Off Your Back And Right In Your Face
Molly Ivins

Now that free markets have usurped government as America's savior, what
remains for government to do? Molly Ivins introduces Big Brother, the
bluenosed busybody.

Have you noticed that under the influence of freemarket theology,
government is becoming both less useful and more onerous? That splendid
libertarian strand of less government that always stoutly defended the
right of motorcyclists to ride without helmets and other forms of
goingtohellinwhateverhandbasketswechoose is losing out to
nannystate conservatism.

If you pair two new books, which at first glance look like an odd couple, I
think you will see what the problem is.

The first is David Shaw's glorious rant against ``The Pleasure Police: How
BlueNose Busybodies and LilyLivered Alarmists Are Taking All the Fun Out
of Life.'' America has always been given to puritanical snits sex,
alcohol, tobacco, sex, drugs, pornography, sex, any form of music favored
by young people, gambling and sex have always sent moralists into gobbling
outrage.

Long before irate Baptist preachers denounced Elvis Presley as a creature
of Satan, and before rap brought out the heavy artillery of the bluenoses,
jazz was condemned as ``perverted'' and ragtime stigmatized as
``degenerate'' (Negro influence there, you see). There's a similar fever
chart with other forms of sin in America.

The other day, House Speaker Newt Gingrich spoke to the National Religious
Broadcasters and announced the chief goal of his party: to achieve a
drugfree America by Jan. 1, 2001, following ``a national crusade fully as
intensive as the effort to balance the budget.'' To achieve this goal,
Gingrich proposes that drug dealers should get mandatory life sentences on
first conviction and the death sentence for second convictions. ``If you
sell it, we are going to kill you,'' he said.

Holy cow. I find this of considerable personal interest because the Texas
Legislature is about to criminalize cigarette smoking by teens, and a
federal judge in North Carolina ruled last month that nicotine is a drug
and can be regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

I hate to be pessimistic, but I fear that Shaw, himself a fairly militant
anticigarette cigar smoker, is correct in his scenario. ``Supplies
plummet. Demand soars. A black market quickly develops to fill the void.
Prices skyrocket. As with Prohibition, people start making their own
illicit cigarettes growing small tobacco plants in the backyard or on
isolated plots of vacant land not likely to be discovered by authorities. .
. . People get sick and die from the toxic bootleg product. . . . Kids
and adults start stealing cigarettes and hijacking shipments of
cigarettes. Latterday Al Capones use modern terrorist tactics in a battle
to control the illicit tobacco trade. Suddenly, Joe Camel looks pretty
benign by comparison.''

Second on Gingrich's list of new national goals is reducing teen pregnancy
surely a noble goal. But as we have already seen in the case of the
18yearold who was recently sentenced to a year in prison for getting his
girlfriend pregnant, criminalizing teen sex is not our smartest move. The
kid was prepared to quit school, get a job and marry the girl, but now he's
in the slammer instead. Not a policy that makes a lot of sense.

If you wonder why our government has nothing better to do with its time and
power than to criminalize smoking and teen sex, take a look at Robert
Kuttner's book ``Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets.''
Like Shaw's book, it is a sensible, moderate look at a broad problem with
some horrifying specific results.

``The ideal of a free, selfregulating market is newly triumphant. The
historical lessons of market excess, from the Gilded Age to the Great
Depression, have all but dropped from the collective memory. Government
stands impeached and impoverished, along with democratic politics itself.
Unfettered markets are deemed both the essence of human liberty and the
most expedient route to prosperity.

``In the United States, the alternative to laissezfaire has never been
socialism. Rather, the interventionist party, from Hamilton and Lincoln,
through the Progressive Era, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson,
sponsored what came to be known as a `mixed economy.' The idea was that
market forces could do many things well but not everything. Government
intervened to promote development, to temper the market's distributive
extremes, to counteract its unfortunate tendency to boomandbust, to
remedy its myopic failure to invest too little in public goods, and to
invest too much in processes that harmed the human and natural
environment.''

Kuttner's book is pragmatic and readable, offering both an intelligent
appreciation of markets and trenchant criticism. Since the ideology of free
markets allows government no role in creating a just society, it perforce
is left with nothing to do but regulate individual behavior. Hence, the
antisin crusade. I highly recommend this pair of books.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth StarTelegram.