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Tue, 12 Dec 2000 18:49:21 -0600
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2000 18:49:21 -0600 Message-Id: <200012130049.SAA07799@server1.pjdoland.com< To: klay@enron.com From: David Theroux <DJTheroux@independent.org< Reply-to: DJTheroux@independent.org X-Mailer: Perl Powered Socket Mailer Subject: THE LIGHTHOUSE: December 12, 2000 THE LIGHTHOUSE "Enlightening Ideas for Public Policy..." VOL. 2, ISSUE 48 December 12, 2000 Welcome to The Lighthouse, the e-mail newsletter of The Independent Institute, the non-partisan, public policy research organization <http://www.independent.org<;. We provide you with updates of the Institute's current research publications, events and media programs. ------------------------------------------------------------- IN THIS WEEK'S ISSUE: 1. Pentagon "Shocked" to Find Rivers Dammed with Pork 2. The Environmental Propaganda Agency 3. William Lloyd Garrison, Antislavery Crusader ------------------------------------------------------------- PENTAGON "SHOCKED" TO FIND RIVERS DAMMED WITH PORK Captain Louis Renault -- Claude Raines's cheerfully duplicitous character in the 1942 film classic "Casablanca" -- asserted glibly that he was "shocked, shocked" to learn that gambling was taking place at Rick's Cafe. Moments later he was only too happy to collect his gambling earnings for the night. All this is by way of preamble to a new Pentagon investigation of fraud in military construction. The investigation concluded that three senior Army Corps of Engineers officials had, just as one whistle-blowing Corps economist had claimed, engaged in a deceitful campaign to justify what the Washington Post called "a billion-dollar construction binge on the Mississippi and Illinois rivers." "The [Pentagon] investigators concluded that the agency's aggressive efforts to expand its budget and missions, as well as its eagerness to please its corporate customers and congressional patrons, have helped 'create an atmosphere where objectivity in its analyses was placed in jeopardy,'" the Post reports. "Even the agency's retired chief economist told them that Corps studies were often 'corrupt,' and that several Corps employees cited 'immense pressure' to green-light questionable projects." Bureaucratic boondoggles of such magnitude are certainly newsworthy. But they are hardly news. Just as the Soviets derided the failures of previous Five Year Plans (only to implement new, equally flawed versions), so it seems that every few years the Pentagon uncovers massive corruption and waste in its own centrally planned fiefdom -- only to present a new Plan that operates under the same bad incentives that encouraged prior malfeasance. With corruption and waste seemingly "taken care of," the worst pork-barrel spenders in Congress and the military are then let off the hook, only to enjoy -- like Casablanca's Renault and Rick -- an amicable toast to the beginnings of a beautiful new friendship. For the Washington Post series on the Army Corp of Engineers boondoggle, see http://www.independent.org/tii/lighthouse/LHLink2-48-1.html. For a summary of the Independent Institute book, ARMS, POLITICS AND THE ECONOMY: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Robert Higgs, see http://www.independent.org/tii/lighthouse/LHLink2-48-2.html. ------------------------------------------------------------- THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROPAGANDA AGENCY Will the neck-to-neck presidential race help reduce -- or intensify -- pressure for the next president of the United States to score points with statist environmental activists? Except on a few controversial issues, a strong case can be made that the forty-third President of the United States will wish to portray himself as a close friend of "the environment." President George W. Bush, for example, would face strong pressure to show that he is "bipartisan" in his approach to environmental protection; whereas President Al Gore would likely attempt to win back those who supported Nader and the Greens. All the more reason, then, to call attention to the failures of the current approach to environmental protection -- especially those emanating from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or, as economist Craig Marxsen terms it, the Environmental Propaganda Agency. The EPA sometimes employs the language of cost-benefit analysis to illustrate its seemingly tremendous success, but it is known to employ it in a highly misleading manner. The EPA claimed, for example, that its Clean Air Act programs produced, from 1970 to 1990, $22.2 trillion dollars in health benefits at a cost of only $523 billion. But, reports Marxsen in THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW, "[The EPA's] study actually represents a milestone in bureaucratic propaganda. Like junk science in the courtroom, the study seemingly attempts to obtain the largest possible benefit figure rather than to come as close as possible to the truth." In conclusion, writes Marxsen, "Without the illusory benefit of all the lives saved, the actual benefits of the Clean Air Act were very modest and probably could have been achieved nearly as well with far less sacrifice. The Clean Air Act and its amendments force the EPA to mandate reduction of air pollution to levels that would have no adverse health effects on even the most sensitive person in the population. The EPA relentlessly presses forward in its absurd quest, like a madman setting fire to his house in an insane determination to eliminate the last of the insects infesting it." For more information, see "The Environmental Propaganda Agency," by Craig S. Marxsen (THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW, Summer 2000), at http://www.independent.org/tii/lighthouse/LHLink2-48-3.html. For analysis of other EPA programs, see the Independent Institute book, CUTTING GREEN TAPE: Toxic Pollutants, Environmental Regulation and the Law, edited by Richard Stroup and Roger Meiners, at http://www.independent.org/tii/lighthouse/LHLink2-48-4.html. For Robert Formaini's insightful review of Kip Viscusi's important book, RATIONAL RISK POLICY (THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW, Winter 1999), see http://www.independent.org/tii/lighthouse/LHLink2-48-5.html. ------------------------------------------------------------- WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON, Antislavery Crusader "I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation.... I will not equivocate -- I will not excuse -- I will not retreat a single inch -- and I will be heard." -- William Lloyd Garrison, THE LIBERATOR, January 1, 1831 December 12 marks the 195th anniversary of the birth of William Lloyd Garrison, a leading figure in the American abolitionist movement. As the late historian Henry Mayer explained in his National Book Award-Finalist biography, ALL ON FIRE: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery: "William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) is an authentic American hero who, with a Biblical prophet's power and a propagandist's skill, forced the nation to confront the most crucial moral issue in its history. For thirty-five years he edited and published a weekly newspaper in Boston, THE LIBERATOR, which remains today a sterling and unrivaled example of personal journalism in the service of civic idealism. "Although Garrison -- a self-made man with a scanty formal education -- considered himself 'a New England mechanic' and lived outside the precincts of the American intelligentsia, he nonetheless did the hard intellectual work of challenging orthodoxy, questioning public policy, and offering a luminous vision of a society transformed. He inspired two generations of activists -- female and male, black and white -- and together they built a social movement which, like the civil rights movement of our own day, was a collaboration of ordinary people, stirred by injustice and committed to each other, who achieved a social change that conventional wisdom first condemned as wrong and then ridiculed as impossible." Indeed, without Garrison's inflammatory but compelling writing, speaking and organizing, there might have been no effective American anti-slavery movement at all. For more on William Lloyd Garrison, read historian Henry Mayer's talk from the Independent Policy Forum, "The Civil War: Liberty and American Leviathan" (with Jeffrey Rogers Hummel), at http://www.independent.org/tii/lighthouse/LHLink2-48-6.html, or hear it in RealAudio at http://www.independent.org/tii/lighthouse/LHLink2-48-7.html. Also see Jeffrey Rogers Hummel's review of Henry Mayer's brilliant biography, ALL ON FIRE: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW, Fall 2000), at http://www.independent.org/tii/lighthouse/LHLink2-48-8.html. ------------------------------------------------------------- If you enjoy receiving THE LIGHTHOUSE ... please help us support it. Your supporting Independent Associate Membership enables us to reach thousands of other people. So, please make a contribution to The Independent Institute. See http://www.independent.org/tii/lighthouse/LHLink2-48-9.html. to donate, or contact Ms. Priscilla Busch by phone at 510-632-1366 x105, fax to 510-568-6040, email to <PBusch@independent.org<, or snail mail to The Independent Institute, 100 Swan Way, Oakland, CA 94621-1428. All contributions are tax-deductible. Thank you! ------------------------------------------------------------- For previous issues of THE LIGHTHOUSE, see http://www.independent.org/tii/lighthouse/LHLink2-48-10.html. ------------------------------------------------------------- For information on books and other publications from The Independent Institute, see http://www.independent.org/tii/lighthouse/LHLink2-48-11.html. ------------------------------------------------------------- For information on The Independent Institute's Independent Policy Forums, see http://www.independent.org/tii/lighthouse/LHLink2-48-12.html. ------------------------------------------------------------- To subscribe (or unsubscribe) to The Lighthouse, please go to http://www.independent.org/subscribe.html, choose "subscribe" (or "unsubscribe"), enter your e-mail address and select "Go." Copyright , 2000 The Independent Institute 100 Swan Way Oakland, CA 94621-1428 (510) 632-1366 phone (510) 568-6040 fax info@independent.org http://www.independent.org
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