Voices of reason - excerpts of interviews with various personalities from 1968 to 1998 - Interview

Reason, Dec, 1998

November 1996 From "Contemplating Evil," an interview with author Dean Koontz

"Every time a poll comes out that shows the public has so little faith in this politician or that party, there's a hue and cry. But I actually find that hugely healthy. If 70 percent of the public believes nothing the president says - and an even higher number for Congress and the press - that's actually pretty healthy. It means people will think for themselves, and that's the way it should be."

January 1997 From "Looking for Results," an interview with Nobel laureate economist Ronald Coase

Reason: You began teaching at the University of Virginia in the late 1950s, and by the early 1960s the administration there was not impressed with the work being done by yourself, Warren Nutter, James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock - four of the most famous and influential economists of the post-war era.

Ronald Coase: They thought the work we were doing was disreputable. They thought of us as right-wing extremists. My wife was at a cocktail party and heard me described as someone to the right of the John Birch Society. There was a great antagonism in the '50s and '60s to anyone who saw any advantage in a market system or in a nonregulated or relatively economically free system.

April 1997 From "Risky Journalism," an interview with ABC's John Stossel

"It was OK to say that regulatory money was being misspent, that less should be spent on Superfund, perhaps, but more must be spent on self-extinguishing cigarettes or fire-proof furniture. [But] to simply say that regulation itself might be damaging to health and the economy was something no respectable journalist should be allowed to do."

June 1997 From "Hints From Eloise," an interview with Eloise Anderson, director of the California Department of Social Services

Reason: You say the goal of welfare should be a minimum wage job. What do you say to defenders of the status quo who say...these are dead-end jobs?

Eloise Anderson: Dead-end jobs. You know, this is a new philosophy. It's a job. If you want to go somewhere else, go somewhere else. We're supposed to be a free people. If that job doesn't take you where you want to go, move to another job. We don't do slavery anymore. So you don't have to stay on that job....Somewhere in the '60s, we started to believe that work was supposed to make us happy. I didn't grow up thinking work was supposed to make us happy. I tell my kids, 'If you want to be happy, be happy at home.' Your home life is supposed to make you happy, not work. If you're lucky, you'll find a job that brings together the vocational and avocational.

October 1997

From "The Peters Principles," an interview with management guru Tom Peters

Reason: There's a great nostalgia now in political circles for the 1950s.

Tom Peters: I have a term that I use in my seminars. I call it the "false-nostalgia-for-shitty-jobs phenomenon": Oh for the halcyon days when I could sit on the 37th floor of the General Motors Tower passing memorandums from the left side of the desk to the right side of the desk for 43 years. It's just total shit. It really is. Life was not as glorious as imagined.