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

Reason, Dec, 1998

Steve Symms: Yes...As a practicing Republican...it's not a political plus for me to be a member of Congress in the Republican Party.... But it's kind of interesting.... I don't have any sympathy for anybody that's involved in it. If they're guilty, I say they got to face the music, and the truth goes a long way in politics. The quicker it comes out the better. I hope that it weakens the Executive Branch of the government, because the Congress has for too long sat down here and handed over the power to the President.

October 1974

From "Straight Talk," an interview with psychiatry critic Thomas Szasz

Reason: You mean you don't believe that heroin is addictive?

Thomas Szasz: Not so fast. It's precisely the word "addiction" that's my quarry. Suppose you give a cigarette to a youngster who has never smoked. He smokes it. Will he enjoy it?

Reason: No.

Szasz: OK. Suppose you give him a martini. His first martini. Will he enjoy that?

Reason: Probably not.

Szasz: Well, I think you can see what I am getting at. Drug use whatever the drug - is like any habit: it must be learned. In my view, drug addiction - that is, the habitual use and craving for a drug - is not something that happens to a person unwittingly, against his will; it's something he does to himself, generally by practicing assiduously how to use - and enjoy - a particular substance. The idea that a single experience with a drug...makes one a "slave" to it, makes one unable to exist without it, is simply not true. It's what I call "pharmacomythology" - in contrast to pharmacology, which has to do with the real chemical effect of drugs.

December 1974

From "An Interview with Milton Friedman," Nobel laureate economist

"There's a strong argument to be made that a free society is a fundamentally unstable equilibrium, in the language of the natural sciences.... There's a great deal of basis for believing that a free society is fundamentally unstable - we may regret this but we've got to face up to the facts.... How often and for how long have we had free societies? For short periods of time. There was an essentially free society in 5th-century Greece. Was it able to survive? It disappeared. Every other time when there's been a free society, it has tended to disappear."

Reason: It's paradoxical but...you are attributing to the collectivist intellectual a better feeling for the market.

Milton Friedman: Of course. But while there's a bigger market for Fords than there is for American Motors products, there is a market for the American Motors products. In the same way, there's a bigger market for collectivist ideology than there is for individualist ideology. The thing that really baffles me is that the fraction of intellectuals who are collectivists is, I think, even larger than would be justified by the market.

February 1975

From "Economics, Politics & Freedom," an interview with Nobel laureate economist F.A. Hayek

"What I expect is that inflation will drive all the Western countries into a planned economy via price controls. Nobody will dare to stop inflation in an ordinary manner because as things are at present, to discontinue inflation will inevitably cause extensive unemployment.... People will find they can't live with constantly rising prices and will try to control it by price controls, and that of course is the end of the market system and the end of the free political order. So I think it will be via the attempt to regress the effects of a continued inflation that the free market and free institutions will disappear. It may still take ten years, but it doesn't matter much for me because in ten years I hope I shall be dead."