crat.” “As president,” Phillips writes in dmittedly, men and women are differ- bragging that Nixon endorsed his ideas and ent. Women are from Venus, men from previous books, “Nixon himself supported A Mars. The French say, “vive la dif- national health insurance, income mainte- férence.” But today’s radical feminists exag- nance for the poor, and higher taxation of gerate the difference and consider men and unearned than earned income.” women two “separate and politically antag- Phillips leaves out a few things: Nixon ran onistic classes.” Libertarians and individual- huge deficits, pressured the Fed to follow ists, on the other hand, look on all men and loose monetary policies so he could be re- women as members of the same human race. elected, and imposed wage and price con- Radical feminists advocate special treatment 59 Ideas on Liberty • June 2003 for women in the workplace, academia, and that government’s “equal-opportunity regu- society; libertarians and individualists see lators” will “remain forever enmeshed in the the issue as government force versus freedom workplace,” and “exaggerates all the prob- and seek equality for women under law. lems the women’s movement has been trying Wendy McElroy is a libertarian, an indi- to change.” vidualist feminist (“ifeminist”), and has “Equity feminist” Camille Paglia consid- written widely on the struggle of women for ers anti-pornography laws “inherently infan- equal rights and opportunity. The contribu- tilizing.” research associate tors to Liberty for Women—university pro- Cathy Young maintains that “an individ- fessors, lawyers, political scientists, econo- ual’s noncoercive sexual behavior is no one mists, physicians, prostitutes, midwives, and else’s business.” even a president of the American Civil Lib- The subject of abortion is discussed by erties Union—cover many issues. According economist Alexander Tabarrok. He writes to McElroy, “all human beings have a right that while ifeminists consider abortion “a to the protection of their persons and prop- private matter that must be left to the con- erty,” and this book applies that principle science of those directly involved . . . main- consistently. stream ‘pro-choice’ feminists consider the The authors want to get government off ‘right to an abortion’ to be an entitlement women’s backs, recognize their “economic for which others may legitimately be forced self-sufficiency [and] psychological indepen- to pay. . . . Ifeminists call for the government dence,” and maintain “realistic attitudes to get out of reproductive decision-making toward female competence, achievement, altogether—to neither subsidize nor tax and potential.” Law professor Richard abortion or other contraceptive choices.” Epstein, for one, advocates removing legal Concerning prostitution, University of restrictions and allowing everyone, men and Chicago Professor Martha C. Nussbaum women alike, the freedom to enter into con- argues “there is nothing per se wrong with tracts to better themselves through voluntary taking money for the use of one’s body.” transactions. He writes that this will “[W]ith prostitution: what seems right is to “enhance the vitality of the social system as use law to protect the bodily safety of pros- a whole” and that it “dovetails neatly into titutes from assault, to protect their rights to any and all theories that recognize the limits their incomes against the extortionate as well as the uses of markets.” As an exam- behavior of pimps, to protect poor women ple of the harm done when the government in developing countries from forced traf- refuses to respect , ficking and fraudulent offers, and to guaran- consider the Supreme Court’s decision, tee their full civil rights in the countries which relied on the Civil Rights Act’s anti- where they end up—to make them, in gen- discrimination Title VII (1964) and the eral, equals under the law, both civil and Pregnancy Discrimination Act (1978), to criminal.” overturn a voluntarily agreed-on contract Norma Jean Almodovar, a prostitutes- devised by a manufacturer of batteries to rights activist and former call girl, argues protect its women employees and their that “So long as the sex is consensual it potential offspring from exposure to danger- should not matter to anyone outside the ous chemicals. What the government calls relationship how many times the sexual “discrimination” Epstein regards as mutu- activity occurs, or with how many sexual ally beneficial agreement. partners, or for whatever mutually agreed Only a few of the essays in the collection upon price.” Decriminalization of prostitu- can be mentioned in this short review. tion “would involve no new legislation to Political scientist Ellen Frankel Paul deal with prostitution per se, because there explains that affirmative-action, comparable- are already plenty of laws which cover prob- worth, and sexual-harassment legislation lems such as fraud, force, theft negligence, increases the cost of hiring women, ensures and collusion.” 60 Books

“[V]exing ethical questions” and “serious Loren Lomasky’s chapter, “Nozick’s Lib- questions about individual rights and con- ertarian Utopia,” contends that Nozick’s tract law” may be involved in the controver- discussion of libertarian utopia—which sial new reproductive technologies, but Nozick presented as a supplementary argu- McElroy holds that “like effective contra- ment for the minimal state—is actually a ception and access to legal abortion, [they] crucial component of the main argument in seem to provide women with the ‘choice’ ASU. Nozick says that his main argument central to virtually all brands of feminism. for the minimal state is that it could arise by . . . The true issue surrounding the new morally permissible steps from a stateless reproductive technologies remains ‘a condition. Lomasky recognizes that showing woman’s body, a woman’s right.’” that the minimal state could arise in this way For decades, radical feminists have misled is hardly decisive, for many radically differ- women as to their interests. Liberty for ent political structures could arise by per- Women explains that their true interests missible steps—if people freely take dumb depend on removing legal obstacles to enough steps. So Lomasky depicts Nozick’s freedom. appeal to the utopian aspects of the libertar- Bettina Greaves was a senior staff member and ian political framework as a way of reveal- resident scholar at FEE for more than four ing why this structure is more appealing decades. Now living in North Carolina, she is a than other structures that could also arise by former member of FEE’s Board of Trustees. permissible means. According to Lomasky, the minimal state is more appealing because it has the utopia-like, synergistic feature of promoting a social order in which each per- son’s well-being is likely to be good for other edited by David Schmidtz people too. These are not the important ben- Cambridge University Press • 2002 • 230 pages efits for people that arise from trade or joint • $60.00 hardcover; $20.00 paperback production. Rather, they are the vicarious benefits for people of others achieving their Reviewed by Eric Mack own diverse goods in their own ways. In ASU Nozick rejects the consequentialist his is a collection of original essays on idea that rightness and wrongness in an the philosophical work of Robert Noz- action is entirely a matter of the value or dis- Tick, who died in the spring of 2002. value of that action’s consequences. He holds, Nozick rose to philosophical prominence instead, that performing an action can be with his first book, Anarchy, State, and wrong even if its outcome would be more Utopia, published in 1974. Contributor valuable than the outcome of not performing Philip Pettit aptly says that this book still that action. For instance, it can be wrong for “stands unchallenged as the most coherent you to kill innocent person A even if your statement available of the case for a rights- killing A would prevent someone else from based defense of the minimal, libertarian killing innocent persons B and C. (Here we state.” None of Nozick’s subsequent five accept the conventional wisdom that it would books dealt directly with political philoso- be better for one innocent person, rather than phy, and during most of his ensuing philo- two innocent people, to be killed.) According sophical career, he attempted to distance to Nozick, there are certain principles you himself from Anarchy, State, and Utopia ought to abide by—such as, do not kill inno- (ASU). Nevertheless, it is indicative of his cents—even if your abiding by those princi- failure to establish this distance that most of ples does not maximize those principles being the essays in this volume focus on the liber- abided by. tarian doctrine of ASU. I shall follow suit by Philip Pettit’s essay, “Non-Consequentialism concentrating on the three strongest of the and Political Philosophy,” focuses on and essays on Nozick’s political thought. criticizes Nozick’s anti-consequentialism. 61 Ideas on Liberty • June 2003

Pettit does a nice job of laying out the ity” involved in the act of abiding by the standard—but, I think, mistaken—arguments principle. Hence, one should be prepared to for why everyone ultimately has to be a violate that principle whenever the utility— consequentialist. especially the symbolic utility—of violating The fundamental dispute between anti- the principle is greater than the symbolic consequentialists and consequentialists is a utility of abiding by the principle. For dispute about the nature of practical ratio- instance, one should be prepared to violate nality. Is rationality in action entirely a mat- the principle of not coercing people to come ter of effectively attaining one’s goals? Or is to the aid of others whenever the symbolic it also in part a matter of abiding by certain utility of having official, public programs of principles—such as the principle against assistance to the needy is greater than the killing innocents—which may restrict the symbolic utility involved in the act of abid- means one may use toward the attainment of ing by the principle. Gaus points to deep one’s ends? Gerald Gaus’s essay, “Goals, flaws in Nozick’s later, essentially conse- Symbols, Principles: Nozick on Practical quentialist, account of practical rationality. Rationality,” analyzes Nozick’s subse- Each of these strongest essays is difficult quently developed theory on this matter. going. First read Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Gaus shows that Nozick’s post-ASU dissatis- Then mull it over and read it again. Then go faction with can be traced to in search of interesting commentaries—three this theory; for according to Nozick’s later of which can be found in Schmidtz’s Robert doctrine, the only reason one has to act in Nozick. conformity with a moral principle—such as, the principle of not coercing people to come Eric Mack is a professor of philosophy at Tulane to the aid of others—is the “symbolic util- University.

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