IN MEMORIAM: JAMES Q. WILSON A GREAT AMERICAN DIED ON MARCH 2, 2012
“Christmas and Christianity,” Dec. 24, 2004:
“Those who are alarmed by the extent of religious belief in this country have roused themselves to make the so-called wall of separation between church and state both higher and firmer. . . . They would be well advised to let matters alone. We have been a free country even though “In God We Trust” is printed on our dollar bills, even though sessions of Congress begin with a prayer, and even though chaplains paid for by our tax dollars are part of our military forces. Our freedom does not depend on eliminating these acknowledgments of the power of religion; it relies instead on the fact that for many generations we have embraced a secular government operating in a religious culture.That embrace will be weakened, not strengthened, by silly attacks on religiosity, stimulating the spiritual to question the seriousness of people who profess a concern for civil liberties.”
Editor’s note: James Q. Wilson, who died Friday at age 80, was one of America’s most consequential political scientists and a frequent Journal contributor. An editorial appears nearby, and here are some excerpts from his Journal writing over the years:
“A Life in the Public Interest,” Sept. 21, 2009:
The view that we know less than we thought we knew about how to change the human condition came, in time, to be called neoconservatism. Many of the writers [for The Public Interest], myself included, disliked the term because we did not think we were conservative, neo or paleo. (I voted for John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and worked in the latter’s presidential campaign.) It would have been better if we had been called policy skeptics; that is, people who thought it was hard, though not impossible, to make useful and important changes in public policy.
“A Cure for Selfishness,” March 26, 1997:
Perhaps the most powerful antidote to unfettered selfishness is property rights. If we are grazing cattle, we will conserve the land if we own it. If we are catching lobsters off the Maine coast, we can restrict over-fishing by allocating space to groups who informally “own” each space. If we want to conserve elephants, we should let people own the elephants. If we wish to water our rice in Bali, we do better if each village has ownership in a part of the water. If we want to conserve our country’s oil reserves, we do better if the reserves are owned by firms than if the government “controls” the whole deposit.
“Democracy and the Corporation,” Jan. 11, 1978:
It’s no surprise that academics in this country have been generally suspicious of business or that in a time like this, when general public confidence in the corporation has fallen, the expressions of hostility grow sharper. But there’s rarely been a better example of this than Charles E. Lindblom’s recent book “Politics and Markets: The World’s Political-Economic Systems.” . . .
Zina Saunders
The argument, stripped of its (minor) qualifications, can be simply stated: The large private corporation is a threat to democracy and, indeed, has no place in democratic theory. . . . [B]usinessmen have superior organization, enjoy disproportionate access to elected officials, dispose of vast political contributions (legal and illegal), control the appointment of government regulators and are capable of molding “human volitions” through advertising, ownership of the mass media and influence on school curricula. . . .
The contrary hypothesis is easily stated. Since the 1930s, and especially since the 1960s, the drift of public policy has been increasingly hostile to business. Public confidence in the corporation has fallen (indoctrination?), the national media are increasingly critical, capital formation is inhibited by taxes and inflationary policies, the profit margins of corporations have declined, social and economic regulations proliferate almost faster than the Federal Register can print them. . . . The student reading this book will learn nothing of the professions, the bureaucracy, the courts or the public interest law firms, and next to nothing of the mass media, intellectuals, “experts,” universities and foundations that have a large effect on American public life.
“Killing Terri,” March 21, 2005:
[The] moral imperative should be that medical care cannot be withheld from a person who is not brain dead and who is not at risk for dying from an untreatable disease in the near future. To do otherwise makes us recall Nazi Germany where retarded people and those with serious disabilities were “euthanized” (that is, killed). We hear around the country echoes of this view in the demands that doctors be allowed to participate, as they do in Oregon, in physician-assisted suicide, whereby doctors can end the life of patients who request death and have less than six months to live. This policy endorses the right of a person to end his or her life with medical help. It is justified by the alleged success of this policy in the Netherlands.
But it has not been a success in the Netherlands. In that country there have been well over 1,000 doctor-induced deaths among patients who had not requested death, and in a large fraction of those cases the patients were sufficiently competent to have made the request had they wished.
Keeping people alive is the goal of medicine. We can only modify that policy in the case of patients for whom death is imminent and where all competent family members believe that nothing can be gained by extending life for a few more days. This is clearly not the case with Terri Schiavo. Indeed, her death by starvation may take weeks. Meanwhile, her parents are pleading for her life.
“Mr. Clinton, Meet Mr. Gore,” Oct. 28, 1993:
Mr. Clinton’s Health Security Plan contains not the 293 pages of the 1991 transportation act but 1,300 pages. It calls for the construction of vast new public and quasipublic bureaucracies.
Related Video
Columnist Holman Jenkins on James Q. Wilson’s contributions to conservative thought.
Untested new state “health alliances” are to be created. They will, in many cases, be monopoly providers of benefit packages with the power to set the fees physicians can charge and to decide whether consumers will be allowed to select their own doctor on a fee-for-service basis. These alliances will be overseen by a National Health Board that will define the standard benefit package, set and implement a national health budget, and establish and manage a system of “quality management.” . . .
Beyond this, the secretary of health and human services will determine the number of training positions (internships, residencies) in each medical specialty, ensure that at least half of all new doctors are trained in primary care, and increase the diversity of the health care work force by giving special incentives to minorities.
All this, of course, is to be done in a way that is “standardized,” “simplified,” “accountable” and “streamlined.” The reality will be very different. . . . The organizational chart of the system will look very much like that created to manage the savings-and-loan bailout. It will link so many entities together in such complex relationships as to resemble a map made by a drunken spider with inky feet.
“Reforming Criminal Trials,” Nov. 20, 1995:
Many Americans have lost confidence in the way our criminal courts assess guilt and innocence. Whatever one thinks of the verdicts, the recent trials of O.J. Simpson, Erik and Lyle Menendez, and various defendants in preschool molestation cases have been lengthy, lawyer-dominated soap operas in which the search for truth has been subordinated to the manipulation of procedures. . . .
Let me suggest four changes that might help:
1) Have the judges select the juries without any participation by the lawyers except for a right to exercise challenges for cause. . . . In federal courts the judges already do this, and so jury selection is both faster and fairer.
2) Authorize and direct the judge to take charge of the trial by, when he or she deems it appropriate, calling witnesses, questioning witnesses called by the lawyers, relegating lengthy motions to nighttime or weekend hearings, and summarizing and commenting on the evidence when the case is given to the jury for deliberation. . . . [T]he lawyers could still deliver their summations—but it might make the presentation of the evidence more intelligible. . . .
3) Allow witnesses to give their initial testimony in narrative form. . . . Each witness would still be subject to cross-examination, and the difference between what he heard and saw and what he presumed or inferred would be made clear.
4) Experiment in a few jurisdictions with the use of a nonspecialized private bar to try cases on behalf of both the people and the defendant. . . . Doing this would . . . reduce the extent to which wealthy defendants could hire attorneys not available to the average person.
Review of “Traffic,” by Tom Vanderbilt, July 31, 2008:
Men like to complain about what bad drivers women are, but the evidence about highway fatalities suggests that testosterone causes twice as many deaths (per 100 million miles driven) as female driving does. And women can help men drive better. When teenage boys pull out of high-school parking lots, they drive much faster when another boy is in the car than when a girl is. (This gender-correlation does not hold true with my wife; when she rides shotgun, she loves high speeds.) And women may be better traffic cops. Mexico City replaced its corrupt male officers with females (they are called cisnes, or swans), who tripled the number of traffic tickets.
“Christmas and Christianity,” Dec. 24, 2004:
Those who are alarmed by the extent of religious belief in this country have roused themselves to make the so-called wall of separation between church and state both higher and firmer. . . . They would be well advised to let matters alone. We have been a free country even though “In God We Trust” is printed on our dollar bills, even though sessions of Congress begin with a prayer, and even though chaplains paid for by our tax dollars are part of our military forces. Our freedom does not depend on eliminating these acknowledgments of the power of religion; it relies instead on the fact that for many generations we have embraced a secular government operating in a religious culture.
That embrace will be weakened, not strengthened, by silly attacks on religiosity, stimulating the spiritual to question the seriousness of people who profess a concern for civil liberties.
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