I realize that many teachers today would consider it demeaning to be called a “peddler” — even a peddler of knowledge and ideas. I consider it a badge of honor.

In a free market in education, teachers would be sales reps for their schools.

Catering to needs and wants is the challenging task of, first, identifying the needs and wants of one’s customers, then carefully crafting products that will meet those needs and wants. The teacher who does this successfully year after year is a peddler par excellence and deserves praise.

FULL ARTICLE

This lament is often heard today about medicine and education, among other fields. Business, however, is the last thing medicine and education have been turned into. Bureaus of the government would be a more accurate description. Why the confusion between bureaucracy and business?

The simplest answer is that most people do not understand the difference between the two. A bureaucracy, as Mises points out, is an organization dominated by methods of managing the affairs of government, whereas a business is dominated by the goal of making a profit through customer satisfaction.Bureaucracy, or rather, bureaucratic management, is a set of rules and a budget handed down from a higher authority to guide the running of a government department, such as the police, the courts, or the military. A business may have guidelines, usually called policies, and each department within the organization may have a budget, but the ultimate yardstick by which business activity is evaluated is profit-making by producing need- and want-satisfying products. When market conditions change, meaning customer needs and wants have changed, policies and budgets must be adapted lest the company fail to keep up with the competition and go out of business. Bureaucracy has no such ultimate yardstick. That is why the rules and budgets of government offices often ossify leading to the familiar refrain of the bureaucrat: “Rules are rules, fella; I don’t make ‘em, I just enforce ‘em.”

When bureaucratic rules, in the form of laws and regulations of business, intrude on the marketplace, businesses that are regulated will take on the characteristics of bureaucracies. This is because the laws and regulations of our mixed economy deflect attention away from profit-making through customer satisfaction to compliance with the rules of the bureaucracy. And the rules almost never coincide with what is best for the market. Ossification sets in and a “rules are rules” mentality eventually takes over. To the extent that a business is regulated by the government, to that extent it will be bureaucratic. Small businesses, except for local zoning ordinances and licensing requirements, usually escape regulation, that is, until they grow in size to a certain number of employees or level of sales; more rules, then, kick in.

Bureaucracy does not mean a large, hierarchically structured organization, such as General Motors or the Department of Justice. This is the popular misconception given by the media and management professors. General Motors is a private business that is highly regulated by the government; bureaucratic intrusions into the profit-making, customer-satisfying operation of the company are what make GM today seem so bureaucratic, not its size or structure. The Department of Justice makes no pretense at being a private business; it was founded as a bureaucracy.

The postal service, on the other hand, does pretend to be a business by mimicking the operations of private enterprise, such as subtracting costs from revenues and conducting market research surveys. But the post office is so thoroughly regulated and controlled by the government—it is a quasi-governmental agency under the executive branch—that it is a joke to consider it anything other than a bureaucracy. Public schools and state universities are government entities, making them bureaucracies by definition; private schools are highly regulated by the education czars and so are nearly as bureaucratic. Almost all operators of both types of school abhor the prospect of making a profit or of having to satisfy paying customers.

Yet occasionally the trustees of these institutions will demand that expenses be accounted for or that pay be tied to merit. This is when the screams of faculty are heard to say that education is just being turned into a business. More accurately, the demands are the bureaucracy trying to mimic business accountability by imposing additional rules on the system. The result is a stilted, heavy-handed decree of arbitrary edicts administered by a “rules are rules” mentality. (And pay tied to merit becomes a political popularity contest.) Add to this the fact that education today, which once was controlled at the local and state level, is rapidly becoming nationalized by the US Department of Education and you have education as a bureau of the national government.

The same attempts at mimicking business accountability can be seen in medicine with the cartel-imposed cost constraints of the insurance industry and Medicare. Medicine is hardly a free market today, nor was it prior to the current health-maintenance-organization/Medicare era. In the early twentieth century, the licensing monopoly of the American Medical Association drastically reduced the number of medical schools and hospitals and continues to keep that number low (1, 2, 3). The mess that we have now is just one bureaucratic monstrosity piled on top of the previous model. Calls for cost containment and accountability are not the calls of free enterprise. They are the panicked cries of bureaucrats who have no clue what they are doing.

But they do have their rules and the rules must be enforced.

Jerry Kirkpatrick is author of In Defense of Advertising: Arguments from Reason, Ethical Egoism, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism and the forthcoming Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism: Educational Theory for a Free Market in Education.

Four years after the conflagration of 2003, we in southern California once again are enjoying the sight of pink skies not caused by the sun, the aroma of burning chaparral, and the sting of smoke getting in our eyes. One can only wonder: what is the role of government in this?Nearly half of the land in Calfornia is owned by the US government, a bunch more by the state. And the fire protection services are government run. That doesn’t sound like a good way to prevent fires.

Dr. Richard Minnick, professor at the University of California, Riverside, argued on a radio program yesterday that the cause of these conflagrations is the past one-hundred years’ policy of fire suppression, that is, the policy of putting out every fire as quickly as it arises. The consequence is that chaparral, the brush that in October burns like paper continues to grow and grow. If fires were allowed to burn when they occur, say, in July, they would burn more slowly and under control. The fuel that is now burning out of control in October would not be there. Minnick said that one of the current fires (I don’t remember which one) is getting close to an area that has not burned in one hundred years.

The news media, of course, are keeping us informed about how the fire protection services need more resources: more people, more equipment, and, especially, more money.

Pirated products appeal to a more price-conscious segment of the market; that is, the buyers of pirated products are probably not legitimate prospects for the innovative new product, either because they cannot afford, or do not want to pay, the higher price. Message to the innovative marketer? Either drop the price of the new product or produce a cheaper version — or be the first to exploit a new technology, something the movie and recording industries chose not to do. Many would rather sue than practice good marketing. FULL ARTICLE

Well, not quite. But I did stumble on this passage in Bureaucracy (chapter V, section 5), relevant to a couple of previous posts (1, 2) about trans fats:

“The dictatorial nutrition expert wants to feed his fellow citizens according to his own ideas about perfect alimentation. He wants to deal with men as the cattle breeder deals with his cows. . . . Every dictator plans to rear, raise, feed and train his fellow men as the breeder does his cattle. His aim is not to make the people happy but to bring them into a condition which renders him, the dictator, happy. He wants to domesticate them, to give them cattle status.”

In product development there are two kinds of errors. A “go” error occurs when the green light is given to a product that eventually fails. The Edsel, a $250 million write-off by the Ford Motor Company in 1959, is one example. The “drop” error occurs when an idea that could have been highly profitable is eliminated from further consideration. How do we know that the idea could have been profitable? In a free market dropped ideas have the habit of being picked up by someone else. Chester Carlson’s invention was dropped by such notables as General Electric, 3M, Kodak, RCA, and IBM, but picked up by the small Haloid Company. In 1961 Haloid changed its name to Xerox. Even go errors in a free market often get corrected; just a few years after the Edsel fiasco, Ford rolled out a better idea called the Mustang.

Peer review is the process by which millions of dollars of government money are handed out to researchers in medicine and the physical sciences; the process by which recognition, promotion, and tenure are determined for professors, especially those in the “softer” sciences who do not need or use grants for their research; and one of the criteria — numbers of peer-reviewed journal articles, for example — used to determine accreditation for universities.

Peer review, a “blind” process in which the names of author and evaluator are concealed from each other, requires two or three so-called peers to read a paper or proposal to judge the quality of actual or proposed research before acceptance. As such, peer review is a product development process that protects only against go errors. It is at best quality control that insures accuracy and reliability of research done. At worst it holds back innovation through drop errors. Since there is no free market in scholarly research — today’s government-university-science complex is a severely hampered market — dropped ideas either never get a hearing or take many more years than they otherwise should to surface.

Medical researcher and long-time critic of peer review, David Horrobin, argued that the peer-review process, which developed in its current form largely as a screening device after World War II, has perhaps improved the accuracy and reliability of conventional research published in medicine, but it has done so at the price of innovation. Prior to World War II, unknown researchers could submit papers to journals only with the endorsement of a published author. The editor would then decide whether or not to publish. Peer review was ad hoc and not common. It was the growth of government involvement in education and, especially, the government’s lavishing of money on research that called for the blind-review screening process.

In a paper titled “The Philosophical Basis of Peer Review and the Suppression of Innovation”¹ Horrobin urged that more unconventional and innovative research be encouraged by journal editors. When a reviewer questioned the need for such a statement, Horrobin produced eighteen incidences of medical innovations rejected by the peer-review process. In 1995 Horrobin’s paper was cited by the US Supreme Court as support for the argument that some “well-grounded but innovative theories” may not be published in peer-reviewed outlets.²

Horrobin’s solution to divvying up grant money was to give funds equally to all researchers and let each work on whatever his or her interests indicated. Prior to 1960, said Horrobin, this interest-as-guide process was essentially how funding was distributed in the UK and more innovation in medicine resulted in those years than in the years since 1960. Horrobin approved of government involvement in and funding of research, but the analogy to free markets in his solution — bottom-up, self-interested choice by researchers — versus central planning — top-down, “expert” direction by peer reviewers — cannot be escaped.

Never mind that Socrates and Galileo were badly treated by their peer reviewers or that frauds and hoaxes sometimes dodge the quality controllers or, further, that you may want to cite Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises but can’t figure out how to get past your peer-review gatekeepers, the real problem of peer review is the severely hampered market in scholarly research. What would a truly free market in scholarly research be like?

First, publishers of journals and scholarly books would have to earn a profit from their buyers and not live off the donations of their authors or other benefactors. Some university presses, for example, are now publishing what are called “supported books,” which means someone, usually the author’s department, must contribute one or two thousand dollars to the publication of the author’s book. And at least one commercial press requires authors to do their own copy edit and provide camera-ready typeset text; this can add up to two thousand dollars or more that authors must fund. Twenty-five dollars per page, charged to authors or their departments, has long been the going rate for published papers in some fields. (In some quarters today this method of getting into print would be called subsidy or vanity publishing.)

In addition, the so-called nonprofits, which finance a portion of today’s research and journals, are in fact creatures of the tax system and must, despite their descriptive name, show an excess of donations over expenses lest their organization become some philanthropist’s very expensive hobby. Under laissez-faire, in the absence of tax write-offs and the guilt and ignorance of economics that wealthy business people tend to exhibit, there probably would be far fewer such organizations than exist today.

Second, there would be no government money to dangle in front of researchers and no government-owned or -regulated universities filled with bureaucratized product lines (curricula designed by committee), bureaucratized sales reps (the professors), or bureaucratized performance evaluations (those mounds of paper, which include lists of published research, that must be produced for promotion, tenure, and most every other consideration). All of this distorts the market and probably encourages the overabundance of pretentious minutia that fills today’s overabundance of academic journals.

Under laissez-faire, only the market would decide who produces what and who gets what in scholarly output. Indeed, the market for this research might not differ much from the product development market in automobiles. Private, profit-making firms, both traditional businesses and universities, would finance the work and effectively and efficiently produce market-satisfying results. Portions of the results might be published in profit-making journals and books, much of it perhaps not.

Yes, there might be some Edsels created by this free-market development process and there might still be some delayed acceptances of Xeroxes, but there also might be a lot more Mustangs! Absent the government-encouraged gatekeepers and other hurdles that must be jumped in order to get into the market, researchers who cannot find an outlet will be free to start their own journals, publishing companies, businesses, or even universities. The hampered market today, which includes the “golden handcuffs” of tenure, makes this quite difficult.

Jerry Kirkpatrick is professor of international business and marketing at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is author of In Defense of Advertising: Arguments from Reason, Ethical Egoism, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism (http://www.tljbooks.com).

Notes

1. JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, March 9, 1990, 263:1438–41. See abstract.

2. Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, 509 U.S. 579.

“Bankers’ hours” is an old phrase that actually reflects monopolistic privilege. The 10AM to 3PM that banks formerly were open to serve customers was made possible by government regulation and the consequent lack of competition to force bankers to be more available when customers needed them. With modest deregulation (and the electronic bookkeeping that deregulation encouraged) banks today are open a little longer than the former hours and some are even open on Saturdays.

Doctors, dentists, lawyers, and professors, however — a distinguished group that enjoy government-granted privileges in the form of licensing and other regulatory protections — still do not usually work weekends. Free-market service firms must be open and available when their customers need them. Why should medical or educational services only be available Monday through Friday, 8AM to 5PM? The significantly unregulated computer industry’s “24/7″ indicates the ultimate in service. The free market gives privilege to no one.

FULL ARTICLE

“Bankers’ hours” is an old phrase that actually reflects monopolistic privilege. The 10AM to 3PM that banks formerly were open to serve customers was made possible by government regulation and the consequent lack of competition to force bankers to be more available when customers needed them. With modest deregulation (and the electronic bookkeeping that deregulation encouraged) banks today are open a little longer than the former hours and some are even open on Saturdays.

Doctors, dentists, lawyers, and professors, however—a distinguished group that enjoy government-granted privileges in the form of licensing and other regulatory protections—still do not usually work weekends. Free-market service firms must be open and available when their customers need them. Why should medical or educational services only be available Monday through Friday, 8AM to 5PM? The significantly unregulated computer industry’s “24/7” indicates the ultimate in service. The free market gives privilege to no one.Privilege is a remnant of aristocratic life, special enjoyments granted due to birth or rank in society. Today, the rank stems directly from bureaucratic intrusions into the marketplace. Its key trait is that it is unearned, making the holder of the rank exempt from competition. Regulations restrict a portion of the market to the exclusive enjoyment of those protected at the expense of those who are not so protected. Sometimes, those enjoying this rank exhibit aristocratic arrogance, such as the professor who says to a student, during the professor’s posted office hours: “I can’t talk now. I have a meeting.” The meeting is with other professors and the message conveyed is that other professors are more important than paying customers.*

Robert Fuller, former president of Oberlin College, has coined a word that actually is broader than the monopolistic privileges I am talking about here. (And Fuller, who is a social liberal, would certainly not agree with my application of his term.) Fuller recognizes that there is legitimate rank that can be earned, so he coined the term “rankism” to mean “the abuse of rank.” Rankism, he says, describes a concept similar to, but broader than, racism, sexism, and bullying in general. “Rankism insults the dignity of subordinates by treating them as invisible, as nobodies. Nobody is another n-word and, like the original, it is used to justify denigration and inequity” (Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank, p. 5). Fuller argues that equality means “equal dignity” and everyone has a right to it; equality does not mean equal wealth or equal rank. As a social liberal, he thinks the government, as in the case of race and gender inequities, must step in. My interpretation is that the government was a cause or magnifier of these particular inequities.

Despite his social liberalism, Fuller’s concept provides valuable insight into the psychological underpinnings of the abuse of rank by those in higher or privileged authority. Earned rank does exist naturally in society—parents hold rank over children, teachers over students, and employers over employees—and more earned rank would exist in a truly free-market economy because bureaucrats would have to get jobs in business and compete for their positions of authority. From the standpoint of psychology, though, as Fuller demonstrates, “lording it over” one’s subordinates derives from defensive anxiety and the necessity of setting oneself up as special or superior to others. Sometimes this necessity is made manifest through regulatory privilege. Rankism, says Fuller, is the last “vestige of aristocratic class” that must be eliminated from the home, school, workplace, and social order before we can achieve a just society based on equal dignity. The first step, in contrast to what Fuller would say, involves removing the last semblance of regulatory privilege by getting government out of our lives and economy.

Fuller’s web site is called Breaking Ranks.

*Oops! Did I say students were paying customers? I realize that many professors—a privileged group I know well—object strenuously to this characterization. Yet students in a state-financed university, such as mine, often work thirty or more hours per week to pay for their education. This means they are paying substantial taxes to pay for their professors’ meal tickets. And this doesn’t count the taxes the students’ parents have paid over the years. So, yes, I do believe it is correct to call my students paying customers.

Jerry Kirkpatrick is professor of international business and marketing at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and author of In Defense of Advertising: Arguments from Reason, Ethical Egoism, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism.

I admit that I have not heard this question—why does capitalism need to be defended?—in precisely that form. After the hardcover edition of my book In Defense of Advertising: Arguments from Reason, Ethical Egoism, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism was published, I did hear the question this way: Why does advertising need to be defended? As advertising is the point man and product of capitalism, the two questions are intimately related.The question about advertising initially surprised me. When the look on my face expressed a “Did you read the book?” reply, my questioners promptly continued, “Advertising in the U.S. is a $270 billion a year business. It doesn’t need to be defended!” Somehow, apparently, the amount of money spent by the industry was supposed to be its own justification. Similarly, I could imagine someone thinking or saying, “The United States is a $12 trillion a year economy. Capitalism doesn’t need to be defended!”

I soon came to realize where my advertising questioners were coming from: their question is motivated by the premises of what I call the critics’ world view. As I argue in my book, the social and economic criticisms of advertising—namely that advertising is coercive, offensive, and monopolistic—are based on false philosophic and economic ideas that at root are authoritarian.

The discussion with my questioners usually runs as follows. The questioners comment that advertising is a “big bucks” industry and, like any other big business, assume it eventually becomes immune to competition—and to criticism. “It’s just words,” they say, “like water falling off a duck’s back. The criticisms have no effect on advertisers who, after all, are so big and powerful that they can easily ignore the complaints. Therefore, advertising does not need to be defended.” QED. Subsequent discussion then brings out the premise that a little (or a lot) of legislation is needed to help cut these guys down to size. Why? Because advertising is so . . . well, coercive, offensive, and monopolistic. At that point, we are off to the litany of criticisms that ranges from alleged sexual orgies subliminally embedded in a Howard Johnson’s restaurant menu to the four-firm concentration ratio.

No doubt, anyone who has engaged the critics of capitalism has observed a similar pattern. It involves a move from surface appearances—advertising doesn’t need to defended—to underlying causal principles that initially seem unconnected to the appearances—these big advertisers need to be brought down a few notches. It is a move from what is seen, to use Bastiat’s phrase, to what is not seen. Bastiat explained the seen and unseen in terms of economic events, but the more fundamental psychological issue here is that conscious perceptions (the seen) are shaped by the contents of one’s subconscious (the unseen). Defenders of advertising and capitalism must probe to those deeper levels and make the critics aware of, and answer, all of the buried fallacies that motivate their surface comments.

Contrary to what the critics of advertising—or capitalism—may think, their criticisms do have an effect. When left unanswered, the criticisms reinforce ignorance and misunderstandings about the nature of advertising and, by implication, capitalism. They reinforce and encourage hostility toward both. And they implicitly and explicitly provide a call for legislation to restrain what are perceived by the critics to be “abuses” of advertising and big business.

Jerry Kirkpatrick is professor of international business and marketing at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and author of In Defense of Advertising: Arguments from Reason, Ethical Egoism, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism. Visit his blog.

Education and social critic Alfie Kohn is an exhaustive researcher and engaging writer. I have not read all of his eleven original books, but I do highly recommend these two: Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes and Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason. The titles and subtitles make clear his premises about human motivation and behavior. In his first book, however, No Contest: The Case against Competition, Kohn writes (p. 9), “The more closely I have examined the topic, the more firmly I have become convinced that competition is an inherently undesirable arrangement, that the phrase healthy competition is actually a contradiction in terms.” To this, I must take exception.Kohn, a strong defender of intrinsic motivation, frames his critique of competition—an extrinsic motivator—as setting up an irreconcilable conflict between doing well and beating others, as focusing on competence and accomplishment vs. trying to do something better than someone else. But healthy competition, especially the economic type, requires strong focus on doing well; beating someone else in the process, if it is focused on at all, is consequence. Kohn’s understanding of economic competition, unfortunately, is laced with Marxist mythology, Galbraith’s dependence effect, and the doctrine of pure and perfect competition, so he sees competition as an unfair and arbitrary creator of desires. Even at the highest levels of athletic competition, winning is consequence of doing well. Winning for its own sake is indeed not an attractive character trait.

Other forms of competition, however, do tend to focus exclusively, or nearly so, on beating others. Competition in the animal kingdom is the extreme example where, because of the limited supply of food and territory, competition often becomes a fight-to-the-death encounter. Among humans living in a society of abundance, a different kind of fight-to-the-death desperation is sometimes seen—not physical desperation as animals might face, but psychological. Because of the anxiety that many people feel, “competitiveness,” or a desperate need to defeat others, becomes a defensive motivator. Doing well takes a back seat. Occasionally, a highly talented and accomplished person exhibits defense-driven competitiveness, but this does not detract from the point that the source of the competitiveness is psychology and the source of the accomplishment is ability.

The one form of competition that devalues doing well and encourages beating others is that caused by government intervention into the economy. Mises points out that totalitarian states encourage people to “court the favor of those in power,” but this is true of any bureaucratic intrusion into the economy. Licensed professionals, because of the privileges extended to them by the government, will focus less on doing their jobs well and more on making sure the bureaucrats keep the unlicensed out of their market. Because of the restriction in supply brought about by the licensing monopoly, the consumers of that profession must now scramble—not too differently from what animals must do in their kingdom—to compete with each other, that is, to try to beat others, to obtain that limited supply. The beaten ones, as in the medical market, go without.

Kohn’s book is filled with examples of bureaucratic and defensive competition, two types that I would agree are unhealthy, but he does not always identify them as such. He, of course, confuses the two with healthy, economic competition. If read with an understanding of this confusion in mind, Kohn’s book can provide a detailed analysis of the less savory forms of competition that exist in our society.

Jerry Kirkpatrick is author of In Defense of Advertising: Arguments from Reason, Ethical Egoism, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism. Visit his blog.

Two New York lawyers detail here the sleazy legal tactics of the Recording Industry Association of America. The lawyers call the tactics a reign of terror against young people and have set up their blog as a clearing house of information and evidence about the RIAA’s “oppressive lawsuits.” I like the lawyers’ designations, but I would also say that the RIAA, in the spirit of monopoly power and privilege, is practicing marketing by lawsuit, rather than marketing by, well, marketing, that is, making high quality products widely available at low prices.

Jerry Kirkpatrick (a marketing professor)

Choice phrases from NY Times op-ed columnist John Tierney on Nora Ephron and the rent-control crowd: “Like European nobles in crumbling castles, rentocrats are above money grubbing. They deserve their homes because of their longevity and their virtues. They compare rent control to Fulbright scholarships — a stipend wisely provided to worthy intellectuals and artists. They will announce, with a straight face, that they’re entitled to keep their apartments because of the extensive “emotional investment” they have made in the buildings.”

And: “No matter how much you love your rent-stabilized apartment, no matter how smug you feel bragging to your friends about your deal, in your heart you know it’s not fair you’re paying so little. It’s like buying stolen goods: you can revel in the low price, but you know it comes at someone else’s expense.” More here. Unfortunately, it requires a Times Select subscription to read the whole column.

In “Trial and Error: The scientific system does little to prevent scientific fraud. Is there a better way?” , New York Times Magazine, January 15, 2006, author David Dobbs, in the wake of the Hwang Woo Suk cloning fraud, says:

“Journal editors say they can’t prevent fraud. In an absolute sense, they’re right. But they could make fraud harder to commit. Some critics, including some journal editors, argue that it would help to open up the typically closed peer-review system, in which anonymous scientists review a submitted paper and suggest revisions. Developed after World War II, closed peer review was meant to ensure candid evaluations and elevate merit over personal connections. But its anonymity allows reviewers to do sloppy work, steal ideas or delay competitors’ publication by asking for elaborate revisions (it happens) without fearing exposure. And it catches error and fraud no better than good editors do. ‘The evidence against peer review keeps getting stronger,’ says Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, ‘while the evidence on the upside is weak.’ Yet peer review has become a sacred cow, largely because passing peer review confers great prestige–and often tenure.”

Suggested solutions are open peer review, where “reviewers are known and thus accountable to both author and public” and open-source reviewing, where “the journal posts a submitted paper online and allows not just assigned reviewers but anyone to critique it. After a few weeks, the author revises, the editors accept or reject and the journal posts all, including the editors’ rationale.” The British Medical Journal has not used closed peer review since 1999.

Peer review, the sacred cow of the scholarly world, is often a hurdle that those of us with less-than-conventional ideas sometimes find difficult to overcome. Thomas Stossel, American Cancer Society Professor at the Harvard Medical School, recently put the process in perspective: “Anonymous peer review by jealous competitors has its merits, but it has a tendency to select for fashionable if relatively unoriginal and inoffensive papers.” (Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2005, p. A10.)

Admirers of Mises, of course, know what his peers did to him in the United States in general and at NYU in particular. And then there was Socrates, who was executed by his peer reviewers, and Galileo, who was put under house arrest by his.

Thomas Kuhn (in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) observed that one aim of establishment science is to prevent the emergence of new ideas; peer review seems to be a good way to accomplish this. Sometimes peer review seems akin to having two or three movie critics determine whether or not a new movie should be released to the public (or have to undergo “major revisions” before it will be accepted). Some years ago I read a colleague’s paper that was in press; when I pointed out an inconsistency between two sections of his paper, he replied that that’s what he had to put in to pacify two reviewers.

The trouble with reviewers (of all types, peer or otherwise) is that they tend to evaluate new material based on how they, the reviewers, would have written the article, book, screenplay, etc., rather than by accepting the author’s premise, then judging the execution. The bottom line of peer review is that one must respect the peer who is doing the reviewing; that’s not always possible in today’s intellectual climate. Unfortunately, Stossel ended his op-ed piece by praising the FDA for its more stringent research requirements, that is, more stringent than those of academic journals. Maybe. But one can only wonder what scholarship would be like in a truly free market, absent government-financed schools and government-financed journals.