Lisa:

The fact is that in this situation, thanks to the FDA, you have only undesirable options to choose from. The decision of whether a drug is beneficial for a particular patient isn’t up to that patient and his physician. The FDA won’t approve a drug unless it can show benefit in clinical trials, and so far the only benefit that the drug company has been able to demonstrate for BiDil is in African Americans.

The FDA approves lots of drugs that work well for some groups of people but not for others. Sometimes contraindicators are known and sometimes they aren’t. This includes everything from oral contraceptives to mood stabilizers.

So why not come out for “approving” BiDil for everybody, without regard to race? If questions about race and medicine need to be mooted, let them be mooted in the doctor’s office instead of the regulatory agencies.

“Race-specific approval” means restricting the liberty of a race of people to choose their own medications. The best solution is to abolish the FDA, but until that happens, why dicker about race politics when the obvious solution is more permissiveness rather than selective permissiveness?

Speaking as an economist, do you seriously believe that government economic planners can calculate more efficient allocation of land resources than consensual market bids in a system of private land ownership? If so, why?

I’ve always thought libertarianism would gladly sacrifice man to the economy instead of the reverse. That just confirms it for me.

… which just goes to show that you don’t know anything in particular about libertarianism.

Have you read any of the (extensive) literature, by even the most emphatically “capitalist” of libertarians, defending the rights of the homeowners against the corporate State in Kelo? Are you aware that the plaintiffs were represented by a libertarian legal nonprofit (the Institute for Justice), or that libertarian think-tanks like the Cato Institute filed amicus briefs on behalf of the plaintiffs?

Hell, did you read any of the other comments on the post?

Just curious.

So, Randall, do you think that white people who want to take BiDil ought to be stopped or discouraged from doing so by the federal government?

I mean, that’s what “race-specific drug approval” means, y’know.

Rainbough: More dangerous than a speeding tornado… [etc., etc.]

Well, not to come across as the humorless scold, but really what’s happening in Zimbabwe is beginning to sound more and more like an echo of forced de-urbanization. Like. In. Cambodia. I fear that it’s rapidly passing the point at which even the most sardonic humor is appropriate.

Marc: Instead, I say the US needs to become an active exporter of revolution. Bring people from oppressed dictatorships around the world to the US, and train them rigorously in BOTH military skills AND constitutional law, and return them to their homelands – with some free M-16’s as a going away present.

“Exporting” United States Constitutional law in its present form strikes me as about as useful to a freedom-loving insurrection in the Third World as the free M-16s.(1) Especially when the understanding of the law is being doled out by the United States government.

(1) N.B.: mass-produced AK-47s are far better suited to the kind of work that guerrillas have to do and the kind of conditions they have to do it in than finicky, expensive M-16s.

That said, there is nothing that I know of that prevents you, now, from doing this — except, perhaps, the M-16s, which might come under federal arms control laws. You could gather the money, rent some land out in the country, make some contacts with Zimbabweans and Zimbabwean ex-pats over the Internet, and hold a Zimbabwean Freedom Summer Camp every summer. Heck, since you don’t have to count on the good graces of U.S. government functionaries anymore, you could even do something more useful — like giving them a crash course in the works of Lysander Spooner and supplementing militia training with a solid grounding in, say, the history and tactics of nonviolent passive resistance. And then help them gain the organizational skills and resources necessary to create similar camps in safe areas in sub-Saharan Africa (say) to do the same thing.

If you really want to “Help the world by helping people help themselves,” why not start by helping yourself instead of depending on the government to do it for you?

benkilpatrick: Who was radical in the 1930s? … My question implicitly excludes state socialists and “old leftists” from any possibility of being radical.

daysofthegun: Then, pick up “The Spanish Anarchists” by Murray Bookchin, and “Homage To Catalonia” by George Orwell.

The revolution in Catalonia is a good example.

daysofthegun: You might also want to do a google search on anarchism in Korea and Japan in the late 1920’s. Then, read up on the International Socialist League (don’t let the name fool you, they were IWW style syndicalists) in South Africa in the late teens/early twenties.

These are not good examples. Not because they’re not radical, but rather because they are not from the 1930s. (If you are going to include the “late teens / early twenties,” why didn’t you just cite the Wobblies in the United States?)

daysofthegun: Then, take a look at the rise of the union movement in the United States in the late 1930’s/early 1940’s.

This is not a good example, either. The surge in membership and resources for government-recognized unions has been catastrophic for the radical labor movement. The reason that membership surged was because the New Dealers and other governments around the world decided that unionism had become too much of a threat to the status quo, so they provided new “pro-labor” regulatory bodies (such as the NLRB in the United States) that made it easy to form a union and get some government privileges in conflicts with the boss—if you submitted to the new government bureaucratic framework. That meant “growth” of the labor movement at the price of government colonization of it, and (in effect) a massive government subsidy for conservative, top-heavy, boss-dominated unions. That meant a “rise” for the AFL and CIO and catastrophe for (say) the IWW. That’s certainly workplace-based, and it’s certainly organized, but it’s certainly not “anti-authoritarian” and whether it’s really “class-struggle” as “fuck” is dubious at best.

There were certainly radical people and organizations in the world in the 1930s, but frankly the time has to be recognized as a disaster for the radicalism that had been rising in the early part of the 20th century. Because while there were prominent and important exceptions, the dominant trends of the decade for radicals were (1) having their effort co-opted and replaced by New Dealers, fascists, and/or Bolsheviks (thanks to backing from the governments of the imperial powers of the world), and (2) being jailed, shot, and bombed by New Dealers, fascists, and/or Bolsheviks (thanks to backing from the governments of the imperial powers of the world).

The rise of labor unionism during the Roosevelt administration is an excellent example of (1). The end of the revolution in Catalonia is an excellent example of (2).

Of course it would be better for marijuana to be legally available and taxed than it would be for marijuana to remain criminalized. The question is what the reasons to be given for opposing marijuana prohibition are.

Trading off increased theft from peaceful marijuana users may be reasonable as a ransom for keeping them from being locked in cages for years. But it seems pretty dodgy to talk up the increased loot from the ransom as if it were a positive reason to endorse ending prohibition, doesn’t it? Why not stick to the aspects of ending prohibition (like reducing government spending, and, more importantly, not assaulting innocent people and robbing them of years of their life) that are genuine benefits, rather than those that are not?

Allport: “I can see that Spencer is a highly controversial addition to the list, and perhaps he doesn’t fit well into a ‘harmful books’ categorization anyway, but I do think that much of the defense of him is beside the point. We’re not really arguing about whether Spencer was a good man or whether his ideas, when properly understood, were good; we’re arguing about whether their misapplication had harmful effects.”

Well. This does, at the least, raise some broad methodological questions about this list and the discussion of the Human Events list that preceded it. (Yeah, I know, this is no doubt taking things too seriously. Oh well. It seems like the point of these lists was to provoke some discussion about books and history, not to mention the specific books named, so here we go.)

I take it that if we’re talking about “harmful books,” we’re attributing the harm, in part, to the contents of the books themselves. But Spencer’s views have been widely misunderstood. Does it make sense to attribute the harm that misunderstandings of his books caused to the books themselves? Even if those misunderstandings are clearly the fault of the reader (or cocktail-party conversationalist) rather than the fault of the author? (This isn’t just about Spencer, either; it’s clearly the case for Rand, for example, and possibly for Freud too.)

The point here is not to insist that you’re doing something wrong if you say that you will count wilfully misunderstood books on the list. I want to say that you’re probably doing something wrong if you do — it seems that you’re treating the books more as historical artefacts than as, well, books. But maybe it’s not obviously wrong to do so. And if it is, there are tricky cases, such as Nietzsche in BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL — who made an appearance on the Human Events list — where the book has been gravely misunderstood, but the author seems to have intended that hasty readers would fail to understand.

The point here, rather, is that different answers to each of these questions could result in some drastically different lists. Imagine what different answers about interpretation might mean when it comes to the Bible or the Qu’ran, if you were to expand the list beyond the last couple centuries! So I’d be interested to know what Ralph (for one) was thinking about questions of interpretation and misinterpretation when he was considering which books to list as “harmful”; and I’d be interested to know if there was any one consistent answer to those questions that he was thinking of when he prepared the list.

Well, there are two major possibilities as to the kind of information Felt might have had on hand.

1. Haldeman was referring to dark, nefarious things that Felt could reveal, which we now know about, but that we didn’t know about around October 1972.

2. Haldeman was referring to dark, nefarious things that Felt could reveal, at least some of which we still don’t know about.

There may be no way to find out, of course. But it’s worth noting that Felt was sitting on top of millions of pages of records relating to COINTELPRO at the time. We found out about COINTELPRO a year before (1971), but the knowledge of its history and operations was pretty limited in 1972 (systematic investigations didn’t begin until 1976). If Felt decided to retaliate against the Nixon administration by releasing several volumes of uncensored records of the details of government surveillance, deception, and malfeasance, at a time when the Watergate scandal was already heating up and the Pentagon Papers a recent memory, then I don’t doubt it would have been pretty hot news at the time, and catastrophic for an administration that was already in deep, deep trouble.

Alternatively, it might have been a matter of old J. Edgar’s blackmail files. Maybe he had dirt (personal or otherwise) that Nixon was afraid of; maybe not. Nixon had his own share of personal demons; but would stuff that just made him look venal or ridiculous be that much worse than what was already coming out about him?

Of course, it could be something else entirely.

I think that pretty much everything you say here is right-on. Quick point of information, though:

“In the last Presidential election, Chirac ran against Dominique de Villpin (sp), a far-right xenophobe, and the left was forced to vote for a conservative incumbent who took their support for granted.”

Dominique de Villepin is a political ally of Chirac’s, just recently elevated to the position of Prime Minister. The fascist revivalist that Chirac faced in the most recent Presidential election was Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the “Front National”. (France has multiparty presidential races with a single run-off round; what happened was that the Left vote was split between several unpopular candidates, so by a fluke Le Pen came in #2 in the first round and went to the one-on-one run-off with Chirac, where he was crushed by an alliance between Chirac and the Left voters, by a margin of 82%-18%.)

Hope this helps.