Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies最新文献

{"title":"America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order","authors":"D. D. Murphey","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-4302","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-4302","url":null,"abstract":"America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke Cambridge University Press, 2004 The scholarly background of these two authors shows in the encyclopedic knowledge they bring to bear on their subject. Stefan Halper is a Fellow at Cambridge University, and a Senior Fellow in the Centre for International Studies; Jonathan Clarke is a Foreign Affairs Scholar at the CATO Institute in Washington, D.C. The great merit of this book is that it provides a detailed account of neo-conservative themes, key documents, origins, personalities, and supporting media and organizations. Because Halper and Clarke are not neo-conservatives, but rather critics of it, a conscientious reader will want to supplement America Alone by a generous reading of neo-conservative writing per se. Halper and Clarke refer us to Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (1995); Robert Kagan and William Kristol (ed.s), Present Dangers: Cnsis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy (2003), where contributions by several prominent authors make it \"close to a neo-conservative canon\"; David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror (2003); and a good many other books as listed in their bibliography. The ideas have come to rest, too, in certain key neo-conservative policy statements. One of the most comprehensive of these is the 1997 \"Statement of Principles by the Project for the New American Century.\" Because Halper and Clarke are critics rather than acolytes, their book is necessarily not merely about neo-conservatism. Since a criticism presupposes a position from which the criticism is made, the authors' own mindscape is evident in the book. They bring their own baggage, good or bad, to the table. We will discuss that after we see what they tell us about neo-conservatism. The neo-conservative movement as described in America Alone brings to mind the statement Shakespeare has Cassius make about Julius Caesar: \"Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus; and we petty men walk under his huge legs....\" The neoconservatives are remarkable for their \"presence.\" They command attention and exude intellectuality. Halper and Clarke tell how the early neo-conservatives - the \"first generation\" - got their start in a \"brief association\" with \"the Trotskyist left in the 1930s.\" Alcove 1 of the cafeteria at the City College of New York was the site where \"America's future neo-conservative intellectuals such as Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Seymour Martin Lipset, Seymour Melman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Philip Selznick received enduring parts of their education.\" During that and the ensuing generation, this group and those who have found common cause with them have engaged in the most remarkable \"networking\" - a web of interlocking organizations, journals, media outlets, books, articles, open-letter signings, etc., that is powerfully reminiscent of ","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84131117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Nationalization of Politics: The Formation of National Electorates and Party Systems in Western Europe","authors":"S. Mayhew","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-4263","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-4263","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84028281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mestizo Democracy: The Politics of Crossing Borders","authors":"Leslie J. Fairchild","doi":"10.5860/choice.40-5483","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.40-5483","url":null,"abstract":"Mestizo Democracy: The Politics of Crossing Borders John Francis Burke Texas A & M University Press, 2004 As everyone knows, the ethnic and racial composition of the American population is changing rapidly as a result of substantial legal immigration and larger illegal immigration. Indeed, it is not just the numbers of immigrants, and the fact that whereas the predominant source of migration was formerly Europe, immigration is now heavily skewed in favor of migrants from Latin America and non-European countries; it is also due to the higher birthrate amongst the non-European immigrants. These guarantee even greater changes in the future, with much higher birthrates among the non-White immigrants than among the American-born Europoid population. Furthermore, these new immigrants are not being absorbed into the prevailing culture of English-speaking America. They are increasingly retaining the use of their own languages, and are even served by newspapers, radio stations and television stations in Spanish and several other languages. A very real multiculturalism is taking root. What is interesting about this book is that the author not only shows how the immigrants and their descendants are modifying the American political scene, creating what he calls a \"mestizo democracy,\" but that the result will be a multicultural democracy that will be prevented from becoming consolidated into a single new hybrid culture due to the permeability of American borders which will permit continued immigration of diverse peoples, maintaining the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural character of this new America. The author applauds this as an extension of Madison's idea of an \"extended republic,\" claiming that the very permeability of American borders will safeguard the future of democracy in America because \"the larger the society, the more capable it will be of self-government.\" One questions whether Madison was right, when one compares the success of democracy in small countries such as Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland, and contrasts that with the history of democracy in larger societies such as Russia and China. Nevertheless, Burke not just accepts but positively advocates increased immigration and greater multiculturalism, and urges that \"we need to dare to re-envision the scheme of uniry-in-diversity at local, regional and national levels, and, in turn, to project transnational democratic initiatives.\" Pluralism, he says, should not be seen just as a deterrent to tyranny, as Madison saw it, but \"must be recast in terms of the substantive pluralism in crossing borders.\" Instead of thinking of borders as frontiers, he says, we should think of them as \"permeable mestizaje\" which will lead to the evolution of \"a dynamic yet democratic sense of community reflective of our multiple, not univocal, cultural identities.\" Indeed, he writes, \"my emphasis on moving beyond territorial boundaries and 'thickly' defined cultural identities is why throughout this text I have looke","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80664225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Future of NATO Expansion: Four Case Studies","authors":"I. McNish","doi":"10.5860/choice.41-4287","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-4287","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76917844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The European Union, Mercosul and the New World Order","authors":"Jonathan Smart","doi":"10.5860/choice.41-4922","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-4922","url":null,"abstract":"The European Union, Mercosul and the New World Order Editors: Helio Jaguaribe & Alvaro de Vasconcelos Frank Cass, London, 2003 This volume is edited by two academics, one from Rio de Janeiro and the other from Lisbon. It comprises papers by six South American and five European scholars which focus on trends in the recent history of the European Union and Mercosul. The authors discuss the problems of regional integration, the way in which these two multinational organizations interrelate with other supra-national organizations and what this may portend for the future of the \"World Order.\" In particular they discuss the problems of regional integration, and some touch upon the disparate experiences of these two organizations. The European Union and Mercosul both represent attempts at regional integration that work with raw material that is very different. In South America, Brazil is a giant compared with other member countries. Geographically, Brazil covers more than 8 million square kilometers, and has a population of 172 million (almost as large as the total population of Germany, France and Britain combined), thereby dwarfing the other member states of Mercusol in both territorial size and population. Sao Paulo, with a population of over 18 million, is the third largest city in the world. The next largest member state of Mercosul is Argentina, which has 2.7 million square kilometers, but only 37 million population. Historically, Portuguese-speaking Brazil has an ethnically very diverse population, with the bulk of the lower echelons being descended from African slaves and, to a less extent, American Indians, but with an upper economic strata of primarily white origin. By contrast, Spanish-speaking Argentina lays claim to a more European-oriented origin and culture. Brazil's economy (at $500 billion) is twice that of Argentina, although its GDP per head is much smaller. Both have problems with inflation. While there are only two languages spoken in the Mercosul countries (Spanish and Portuguese), the European Union is made up of countries speaking many different languages, but dominated by the relatively healthy economies of Germany, France and Britain. It hopes to eventually eliminate poverty in the more backward member countries. Slovakia, for example, has a smaller GDP than Malaysia, and has largely eliminated barriers to the movement of capital and people. In short, it is more advanced along the road to economic and political union than the Mercosul countries, which have presently no real plan to unite as a single entity - something that has strong advocates, for better or for worse, in the European Union. With 82 million inhabitants, Germany, although the largest of the European Union member countries, still has less than half the population of Brazil, but its economy is three and a half times that of Brazil, despite the fact that it has few natural resources and a land area of only 357 thousand square kilometers. From an overview of the abo","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90611629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice","authors":"D. D. Murphey","doi":"10.5860/choice.41-2471","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-2471","url":null,"abstract":"The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor Random House, 2003 This hook by Justice O'Connor will no doubt be enjoyed by many readers as a readable and not very heavy discussion of the United States Supreme Court, highlights of its history and personalities, and personal details about O'Connor's own experiences on the Court as the first woman appointed to it. At this level, the book must be credited as \"recommended reading.\" It contains a number of worthwhile and instructive elements, such as a history of habeas corpus, of Magna Carta, of the jury system, of the \"reporter system\" early in the Court's history through which its decisions were published, of the women's movement in the United States, and of the role of the privy council in the colonies before the American Revolution. O'Connor makes a number of valuable suggestions, say, for improving the jury system, such as that jurors should be allowed to take notes and that it shouldn't automatically disqualify a juror to have heard something about the case. She recommends that jurors should he instructed generally about the law applying the case before they hear the testimony, so that they will have a conceptual framework into which to fit the testimony as they hear it. As a lawyer, I have thought for many years that the courts' failure to give jurors such a road map reflected an odd anti-conceptualism, as though ideas don't count. So I am pleased to see her recommendation. There is a deeper reading of The Majesty of the Law, however, that makes the book \"recommended reading\" for a very different reason. Here, the instruction from the book comes from what it tells us about O'Connor's mental landscape and the role she sees for herself as a justice. Those are things very much worth knowing about and pondering carefully. She was appointed by President Reagan, and therefore started out presumptively as one of the conservative justices on the Court. An important fact about the Reagan presidency, however, is that he did a number of things that reflected his being \"a man of his time\" and that weren't on the mark from the ideological standpoint of his most fervent supporters. One of these was his desire \"to be the first to appoint a woman to the Court,\" even though O'Connor lacked exemplary credentials (having been a trial judge and then a judge on a lower state appellate court). The fact that stands out most prominently from the book for those who read it more contemplatively is that O'Connor is thoroughly imbued with the worldview that today permeates the educated elite in the United States. Her outlook is a comfortable one, suiting her to a pleasant life on the Court. She is \"politically correct\" in her support for an egalitarian make-over of American society even if that runs counter to overwhelming public sentiment; she talks much of \"democracy\" and \"democratic process,\" but it is the democracy of the egalitarian model and not of law and government's being resp","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87724898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator","authors":"D. D. Murphey","doi":"10.5860/choice.37-5853","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.37-5853","url":null,"abstract":"Joseph McCarthy: Reexamining the Life and Legacy of America's Most Hated Senator Arthur Herman Free Press, 2000 The consensus in the United States for almost half a century has been that Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy was a loose cannon and extremist, who in his crusade against \"Communists in government\" used despicable methods to vilify innocent people. To summarize the accepted view of him in such strong terms is in no sense an exaggeration. The noun \"McCarthyism\" often appears in the writings even of American conservatives when they want to characterize something as grossly unfair or unfounded. At no time has this been a true picture of the man or his career. The caricature was as obviously false in the 1950s as it is to an objective observer today. A \"reexamination of McCarthy's life and legacy,\" as Arthur Herman is attempting in this book, is made necessary only by the fact that the Left won in the battle with McCarthy, leaving its perspective occupying the field of public opinion. That even conservatives accept that perspective is itself an indication of the extent to which American society has absorbed the ideological coloration of the Left. What would an \"objective\" reexamination of McCarthy's career require? Before we can answer that, we must make some fundamental decisions about what objectivity demands. Is objective opinion the same thing as respectable opinion, as most people will implicitly insist? Does it, require staying within the myths - the immense mental constructs according to which people understand social reality - that set the parameters of our thinking? To a thoughtful,person, objectivity requires this conformity to the myths only if those large mental constructs are correct. If the myths are fashioned out of a selective perception that ignores much that is essential to understanding, a true (as distinguished from a merely apparent) objectivity will require taking full account of the realities that have been ignored. This is indeed the situation so far as McCarthy and the antiCommunism he championed are concerned. Here are some of the realities that are ignored by the conventional wisdom and that an objective view will have to take into account: 1. That if Nazism was morally and intellectually despicable, Communism was no less so. The consortium of French intellectuals who recently wrote The Black Book of Communism estimate from 85 to 100 million victims killed worldwide during its 72 year reign of terror. 2. That an appreciation of this fact requires a fundamental reorientation of our thinking. It means moving radically away from the nearly universally-accepted double standard that interprets countless events through a prism that condemns everything Nazi while either minimizing the role of Communist ideology or crediting Communism forbearingly as a misguided idealism. If we were to set aside that double standard, the events of much of the past century would look considerably different to us than they do. 3. That the","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90012372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Vietnam, the Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict","authors":"D. D. Murphey","doi":"10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim170230040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim170230040","url":null,"abstract":"Vietnam, The Necessary War. A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict Michael Lind Simon & Schuster, 1999 Michael Lind has written a fascinating and instructive book. It is most specifically about the Vietnam War, but Lind takes care to place the war, as he should, in the context of world strategy during the Cold War. It is a strength (but also a weakness, for reasons I will explain) of the book that Lind has \"followed his mind where it leads,\" seeking to touch on all facets of the still-continuing debate over the war. He would almost certainly not agree, but it is at that \"macro\" level that this reviewer sees the weakest parts of his book: (a) his discussion of the long-standing debate between \"minimal realists\" and \"maximal realists\" about international affairs, and (b) his tying into the thinking advanced by several social theorists that American attitudes and policies about military and world affairs has largely reflected the differing orientations of a long-existing ethnic regionalism in the United States. The weakness comes from the reductionism that is inherent in the positions of both types of \"realists\" and of the \"regionalists.\" Each focuses on a certain thing, albeit valuable in itself, while ignoring much else that is pertinent. This follows the antiseptic pattern of a fair portion of modern social theory, which formulates abstract cubby-holes that substitute, then, for a direct examination of the world in its complexity. Lind describes himself as a \"centrist\" with regard to the Vietnam War. But no label captures his thinking adequately, since his is too independent a mind to be neatly encapsulated. As one might expect a \"centrist\" would, he repeats certain shibboleths from today's conventional wisdom in the United States, which is left-liberal. He argues, for example, that the \"China hands\" whose advice led to the surrender of China to Mao in the late 1940s weren't Communist agents, as Senator Joseph McCarthy saw them, but just \"gullible dupes.\" This suggests, naively in light of the intellectual history of the 1920s and 1930s, that there was a distinction that was really meaningful between those members of the American intelligentsia who were active Communists and the many who for so many years simply carried on an impassioned love affair with \"the Soviet experiment.\" One of the odder manifestations of Lind's centrism is his opinion that the state-induced famines in the Soviet Union in 1932-33 and in China during the Great Leap Forward from 1958-62 were simply the \"unintended consequences\" of \"socialist economic policies.\" It is hard to believe that the starvation of several million people goes unnoticed by those who by deliberate policy put and then hold those millions in that position. Lind's mental independence leads him, however, to a great many valuable insights that are by no means simple reflections of the leftliberal worldview. These insights are so numerous that a brief discussion of some of them doe","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2003-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83124073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America","authors":"D. D. Murphey","doi":"10.5860/choice.39-6633","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.39-6633","url":null,"abstract":"At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America Philip Dray Random House, 2002 There is no subject that lends itself more to anti-American (and, most recently, anti-white) alienation than lynching. The scenes, after all, were often of the utmost cruelty. No decent individual, sensitive to human suffering, undertakes to defend that cruelty. It is unfortunate, however, if that means that no one is willing to speak in defense of the mainstream of American society during the century following 1865, placing this very cruel subject in context and perspective. Such a failure leaves the field to those who like to paint the picture of white Americans of that period as one of viciousness, rapacity, unbridled racism, and hypocrisy; and who like to picture blacks as victims who received the brunt of that cruelty. This latter view has long-since become the conventional wisdom among the opinion-makers in the United States. And elsewhere, as well: this reviewer wrote a legal studies monograph in 19951 analyzing the history of lynching and placing it in perspective from a scholarly point of view - and it has been barred from Canada as \"hate literature\" (an act that is arguably as intellectually disgraceful to Canada as Stalin's insistence on Lysenkoism was to the Soviet Union). Herbert Marcuse's prescription, in his discussion of \"repressive tolerance,\" that all views from the left should be permitted and all from the right prohibited has become reality. Philip Dray's new book on lynching fits into that conventional wisdom. Unless one is predisposed to question the Left's image of white Americans, a reader will be inclined to accept its narrative at face value. Dray has written a readable chronology of lynching, with emphasis especially on the South, and his study is the product of considerable research into the subjects he considers important. This said, it remains important to note the ways his book lacks perspective. (What follows is a discussion of just some of those ways, since a complete examination of them would go far beyond the scope of a book review): 1. His entire theme (\"the lynching of black America\") repeats the now-customary premise that lynching was primarily an expression of racism. \"Lynching,\" he says, \"was a form of caste oppression... the white world's cruelty\"; and, elsewhere, \"victims were chosen for their race.\" What is odd is that he cites quite a lot of counter-evidence, but never reflects about it. He tells about the San Francisco Vigilante Committees of 1851 and 1856; about the hanging of the white gamblers in Vicksburg; about the lynching of eleven whites in New Orleans in 1891 after the Police Superintendent was shot from ambush; that half the thirty lynch victims in Illinois after 1882 were white; that thirty-five whites were lynched in North Dakota in the mid-1880s for cattle rustling; and much more. Lynching was not limited by race or by region of the country. Robert Zangrando's The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching, 1","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78595612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Free Market for Human Organs","authors":"M. Clay, W. Block","doi":"10.1201/b11262-7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1201/b11262-7","url":null,"abstract":"The authors draw attention to the shortage of human organs which, as surgical methods improve, can frequently be used to save the lives of the living after their owners are deprived of their use by death. They propose the legalization of the sale of body parts as a legitimate free market activity, and argue that in such conditions the price of human body parts would fall to a sufficiently low level to discourage the theft of human organs which the present laws are intended to prevent. Key Words: Human organs, Organ donation, Medicare, Medicaid, free markets, legalization. Every year thousands of men, women and children1 needlessly suffer and die because of a law, a simple legislative enactment that could easily be changed2. One may think that something like this could only happen in a third world country. Or believe that a responsible government would change the law that in effect if not by intention kills innocent people every day. Unfortunately, this is now happening in the United States. It is currently illegal to buy or sell human organs. While roughly 80,000 people need organ transplants every year, only about 20,000 people receive them annually3. These 20,000 body parts come from people who donate their organs as a gift to humanity. They receive no remuneration for their acts of generosity. Because people do not have an economic incentive to donate their organs many people take them to the grave where they will be of no use to anyone. The number of donated organs falls far short of meeting the demand. Consequently people die tragically and needlessly waiting for transplants. Diagram #1 illustrates this situation. If a market clearing price were but allowed, supply and demand would intersect at point B, under which circumstance there would be no shortage of transplantable organs. However, at the governmentally mandated price of zero, demand at point D is in excess of A; hence, the shortage is brought about by unwise state policy. This shortage has created numerous other problems. Doctors and medical professionals must chose who receives an organ and who will die waiting for one. They often base this decision on age, sex, health status, and a calculation of post operational life expectancy. For example a 60-year-old male, who would be expected to live five years after the operation, will be placed lower on the transplant list than a 10year-old girl, who can be expected to live a full and normal life if she receives this operation. At first glance this seems like a very equitable way of distributing the donated organs. But let us take a closer look. This practice requires fallible human beings to place more value on one life than another. The 60-year-old man did nothing of his own volition to be placed lower on the list. The 10-year-old girl did nothing to deserve the priority placement. This is hardly equitable. Rather, the current system enables medical bureaucrats to play god. Anyone who would take this role upon himself by that very fact e","PeriodicalId":52486,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2002-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79817235","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}