Molly Ivins May 13AUSTIN — Have you noticed that under the influence of free-market theology, government is becoming both less useful and more onerous? That splendid libertarian strand of less government that always stoutly defended the right of motorcyclists to ride without helmets and other forms of going-to-hell-in-whatever-handbaskets-we-choose is losing out to nanny-state conservatism. If you pair two new books, which at first glance look like an odd couple, I think you will see what the problem is. The first is David Shaw's glorious rant against "The Pleasure Police: How Blue-Nose Busybodies and Lily-Livered Alarmists Are Taking All the Fun Out of Life." America has always been given to puritanical snits — sex, alcohol, tobacco, sex, drugs, pornography, sex, any form of music favored by young people, gambling and sex have always sent moralists into gobbling outrage. Long before irate Baptist preachers denounced Elvis Presley as a creature of Satan, and before rap brought out the heavy artillery of the bluenoses, jazz was condemned as "perverted" and ragtime stigmatized as "degenerate" (Negro influence there, you see). There's a similar fever chart with other forms of sin in America. The other day, House Speaker Newt Gingrich spoke to the National Religious Broadcasters and announced the chief goal of his party: to achieve a drug-free America by Jan. 1, 2001, following "a national crusade fully as intensive as the effort to balance the budget." To achieve this goal, Gingrich proposes that drug dealers should get mandatory life sentences on first conviction and the death sentence for second convictions. "If you sell it, we are going to kill you," he said. Holy cow. I find this of considerable personal interest because the Texas Legislature is about to criminalize cigarette smoking by teens, and a federal judge in North Carolina ruled last month that nicotine is a drug and can be regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. I hate to be pessimistic, but I fear that Shaw, himself a fairly militant anti-cigarette cigar-smoker, is correct in his scenario. "Supplies plummet. Demand soars. A black market quickly develops to fill the void. Prices skyrocket. As with Prohibition, people start making their own illicit cigarettes — growing small tobacco plants in the backyard or on isolated plots of vacant land not likely to be discovered by authorities.
Second on Gingrich's list of new national goals is reducing teen pregnancy — surely a noble goal. But as we have already seen in the case of the 18-year-old who was recently sentenced to a year in prison for getting his girlfriend pregnant, criminalizing teen sex is not our smartest move. The kid was prepared to quit school, get a job and marry the girl, but now he's in the slammer instead. Not a policy that makes a lot of sense. If you wonder why our government has nothing better to do with its time and power than to criminalize smoking and teen sex, take a look at Robert Kuttner's book "Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets." Like Shaw's book, it is a sensible, moderate look at a broad problem with some horrifying specific results. "The ideal of a free, self-regulating market is newly triumphant. The historical lessons of market excess, from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression, have all but dropped from the collective memory. Government stands impeached and impoverished, along with democratic politics itself. Unfettered markets are deemed both the essence of human liberty and the most expedient route to prosperity. "In the United States, the alternative to laissez-faire has never been socialism. Rather, the interventionist party, from Hamilton and Lincoln, through the Progressive Era, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, sponsored what came to be known as a 'mixed economy.' The idea was that market forces could do many things well — but not everything. Government intervened to promote development, to temper the market's distributive extremes, to counteract its unfortunate tendency to boom-and-bust, to remedy its myopic failure to invest too little in public goods, and to invest too much in processes that harmed the human and natural environment." Kuttner's book is pragmatic and readable, offering both an intelligent appreciation of markets and trenchant criticism. Since the ideology of free markets allows government no role in creating a just society, it perforce is left with nothing to do but regulate individual behavior. Hence, the anti-sin crusade. I highly recommend this pair of books. *** Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. COPYRIGHT 1997 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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