Independent Review articles from September 1999

Independent Review archives from September 1999

Watching You: Systematic Federal Surveillance of Ordinary Americans.
September 22, 1999... Imagine for a moment a nation whose central government mandated ongoing collection of detailed personal information--individually identified --recording each citizen's employment, income, childhood and subsequent educational experiences,...

What's Wrong with the IMF? What Would Be Better?
September 22, 1999... The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, created in 1944, reflected the experience of the 1920s and 1930s. The Fund's tasks were to adjust current-account imbalances and manage the exchange-rate system. The Bank's main tasks...

The Ivory Bandwagon: International Transmission of Interest-Group Politics.
September 22, 1999... In October 1989 the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, voted to classify the African elephant as an endangered species and to make trade in ivory illegal....

Regulatory Moral Hazard: The Real Moral Hazard in Federal Deposit Insurance.
September 22, 1999... Many banking regulators, academics, and others hold that deposit insurance creates an undesirable moral hazard in banking. But the real moral hazard that federal deposit insurance creates is regulatory moral hazard. In this article I describe...

Martin Van Buren: The Greatest American President.
September 22, 1999... President Martin Van Buren does not usually receive high marks from historians. Born of humble Dutch ancestry in December 1782 in the small, upstate New York village of Kinderhook, Van Buren gained admittance to the bar in 1803 without benefit...

Everything Is Coming Up Roses, Isn't It?(Review)
September 22, 1999... If your memory extends back as far as the 1970s, you won't need a book to tell you that American living standards have risen dramatically over the past generation. But if your memory is short, you should have a look at W. Michael Cox and...

A New and Superior Theory of Ideology?(Review)
September 22, 1999... J. M. Balkin, who teaches law at Yale, does a fair job in Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) of describing the overall intellectual terrain in which most of the important theories of ideology...

Heil Health.(Review)
September 22, 1999... From the vantage point of a late-twentieth-century observer, the public Health policies of the National Socialists who ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945 seem surprisingly modern. Those policies are illuminated in Robert N. Proctor's most recent...

The Pirates of Penzylvania Avenue.
September 22, 1999... Gen: It's a glorious thing to be the Economist-General. (sung) I am the very model of a market-free economist, By leanings I'm a Marxian, a Keynesian, a Socialist; I advocate that government supply our basic goods for...

Lock 'em Up!
September 22, 1999... Let's play the old form-a-line game. Suppose you took all the people incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons as of June 30, 1998, and formed them into a line, with the individuals standing one yard apart. How far would the line stretch? Starting...