Author Interview: Economist Adam Smith Describes How 'Bootleggers & Baptists' Cooperate

Just over three decades ago, economist Bruce Yandle, then working for the Federal Trade Commission, published an article in the journal Regulation headlined “Bootleggers & Baptists: The Education of a Regulatory Economist,” which noted how groups presumably at odds with each other often collaborate, wittingly or unwittingly.

In 1999, in another piece for Regulation (PDF), Yandle described more fully the phenomenon after an additional 16 years of observation:

“Durable social regulation,” he said, “evolves when it is demanded by both of two distinctly different groups.” Those groups are the “Baptists,” a shorthand term for those who make a moral or ethical case for legislation or regulations, and the “bootleggers,” a term that applies to economic interests who benefit financially from legislation or regulations. (A synonym for “bootlegger” might be “rent-seeker.”)

“'Baptists' point to the moral high ground and give vital and vocal endorsement of laudable public benefits promised by a desired regulation,” wrote Yandle, while “'Bootleggers' are much less visible but no less vital. Bootleggers, who expect to profit from the very regulatory restrictions desired by Baptists … are simply in it for the money.”

What Yandle did was to apply public-choice economic theory to regulatory politics and, in the process, create a colorful concept that has been cited thousands of times since 1983 in attempts to explain how government makes rules.

Fast-forward to 2014, when Yandle, now a retired dean at Clemson University, has collaborated with his grandson, economist Adam Smith of Johnson & Wales University. Their new book is called Bootleggers & Baptists: How Economic Forces and Moral Persuasion Interact to Shape Regulatory Politics. The two authors spoke about it at a forum hosted by the Cato Institute in Washington on October 9, 2014.

'Aligned interests'
After the forum, I asked co-author Adam Smith a few questions about the book and his research.

Adam Smith speaks at the Cato Institute

Smith explained that the term “bootleggers and Baptists” originated during alcohol Prohibition in the 1920s, when “you had bootleggers and Baptists with aligned interests” even if they did not realize it.

Baptists, he explained, proclaimed “Down with legalized distribution of alcohol!” because they saw drinking as morally detrimental. Bootleggers, too, proclaimed “Down with legalized distribution of alcohol!” because Prohibition raised the price of illegal liquor and fed more profits to the bootleggers.

“It was a boon to the bootleggers,” Smith explained, “and the Baptists were kind of oblivious to that situation.”

Broadening the concept to include other kinds of regulations, Smith said, “what we see today in our modern political economy [are] many, many manifestations of the same kinds of strange bedfellows.”

More and more, he said, “we're seeing that those bedfellows are recognizing one another and coming together to form even more powerful would-be bootlegger/Baptist coalitions.”

There is also a relationship between “bootleggers and Baptists” and “crony capitalism,” when government grants preferential treatment to certain, well-connected businesses.

Smith said that, in the book “we call it 'bootlegger/Baptist' capitalism instead of crony capitalism.”

He added that “what I hope the book shows is that cronyism is more than just a bootlegger. That's the only thing that's usually recognized: There's just some special interest group.”

Yet, he explained, “a special interest group cannot move forward without moral cover, or at least can't get much out of the political domain without the Baptist” providing a beneficent reason for legislation, “and so we have to call attention the bad work Baptists are doing in creating opportunities for cronyism.”

Avenues for research
Both Smith and Yandle acknowledge that their book, while expanding upon the original thesis Yandle put forth in 1983, opens up new opportunities for further research by other economists and social scientists.

“There's obviously a lot of empirical work to be done,” Smith explained.

He pointed to “all these social regulations that people aren't looking at in terms of econometric work in the same way that they are [looking at] economic regulations, because we just don't think of it that way. We don't think of environmental policies and health-and-safety standards as giving money to anybody.”

Instead, he said, people “think of those as in the public interest. In other words, the Baptists have succeeded in convincing us of that fact but that's just not true. There are a lot of groups that benefit from that legislation and we need to put them under the microscope. We have to put those regulations under the microscope in the same way that we do economic regulations.”

Smith added that “this is a useful framework for recognizing groups” that may have self-serving (but hidden) economic interests in promoting new regulations.

“Never count a good bootlegger down,” he quipped. “A lot of times when we can't see the bootlegger, it doesn't mean they're not there. Seeing the Baptists can call attention to the fact that maybe there's a bootlegger standing in the shadows” during a debate about imposing new rules or restrictions on human action.

Bootleggers & Baptists, by Adam Smith and Bruce Yandle, was published by the Cato Institute on September 7, 2014.

(This interview appeared, in slightly different form, on Examiner.com on October 14, 2014.)

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Author Interview: James Robinson on 'Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty'

One year ago today, in his first speaking engagement at George Mason University, Harvard political scientist James A. Robinson paid a compliment to the school by noting its “distinct intellectual atmosphere.”

Robinson appeared at the Arlington campus of GMU at the invitation of the Mercatus Center to discuss his 2012 book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, which he co-wrote with MIT's Daron Acemoglu.

In his lecture, Robinson explained how his and Acemoglu's empirical research had led to a predictive theory about how nations develop economically and politically. All countries, he said, can be plotted on a matrix using the categories “inclusive” (politics and economics) and “extractive” (politics and economics).

Success or failure for nations depends on whether they have inclusive or extractive institutions, Robinson said, and these institutions have their origins deep in history – although circumstances can change through the adoption and adaptations of new, better institutions.

As an example of this kind of change, Robinson noted that 200 years before the Industrial Revolution, England was an economic backwater on the edge of Europe. Elizabeth I's defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 was unexpected and unpredictable, yet by 1788, Great Britain was Europe's most formidable economic power and the world's leading colonizer. This was the result of institutional change in law and society.

After signing books for fans and admirers, Robinson clarified and expanded some of his remarks in an interview with me. (It turns out we were both students at the London School of Economics at about the same time.)

He explained that although the Spanish and English colonies in the Americas both began with the same model, the English experience at Jamestown, Virginia, set North America down a more economically prosperous path than the colonies in South America trod.

The circumstances in Virginia and, for instance, Buenos Aires, “were very different,” Robinson said.

“Because there were very few indigenous people [who were] organized in a very different way in Virginia as compared to, say, the central valley of Mexico, a very different type of society emerged.” This society was “based on creating incentives and opportunities for European [settlers] rather than exploiting indigenous people,” which was the case in Latin America.


Mysterious development?

Asked whether there is a difference in the questions of “why nations fail” and “why nations succeed,” Robinson replied that “they're two sides of the same coin.”

James Robinson

The reason his book has the title it does is that he and his co-author “don't think of economic development as being mysterious.”

Instead, he said, “to us, the puzzling thing is, why on earth don't poor countries that ought to be able to generate huge amounts of wealth and improve the living standards of their people” do so by investing in education, adopting technologies, and securing property rights?

“Why don't they do it?,” he repeated. “We've always found failure more puzzling. Why is it people don't take advantages of these huge opportunities?” This question is particularly salient when countries have abundant mineral resources, climates and soils conducive to agriculture, and convenient locations for trade and industry -- yet still fail to develop economically.

Many commentators on economic development – Thomas Sowell, for instance – focus on cultural values as the basis for success or failure. Robinson and Acemoglu take a different approach by emphasizing institutions.

Their approach, Robinson said, came about “mostly because of the empirical work we've done, all the scientific research. We've always found measures of institutions to have much more predictive power than different measures of culture.”

He conceded that “there's a problem of language here. When I talk about institutions, I don't just mean things written down, like the U.S. Constitution.”

He gave the example of the limit of two presidential terms, which was established as “a social norm that lasted for 150 years” by George Washington, before Franklin Roosevelt parted with the tradition and, eventually, the Constitution was amended to make the tradition statutory.

Nobel laureate economist Douglass North, he pointed out, “talks about informal institutions, social norms, and I think that's enormously important. It's not just about written-down laws. Social norms and informal institutions are quite similar to what a lot of people talk about when they talk about culture.”

When Robinson and Acemoglu talk about culture, however, “it's not about values or normative beliefs or normative principles or religious principles. We don't find that to be important; we don't think it's important” in terms of predictive value for economic success or failure.

Why Nations Fail is published in hardback by Crown Business and in paperback by Profile Books Ltd.

Adapted from an earlier article on Examiner.com.

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Author Interview: Garrett Peck Writes History of Prohibition-Era Washington, D.C.

When Woodrow Wilson left the White House in 1921, he moved to a 12,000-square-foot home in Kalorama, an elevated section of Washington that provided him and his wife with an unobstructed view of the city all the way to the Potomac River.

Moving his household necessitated a special dispensation from Congress because Wilson had a large collection of fine wines and, under the terms of the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act, the transportation of alcoholic beverages – even within a city, even over a distance of barely a mile – was illegal.

This anecdote is one of many contained in a new book by Garrett Peck, a writer based in Arlington, Virginia, who has a keen interest in local Washington history and the history of alcoholic beverage regulation. (His previous book was called The Prohibition Hangover: Alcohol in America from Demon Rum to Cult Cabernet.)

So it was no surprise that the book party celebrating the publication of Peck’s Prohibition in Washington, D.C.: How Dry We Weren’t was held at the Woodrow Wilson House, now a museum (in fact, the only presidential museum in the District of Columbia), which still holds one of the largest remaining collections of Prohibition-era wine.

Starting with the ‘Temperance Tour’
Peck explained in an interview that the Wilson house is the final stop on the “Temperance Tour” of Washington that he has led since 2006. This walking tour gave him the idea for his most recent book and also provided him with much of the material for it.

Garrett Peck at Woodrow Wilson House

Using primary source material, including newspaper databases, microfilm, diaries, memoirs, and magazine articles, Peck prepared a chapter “on spec,” which he presented to his eventual publisher, The History Press.

That chapter was called “The Man in the Green Hat,” and it was about George Cassiday, who was the personal bootlegger to Members of Congress during Prohibition.

One he sold the idea for the book, he dived deep into his source material.

“I used a lot of primary material,” he said, such as “the Washington Post online archives. I went to the D.C. Public Library and dug through microforms of different newspapers.”

He discovered that there are “actually a lot of biographies from the 1920s, so I used a lot of those. Probably 90 percent of the book is primary research,” he explained, which included interviews with descendants of some of the key players of the era.

Surprising and unexpected
Three things struck Peck as surprising as he conducted his research.

One was the “size of the brewing industry before Prohibition,” in Washington, he said, “which was huge, and then seeing it just collapse with Prohibition. That was really surprising.”

He also wrote a chapter on African-Americans in Washington during Prohibition.

Nobody, he pointed out, had previously written about that community, “because the press was segregated at the time.”

That lack of coverage had the result, Peck said, that the chapter on Washington’s African-American neighborhoods absorbed “about half of my research time, just trying to come up with an answer to, ‘What did black people think about Prohibition?’”

The difficulty of researching that topic “really surprised me,” he said.

The third surprise he found were the “back-to-back stories of Rufus Lusk and George Cassiday,” which came out in the press “within about a month of each other” in the fall of 1930. Lusk, who founded a real estate records firm that still bears his name, had published a map of Washington showing all the speakeasies in the city, meant to demonstrate how ineffective Prohibition enforcement was.

Cassiday “spilled the beans about bootlegging in Congress” in a series of articles for the Washington Post. That, together with Lusk’s map, Peck explained, “just had a huge impact for the wet cause and helped shift the country towards repeal” of Prohibition, which finally came in December 1933.

3,000 speakeasies
In remarks at his book launch party, Peck noted that prior to Prohibition – which, according to his book, actually began two years earlier in D.C. than in the rest of the country, thanks to the Shepard Act passed in 1917 – there were 300 saloons in the city of Washington. During Prohibition, there were at least 3,000 speakeasies (illegal drinking establishments), an increase by a factor of ten.

D.C. woman putting flask in her boot, 1922

The explosive growth is easy to explain, he said.

It makes sense “from an economic standpoint,” he explained.

“It was an economic opportunity for a lot of people. People still wanted to drink.”

The law of supply and demand meant that, “if there are people who want to drink, there are going to be people to meet that supply.”

According to Peck, “Plenty of people realized, ‘Hey, I can make a good living selling booze to people, whether it’s in my apartment or if I set up a club.’ Here in D.C.,” he explained, speakeasies were located in “a lot of apartments or [in] a room above a business so it looked like it was legit.” Many of these were hidden in plain sight, as shown on the widely-seen map published in 1930 by Rufus Lusk.

Local Prohibition history
While he prefers to “stick with DC” because it’s the city he knows best, Peck acknowledges that Prohibition in Washington, D.C. could be the start of a series of volumes of local history along the lines of “Prohibition in St. Louis,” “Prohibition in Milwaukee,” or “Prohibition in Buffalo.”

“I would certainly encourage historians in those other cities to explore those questions, especially where they know in fact there was a huge Prohibition culture,” he said, adding:

“I think Cleveland could write a story, Detroit could certainly write a story, Boston. Each one could definitely tell its own story about how the mayhem unfolded in their particular city. I would encourage that. I think the History Press would love to see more proposals like that.”

Garrett Peck will be speaking about his new book, Prohibition in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, June 9, from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m., at the Arlington Central Library, 1015 N. Quincy Street, in Arlington, Virginia.

Peck also noted that his book is available for purchase in the gift shop of the Woodrow Wilson House and available through on-line booksellers Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

(An earlier, slightly different version of this article originally appeared on Examiner.com in two parts on May 27, 2011.)

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Author Interview: Jim Bacon Predicts Economic 'Boomergeddon'

On August 20, Richmond-based Oaklea Press released a new book called Boomergeddon: How Runaway Deficits and the Age Wave Will Bankrupt the Federal Government and Devastate Retirement for Baby Boomers Unless We Act Now, written by James A. Bacon, Jr., founder of the on-line political newsletter, Bacon’s Rebellion.

That mouthful of a title was the topic of a conversation between Bacon and me in early August in Richmond, at a meeting of political activists and policy experts sponsored by the advocacy group Tertium Quids.

'Deep Doo-Doo'
“Boomergeddon basically makes the argument that we’re in very deep doo-doo,” said Bacon.

“The federal government,” he explained, “is going into default within the next 15 or 20 years.”

This will “precipitate an unbelievable series of events,” said Bacon, starting with “a massive Keynesian contraction which will probably push the country into a steep recession, if not a depression.”

The federal credit crunch will also “lead to the collapse of the American empire,” and hinder the ability of the United States “to project force overseas” with “complications and ramifications” that will particularly affect world trade.

Finally, Bacon said, “it will lead to a total shredding of the social safety net. Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid will be decimated.”

Baby Boomer Retirement
The book is “addressed to baby boomers,” added Bacon, those who will be retiring through the next 15 years and who “haven’t saved enough money for our retirement.” Boomers will not “come close to being able to replicate our lifestyles that we’ve enjoyed until now.”

The problem is, Bacon noted, that “if we’re counting on Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and all those things to back us up [and] to create a nice retirement then we’re all be very disappointed. It’s going to be really, really, really ugly.”

The causes of this coming crisis include health-care costs, which, Bacon points out, even President Obama recognizes as “the biggest driver of all, driving the cost of Medicare and Medicaid.”

Bacon said that in his book he “dissects” how the president tried to address this looming issue through Obamacare, but he concludes that the new health care plan “is not going to bend the cost curve downwards.”

National Debt Bomb
A second cause is the national debt, which “will continue to mount, even by Obama’s calculations, up to $20 trillion within the next ten years.” This will cause a global capital shortage and higher interest rates passing 10 percent.

When interest rates go get that high, Bacon said, “the only way you can cut back is to default, and that’s going to precipitate what I call Boomergeddon.”

There are what Bacon calls “theoretical solutions” that could prevent the crisis he foresees.

Strategy to Prevent Boomergeddon

He lays out a strategy in the book to “bring the budget back into balance by cutting about $800 billion in annual expenditures through a combination of things like a fair tax, cutting defense spending, cutting discretionary spending, and cutting corporate welfare and a variety of other means.”

He doubts that Congress and the Executive will be able to do that, however, “given the hyperpolarization we have in the capital and the blindness to what’s happening.”

(A slightly different version of this article appeared on Examiner.com on August 19, 2010.)

Author Interview: Greg Mills Discusses African Poverty and Solutions

Why is Africa poor? What can Africans do about it?

These two questions are combined in the title of a new book by South African scholar Greg Mills, who discussed his work at a forum hosted by the Cato Institute in Washington on October 6.

Mills is director of the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation, which “was established in 2005 by the Oppenheimer family,” he told me in an interview after that book forum.  He is also the co-author, with David Williams, of Seven Battles that Shaped South Africa.

The foundation’s objective, Mills said, is to “try to strengthen African economic performance. Essentially we operate at a strategic level with African presidencies, at their request,” providing research and advice “based on primary fieldwork in African countries” and drawing “a lot of good and bad examples from around the world: things to avoid and things to try to replicate.”

Describing his new book, Why Africa Is Poor and What Africans Can Do About It (released in hardcover by Penguin Global on November 17), Mills explained it has three parts.

“It tries to understand, firstly, why Africa is poor, and it advances the idea that this is a choice of African leadership. It’s an option that they have taken; it’s a result of their poor decisions,” he said.

It also tries to explain, Mills added, “why those decisions have been made. It often relates to the fact that African electorates are apathetic. In many cases, they don’t hold their leaders to account.”

The book also relates how economic aid from developed countries – or lack of it, depending on how one looks at it – “provides an opportunity for Africans to externalize their problems and also their solutions.

The second part of the book, Mills said, “focuses on international experiences and the best examples that Africa can draw” upon, while “the third part of the book really focuses on some of the opportunities in Africa [and] how these ideas might be implemented.”

That third section, he explained, examines the coming “demographic dividend in Africa and what this means [as] a huge opportunity for Africa, and what we have to do to realize this.” It also focuses on issues like agriculture, mining, and tourism, “three areas of great comparative advantage for the continent.”


Huge Potential for Tourism
With regard to tourism, Mills noted, “Africa currently gets about 4 percent of the global one billion-person tourism market,” meaning that Africa is wildly underrepresented in that economic sector, even though “in terms of wildlife and other beach and safari-type options, we have tremendous potential.”

He gave the examples of “a country like Kenya has a million fly-in tourists a year. Tanzania has 500,000 fly-in tourists a year, [while] Mozambique just has 50,000,” despite being “right next door to South Africa. There’s clearly a lot of potential in terms of an increasing that market.”

To increase tourism, Mills said, “we need to make it easier to get to Africa, cheaper to get to Africa, [and provide] higher quality resorts when people get there,” as well as assure “safer conditions where people don’t have to be worried about what surprises they’re going to find en route.”

He said that “the way to do it is to try to make it cheaper for South African tourists, in particular, to fly” to other African countries, “and then to relax visa restrictions on other external tourists.” In his formal remarks, Mills had pointed out that the Republic of Georgia no longer requires tourist visas for visitors from countries that have a bigger GDP than Georgia has, because such people are unlikely to stay there looking for work.

“Unfortunately,” Mills lamented, “most African countries have a very onerous visa regime and the air flights are not only unreliable, but relatively sparse in terms of their coverage and penetration of African markets.”

Still, he concluded, there is “certainly a huge amount of unrealized potential in tourism with all the multiplier employment prospects that it offers.”


‘Ditto’ for Agriculture
“Ditto,” he said, “in terms of agriculture,” which is extremely underdeveloped in relation to its potential in Africa.

“Africa’s agricultural yields have been two-thirds below that of the rest of the world,” Mills explained, due to “a huge lack of investment in extension services and fertilizer and seed programs.”

African agricultural output, he said, has “more or less flat-lined since independence in terms of its yield increases. This means that 38 of 48 sub-Saharan African countries are net food importers. It’s a staggering statistic.”

With more and more Africans moving to urban areas, he warned, “if we are to develop in our cities and if we are able to reduce food costs, we need to up our game.”

That means “addressing questions about land title, it means improving extension services, it means getting the private sector involved. It means upping scale in terms of agriculture, because that obviously brings certain efficiencies, and it means introducing technologies.”

In essence, Mills said, Africa must move “from a subsistence, peasant-type farming environment to a large-scale commercial involvement, [with] all the steps in between, particularly in mid-level farming.”

Despite this current underutilization of agricultural resources, Mills continued, “there’s huge potential on the continent. We shouldn’t be stuck at 5 percent growth. We should be looking at 10 percent growth and find out and understand the reasons why we’re not doing 15 percent growth,” since Africa is starting “from such a low base.”

(This article originally appeared in two parts, and in somewhat different form, on Examiner.com, on October 7 and October 8, 2010.)

'Cities and the Wealth of Nations'

This review-essay about Jane Jacobs' Cities and the Wealth of Nations was published in The New York City Tribune on April 7, 1987 -- my birthday, as it happens -- and was datelined London, where I was attending graduate school at the London School of Economics and Political Science.  On that day, specifically, I was enjoying spring break in Paris.

The Hidden Causes of Third World Poverty

Richard Sincere

LONDON – The Vatican has issued, through the Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace, an 8,000-word statement on the international debt crisis. “Political officials and economists, social and religious leaders, as well as public opinion throughout the world,” it begins, “recognize the fact that the debt levels of the developing countries constitute a serious, urgent, and complex problem due to their social, economic, and political repercussions.” That is VaticanSpeak for: Third World debt levels are precipitating a crisis of unprecedented proportions.

Average citizens in the industrialized countries of Western Europe and North America might be inclined to shrug off Third World debt as a problem, but no concern of theirs. Leaders in developing countries, they might say, made bad political and economic decisions and are now paying the consequences; it doesn’t affect us.

In fact, though, it does. As the Third World debt whirlpool swallows up capital from all over the developed world, the effects are felt in shrinking national budgets, declining industries, rising interest rates, and increasing trade deficits. For the ordinary person, it means more difficulty in purchasing a home or a car – particularly if he or she is a first-time buyer.

A unique perspective on Third World debt – indeed, on a whole range of issues regarding the world political economy – may be found in a 1984 book, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, by Jane Jacobs. The book was widely reviewed and critically acclaimed when it was first published by Random House in the United States and Canada and by Penguin in the United Kingdom.

Jacobs is respected worldwide for her research and writing on cities. Her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is required reading for most students of urban planning. The secondhand department at the Economists’ Bookshop in London informs me that they get more requests for Jacobs’ The Economy of Cities (1969) than for any other out-of-print book. These observations reinforce her credibility and scholarship almost as much as the fact that she is a careful and thoughtful writer – averaging one book every seven to 10 years – as well as vibrant, witty, and commonsensical.

Cities and the Wealth of Nations begins by questioning the very structure of the world economy – its division into “nations” as distinct economic entities. They are political and military entities, but this does not mean they are also “the basic, salient entities of economic life or … the reasons for the rise and decline of wealth.” Jacobs argues that the failure of national governments and “blocs of nations” to control economic life effectively “suggests some sort of essential irrelevance.”

Political sovereignty is the only thing various nation-states really have in common, and Jacobs thinks it “affronts common sense, if nothing else, to think of units as disparate as, say, Singapore and the United States, or Ecuador and the Soviet Union, or the Netherlands and Canada, as economic common denominators.”

The basic unit of economic development, Jacobs asserts, is the city, and regions surrounding individual cities, and enlarging that unit inevitably leads to bad economic feedback and bad decision making. This problem cannot be overcome without a radical restructuring of the world economy – but the new structure must reflect free markets, attention to private enterprise, promotion of new industries, and (most important) trade among equals. That means underdeveloped Third World states should concentrate their commerce on other underdeveloped Third World states, learning “import replacement” and avoiding direct competition with the industrialized world unless and until their levels of development are more nearly equal.

Jacobs identifies what she calls “transactions of decline,” which include heavy lending to impoverished or underdeveloped areas. Such lending takes useful capital away from productive cities and sinks it into unproductive rural areas and uncreative towns and cities where it can do no good – and, indeed, often does harm. Transactions of decline like this may initially stimulate commerce and industry, but within a short while both economies – the lender’s and the borrower’s – begin to stagnate and then to decline. The downward spiral continues because policymakers, oblivious to the root causes of the decline, take more money from the pockets of productive workers and entrepreneurs and attempt to induce “development” in depressed areas at home or abroad. In the end the whole process is futile and frustrating. “Subsidies milked from cities,” notes Jacobs, are “profoundly antidevelopment transactions.”

To achieve genuine and lasting development, cities, regions, and whole countries must generate their own capital. Development must come about the old-fashioned way – you earn it.

There is no specific solution available from Jacobs’ analysis. But her arguments are worth pondering. The radical change suggested by Cities and the Wealth of Nations is precisely the opposite of the one demanded by Third World states called the New International Economic Order. Instead of authoritarianism, this change invokes free enterprise; instead of central planning, it calls for pluralism; instead of stagnation, it offers creativity and growth. If we are to solve the international debt crisis – an apparently insoluble problem – this is a good place to start

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based policy analyst who writes frequently on African affairs.

VaBook10: Short Takes 4

While I anticipated attending four events at the Virginia Festival of the Book today, in the end I went to just two.

That might sound disappointing, but the two sessions were quite good. In fact, the second -- A Conversation from Left and Right: With Hendrik Hertzberg and Richard Brookhiser -- may have been the highlight of the festival.

That one, sponsored by the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership at UVA and moderated by its executive director, Bob Gibson, offered a wide-ranging exploration of American governance and constitutional issues that could serve as a model for civil discussion between (as the event's title indicated) "left" and "right."

Here's what Bob Gibson had to say shortly after the program, held in the Culbreth Theatre on the grounds of the University of Virginia, ended:

I was also able to ask the two conversationalists, Hendrik Hertzberg and Richard Brookhiser (both, as Gibson noted, called "Rick"), to give their basic elevator speech about their most recent books.

National Review editor Brookhiser talked about his new memoir, Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement:

Hertzberg, a senior editor at The New Yorker, spoke with great affection about his new book about Barack Obama, called Obamanos!: The Birth of a New Political Era:

Earlier in the day, at the UVA Bookstore, the producers of the public radio program Backstory: With the American History Guys sponsored a panel featuring three historians. (Like the Virginia Festival of the Book, this radio show is underwritten by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.)

Tony Field, the show's producer, acted as moderator and said a few words about Backstory for the camera:

One of the panelists was Backstory's "20th Century Guy" Brian Balogh, who teaches at the University of Virginia and is the author of the new book about 19th-century America, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America:

A second speaker also wrote a book about the 19th century, though a more discrete segment of it. Attorney David O. Stewart once worked on an impeachment case before the U.S. Senate and has now produced Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln's Legacy:

The third speaker was Guian A. McKee, an historian at UVA's Miller Center for Public Affairs and author of The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia:

Tomorrow is the last day of the book festival, with twelve programs remaining.

'Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery'

This book review appeared in The Washington Times on Monday, November 13, 1989. Historical note: Four years after this review was published, the book’s author, Robert Fogel, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Science.


An honest examination of the slave economy 

WITHOUT CONSENT OR CONTRACT: THE RISE AND FALL OF AMERICAN SLAVERY
By Robert William Fogel
Norton. $22.50, 502 pages
REVIEWED BY RICHARD SINCERE JR.

"Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery” is a remarkable book that sheds new light on a historical topic that until now has been characterized by exaggerated mythology and moral grandstanding.

Robert William Fogel, director of the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago, does not shy away from facts that will leave people aghast. At the same time, however, in an afterword, he provides a moral critique of slavery that is fitting for the latter 20th century and, in retrospect, superior to that relied upon by the various groups and individuals who opposed slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War.

The book is the result of nearly a quarter-century’s worth of research by a team of historians, demographers and economists at the University of Chicago. It is, in fact, the third of three volumes by the same title, the first two consisting of technical papers. This primary volume condenses those findings into a readable whole.

That is not to say the book is an easy read — far from it. It would be more correct to say, however, that it is two books, one difficult and one not. The difficult part is the first half, which takes an unprecedented, in-depth look at the economics and culture of slavery in the New World. To readers who are not comfortable with numbers, this lengthy section is rough going.

The second part, which traces the rise of the anti-slavery movement in Britain and the United States, is a tour de force of historical writing. It flows smoothly, yet incorporates disparate elements of antebellum history that, on the surface, seem unrelated, and Mr. Fogel deftly draws these elements together.

Mr. Fogel will no doubt initiate controversy with his firm assertion that, far from being a primitive and decaying economy, the South was at its most prosperous on the eve of the Civil War and that slavery was in- deed an efficient and productive way to organize that economy. Moreover, he argues — and offers more than enough evidence to prove it — that slaves were better fed, clothed and housed than free laborers in the North.

This may be why opponents of slavery waited until the 1850s before they attempted to use economic arguments to bolster their case; they knew that, empirically, the slave economy was sound. Only moral arguments — whether based in religion or secular philosophy — provided the foundation for an effective case against slavery.

What makes this book most interesting is its tendency to give greater emphasis to those elements of antebellum politics that have been given short shrift by other historians, particularly those popularizing historians who write our high-school and college textbooks. For example, most political trivia buffs recognize in the Know-Nothing Party just one notable fact — that the Know-Nothings held the first political convention for purposes of nominating a presidential candidate. Other people might remember that the Know-Nothings were anti-Catholic nativists who stole the stone contributed by the pope to the building of the Washington Monument.

Mr. Fogel, however, makes it clear that the Know-Nothings were a force to be reckoned with in U.S. politics throughout the 1850s and made a major contribution to the realignment of party allegiances that made the Republican victory of 1860 possible, and thus the end of slavery.

Know-Nothings sent more than 70 representatives to Congress, for instance, and controlled the state government of Massachusetts. Their ability to organize the working classes who felt threatened by immigrant labor fertilized the soil for the anti-slavery parties seeking to seed their ideas among new constituencies. Mr. Fogel writes: “It is ironic that so ignoble a movement as anti-Catholic nativism should have played so large a role in the ultimate victory of the crusade to abolish slavery.”

The role of religion in the end of slavery also cannot be ignored. In Britain and the United States, Quakers, Methodists and evangelicals (in particular, not to exclude others) paved the intellectual highway for others to dispose of the idea — which had lasted at least 3,000 years — that slavery was acceptable and a normal part of the nature of human society.

On both sides of the Atlantic, religious thinkers became prolific pamphleteers and letter-writers, trying to change the minds of so many others for whom slavery was not yet a moral issue. At the end of the 17th century, when almost all others rejected anti-slavery sentiments, one small religious group, the Quakers, maintained that slavery was unmitigated evil. It is a true testament to the power of religious faith that by the 1880s, that position was held almost universally by believers in the Western world.

In both Britain and America, the anti-slavery campaign intersected with other important political developments. Most people would think that anti-slavery politics was set apart because of its moral importance. This was not the case. In Britain, anti-slavery issues were tied up with Catholic emancipation, the extension of suffrage to the lower classes, parliamentary reform and the fear of radicalism in the aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars.

In the United States, the antislavery movement faced great hurdles, not the least of which was that of the first nine presidents, seven were slaveholders. Moreover, the South was overrepresented in Congress because three-fifths of the slaves were counted in the census to determine representation.

Mr. Fogel writes: “Southerners also were installed as Speaker of the House in 28 of the preceding 35 years (up to 1850); they were a majority of the Supreme Court and of the Cabinet; and every Senate president pro tern since the ratification of the Constitution had been a slaveholder.” These facts were cited by anti-slavery activists as evidence of the political conspiracy of “Slave Power”: Slavery’s mere existence in the South meant the political enslavement of all Americans.

By the mid-1850s, opponents of slavery also claimed “Slave Power” was an economic conspiracy. Mr. Fogel says such arguments were wrong, in light of recent cliometric research on mid-l9th century economic conditions, but they were convincing at the time.

Though leaders of the movement such as William Lloyd Garrison opposed changing their fundamental case against slavery from moral to economic grounds, “the principal basis of the antislavery appeal did suddenly shift from ‘Christian duty’ to ‘the pocketbook.’ The shift took place between 1854 and 1856 and the political success was immediate and spectacular. The new approach transformed the antislavery movement from a minor political factor into a powerful political force that could control the national agenda.”

Mr. Fogel admits there is still much to learn about the slavery era, many more texts to examine, more artifacts to unearth. Until that time, however, his recent book likely will serve as the definitive report on slave economy and slave culture, and his interpretation of the anti-slavery movement should have few detractors.

Richard Sincere Jr. is a Washington-based issues analyst and writer.

Book Notes 2

These “book notes” (see Book Notes 1 for background information) appeared originally in terra nova, Volume 2, Number 1 (Autumn [North] Spring [South] 1992).

The Russian Heart: Days of Crisis and Hope. Photographs and Journal by David C. Turnley. (New York: Aperture, 1992), 144 pp., $40.00 cloth.

Pulitzer-prize winning photojournalist David Tumley spent two months in the Soviet Union during the summer of 1991, arriving in Moscow in the midst of the hardliners’ coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. The 100 color photographs in this collection show all the grit and grind of Soviet life: queues for food, the blackened faces of coal miners, the drabness of a political prison. They also provide glimpses of a more open future: naval cadets attending a service at St. Isaac’s Cathedral, Lithuanian President Landsbergis and his 98-year-old father, synagogues and mosques vibrating with prayer after years of repression. The photographs from Moscow during the coup are the most dramatic: a young soldier sitting atop a tank in the rain, Gorbachev thanking Yeltsin, crowds cheering the end of the putsch and waving the Russian national flag. This is a coffee-table book with a difference.


A Dictionary of Environmental Quotations, compiled by Barbara K. Rodes and Rice Odell. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 335 pp., $35.00 cloth.

One expects that a book from Simon and Schuster’s prestigious Academic Reference Division would make some pretense to comprehensiveness and balance. Not so with this “dictionary,” really a book of quotations that make the case for increased environmental regulation and governmental intrusiveness and make fun of those who cast doubt on that program. The omissions are telling: not a single major proponent of the free-market environmental movement is quoted— not Walter Block, Terry Anderson, Fred Smith, nor Michael Greve, to name a few. The late Warren Brookes merits one mention. S. Fred Singer comments on the ozone layer, but Patrick Michaels, debunker of global warming, is missing, as is Edward Krug, who has proven that acid rain is not a problem. Rodes and Odell have performed a disservice to their readers.

Restoration: Congress, Term Limits, and the Recovery of Deliberative Democracy, by George F. Will. (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 260 pp., $19.95 cloth.

The 1992 campaign season has been uniquely plagued or blessed (depending on one’s perspective) by the voluntary retirement of some 100 Members of Congress, and the involuntary retirement (through electoral defeat) of several others, including Senator Alan Dixon (D-Ill.) and GOP Congressional Campaign Chairman Guy van der Jagt (R-Mich.). Framing these “defections” is a widespread national debate about the merits of placing limits on the terms legislators can serve. Several states have adopted term limits for both their own legislatures and for their representatives in Washington, usually through hard- fought referenda set before the general electorate. Here political pundit George Will weighs in on the issue: formerly opposed to term limits in principle, he now feels they are necessary to resuscitate a moribund democracy. Term limits, he says, will return the United States to the tradition of citizen-legislators envisioned by the Founders and destroy the “incumbency machine” that the modern Congress has become.


1492 and All That: Political Manipulations of History, by Robert Royal. (Washington: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1992), 203 pp., $18.95 cloth.

The quincentenary celebration of Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to America has brought out of the woodwork all sorts of countercultural protests, all decrying the effect of Western (read: European) culture on the rest of the world. Royal quotes activist Hans Koning as saying the Columbus anniversary “presents the best opportunity for progressives ‘since the Vietnam War,” adding that “the linkage here is not accidental. A large portion of the most rabid anti-Columbus material in 1992 comes out of the same cultural and political quarters as the antiwar protests of the 1960s.” 1492 is a scholarly examination of history and historiography; it also provides intellectual ammunition for the 500th anniversary’s cultural battles.


Preferential Option: A Christian and Neoliberal Strategy for Latin America’s Poor, by Amy L. Sherman (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992), 230 pp., $17.95 paper.

Amy Sherman, a frequent contributor to the pages of terra nova, provides a clear and articulate free-market agenda for Latin American economic development. Her intended audience is committed Christians, who are taught by the Gospels that “opting for the poor is not optional.” She adds that “how Christians opt—what development strategies they pursue—makes all the difference if the poor are to be served effectively.” Drawing on Catholic and Protestant social teaching, critiquing conventional macroeconomic development models, and creating a moral defense for free enterprise, Sherman makes a strong case for economic liberty as “the preferential option for the poor.”


Coming Out Conservative: An Autobiography, by Marvin Liebman (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1992), 272 pp., $19.95 cloth.

The triumph of conservative politics in the United States and classical liberalism worldwide was not due entirely to academic treatises. It required ward- heeling, electioneering, money, and propaganda. This memoir tells the tale of a behind-the-scenes activist helping others gain the limelight. Liebman was a committed Communist whose mind was when Stalin’s atrocities came to light in the 1950s. He brought to the nascent conservative movement a talent for the agitprop developed by the Left and instituted grassroots organizing and fundraising methods still in use today. A longtime associate of William F. Buckley, Jr., he cofounded Young Americans for Freedom and the American Conservative Union. He is probably the only person to work both on Henry Wallace’s Communist-front presidential campaign in 1948 and those of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan two decades later. His book helps put the conservative movement in both a personal and a historical context.


No More Martyrs Now: Capitalism, Democracy, and Ordinary People, by Don Caldwell (Johannesburg: Conrad Business Books, 1992), 272 pp., R40 paper.

One of the more stimulating and frustrating challenges in post-apartheid South Africa is spreading the truth about free enterprise in the face of hostility, mythology, and simple misunderstanding. Caldwell, a writer and lecturer on business and economic topics, states that his new book “is written from an unashamedly liberal-democratic perspective. It’s in favor of capitalism and skeptical of politicians from beginning to end.” In a breezy but not unserious style, he describes the importance of civil society, decries the imposition of social engineering, and takes aim at the African National Congress’s authoritarian tendencies. The book also contains some useful appendices: the 1955 Freedom Charter, draft bills of rights from the ANC and the South African Law Commission, and the constitutional principles of the ANC and the National Party.

'Breakfast in Hell: A Doctor’s Experiences of the Ethiopian Famine'

This review originally appeared in the Washington Times on Monday, June 1, 1987, and in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, June 3, 1987.

RICHARD SINCERE
A Doctor’s Story Of Deliberate Famine And an African Hitler 

Breakfast in Hell: A Doctor’s Experiences of the Ethiopian Famine, by Myles Harris, Picador, London, $4.85, 221 pp. 


In the play Man of La Mancha, the poet Cervantes explains what impelled a plain country squire toward becoming the knight Don Quixote: “Being retired, he has much time for books. . . . All he reads oppresses him, fills him with indignation at man’s murderous ways toward man.”

This is one of those books. Breakfast in Hell came to my attention through an article by the author in The Spectator, the British public affairs weekly. The title was “The Regime That Kills Ethiopians,” and that sums up the whole story. It would be extraordinarily difficult to come away from Myles Harris’s account of the state-imposed famine in Ethiopia without profound anger and indignation.

Myles Harris is a medical doctor who has worked all over the world caring for the malnourished, ill-housed, poorly clothed and impoverished people who make up such a large number of us. Prior to his six months in Ethiopia with the Red Cross, he and his wife Janet had worked in undeveloped regions in Papua New Guinea, Australia and the Kalahari Desert.

It is clear from the outset that Harris went to Ethiopia with few, if any, preconceptions of what he would encounter there. The Red Cross needed medical personnel to work in famine areas, and he responded to their call. He had no trouble adopting the apolitical life of a Red Cross delegate and wanted only to help suffering Ethiopians.

He emerged from the country half a year later with bitter feelings toward the Mengistu regime, toward international aid agencies and toward petty Communist Party officials who blocked genuine humanitarian relief; he has fond and loving memories of his Ethiopian co-workers and the farmers, townspeople, young mothers and children he encountered in the feeding camps and medical stations.

Harris writes vividly and pulls no punches. He compares the Emperor Mengistu (as he calls Ethiopia’s Marxist military dictator) to Hitler and Stalin; indeed, reading some of the descriptions of Mengistu’s atrocities makes one think Adolph and Joe were mere pranksters.

For instance: The Soviets, as part of their aid to keep him on his throne, sent a unit of the East German Volkspolizei, “a secret police force with one of the finest pedigrees in suppression in the world. . . . At the time of the Ethiopian terror in 1977, some of the most senior Volkspolizei officers had once been serving members of the Gestapo. For, at the end of the Second World War, the capitulation of half the Third Reich to the Russians had meant little more for them than. . . swapping a swastika for a red star, before it was business as usual.”

The business these ex-Gestapo henchmen taught Mengistu was the need for a memorable terror to bring all Ethiopians into his iron grip. “Mengistu searched his heart for the most terrible thing he could do to bring his people through fear to the truth of Marxism-Leninism, and he thought of burial. Ethiopians hold burial to be one of the most important rites of life. To die unburied, to be forgotten in death, is so awful that even today those who whisper to you their memories of the Terror can hardly bring themselves to speak of this part of it…. [Mengistu] ordered that the bodies of the slain should lie unburied, and that those who tried to take them for burial were themselves to be slaughtered. One morning, the people of Addis woke to streets filled with corpses and a sky dark with vultures.” Later, “the lampposts were strung with corpses, not of men, but of young school boys who had tried and failed to rescue their fathers’ and brothers’ bodies for burial. . . . When it was over, of the 5,000 students at the University of Addis Ababa, only 1,500 were still alive.”

That excerpt exposes the minds of men who would, among other things, padlock food warehouses for days and weeks, refusing to give relief workers access to the tools of their trade; who would refuse hospital admission to obviously sick and dying children whose parents lacked the proper papers from the local farmers’ association, papers that took five days or longer to obtain; who would ship truckloads of grain from the famine-stricken north of the country to the healthier and more fertile south, where it was stored for unknown reasons -- perhaps for later shipment to the masters in Moscow. These are men who forbid the sale of yeast to Ethiopian citizens in order to secure a government monopoly on the baking and selling of bread.

Harris spares nearly no one from his understated but strongly felt wrath. The Red Cross and other relief agencies get criticism for trying too hard to work with and please the government -- a government that wants to keep the Red Cross from doing its job. At one point, he tries to explain this to his superiors:

“We had done exactly what we had been instructed to do by Geneva: emptied the camps of all except the very ill and returned the rest of the people to their villages.

“But each success would have found little favor with the Ethiopians. Suddenly, they had been washed into the center of a disaster worse than the First World War.

Confused and frightened, their only remedy -- huge feeding programs -- seemed the only rock to cling to. Then we came along and tried to close down their camps. Closing down their operation implied their failure, and, as in most aid programs, threatened bureaucratic livelihoods. Famine camps meant foreign aid, foreign aid meant jobs.”

Hitler, Stalin and Mao share one positive characteristic — they are all dead. But Mengistu and the communists who rule Ethiopia with him are alive and dripping with the blood of their countrymen. Why, then, do Western governments, the United Nations and Bob Geldof’s Band-Aid continue to send them money that perpetuates their tyranny?

Richard Sincere, a Washington writer, is currently pursuing post-graduate studies in international relations at the London School of Economics.

Book Notes 1

For about one year – mid-1991 through early 1992 – I was books editor of terra nova, a quarterly journal published by the International Freedom Foundation. (I later became editor-in-chief, succeeding Mark Franz.) One of the recurring features in the books section of terra nova was “Book Notes,” short blurbs about (then) current books. I contributed several of these over the short period that terra nova was published.

These “notes” appeared in Volume 1, Number 1 of terra nova (Summer [North] Winter [South] 1991).

Book Notes
Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

Development in Practice: Paved with Good Intentions by Doug Porter, Bryant Allen, and Gaye Thompson. (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, April 1991). 247 pages, $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.
Three Australian researchers looked at a major aid project in Kenya funded by the Australian government over a period of thirteen years. The authors note that “the failure of a great many development projects to achieve even their most fundamental objectives is due to a reluctance on the part of development practitioners to appreciate the significance of history. Projects are frequently designed as if time began with the project implementation schedule. Past lessons are seldom examined and still fewer professionals bother to inquire into the historical circumstances of the people their interventions seek to assist.” To fully explain the failure of this project—the Magarini Settlement Project in Kenya’s Coast Province— the authors look at the 70 years of social, political, and economic history among the Giriama people that preceded the launch of the initiative. They examine the project’s implementation, its review and accountability back home (in Australia), and the effects of the project’s failure on Australian development aid policy.

Foreign Aid in Practice by Stephen Browne. (New York: Columbia University Press, July 1990). 283 pages, $60.00 cloth.
Attempting both to explain and justify current foreign aid programs and practices, Foreign Aid in Practice is in many ways a primer for readers unfamiliar with the wider literature on development. As such, it is a trap for the uninitiated, for it accepts as a given that development aid actually works, contrary to the findings of economists and other experts. To the extent that the volume explains the inner workings of the World Bank, IMF, and various countries’ development agencies, it is useful, but its overly rosy view of the purposes and potential of foreign aid renders it a dubious source of critical insights.


The Political Economy of Senegal Under Structural Adjustment, edited by Christopher L. Delgado and Sidi Jammeh. (Westport. Conn.: Praeger Publishers, March 1991), 232 pages, $45.00 cloth.
Twelve essays by African, American, and European experts on the political economy of West Africa comprise this volume, an examination of one of Africa’s few multiparty democracies. The essays look at external economic forces affecting Senegal’s economic performance, internal political events and trends that influence economic decisionmaking, and the role of international development agencies. The editors note in the introduction that “if it is correct to characterize Senegalese nation-building from colonial days to the end of the 1970s as using economic strategies to address complex political issues, it would be equally correct to characterize the period since then as using political strategies to address nearly insoluble economic dilemmas.” This book uses that conceptualization to examine a transitional phase in the development of Senegal’s political economy.

Effective Sanctions on South Africa: The Cutting Edge of Economic Intervention, edited by George W. Shepherd, Jr. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, March 1991). 160 pages, $39.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.
The editor of this volume contends that, unlike sanctions strategies in the past, which have had a consistent record of failure, economic sanctions against South Africa have been effective in promoting change in that country. While he notes that there has been a continuing debate about the effectiveness of sanctions and whether they will actually hurt the cause they are meant to help, he brushes aside the objections and states baldly that even in the wake of substantial reform and the opening up of the South African political process since February 1990, “the case for ongoing, effective sanctions seems clear.” The contributors contend that “the movement for racial equality in the world is not spent,” which leads them to offer the South African sanctions as a model for policy elsewhere in the world, a prospect that should make wary anyone who supports unfettered commercial intercourse and non-coercive political relations between sovereign states.