Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Pornography
Reynolds, Alan
"Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Pornography" But Feldstein offers yet another reason: the problem isn't that jobs aren't there; rather, the problem is that people won't take them. In short, the idea of the...
...The Policy Plarming Staff, led by Paul Nitze, recommended "a major reconsideration of national strategy...
...For the first time in postwar years, it became clear that a massive strategic threat would not guarantee Soviet amenability, that Americans could not halt Soviet expansion or turn Soviet probes except by meeting them one by one as and when they appeared and by employing varieties of limited counterforce...
...But the most significant point of his article seems to me to be the one he makes at the very beginning...
...A multimillion dollar effort to fix-up downtown Sacramento, in an effort to bring back family shoppers, was partly thwarted by the infestation of the area by "adult" bookstores and movie theaters...
...The individual who dismisses the idea of a cornucopia of easily available wealth as so much bosh and attempts to put in a lonely word for the dignity and necessity of individual endeavor sounds, by contrast, as if he is singing the opening song of All in the Family along with Archie Bunker...
...Similar community licensing or zoning authority could easily be extended to other avowedly pornographic enterprises...
...The old soldier himself grew frustrated and impatient over the rigidity of his negotiating position: " . . . when ] was Secretary of State I was being pressed constantly . . . to give the Russians hell . . . . I was getting the same appeal in relation to the Far East and China...
...Why on earth can't urban residents exercise similar control over the location of porn businesses, which are certainly no less offensive to the senses...
...Conservatives are properly wary of granting judicial or regulatory bodies the authority to The Alternative March 1974- 9 determine whether or not a crime has been committed after the fact...
...It's hypocritical at best, and quite inconsiderate...
...Banned in Boston" is a principle far less subject to abuse than either setting national standards for obscenity, or setting no standards at all...
...Aside from selling diluted hallucinogenic drugs, the only commerce not considered immoral by the New Left is the exploitation of the auto-erotic fantasies of the sexually frustrated...
...It seems there really is a bottom to the barrel...
...as in the past the debate and its conclusions will define the nature of subsequent American foreign policy...
...Similarly, much unemployment is voluntary-about 50 percent representing people who have voluntarily left their jobs...
...Paradoxically, the more powerful weapons become, the more reluctant people are to employ them...
...Where cities have used liquor licensing powers and other pressures to keep "topless-bottomless shows" out of their boundaries, such shows have often moved to highways between the cities...
...All this is well and good, and Mr...
...The porn vendors on Times Square, for example, might be prohibited from scribbling "Live Sex" on their windows, and be required to relocate to, say, the Bowery...
...There really is an end...
...In fact, the issue concerns magazines, photographs, films, and books explicitly depicting sado-masochism, child molesting, bestiality, lesbianism, oral and group sex, anal fetishism, and a variety of other practices and positions that defy description...
...The problem is very real to those who are close to it...
...I suspect that this same portion of the population would be highly offended if this nation decided it would no longer subsidize that preference...
...Unlike the subjects of most liberal-statist restrictions, these are matters that do affect third parties who are neither buyers nor sellers...
...Its effect on our economic life would be most welcome...
...But it is not, after all, that painful a lesson...
...For example, Feldstein points out that most unemployment is of relatively short duration---over 50 percent being unemployed for less than five weeks...
...Few people have objected to this control, or have maintained that the classifications arrived at were entirely arbitrary...
...After NSC-68 appeared in spring 1950, the United States developed a strategy combining massive retaliation and primitive flexible response...
...it was disturbing and ominous...
...Many people have to walk past skin flicks and "massage parlors" on the way to work, and their children may be indirectly or directly exposed to a rather demeaning, vicarious approach to sex ("Mommy: What's a 'Deep Throat...
...At about the same time the newly formed National Security Council reached similar conclusions, and with participants from State and Defense the NSC initiated discussions which culminated more than two years later in the famous NSC-68 proposals for large increases in conventional forces...
...In the period from 1947 to 1950, massive failure to limit Soviet expansion and to construct a congenial postwar order occasioned initial assessments of that question deep in the confidential recesses of the American bureaucracy...
...The economy is not, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, the World's biggest Reader's Digest Sweepstakes, with 200,000,000 prizes guaranteed to be awarded...
...Those who would be the first to object to an unsightly hamburger joint in the middle of a scenic area seem to have no objection to a schlock shop peddling porn in someone else's neighborhood...
...To control pornography, one must first be able to identify it...
...A handbook on how to practice bacterial warfare would be a likely candidate for censorship by even the most liberal of liberals...
...Discrimination" is hard to define...
...the other half is that some people won't take or keep jobs that they find "unattractive...
...In part, this may be a reflection of sublime innocence...
...The issue is discussed, in editorials and TV talk shows, as though it were addressed to Playboy and the novels of D.H...
...Adoption of the containment policy in mid-1947 almost ensured that such recommendations would emerge from any consideration of political-strategic necessity...
...Lawrence...
...At the same time, both administrations developed the conventional alternative to nuclear war first used extensively 10 The Alternative March 1974...
...How does one counter all this...
...It is ludicrous for liberals to posture as opponents oi ~ state restrictions when they have created a society in which one must get the state's permission to work in many trades, to raise the price of one's labor or product, to set up a new business, or to advertise that your product cures acid indigestion...
...This is over-the-counter stuff in most big cities, and a simple request for more "action" will bring even raunchier material from beneath the counter...
...Nevertheless, some laws are both necessary and necessarily vague, and clear and predicable standards have usually evolved to deal with such cases...
...Liberals, by contrast, are especially fond of such broad grants of authority, except when it comes to regulating smut...
...After a few months under Marshall the State Department concluded that the United States needed to increase its conventional military forces...
...bad business drives out good...
...In Economics and the Art of Controversy (1958), John Kenneth Galbraith warned conservatives not to exaggerate their objections to statist interventions lest they lose their credibility...
...Surely liberals need the same lesson regarding the Mario Savio syndrome of identifying "free speech" with the right to offend others...
...Obviously, the atomic monopoly of 1945-1949 was insufficient to stop the Soviets in Eastern Europe, or the communists in China, despite Truman's aggressive posturing and veiled threats...
...A decade later the question again dominated discussion, partly because of the new Soviet ability to carry nuclear destruction to the United States and partly as a result of an increasingly activist American foreign policy...
...the spenders have changed...
...This is not so insurmountable a problem as many claim...
...Insulated by their affluent suburbs, the ritualistic liberals don't address themselves at all to the main issue of what proliferating smut shops and theaters can do to the aesthetics and safety of a shopping or entertainment area...
...Anyone who wished to establish an "adult" bookstore or theater would then have to conform to certain standards regarding offensive signing, and would have to locate in specific areas...
...It would appear, then, that a significant portion of the population no longer thinks working is worth the candle...
...A Boston manpower program in the late 1960s had well over half of its participants turn down openings that the program agency had located for them...
...A society has a perfect right to circumscribe the boundaries of individual choice when those choices interfere with the lives of others...
...For the third time in twenty-five years, the United States is in search of a national strategy...
...The bomb as the only backstop to policy had proven inflexible, and lack of conventional forces threatened to paralyze American negotiators...
...In his words, "A firm can generally provide the opportunity to acquire new marketable skills--by on-the-job training, detailed supervision, or even just by learning by experience--only to a worker whose net product during the period of training is at least equal to his wage...
...Menning American Strategy in the Nuclear Age T HE REVOLUTIONARY age of nuclear strategy has raised anew the oldest, most basic question of foreign policy, that of the relation between force and diplomacy...
...A vigorous campaign of racist or anti-Semitic propaganda would be denounced for the same reason that wide-open pornography ought to be denounced--many innocent people would be injured or offended by such material and by the clientele it attracts...
...For another, the minimum wage laws, as Feldstein illustrates, help turn many entry-level jobs into dead ends...
...Americans had hoped to avoid the outbreak of a third world war and to prevent Soviet and communist expansion...
...The first period of questioning about national strategy in the aftermath of the bomb occurred two short years after the United States had demonstrated for all the world its conclusive strategic power at Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...When a Galbraith writes a book, a hundred Schlesingers and other worthies say things like "This brilliant book opens new paths in our understanding," or that anyone who fails to read it "will be opting out of serious discussion of the future of American life...
...its effect on our spirit, even more so...
...To say that pornography is hard to define is not to say that it doesnt exist, or that it doesn't present a problem...
...so are 'kmfair competition," "intent to defraud," %insanitary conditions," and "loitering...
...It is difficult, to say the least...
...Hardly anyone today maintains that war represents merely the extremity of political recourse, or even, as at times in the past, a casual or desirable alternative far short of the extreme...
...Art itself is seriously threatened, we're told, by the "average vigilantes...
...In short, minimum wage raises the pay scale for entrylevel jobs, but makes it too expensive for firms to turn those jobs into a route to something better...
...The commtmity is clearly the optimal decision-making unit for drawing the line between racy and raunchy, because community standards take "neighborhood effects" into account, while allowing for a variety of choices between different social environments...
...Indeed, many smut suppliers are only too happy to identify their products as intended for "adults only," as a selling point, thus advertising the prurient intent...
...By 1947 the confidence American leaders had derived from the atomic monopoly had diminished...
...Yelling ~'fire" in a crowded auditorium is not a whole lot different from peddling the hot stuff in a crowded city...
...All in all, it's a pretty insulting, elitist view of the average man in the average community...
...Moreover, this is true even when substantial public effort is made to find jobs for the unemployed...
...Pornography shops are beth a symptom and a contributing factor in the exodus of middle-class families from the cities...
...There is yet some hope, however, that what we lesser lights call "reality" will intrude...
...Community control of schools is now terribly chic, it seems, but not so community control of porn parlors and skin flicks...
...In the thermonuclear era, that reluctance has seemed almost an imperative, so that people have wondered whether war can still be a rational policy alternative whether any goals have sufficient validity and importance to require their attainment through nuclear conflict...
...Now, there are several reasons for this...
...There is a good possibility that reasonable restrictions on the location and sales-tax exemption of such material might well be workable using the industry's own classification scheme...
...The Truman Administration, and the Eisenhower-Dulles Administration after it, continued to rely on massive strategic nuclear air power in potential direct confrontation with the Soviet Union...
...Unfortunately, the current minimum wage law prevents many people from accepting jobs with low pay and valuable experience...
...Thomas H. Etzold and B.W...
...Alan Reynolds Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Pornography F ROM TH~ WAVE OF hysteria that followed the Supreme Court decision on pornography, one might suppose that Galileo and Darwin would not have made the grade under contemporary cormnunity standards...
...The relation between force and diplomacy has been the subject of repeated debate in post-1945 American foreign policy...
...jobs are there, but people won't take them, even in a tight labor market...
...During the next three years, as American leaders ip debated national strategies, impressive new failures in China and a potentially disastrous loss of security inherent in Soviet acquisition of the bomb were to provoke reexamination of the relation between force and diplomacy, in this case the American nuclear monopoly and the American intention to inhibit Soviet expansion...
...In the polite language of social science, there are obvious "externalities," "social costs," or '~aeighborhood effects" arising from having an "adult" bookstore or theater next door to your apartment, stere, or office...
...Nobody, in fact, really believes in unrestricted communications...
...If there is benefit in an economy rapidly growing short of gasoline, paper, fuel oil, and electricity, it is surely the lesson that all these things are not the boundless gift of a munificent and indulgent providence...
...New York's Times Square area has been ruined as a tourist attraction by scruffy little porn shops...
...At that time my facilities for giving them hell---and I am a soldier and know something about the ability to give hell-was 1-1/3 divisions over the entire United States...
...Nor does anyone really believe that any business should be permitted to operate anywhere it wants: A refinery, auto body shop, or kennel would be most unwelcome in the residential sections of Scarsdale or Beverly Hills...
...Most communities have effectively limited minors' access to pornographic material...
...It follows Gresham's law...
...This presents some inconvenience to the proprietors and patrons of such places, but it does strike a workable compromise between total censorship and the commercial blight and creepy atmosphere that typically accompanies the skin trade...
...The State Department had explicitly stated that the main reason the United States needed to maintain armed strength was to furnish "support for our political position" - - t h a t is, containment...
...In the early 1970s, as the war wound down in Southeast Asia, Americans were examining the question again...
...Foreign policy goals had been simple to define, hard to achieve...
...Didn't have no welfare states/Everybody pulled his weight/Gee, our old La Salle ran great/ Those were the days...
...For one thing, through welfare and unemployment compensation, whatever their other merits or demerits, the government provides notorious disincentives to work...
...In short, the idea of the '%ard-core unemployed," unable to find jobs, is only about half true...
...The politics of affluence is deeply ingrained, and one's acceptance of it has become a measure of his sophistication in any number of academic, journalistic, and political circles...
...By 1947 American failure in the latter regard was more than obvious...
...It is strange, perhaps, that man's most advanced technological society needs tc learn all over again the world's most fundamental lesson: Nothing is free...
...During Marshall's tenure as Secretary of State, many negotiators warned of the injury that would result from massive and overhasty demobilization...
...That is quite a proposition when you deal with somebody with over 260 and you have 1-1/3...
...Feldstein suggests a number of policies to alleviate the problem which merit serious consideration...
Vol. 7 • March 1974 • No. 6
