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

Reason: What is the role of the poor and the minorities in the Reagan years?

Karl Hess: To be poor. That's what their job has always been, and until they understand that this is literally a job, I don't think they have any chance of reversing the situation. Poor people stop being poor when they lose habits, when they stop thinking poor and start creating wealth. This doesn't mean becoming rich; it just means producing wealth, working.... The concerns of the poor have never been addressed by anyone. The liberals have simply said they were addressing them but kept people poor by putting them on welfare. The Republicans will say, "We're gonna keep you poor, and we won't keep you on welfare." At least that will be the implication. Unfortunately, it won't be the truth. If it were the truth, then we'd have a lot of poor people who would stop being poor.

January 1983

From "Reason Interview: Irving Kristol," neoconservative intellectual and founder of The Public Interest

"If you have standards, moral standards, you have to want to make them prevail, and at the very least you have to argue in their favor. Now, show me where libertarians have argued in some comprehensive way for a set of moral standards.... I don't think morality can be decided on the private level. I think you need public guidance and public support for a moral consensus. The average person has to know instinctively, without thinking too much about it, how he should raise his children."

January 1984

From "Reason Interview: George Stigler," Nobel laureate economist

Reason: What is capitalism's constituency?...Who's in favor of capitalism?

George Stigler: Oddly enough, aside from Chicago professors of economics, not as many as should be. In the long run, of course, workers and consumers are the main beneficiaries - easier jobs, higher incomes, and so forth. That is the main performance of the system. The businessman can make a killing, but it's a small killing compared to society's killing. Henry Ford made a lot of money making cars at one time, but that was a small advantage to him compared to the benefit to millions of people who for the first time in their lives were emancipated from common public carriers and could live where they wanted, move at the hours they wanted, to the places they wanted. Ford collected a billion bucks, but that was peanuts compared to the benefits.

December 1984

From "Reason Interview: Henry Hazlitt," journalist and author of Economics in One Lesson

"I'm glad that I'm not going to live for many years now, because I see a very dreadful time. Now that we have discovered the atomic bomb, I can't see how we're going to keep somebody from using it, just out of sheer curiosity."

"You can write limits into a constitution, but the question is, is there any way to ensure the preservation of a limited democracy? Even if you have a good system, if the majority has its way, it's sure to lead to bad policy, because the majority doesn't understand limited government."