Book Reviews

BOOKS For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health by Jacob Sullum The Free Press. 1998 • 288 pages • $25.00 Reviewed by John Attarian H ounded by billboards and other "public service" exhortations, barred from light ing up almost everywhere but in their own cars and homes, and saddled with rising ciga rette taxes, smokers are being treated like pariahs-for their own good, of course. The anti-smoking crusade asserts that tobacco companies concealed the dangers and addic tive nature of cigarettes, and manipulated their nicotine content to addict smokers; that all tobacco forms are bad; that secondhand smoke greatly endangers others; that people, especially impressionable teenagers, smoke because of insidious advertisements like Joe Camel; and so on. In this levelheaded and well-informed book, Reason magazine senior editor Jacob Sullum convincingly debunks these claims.

Smoking's health hazards have been known, and openly discussed, for decades. So has manufacturers' control of cigarettes' nicotine levels. Cigars and smokeless tobacco are far less dangerous than cigarettes. No evidence exists that casual exposure to secondhand smoke is a significant danger. As for suppos edly sinister old Joe, the most important fac tors influencing teenagers' decisions to smoke are their sense of smoking's risks and benefits, the demonstration effect of family members who smoke, and peer behavior. Opposition to smoking, Sullum points out, is nothing new. King James I, Pope Innocent X, and others denounced tobacco as addictive, unhealthy, inconsiderate of others, and down right wicked. But people kept smoking for the benefits and pleasures they got from it, and brushed off warnings of health hazards. 57 The 1964 Surgeon General's report stated that smoking, linked to cancer and other ail ments, was a health hazard serious enough to warrant "appropriate remedial action." This opened, in Sullum's words, "the most concert ed, sustained, and successful effort in history to discourage the use of tobacco." For Your Own Good carefully narrates that effort. At first, public health officials realistically recog nized that Americans would not abruptly kick the habit, and opted to steer them to safer cig arettes with low tar and nicotine. But gradual ly the objective changed to eliminating all tobacco use. The anti-smoking movement won several victories. Cigarette advertising on television and radio was banned after 1970. Increasingly blunt warnings were man dated on cigarette packs and cartons.

Feeling the pressure and terrified of law suits, the tobacco companies responded by criticizing the evidence of health hazards as inconclusive, sponsoring its own research into the link between tobacco and lung cancer, and introducing filter-tipped and other "safer" cig arettes. Sullum observes that this refusal to acknowledge smoking's well-known dangers "has made the cigarette business the most reviled and distrusted industry in America." The unrelenting threat of lawsuits finally broke the tobacco companies' resistance, and in 1997, to limit their liability, they offered the (in)famous $368.5 billion agreement with the federal government. Sullum acknowledges the cancer risk and describes nicotine as "the most dangerous recreational drug." He describes the tobacco companies as "cynically dancing around the truth to ward off liability and protect [their] profits," but he adds that they "didn't fool anyone who didn't want to be fooled."

By contrast, one of the anti-smoking move ment's worst aspects is its end-justifies-the means dishonesty, which Sullum abundantly presents: twisting research to fit its agenda, attacking researchers for saying what they in fact did not say (for example, that some ciga rettes are safe), and relying on hysterical rhetoric, ad hominem assertions, and outright falsehoods. Sullum himself has been smeared as being "in the pay of the tobacco industry," because R.I Reynolds used one of his articles 58 THE FREEMAN/IDEAS ON LIBERTY • MARCH 1999 in an ad campaign and a tiny fraction of the Reason Foundation's budget comes from Philip Morris contributions. A favorite recent recourse of the smoking bashers is cigarette tax increases. This will reduce smoking marginally, but will also spawn corruption and smuggling. Further more, stating that smoking is sensitive to price defeats the argument that cigarettes are irresistibly addictive. As Sullum wryly notes, "giving up cigarettes when the price of a pack goes up twenty-five cents is not the behavior of someone who is powerless over nicotine."

Indeed, addiction receives much attention. Sullum concludes that smoking is a habit dif ficult to break, but not impossible (America has about as many ex-smokers as smokers). Will power is crucial. Smoking bashers who assert that cigarettes are irresistibly addictive are in effect abolishing man as a moral agent; "they criticize individualism itself, because it implies that people are responsible for their own behavior." Given the anti-smoking crusade's premises, a cigarette ban is its logical culmination. But Prohibition and the war on drugs, Sullum shows, provide a valuable cautionary tale of crime, corruption, and despotic encroach ments on individual liberties. For Your Own Good is a rare, welcome voice of reason and truth about cigarettes. If you want to make sense of the smoking war, don't miss it. 0 John Attarian is a freelance writer in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and an adjunct scholar with the Midland, Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

Star-Spangled Men: America's Ten Worst Presidents by Nathan Miller Scribner • 1998 • 272 pages • $23.00 Reviewed by Gene Healy H istorians who evaluate American presi dents suffer from a bias against inaction. In the conventional view, great presidents are the nation builders and the war leaders; the failures are the ones who "never did anything." Nathan Miller, author of Star-Spangled Men: America sTen Worst Presidents, shares the conventional bias. For example, he indicts Silent Cal Coolidge with Mencken's faint praise: "He had no ideas, and was not a nuisance." Those of us who favor limited government see it differently. This would have been a hap pier century by far if the worst that could be said of any president was, "He had no ideas, and was not a nuisance." One (unintended) virtue of Miller's book, then, is that it reminds us of some of the forgotten men who have held America's most powerful office, yet somehow managed to leave well enough alone.

Miller picks his losers by asking, "How badly did they damage the nation they were supposed to serve?" What's strange, then, is that the presidents he selects were mostly peacetime leaders who did little perceptible damage to the Republic and its institutions. Take Coolidge, whom Miller writes off as "a reluctant refugee from the nineteenth cen tury." Miller fairly sneers at Coolidge's emphasis on fiscal probity and laissez faire. Unable to find much to criticize in the unin terrupted prosperity of Coolidge's tenure, Miller tries a cheap shot: Coolidge's "penny pinching refusal to cancel [the war] debts contributed to the rise of Adolf Hitler." Well, maybe. But as long as we're doling out responsibility for Nazi atrocities, why don't we give some to Woodrow Wilson? Wilson's dragging the United States into World War I allowed the Allies to impose a punitive peace on Germany in the first place. Why, then, does Miller consider Wilson a "near great"

president? Unlike Wilson, Coolidge was never awake for long enough to do much damage; as Miller recounts, he slept 11 hours a day. Dur ing his waking hours, Silent Cal's sound instincts allowed him to hew to the presiden tial equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath. As Coolidge put it, "Nine-tenths of a president's callers at the White House want something they ought not to have. If you keep dead still they will run out in three or four minutes." Miller's chapter on William Howard Taft inspires reflection on the varieties of presidential obesity. Mencken saw Grover Cleve land's great bulk as indicating a kind of implacable strength. But Taft's girth reflected placidity and inaction, complementing his sedate view of the presidency: "the president cannot make clouds to rain, he cannot make the corn to grow, he cannot make business to be good." Miller rates Taft as the ninth worst, but his tenure in the White House was marked by peace and prosperity.

Warren G. Harding receives the most unde servedly rough treatment of any president examined. From a classical liberal perspec tive, Harding was arguably the greatest presi dent of the twentieth century. He initiated the largest spending cut in history-a 40 percent reduction from Wilson's last peacetime bud get. And Harding's good nature and liberal instincts led him to overrule his political advisers and pardon Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs. Debs had been jailed during Wilson's jihad against opponents of World War I, but Harding turned him and other dissenters loose; "I want [Debs] to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife," he said. The scandals surrounding Harding's adminis tration push him near the top of Miller's hit list. But, as Miller notes, he never took "so much as a nickel" from any of his corrupt cronies. Despite the author's depressingly conven tional perspective on presidential greatness, Star-Spangled Men is tremendously enjoy able. Miller ~an turn a memorable phrase: (for example, he writes that Kissinger "looked like a Bronx Butcher and operated with the cyni cism of a Renaissance Cardinal") and has an eye for the kind of detail that makes reading history fun.

Read with the proper attitude, Star Spangled Men inspires reflection on what we should value in a president. D Gene Healy is a student at the University of Chicago Law School. BOOKS 59 Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-CommunistEurope by Vladimir Tismaneanu Princeton University Press. 1998 • 216 pages • $29.95 Reviewed by David L. Prychitko C ommunism is dead, but collectivism is quite alive. Vladimir Tismaneanu's book Fantasies of Salvation explains why. Tisman eanu, once a Romanian dissident and now professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, argues that while the centrally planned, socially engineered visions of Marxism-Leninism are dead, the false, utopian hope of emancipation through the state lives on. The myth of socialist interna tionalism has now been replaced by a new myth, populist nationalism. Communism declared that its aim was the unification and collective freedom of workers around the world, but the new post-commu nist vision abandons that myth for a much narrower but equally deadly one. The new political vision in many former socialist regimes is not the Western ideal of individual freedom and civil society. Instead, "the nation" is the focus of attention.

The 1990s are a stubborn and sobering reminder that classical liberalism does not necessarily replace socialism by default. Although there have been success stories countries like the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovenia, for example-the 1990s might be better remembered for the Bosnian war, the growing Kosovo crisis, and the return of refugee camps. Who would have thought that the collapse of the Berlin Wall would be fol lowed by the return of ethnic cleansing? Tismaneanu shows that the problems of post-communism remain because the fight is less about the freedom of individuals and more about the emancipation of the ethnic enclave. Throughout eastern and central Europe "the nation" is paraded as the true center of history, the source of dignity, the subject of sorrow and oppression. The author 60 THE FREEMAN/IDEASON LIBERTY • MARCH 1999 demonstrates how this emergent populist nationalism seeks to destroy individuality, pluralism, and democracy and instead cham pions unity, stability, and authoritarianism.

Tismaneanu's explanation of why collec tivism has re-emerged in many post-commu nist states is worth quoting at length: The end of communism has left individuals with a sense of loss: even if they hated their cage, it offered at least the advantage of stability and predictability. Like former prisoners, they now have freedoms but do not know exactly what to do with them. Under these circumstances, they are ready to espouse the rhetoric of the tribe with its emphasis on group identity and communi ty values. The neurosis of the transition period, the collective fear of a general col lapse, the closing of the historical horizon and the anger at the new economic barons nourish sentiments of revolt, distress, and intolerance. There is need to find scape goats, to identify those culpable for the ongoing sorrows. The political myth of lost and reconquered ethnic unity serves pre cisely this purpose: to explain defeats and alienation and reassure the individual that he or she has a place within the volkisch community.

In the face of all this, Tismaneanu remains optimistic over the prospects of the liberal intellectual dissidents in the post-communist countries and their continued resistance against collectivist nationalism. The emer gence of classical liberal institutions-a mar ket economy, a fully flourishing civil society, and constitutional democracy-remains criti cally dependent on them. I highly recommend this book. Those familiar with Ludwig von Mises's Nation, State, and Economy: Contributions to the Pol itics and History of Our Time will find in Tismaneanu's book a fascinating and probing updating to our time. D David Prychitko studied the former Yugoslav system on a Fulbright grant in 1989, and currently heads the department of economics at Northern Michigan Uni versity in Marquette. He is co-editor, with Nevenka Cuckovic, of a collection of classic articles by Mises and Hayek, translated into Croatian.

Out of Order by Max Boot Basic Books • 1998 • 252 pages • $25.00 Reviewed by George C. Leef M ax Boot is a journalist and editor at the Wall Street Journal who has made a name for himself (and a lot of enemies) with his articles exposing the despicable practices of plaintiffs' lawyers who will do almost any thing to squeeze money out of "deep pocket" defendants. With Out of Order, he turns his considerable writing and reportorial skills toward another facet of our legal system judges. Once highly respected pillars of the community, the ranks of the black-robed con tain, Boot argues, many who have little or no regard for justice. This is a serious problem that has received too little attention. Thus this is a welcome book. The bad-judge problem has several facets. One that Boot addresses is partisan judges, ones who have an ingrained preference for certain litigants, lawyers, or causes, so that their courtrooms are about as fair as the Stal inist show trials of the 1930s. Plaintiffs' lawyers know who they are and naturally con trive to :file suits in their courts. You have probably heard of the multimillion-dollar punitive damage awards in cases where there was truly no harm at all, such as the infamous repainted BMW case in Alabama. But how do these absurd instances of legal plunder ever get to trial at all?

The answer is that some judges-elected with copious amounts of money contributed by lawyers who will have cases before them are unwilling to serve the interests of justice by dismissing suits that are transparently nothing more than legal extortion. Boot names names and gives the nasty details. But the harm done by rogues who play favorites is minimal when compared to the harm done by another class of bad judges those who have aided and abetted in the unconstitutional expansion of power of gov ernment. This has mainly been the work of the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts, many of whose members have been chosen for their philosophy that the Constitution's restraints on governmental power should be "interpreted" in such a way as to give the Congress and President virtual carte blanche. This category includes judges who insist on amending the Constitution through creative interpretations. As an example, Boot cites Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg-long an advo cate of the vague, never ratified "Equal Rights Amendment"-who managed to smuggle it into the Constitution with her opinion in the Virginia Military Institute case.

Yet another facet of the bad-judge problem is the phenomenon of judges who regard themselves as potentates, taking over prison systems, ordering busing schemes, and even decreeing that taxes be raised for their utopi an visions. Consider, for example, the Kansas City judge who decided that he was going to "equalize" educational opportunity by order ing an incredibly costly program of inner-city school construction, or the New York judge who ordered the City ofYonkersto build hun dreds of units of low-income housing in middle-class neighborhoods. Power always attracts authoritarians. That judges can get away with a lot of tyranny bodes ill for the future. Given that we have a judicial system infest ed with judges who are partisan and judges who use their positions to coercively reshape society, what are we to do? Boot discusses several ideas for ameliorating the problem. He suggests, for example, ending the practice of popular election of judges, which has had the unfortunate effect of putting justice up for sale-read his account of a race for the West Virginia Supreme Court. That might help, but it might just as well turn out like so many other attempts to clean up the political system and merely hide the problem.

Assume that judges were chosen through some other political mechanism. The special interest groups that have been getting the judges they want through elections will not give up their quest merely because we enact some reform statute. They will simply con centrate their efforts on influencing the new judicial selection method, perhaps by getting friendly faces appointed to the judicial selec tion board. Under a "reformed" system, it BOOKS 61 may be even harder to identify judges who are puppets of organized labor or the plaintiffs' bar. The bad-judge problem has the same roots as most of our other problems, which is to say, our over-politicized society. Trying to rein in partisan and Constitution-wrecking judges is, I fear, an exercise in futility as long as so many people see politics as a legitimate way of getting what they want. But even if there is no easy remedy for the bad-judge problem, we still ought to be cog nizant of it. Out of Order skillfully assists us. [J George Leef is book review editor ofThe Freeman.

A History of the AmericanPeople by Paul Johnson HarperCollins Publishers • 1998 • xv + 1,088 pages • $35.00 Reviewed by Burton Folsom "The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures. No other national story has such tremendous lessons, for the American people and for the rest of mankind." So begins Paul Johnson in his upbeat and first-rate A History of the American People. As a British historian and non-academic, Johnson avoids the pitfalls of so many Amer ican historians. Academic historians in partic ular often impose a double straitjacket on U.S. history: first, that economic issues have been paramount in shaping American politics; and second, that government intervention in the American economy has been necessary and benign. Johnson disputes both of these points. Johnson gives due attention to economic issues, but he also highlights the crucial role of religion in shaping American history. For example, he takes the Puritans seriously as men of ideas. Later, he analyzes the Great Awakening, the religious fervor of the 1740s.

"The Great Awakening," Johnson argues, "was thus the proto-revolutionary event, the formative moment in American history, pre ceding the political drive for independence 62 THE FREEMAN/IDEASON LIBERTY • MARCH 1999 and making it possible." George Whitefield, its leader, "was the first 'American' public fig ure, equally well known from Georgia to New Hampshire." In Johnson's history, the rise of America to world prominence is a fascinating story, full of key inventions and daring entrepreneurs. Liberty, not government, is what extended the American dream to millions of Americans, immigrants and natives alike, during the 1800s. The 1900s might well be called the century of big government in U.S. history. "It was [President Woodrow] Wilson who first intro duced America to big, benevolent govern ment," Johnson asserts. But Wilson "was cor rupted by power, and the more he had of it the deeper the corruption bit, like acid in his soul."

Johnson prefers Calvin Coolidge: "No one in the 20th century defined more elegantly the limitations of government and the need for individual endeavor, which necessarily involves inequalities, to advance human hap piness." Coolidge cut taxes, promoted free enterprise, and had the lowest misery index (inflation plus unemployment) of any presi dent in this century. "Of those who came to power at the same time as Coolidge, all the most notable were dedicated to expanding the role of the state." When the Great Depression hit, both Hoover and Roosevelt brought bigger govern ment to America-and much of it had nega tive consequences, according to Johnson. "No series of events in modern history is sur rounded by more mythology than the New Deal," Johnson writes. "There was no actual economic policy behind the program." Demo cratic Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and Republican Nixon expanded government fur ther. But, Johnson says, Ronald Reagan, a "conservative revolutionary," challenged the Democratic hegemony. Johnson curiously ignores Nixon's failed economic intervention, but praises him for challenging the Kennedy money and the "liberal" media.

Johnson's history is a superlative achieve ment, not only for his knowledge and insights but also because he is an able writer and cap tivating storyteller. In a recent interview, Johnson showed impatience with historians who "niggle" at his work, but more niggling by his editors would have cleared up a variety of misspellings and minor errors. Zachary Taylor was a Whig, not a Democrat; it's Alfred Sloan, not "Sloane," and John W. Davis, not "Davies." But let me niggle no more. Critics accuse Johnson of being biased, but he is in fact balanced and nuanced in his treat ment of historical events and personalities. Johnson appears biased to other historians because so many of them are accustomed to teaching from the standard "liberal" texts that dominate the market-for example, Samuel Eliot Morison's Oxford History of the Ameri can People. Where Johnson treats Coolidge with respect, Morison lashes out, calling him "a mean, thin-lipped little man, a respectable mediocrity ... dour, abstemious, and unimag inative." Where Johnson dissects the New Deal, Morison is filled with gushing praise, saying that it was "just what the term implied-a new deal of old cards, no longer stacked against the common man.... Proba bly it saved the capitalist system in the United States."

These snippets are typical of the "history" most Americans have learned. Johnson's excellent work often stands in opposition to the conventional wisdom. It deserves a wide readership among students as well as adults, and if so, we may yet train our next generation to appreciate American history. D Burton Folsom is senior fellow at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. He is author of The Myth of the Robber Barons and Empire Builders. Independence Hall The Pursuit of Happiness 'Economies Illuminating the Unseen by Russell Roberts T he good effects of laws are often easily seen. The bad effects, unseen. So observed Frederic Bastiat 150 years ago. His basic insight remains true today. We live in busy times. Information bombards us. In such a world, even that which is seen is often over looked. The unseen is that much more elusive. If we are to make the case for economic freedom, we have to bring these unseen costs to light. Consider an increase in the minimum wage. What is seen: businesses give some of their low-wage workers a raise. The direct effects of the minimum wage-more money for low-wage workers, less money for busi nesses that pay them-frame the entire debate. Senator Christopher Bond of Missouri says the minimum wage is bad because it hurts small business-as he argued in his recent re-election campaign. So most people see the minimum wage as a tax on small busi ness that helps the poor. No wonder many people think it's a good idea.