Think tanks wrap-up 2

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 (UPI) -- The UPI think tank wrap-up is a daily digest covering brief opinion pieces, reactions to recent news events and position statements released by various think tanks. This is the second of two wrap-ups for August 29.

The Independent Institute

(II is an independent public policy research organization whose goal is to transcend the political and partisan interests that influence debate about public policy. II aims to redefine the debate over public issues, and foster new and effective directions for government reform, by adhering to the highest standards of independent scholarly inquiry, without regard to political or social biases.)

OAKLAND, Calif. -- The President Is Reading a Book, I'm Afraid

By Robert Higgs

President George W. Bush has been reading a book. At least, he claims to have been reading one. I know what you're thinking, but the First Shrub swears that he has been reading more than just the funny papers lately. We'd all be better off, however, if he had stuck to the comics.

In an interview last week, Bush said that on his vacation he had been reading a recently published book by Eliot A. Cohen, "The Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime." Cohen is a well-known neocon war hawk and all-around armchair warrior who professes "strategic studies" at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and, in his spare time, ponders mega-deaths (his own not included) with other lusty members of the Defense Policy Board. The quintessential civilian go-getter, he never met a war he didn't want to send somebody else to fight and die in.

The Supreme Command consists of case studies of how four "statesmen"-- Abraham Lincoln, Georges Clemenceau, Winston Churchill, and David Ben-Gurion -- successfully managed to make their generals act more vigorously than those officers really wanted to act. By spurring their too-timid generals, these four micro-managing commanders-in-chief supposedly got superior results from their war-making efforts.

The common soldiers who were fed into the consuming maw of war under these worthies might have given us a different opinion, but dead men don't make good critics.

So, what are we to make of Bush's reading of this book, assuming that he really has been reading it?

The short answer is that this is not good news for the world. Such reading seems calculated to bend the president's mind, never a mighty organ in any event, toward thinking of himself in Lincolnian or Churchillian terms.

Indeed, those of us who have had the stomach to observe his public strutting and puffing since Sept. 11 might have suspected that his juvenile sensibilities would be drawn all too readily toward such a grandiose self-conception. After all, does he but speak, and mighty armadas are launched on a global war against evil?

As he clears brush at his Texas digs and takes his jogs with the Secret Service boys, Bush may fancy that he is cut from the same cloth as his Republican predecessor Theodore Roosevelt -- he of the strenuous life and the more-than-a-bit balmy conception of man's relation to his fellow man, most of whom he would gladly crush like bugs under his manly jackboots.

Why worry, the current president might be thinking, about the views of a wimp such as Colin Powell? What does he know about war, in comparison with, say, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, whose heroic military service has long been the stuff of legend?

Unfortunately for the world, the president's bedtime perusal of Cohen's Supreme Command may set his childish imagination aflame with visions of Great Statesmanship.

"Damn," he may think, expelling a masculine expletive, "I too can be a Lincoln or a Churchill."

Devoutly may we all hope that the opportunity evades him, for both of those storied "statesmen" were monsters whose hands were stained beyond cleansing with innocent blood. Yet a man would need an adult sensibility to understand such realities, and Bush II, it seems clear, has a mind that never matured, if indeed it had the potential for such maturation in the first place. Manifestly, he is but a boy playing with immense, lethal toys. Yet when he says jump, legions of heavily armed men ask: how high?

When word got out that Bush was reading a book, reporters sought out gurus to cogitate on this strange development and to cough up appraisals, and those gurus, being deep thinkers, could not resist suggesting other books that the president might profitably read, should he ever decide again to read a book.

One talking head recommended Sun Tzu's "Art of War." Another touted "October Fury," Peter Huchthausen's book on the Cuban missile crisis. Still another sage pointed to Churchill's three volumes on World War II, as if the Shrub were capable of such heavy lifting.

Very well, I can play this game. I recommend that the president read "The Constitution of the United States." It's short; he can handle it. And, after all, it's what he swore to "preserve, protect, and defend" when he took office, so he might have some interest in reading it.

If he's really pressed for time, he can skip everything except Article II, Section 2, which in just three short paragraphs describes the constitutional duties of the president of the United States. Sure enough, as the president's flunkies never cease telling the press, the president's first constitutional power is to "be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy." But that's all, along those lines: just to be commander in chief.

There's not even so much as a hint that the president has constitutional authority to commit the country to war -- that power is obviously lodged in Article I, where the powers of Congress are enumerated. Certainly, the Constitution does not authorize the executive to engage the nation's armed forces in a "preemptive war" against Iraq, a small, impoverished country halfway around the world that does not now pose a serious threat to the security of the American people who have the wit to steer clear of it and its immediate environs.

If the president should want to read further, perhaps to find out how the powers of the presidency have been so vastly and unjustifiably enlarged over time, until presidents now consider themselves warranted in acting as absolute tyrants over their own people and those of other countries as well, he might well read two books edited by John V. Denson, 'The Costs of War" (1997) and "Reassessing the Presidency" (2001).

Clemenceau famously declared that war is too important to be left to the generals. It's a no-brainer to see that war is too important to be left to the likes of Bush, Cohen, Perle, Wolfowitz, and company.

(Robert Higgs is the senior fellow in political economy at The Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review.)

The Reason Foundation

LOS ANGELES -- Help a Smoker: Show Him the Door

By Jacob Sullum

E. Charles Hunt, executive vice president of the New York State Restaurant Association, sounds resigned to a future in which the hospitality industry will be forbidden to accommodate smokers.

"The whole thing seems to be boiling down to an employee safety issue at this point," he tells The New York Times.

That's the rationale New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has emphasized in proposing that the city's smoking ban be extended to all bars and restaurants, with a fine of up to $100 and a jail sentence of up to 30 days for smokers who fail to comply. Now it looks like his approach may be imitated by nearby jurisdictions, creating what the Times calls "an eight-county no-smoking zone across lower New York State."

Workplace safety is also the official goal of comprehensive smoking bans in California and Delaware, as well as a proposed ban in Florida. So when Timothy Filler, associate director of Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights, hails Bloomberg's plan as "a great step forward in public health," you might assume he's talking about the health of waiters and bartenders.

From the perspective of anti-tobacco activists, however, smoking bans promote "public health" primarily by making the habit less convenient and less socially acceptable, thereby encouraging smokers to quit. In 1994, testifying about the impact of federal legislation that would have banned smoking in most businesses, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency said "the reduction in smoker mortality due to smokers who quit, cut back, or do not start is estimated to range from about 33,000 to 99,000 lives per year."

Protecting nonsmokers from secondhand smoke was the excuse for the bill, but protecting smokers from themselves was the main expected benefit.

The same motivation can be seen in New York. A Bloomberg aide told the Times "the mayor will push this (smoking ban) for all the same reasons he pushed the cigarette tax." When Bloomberg approved an unprecedented 1,800 percent increase in New York City's cigarette tax, pushing the price of premium brands to around $7.50 a pack, he said his aim was to deter smoking by making it prohibitively expensive.

Similarly, Christine Quinn, chairwoman of the New York City Council's health committee, clearly has more than employees in mind when she imagines a smoking ban covering the whole metropolitan area.

"If someone is going to drive from Manhattan to Orange County (New Jersey) to have a cigarette," she told the Times, "then there is really not much we can do to help that person."

Smokers, of course, did not ask for Quinn's "help," and they're not exactly grateful for it. But smoking bans are paternalistic even as workplace safety measures. They're based on the assumption that employees are not capable of judging their own interests and therefore should not be allowed to tolerate secondhand smoke in exchange for higher pay, bigger tips, better benefits, or otherwise superior working conditions.

A Manhattan bartender alluded to such tradeoffs when he told one reporter: "Being subjected to smoke is part of my job."

The extent of the danger posed by secondhand smoke remains controversial, but one thing is clear: In a country where the government still allows people to work as miners, loggers, and boxers, it's absurd that serving drinks in a smoky bar is thought to pose an unacceptable risk.

(Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine and the author of "For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health.")