friday, September 25, 1981
page 4
daily nebraskan
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A presidential 'commission has recommended
restitution be made to the Americans held hos
tage for 444 days in Iran. The commission recom
mended the hostages be paid $12.50 per day for
their ordeal.
The per day amount totals 55,550 for those
held the entire 444 days.
Jerry Plotkin, a businessman among those
taken, would not be eligible for the benefits. The
commission ruled private citizens who went to
Iran after travel warnings were issued were on their
own.
Meanwhile, seven Secret Service agents who
helped save President Ronald Reagan from the as
sassination attempt on March 30 received com
pensation for their work on the job.
Four of the agents received $10,000 each and
the Treasury Department's exceptional service
award.
In neither the hostage nor the Secret Service
agent examples is monetary compensation an ade
quate reward for their services.
A Secret Service Agent's job is to protect the
president. This is exactly what agent Tim McCar
thy did when he used his body to protect the
president from the gunfire.
But why call this a heroic deed? It was his duty
to use his life to save the president's. Rewarding
him or anyone else in the agency for performing
their job is an admission that we don't expect
these people to risk their lives without some
monetary reward.
Paying the hostages a mere $12.50 a day is a
sham. No amount of money can compensate the
hostages for what they endured.
Some say $12.50 is a good "symbolic gesture."
A lawyer for some hostages and their families is
suggesting a minimum of $1,000 a day as restitution.
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"It's God and Satan. Good versus bad."
- Larry Nolte, Faith Baptist Church parishioner
as quoted Sept. 22 in the Lincoln Journal
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Minorities rise fastest through market
I once saw a reference to Thomas Sowell in which he
was described as "an economist who happens to be
black. n The tone was somehow wrong, as if his race were
an incidental embarrassment, on the order of calling
Marlene Dietrich an entertainer who happens to be fe
male. Sowell was in New York recently to promote his three
new books. He is a sternly handsome man who looks
much younger than his 51 years. He talks with the ease of
a stand-up comedian.
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His basic thesis, as a commentator on public policy, is
that ethnic minorities have always risen fastest through
Ithe free market, rather than through politics.
"I do not have faith in the market," he says. "I have
evidence about the market." That evidence is amassed in
bthnic America and Markets and Minorities, two of his
three current books.
As Sowell sees it, the market ignores the very factors of
socially-ascribed inferior status that keeps minorities "in
their place." Instead, it rewards them for what they do.
An employer who hired a less-qualified white over a
more-qualified black is imposing upon himself what
Sowell calls "the costs of discrimination," and leaving the
superior job candidate to some competitor.
He points td such homely examples as the Washington
Redskins of a few vears back, who were the National
Football League's whitest-and-worst-team. The costs of
discrimination are inherent, he says, in a competitive sys
tem. Therefore blacks should favor free competition.
The death of Roy Wilkins has been widely remarked on
as signaling the end of the old civil rights movement. Cur
rent black leadership has abandoned the Wilkins-era stress
on merit hiring and on opposing double standards, in
favor of group entitlements and "Affirmative Actions" -divisive
and, in Sowell's view, self-defeating policies.
What does Sowell advise blacks to do?
"I am not the Dear Abby of black people," he said. He
dislikes talks of "solutions." In the real world there are
only "alternatives," which must be compared with each
other, not with some hypothetical ideal.
- -
Sowell is an original thinker whose method is not easy
to grasp, but he owes a heavy debt to Friedrich von
Hayek, the Austrian economist whose epistemology of the
marketplace forms the basis of Sowell's widely hailed
book, Knowledge and Decisions.
He rejects the state-imposed "solutions" favored by
liberalism and adopted, unfortunately, by most of the
black establishment. This has not endeared him to that
establishment; nor has his blunt ridicule of what he sees as
its social elitism; nor has his penchant for independent
theorizing.
Born in North Carolina, Sowell grew up in New York,
dropped out of high school, joined the Marines and
eventually got his doctorate in economics at the Univer
sity of Chicago where he gave over his early radicalism
in favor of the free-market economics fostered by the
Chicago school.
At one time he was an oddity, and his first teaching job
was at a private women's college. But he made his mark,
and last fall Ronald Reagan offered him a Cabinet
position in the Department of Education.
Continued on Page 5
Few people believe money will help ease any
mental anguish the hostages suffered. Yet we are
willing to award these victims of circumstance
money, although we turn our backs on others.
There are many other groups who could claim
a right to some compensation.
Vietnam veterans and Japanese-Americans,
whose civil liberties were denied during World
War II, are just two groups. Many descendants of
the first Americans, the Native Americans, would
have a legitimate gripe about having their ances
tors land stolen by the U.S. government.
What happened to the hostages, the Vietnam
veterans, and the Native Americans was unfair.
But life is unfair and we must accept it.
And it is just as unfair to give money away to
the hostages or Secret Service agents when it
could be better spent on the entire country and
not just one small group.
you have to ask,
you can't afford it
My wife, Glynda, came into a small inheritance. We
decided to discover how the other 1 percent lives by go
ing yachting.
"If you have to ask how much it costs to charter a 40
foot yacht," as J. P. Morgan once said, "yu should be
ashamed of yourself." It costs $200 a day, not counting
gin, Band-Aids and food, in that order of importance.
I was sorry we asked. "For that amount of money"
said Glynda, who is terrified of any and all waters over
four feet deep, "we could afford to sit in an ice-cube-filled
bathtub and flagellate ourselves with chains."
But I pointed that we would be sharing this luxurious
sailboat with our dear friends Captain and Mrs. Bligh (1
have changed their names to protect our friendship).
And thus it would cost us a mere $100 a day to experi
ence the sybaritic existence of the idle rich while cruis
ing the magnificent fjords off The Inland Passage.
This bargain proved too much for Glynda to resist
and I am thus able to report to you first hand how the
idle rich live.
The idle rich arise each morning very early and very
carefully. The reason for the latter is that the distance
between my bunk and the shelf overhead is 26-54 inches.
The reason for the former is obscure.
But it seems there is always a tide in the affairs of
men, which, taken at the flood, requires getting up at
some ungodly hour.
Continued on Page 5
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