Correspondence

...C 0 R R E S P 0 N D E N C E m, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ; . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . - 7 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bethell Intrigues I am afraid that in his February column, "Sound Minds," Tom Bethell has fallen from his usual standards...

...None has heard of OSHA or FTC or Minimum Wage, and the IRS will have a tough time since most of their transactions are cash or barter...

...There is substantial eviThe American Spectator welcomes correspondence from its readers...

...They are as busy as bird dogs, and creating little trouble for anyone...

...If government services are worth more than they cost, the GNP accounts will underestimate their value...

...That they get here at all is a credit to their seamanship, and they land, usually on the beach, anywhere from Fernandina to Key West...

...Using input prices would tend to overvalue the services of unprofitable firms and undervalue the services of profitable firms...

...The professional do-gooders are beginning to discover them, and to wring their hands, but the illegal Haitians are reveling in a luxury they have never known...

...I may be willing to pay the government to set up defenses to keep the Soviets out of Seattle, and so might my neighbor, but each of us has a strong irfcentive not to pay but let everyone else pay, because we get the benefits regardless of whether we pay for the service of national defense...

...But it is certainly wrong to conclude, as Bethell does, that the value of a dollar spent on government services is therefore less than that dollar's value in the private sector...

...Only a few of them have found regular employment, but the amazing thing is that the Haitian colony has created its own economy...

...They are promptly rounded up by the authorities and ultimately land with their predecessors in abandoned government buildings near Miami...

...William Sjostrom Department of Economics University of Washington Seattle, Washington Tom Bethell's column in the February American Spectator, touching on immigration and the illegal immigrant, intrigued me greatly, coming as it did on the heels of news (rumors, rather) coming out of Miami that something strange and wonderful is happening there...

...These people are all coal black, and most of them are illiterate, and nobody at all speaks English, their language being a combination of seventeenth-century French and tribal expletives with overtones of gullah...

...dence that property taxes often increase the value of homes, because the taxes are spent on valuable projects such as sewer systems and parks, which are more valuable than their cost...

...but he would do his readers better service by more careful analysis and less dogmatism...

...These unfortunate people come mostly in overcrowded, open, leaky sailing craft with frayed halliards, torn sails, and cracked rudders...

...a hundred in a vessel which should carry twenty at the most...

...Arlene N. Heath San Francisco, California THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1983...

...Please limit your comments to 200 words, and include full name, address, and telephone number...

...He uses the tiresome game, usually played by the more inane members of the Left, of denouncing his foes as "old-fashioned," whereas his friends are "modern," then gives us an exasperating non sequiter...

...There are real difficulties with using GNP as a measure of the value of government services, and I would probably share Bethell's attitude toward the vast majority of those services, but little is gained by the sort of dogmatic rhetoric Bethell uses...

...Moreover, I confess to a bit of difficulty with the notion that a dollar invested in the company that makes Pac-man is worth more than a dollar given to help feed a starving family...

...It hardly requires that one be a bloated bureaucrat shamelessly defending his perquisites to see that Bethell's argument is confused...

...How long it will take the liberals to get these people disgruntled is unknown, but right now, it seems, they're happy as clams...

...At his worst he is better than Hobart Rowen at his best (is that an oxymoron...

...William Davies Melbourne, Florida Standard Gold Whatever better things Vic Gold may find to do with his life, let us hope that he will always find the time to write book reviews as perceptive and as entertaining as his review of Hamilton Jordan's Crisis: The Last Year of the Carter Presidency (TAS, February 1983...

...As you doubtless know, in addition to the tens of thousands of Cubans who have fled to Florida, in recent years there has been a hefty influx of refugees from Haiti, all of whom are just about as illegal as they come...

...They sell their handicrafts, have created their own markets, and perform a multitude of services for one another, all entirely outside of the regular, controlled economy...

...Nobody in Miami has done very much about them except to keep them rounded up...

...It is true that in GNP accounts, government services are evaluated at input prices, rather than at output prices, because there usually are no output prices for those services...