In the Public Interest

It borders on the banal to observe that the aggregate voting record of Congress is becoming more remote from the aggregate views of the people. If a variety of Louis Harris, Peter Hart, and other pollsters are to be believed, the public disagrees with the plethora of congressional votes recently that favor Big Oil, less…

Inflation or no inflation, Congress remains the best “buy” in the country. The business lobbies that ply Capitol Hill with their campaign money and fringe benefits know that such lucre is receiving far more value than when Will Rogers uttered his pithy description of the national legislature nearly 50 years ago. Some political observers believe…

Passage of the Chrysler bail-out legislation by the Congress revealed clearly the ideological bankruptcy of self-styled political conservatives who say they oppose Big Government and favor the rewards and risks of a free-enterprise system. The Senate debate on the Chrysler bill should become a classic in the archives of political science. Rarely has the schism…

Washington is a city which diligently goes about reducing human activity in travail to statistics. As a summary form of understanding, statistics pose a challenge to the capacity of human beings for empathy. That estimable quality of the heart and mind is not often tapped by just reciting, for instance, that 100,000 U.S. workers die…

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is proposing to turn over the operation of the public’s airways almost entirely to the radio stations. There now are so many radio stations, offering so much choice of communications, some FCC officials argue, that there no longer is any need to retain traditional public interest standards. Specifically, the FCC…

It was just before 3 p.m. on October 17 near Barnwell, S.C., when a 40-year-old man driving a 1972 Mercury went into insulin shock. The car shot forward toward the Savannah River nuclear facility, breaking through a metal chain link fence and striking several pine trees and a sign post before the vehicle rolled over.…

“After several days of congressional hearings, the Chrysler bailout situation is becoming clearer. There is widespread agreement (government, labor, new Chrysler executives and others) that the company has been mismanaged. Little credence among decision makers is being given to Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca’s repeated scapegoating of Uncle Sam–the regulator for much of the failing company’s…

A grotesque spectacle is emerging in the U.S. Senate. It is in the form of chain-smoking Wendell H. Ford, the senator from Kentucky and the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Co. In his position as chairman of the Consumer Subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee, Ford is supposed to be a leading defender of consumer rights.…

It has been called the war between the bulldozer and the plow. The plow is losing. Every year, about 1 million acres of prime farmland and 2 million acres of lesser quality agricultural land are being converted to such non-farm uses as urban development, shopping centers and highways. The Tellico Dam in Tennessee, criticized as…

At Princeton University in the 1950s, Professor John Kemeny was known for his precision and persuasiveness–at least in teaching his course on Aristotelian and symbolic logic. It is unfortunate that he did not apply these talents in adequate measure to himself and the rest of the President’s Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island.…