Tue, 12 Dec 2000 18:49:21 -0600
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2000 18:49:21 -0600
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From: David Theroux <DJTheroux@independent.org>
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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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For previous issues of THE LIGHTHOUSE, see
http://www.independent.org/tii/lighthouse/LHLink2-48-10.html.

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http://www.independent.org/tii/lighthouse/LHLink2-48-11.html.

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