Articles 1996
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Medical Meddling
Who's afraid of managed care?
Reason, December 1996
I would be extremely upset if someone put an initiative on the California ballot outlawing the payment of salaries to journalists. Quality journalism, the initiative's authors might say, requires per-story payment; many of the profession's finest have made their living that way. Paying salaries to journalists, they'd argue, means people can make money even when they aren't working. A salary system rewards people who undersupply articles and punishes those who turn out lots of them. And there's no incentive to do a good job on the articles you do write, since you get paid either way
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On the Frontier: An Interview with Esther Dyson
The promise of unsettled territory -- and the challenge of civilizing it.
Reason, November 1996
"How [Esther] Dyson makes her living is hard to classify," Claudia Dreifus wrote recently in The New York Times Magazine. Actually, it is not. Dyson is a cyberguru--perhaps the only one who's matter-of-fact.
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The Other Drug War
The struggle over the FDA has little to do with tobacco, or even David Kessler.
Reason, November 1996
Jennifer Cox could barely breathe. Bronchial asthma and a seizure disorder had not only driven her home from college but left her so weak she couldn't cross the room. Asthma medicine exacerbated the seizures, and the only drugs approved to treat the seizures themselves had terrible complications: One made her chest and respiratory muscles cramp constantly. Another destroyed her bone marrow. The remaining alternative, a three-drug cocktail, gave her tremors, double vision, and balance problems
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Flexibility Rules
Forbes ASAP, October 06, 1996
When David Packard was an young engineer at General Electric, the company zealously guarded its tools and parts, afraid that employees would steal them. "Faced with this obvious display of distrust," wrote Packard in The HP Way, "employees set out to prove it justified, walking off with tools or parts whenever they could....The irony in all of this is that many of the tools and parts were being used by their GE 'owners' to work on either job-related projects or skill-enhancing hobbies."
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The Choice
Can Republicans take libertarian votes for granted?
Reason, October 1996
So many people have said so many bad things about Bob Dole's campaign for the presidency that it almost seems unfair to pile on. But it is necessary. There is more at stake than poor organization or an inept candidate
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The Big Uneasy
Forbes ASAP, August 25, 1996
For the past several years, independent bookstores and their intellectual friends, have been attacking book superstores -- those 100,000-plus-title Borders and Barnes & Nobles that sell coffee and atmosphere along with their books. They fear the big stores will run the independents out of business. Critics paint dire scenarios of monopolies stamping out diversity and quirkiness.
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Past Master
Bob Dole's campaign has no future.
Reason, August/September 1996
Bob Dole believes values are a thing of the past, qualities rooted in time and place. At least that was what he was saying last August, on a campaign swing through Iowa
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Gas Bags
Technocracy is running on fumes.
Reason, July 1996
In 1994 and '95, paper prices skyrocketed. The cost of magazine paper rose by about 10 percent a month, hardly the sort of hike you can simply pass on to subscribers. Most publishers, including REASON, dealt with the increase by printing fewer pages and adding fewer new subscribers than they'd planned. Newspapers were even harder hit: Escalating newsprint prices drove many to lay off hundreds of employees, raise prices, and, in some cases, go out of business. It was not a happy time in the publishing industry
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Tinkerer's Secret
Forbes ASAP, June 02, 1996
Gail Borden was a surveyor, land agent, and newspaperman before he hit it big with condensed milk.Clarence Birdseye was a naturalist and author before he happened on quick-freezing food. King Gillette was a traveling salesman.
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Legacies
One day' s obituaries reveal the blind spots of the opinion establishment.
Reason, June 1996
On the day of the California primary, an all-but-meaningless election with record-low turnout, two famous men died, both in their early 80s. One was Edmund Muskie, former senator, briefly secretary of state, and the candidate wistful Democrats like to imagine might have been their 1972 nominee if not for a dirty trick and tears in the snow. (They forget, conveniently, that McGovernites had engineered the delegate-selection rules.) Muskie's obituary took 82 column inches in The Washington Post, 84 in The New York Times