TALKING BACK TO LANDSBURG
Steven Landsburg is wrong (“On the
Money,” September 7). Everybody does not benefit. The US
manufacturing sector: machinists, production managers, janitors, engineers,
technicians, and production workers all lost when corporations moved jobs to
low-wage countries. It sure looks like the major stockholders reaped virtually
all the benefits. The results of corporate controlled ‘free trade’ are in. It
is a disaster.
Bill McCoy, Magee Avenue, Rochester
As they say in the sports world, the best offense is a good
defense.
So it is with Steve Landsburg’s
libertarian perspective: at once he opposes the loss of consumer choice in a
“protectionist” marketplace while favoring it when gay or black tenants suffer.
If holding these two positions seems inconsistent, that’s the point: given that
blacks and gays are important liberal constituencies, crafting two “it’s my
money and I’ll do what I want with it” arguments in specious parallel becomes
the poison pill designed to make a liberal critique sound either illogical or
wavering. And at the same time, it attempts to engage the undecided, skeptical,
bread-and-butter middle into an imperiling your-money-or-your-government
seduction.
For the sake of their central theorem — that property is
an absolute right —libertarians live gleefully in a Hobbesian
world, and it is a pity that City’s first interview with Landsburg didn’t bring that out
in all its warty ugliness. Rather, it took a round-the-park approach that
skirted the issue and instead visited the preposterous notion that 19th-century
Africans would have perhaps accepted slavery in America
over freedom in Africa based on the unforseeable
fortunes of their posterity. Whether that is Landsburg’s
attempt to diffuse anti-libertarian animus from the left’s other (largely
affluent) former-slave constituency is anyone’s guess.
Despite the similarity of name, liberals and libertarians
have little in common, save for a few personal-freedom issues (such as the drug
laws) that induce a strange Stalin-is-our-ally effect between the two camps. A
wealth-dispersed, independent agrarian society of philosopher kings was
libertarianism’s best chance for implementation over three centuries ago; it
does us little good now to try it out in a world where 400 Americans personally
own as much as the annual budget of the federal government.
The upshot, gridiron fans? Under libertarianism, there’s
only one play you have to remember: we’ll just send you (the water boy) in padless when the going gets tough, and damn the final
score.
Tom Elston, East Avenue, Rochester
In the mid-1980’s, I worked on a project that took me across
Pennsylvania interviewing and photographing poor and homeless people, many of
whom were former workers at steel mills and factories that had closed because
the work was being done cheaper elsewhere.
I’ve worked in shelters filled with people made homeless by
every scenario one can imagine, including downsizing. I’ve documented the lives
of migrant workers in Western New York who are working for minimal wages under
brutal conditions and who won’t complain for fear they’ll be replaced by
someone who will work for less.
I’ve been in remote Mexican villages where people are on the
verge of starvation because the price of coffee has plummeted as cheaper coffee
floods the market. I’ve met farmers in both Mexico and the US who say they
can’t compete with the prices of imported food.
Steven Landsburg would apparently
see all of this as a good thing because we’re paying less and less for goods
and services. My question to him is, what does he propose we do with the
millions of people who are being driven out of work? Shelters, soup kitchens,
and service-sector jobs are full.
Joseph Sorrentino, Suter Terrace, Rochester
TIME OUT!
I’m becoming concerned: for at least three weeks now,
President Bush has not had a vacation. He still gets his two-hour workout every
day, and he still tucks himself in at 9 or 10 every evening so that he’s sure
to maintain his “normal” life in such trying times, but what kind of
country is this if our president can’t vacation more often than George W. Bush
does?
I trust he’s not spending too much time studying our
situation in Iraq, or disaster relief after Katrina and Rita, or increasing
environmental degradation because of current energy policies, or the fact that
theocratic Iran will soon have nuclear weapons and a delivery system that could
reach thousands of miles. Studying details is just too strenuous and might
remind him of cramming for tests in college — who needs it?
You’ll have your own solutions for our leader’s difficult
life right now. What I plan to do is to send him a care package that includes
some suntan lotion, ear plugs for use during boring high-level meetings, and,
to save him from having to shop for her birthday, a rose for his compassionate
mom who said that the refugees in the Houston Astrodome are actually better off
than they were before the hurricane.
Mr. President, heck, take your time and get your beauty rest
every night, no matter what.
William Heyen, Frazier Street, Brockport
WRITING TO CITY
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This article appears in Sep 28 – Oct 4, 2005.
