| Alan W. Bock is
a senior columnist for the Orange County Register.
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Government Gastronomy — Guess which
cafeteria the District of Columbia recently shut down for such sins against the
health code as water dripping from the ceilings, cooks without hair nets, poorly
cleaned surfaces, and mouse droppings everywhere? Why, the cafeteria at the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, the agency charged with keeping the country's food
supply safe. — Alan W. Bock
| Randal O'Toole
is senior economist with the Thoreau Institute. |
|
Only you (not the Forest Service) can prevent forest fires
— A Colorado acquaintance visited his parents near San
Diego last summer and found that the yard around their home was overgrown with
manzanita and other natural — and highly flammable — vegetation. He
called a landscaping company and told them to clear everything within 30 yards of
the house.
When the fires reached their neighborhood this fall, firefighters quickly
recognized their home was the only firesafe home in the area and they used it as
a command post. Despite the best efforts of firefighters, many of the neighboring
homes went up in smoke.
Congress is reacting predictably to the hundreds of homes burned in California
forest fires: it is throwing more money on them. Or, to be precise, throwing
money at the Forest Service. Will the Forest Service spend the money helping
homeowners remove flammable vegetation from their property and otherwise make
structures firesafe? Of course not. It is going to spend the money doing things
on federal lands that are neither necessary nor sufficient to protect people's
homes.
Forest Service documents show that only a few million acres need to be thinned
to protect homes, and most of those acres are on private land. With the money it
is getting from Congress, the Forest Service could do all of these acres in less
than two years. But almost none of the money Congress is dedicating to fire will
go to private lands.
In my more cynical moments, I suspect that the Forest Service wants homes to
burn because every burnt house means another few million dollars in its annual
budget. More likely, the Forest Service is just using the fire issue to get money
from Congress to do things its employees think are necessary in the 192 million
acres that it manages, whether they have to do with fire or not. — Randal
O'Toole
| Fred Smith is
president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
|
|
The Thin Green Line — A prominent
feature of those who hate the market is their ability to see criminality
everywhere. Recall Mises' comment: "The trial has been held. The businessman has
been convicted. The crime will be announced at a suitable occasion."
The great protector of the people, The New York Times, noted in a Sept. 25
editorial: "Low-income homeowners can be easy targets for unscrupulous lenders"
with, of course, the greatest burden falling on the "elderly, African-Americans,
and immigrants."
That editorial went on to discuss excessive fees, higher interest rates,
balloon payments, and the practice of bundling these loans and selling them to
investors. Of course, the Times noted that there is a value in willingness to
lend to lower-income people in distress, but the fine hand of government is
needed to "extract the bad apples" — don't you love the Times'
sophistication? State and federal consumer protection agencies must step in to
protect consumers from such practices.
Ironically, only a few years ago, the Times and other statist champions were
railing against those same financial institutions for "redlining," the practice
of ruling out loans to people because they live in a low-income neighborhood.
So, the rules are clear. You shouldn't lend to people who might default but
you must lend to anyone who might not default. And, if default occurs, then it
was your fault! — Fred Smith
Caucasian Commotion — A recent
article in the Washington Times reports the effort of a 15-year-old girl to
create a Caucasian club at her high school. Darnell Turner, an opponent of the
club, warned that "the club could morph into a white-supremacy group," and
suggested that the club's name should be changed to the European-American Club so
that the focus would be on heritage, not race. Mr. Turner, it was noted, was the
vice president of the East County National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People!
Oh well, never mind! — Fred Smith
| Thomas S. Szasz,
M.D. is professor of psychiatry emeritus at the SUNY Health Science Center in
Syracuse, N.Y. |
|
| The Greatest Poem I spent the
first eighteen and a half years of my life in Hungary, and the next sixty-five
years in the United States. I am Hungarian. I am American. I am both. I am
neither. Who we are depends on how we and others define our identity.
As a youth in Hungary, I wrote poetry and wanted to be a writer. Later, a
fellow ex-patriate, the psychoanalyst Sandor Feldman, told me that one of the
definitions of a Hungarian goes like this: A Hungarian is a citizen of a country
of 8 million people and 9 million poets.
As an adult, I came to realize that only as bodies do we live in physical
space. As persons, we live in linguistic space. This is why a country, a
political entity, is a matter of geography, but a nation, a social entity, is a
matter of language.
The immigrant who wants to live in a new language, not just speak it, must let
a part of himself die. The self generated by and through the new language is a
radically new self. Refusal to learn the majority language is existential
self-preservation or self-mutilation, depending on the immigrant's point of view.
I did not know this when I was eighteen, but I felt it. I was deeply attached to
the Hungarian language, which I loved with the intensity and naivete typical of
children educated in the best Gimnaziums in Budapest in the 1930s.
Luckily, necessity is the mother not only of invention but also of adjustment.
So, like most immigrants, I learned English and came to love it more than I think
I ever loved Hungarian. In short, my coming to America, when and how I came, was
a piece of incredible good luck, a fact of which I was well aware intellectually.
At the same time, it was also, linguistically, an exceptionally traumatic
experience, which I felt deeply.
I feel particularly fortunate, then, not only for having been able to leave
Hungary when I did, escaping the dark decades my homeland was facing, but also
for having had the opportunity to be reborn, as it were, into the
American-English language. "The United States themselves," wrote Walt Whitman,
"are essentially the greatest poem." What other country's national poet would
characterize his homeland in such terms?
(from Dr. Szasz's remarks upon being presented with the George
Washington Award of the American Hungarian Foundation, Nov. 11, 2003.)
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