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The New Age of Reason

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

American society periodically weathers de-cades-long storms of moral renovation set off by thunderclaps of Christian evangelism. Old spiritual and moral doctrines get reinterpreted in a new light, producing far-ranging, and not always welcome, political change. Scholars commonly refer to these tumultuous periods as “Great Awakenings.”

Historians date the First Great Awakening to the mid-18th century, when widespread Presbyterian and Baptist revivals helped beget the American Revolution. The second came in the early 19th century, when evangelical Christians launched temperance, abolitionist, and other reform movements, culminating in the Civil War. The third was a response to Darwinian theory and to the social problems caused by rapid industrialization and urbanization in the late 19th century, ending with the Progressive Era in the early 20th century. The fourth unleashed the “culture war” that began in the 1960s and has dominated political debate ever since. But thankfully, there are signs that the Fourth Great Awakening is finally coming to a close. Among other beneficial side effects, this ending of an era likely will reduce calls for censorship and other legal intrusions into private activities while broadening tolerance for new and different ways of life.

Historian William McLoughlin, in his 1978 book Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977, defined awakenings as “periods of ideological transformation.” They “begin in periods of cultural distortion and grave personal stress, when we lose faith in the legitimacy of our norms, the viability of our institutions, and the authority of our leaders in church and state,” McLoughlin wrote. “They eventuate in basic restructuring of our institutions and redefinitions of our social goals.”

The Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Fogel, in his 2000 book The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, posited that Great Awakenings “are primarily political phenomena in which the evangelical churches represent the leading edge of an ideological and political response to the accumulated technological, economic, and social changes that undermined the received culture.” Awakenings, Fogel maintains, go through three phases: revival, when cultural stresses produce religious revitalization movements; reform, when activists persuade governments to adopt moral improvement programs; and resistance, when religious fervor wanes and the forces of moralization encounter stiffened cultural opposition.

The Fourth Great Awakening has reached the stage where moral hectoring is being resisted. The once politically potent Moral Majority has disappeared, and the Christian Coalition is a shadow of its former self, its membership down from millions to tens of thousands. Voters have tossed out such Bible-thumpers as Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), Rep. John Hostettler (R-Ind.), Rep. Jim Ryun (R-Kan.), and Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.). Evangelical political projects have failed around the country, from a ballot measure to prohibit abortion in South Dakota to a Missouri initiative to ban embryonic stem-cell research. The Kansas state school board has repealed guidelines that had questioned biological evolution.

These developments may be glimmers of the Fourth Great Awakening’s impending demise. But there is a darker possibility as well: that the awakening is merely mutating into a more left-wing phase of moralizing.

The First Awakening
The First Great Awakening erupted in Great Britain and its American colonies in the 1730s. Preachers such as the English Methodist George Whitefield and the New England Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards began to soften the harsh Calvinist doctrine that only a few predestined elect would be admitted into the joys of Heaven while the majority of born sinners headed straight to Hell. Whitefield and Edwards stressed God’s willingness to save those who had truly repented of their sins. During revival meetings, repentant sinners experienced an emotional “new birth.”

The revivalists urged believers to trust their own experiences rather than depend on the authority of corrupt church officials. Consequently, many converts defied traditional authorities in asserting their new convictions. This spirit of defiance also led many Americans to challenge the colonies’ tax-supported churches as inimical to freedom of conscience.

The theological idea that all people were equal in the sight of God had other political implications. If everyone is equal before God, on what grounds could elites claim moral or political superiority? As the Protestant minister Elisha Williams put it in 1744, “Every man has an equal right to follow the dictates of his own conscience in the affairs of religion…even an equal right with any rulers be they civil or ecclesiastical.” By teaching citizens to question both church and civil authorities, the First Great Awakening helped unleash the American Revolution.

The period of resistance to reform, to use Fogel’s schema, took off after the Revolution. Paradoxically, as religious tolerance became widespread, religious enthusiasm waned. By 1790 only 5 percent to 10 percent of the adult population belonged to formal churches. Both the democratic spirit and the call of the frontier loosened American morals. In their 1982 book Drinking in America, the historians Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin described the period from the 1790s until the early 1830s as “probably the heaviest drinking era in the nation’s history.” In 1800 the mean absolute alcohol intake for Americans 15 years and older was 5.8 gallons per year. By 1830 that had risen to 7.1 gallons per person, of which 4.3 gallons were hard liquor and 2.8 were beer, cider, or wine. The historian W.J. Rorabaugh argued in The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (1979) that post-Revolutionary Americans regarded heavy drinking as their right as free people. As Lender and Martin summarized Rorabaugh’s argument, “a personal binge…was in a sense an assertion of individuality, a freedom from communal restraints. Even the drunkard, in essence, was a pluralist—free under the laws of the nation to pursue his or her own lifestyle no matter what others thought.”

In American Metropolis: A History of New York City (1999), the historian George Lankevich estimated that 1820 New York, with a population of 124,000 people, was home to 2,500 saloons—one bar for every 50 residents. Today, by comparison, there are just over 10,000 licensed bars, restaurants and nightclubs in a city of more than 8 million people—one bar for every 800 residents.

Prostitution also became common in cities during the period of the First Great Awakening. By 1831 moral reformers improbably claimed that New York City was home to some 10,000 prostitutes; that would have been 27 percent of the city’s young female population. The historian Timothy Gilfoyle offered a more reasonable, and still quite high, estimate in his 1992 book City of Eros: “five to 10 percent of all nineteenth-century young women in New York (between 15 and 30 years of age) prostituted at some point.” Whatever the number, it was clear that the fire-and-brimstone religious revival ushered in by the likes of Jonathan Edwards had become a distant memory in the wake of the revolution it helped inspire.

The Second Awakening
Even as Americans were enjoying themselves in barrooms and brothels, the revival phase of the Second Great Awakening was gathering strength. When Timothy Dwight, the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, became president of Yale, the vast majority of students described themselves as skeptics. But through a series of powerful sermons beginning in 1801, Dwight revived Christianity on campus. About the same time, Methodist camp revivals were taking root in the trans-Appalachian West.

These revivalists completely rejected Calvinist predestination in favor of free moral agency, arguing that anyone could be saved by God’s grace if he struggled fiercely against sin. Evil arose from an individual’s conscious choice, not, as Calvin had claimed, from his innate depravity. Since everyone was free to choose good or evil, the revivalists located the source of social problems in individuals. “Lurking in this view,” Fogel writes, “was the belief that poverty was the wages of sin.”

The Second Great Awakening fostered the rise of numerous single-issue organizations advocating programs of moral and political uplift, from temperance in alcohol to the abolition of prostitution to official enforcement of the Sabbath. The temperance movement proved so successful that per capita alcohol consumption fell by more than 50 percent between 1830 and 1840.

All this took place against a background of mass immigration, especially from Ireland. Some reformers feared the tide of alien Catholics would overwhelm and outbreed America’s Protestant majority. Thus arose a campaign to ban abortions, led by the newly formed American Medical Association. (In the early 1800s American women were legally free to terminate a pregnancy until quickening—that is, until fetal movement in the womb could be felt.) The Boston physician Horatio Storer kicked the anti-abortion campaign into high gear in 1855, a full 14 years before the Vatican definitively forbade abortion for Roman Catholics. “The fashionable young bride, accustomed to adulation, is reluctant to forego at once the excitement of society,” he warned. “Wishing still to enjoy the immunities of unmarried life—to be as free, as unshackled as ever—she will not endure the seclusion and deprivations necessarily connected with the pregnant condition, but resorts to means, readily procurable, to destroy the life within her.”

Reformers also preached the virtues of bodily purification. The Rev. Sylvester Graham, who in 1830 became the general agent for the Pennsylvania Temperance Society, inveighed against “venereal excess.” He claimed that immoderate sexual passion would cause indigestion, headaches, feebleness of circulation, pulmonary consumption, spinal diseases, epilepsy, insanity, early death of offspring, and more. He also claimed that “high-seasoned food; rich dishes; the free use of flesh; and even the excess of aliment; all, more or less—and some to a very great degree—increase the concupiscent excitability and sensibility of the genital organs.” To cool people’s sexual passions, the minister proposed a special diet that included two of his own inventions, Graham crackers and bland, whole wheat Graham bread.

The most politically significant reform movement linked to the Second Great Awakening—and the most appealing from a libertarian point of view—was the campaign to abolish slavery. If all men are equal before God, then no man may justifiably own another. By 1838 the American Anti-Slavery Society had grown to 1,350 chapters, with more than 250,000 members. Politically the reform period of the Second Great Awakening climaxed with the Civil War.

Resistance to these crusades rose in the aftermath of the Civil War. Once again, the expanses of the frontier beckoned Americans to leave behind the constraints of family, community, and church. The restless movement westward was complemented by an unprecedented spate of industrial, economic, and population growth. The richest industrialists indulged in showy displays of opulence, provoking Mark Twain to brand the era the Gilded Age.

The Third Awakening
The revival period of the Third Great Awakening began in the 1870s. Crusades by the evangelist Dwight L. Moody in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago drew tens of thousands of worshipers. Moody, sometimes described as the first Christian fundamentalist, preached a literal interpretation of the Bible and rejected any accommodation with the new evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin.

A theological split gradually opened within the evangelical movement. On one side stood the modernists: mainstream Protestants who no longer believed in the inerrancy of the Bible and who accepted Darwinian evolution. Their New Theology argued that God worked through natural laws and revealed Himself through the progress of history. Moody’s spiritual heirs, calling themselves fundamentalists, rejected the New Theology and asserted that a believer’s personal salvation was ultimately more important than social action. They insisted on the inerrancy of the Bible, the Virgin Birth, bodily resurrection, and salvation only through Christ. A series of 12 booklets, titled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, set out and defended these principles between 1910 and 1915. The two evangelical groups’ political agendas did not overlap significantly, although there were figures—most notably the three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan—who straddled the divide, combining fundamentalist religious views with a modernist economic agenda.

It was the modernists who dominated the Third Awakening. In his 1917 book A Theology for the Social Gospel, the Baptist modernist Walter Rauschenbusch warned of “the sinfulness of the social order and its share in the sins of all individuals within it.” We couldn’t end personal sin, Rauschenbusch argued, without ending social sin; collective sin required collective redemption. Equality of opportunity as preached in the First and Second Awakenings was not enough for Third Awakening evangelicals, who called on the government to redistribute wealth. This, they believed, would enable the lower orders to rise above their spiritual poverty and amend their moral faults. Equality of condition became a prerequisite for moral improvement.

The reform stage of the Third Great Awakening flowered in the first two decades of the 20th century, known as the Progressive Era. This period saw both new interventions in the economy and new restrictions on private and public pleasures, from boxing to the movies. Prohibition advanced with breathtaking speed. By 1900 every state required mandatory “temperance education” in public schools. Under pressure from the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League, the number of dry states increased from three in 1903 to 32 in 1916. The 18th Amendment, which established Prohibition nationally, was ratified in 1919. Many advocates of the Social Gospel were also prominent Progressives. Lyman Abbott, for example, was both the pastor of Brooklyn’s Plymouth Congregational Church and a confidante of President Theodore Roosevelt.

There was a concurrent surge in concern about hygiene, pure foods, and sexual self-control. The scientific cooking movement trained women in “domestic science,” showing them how to use precise recipes to produce uniform dishes in the home. One of the more prominent pieces of Progressive legislation was the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which empowered the federal government to ensure foods and drugs were not adulterated. The authorities also launched campaigns against opium, cocaine, and heroin. A campaign against “self-abuse” had another lasting effect: The Seventh-Day Adventist doctor John Harvey Kellogg invented corn flakes, a bland breakfast cereal intended to suppress the urge to masturbate.

Resistance to the Third Great Awakening took off after World War I. Millions of troops returning from European battlefields wanted more than drudgery on the family farm or factory floor. Women who had flocked to wartime workplaces resisted being consigned again to the dull routines of homemaking. Wider access to new technologies such as automobiles and movies helped push traditional values into the background. The fact that by 1920 more than half of all Americans were living in urban areas also eroded traditional social bonds and hierarchies, since cities have always been refuges for people seeking greater autonomy and self-expression. The 1920s became the era of hot jazz, speakeasies, bathtub gin, and flappers. Novels, movies, and magazine stories became more sexually explicit. While mild by comparison to contemporary American mores, a new sexual freedom flowered.

The Fourth Awakening
After World War II, American economic expansion resumed. Often described as the era of the “organization man,” the 1950s also gave us books like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), which exalted drugging, drinking, and sexual libertinism. In 1960 the anarchist sociologist Paul Goodman, in Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System, highlighted “the disaffection of the growing generation” with “the disgrace of the Organized System of semimonopolies, government, advertisers, etc.” The sexy rhythms of rock and roll became popular, and Playboy magazine, founded in 1953, both reflected and amplified a new wave of sexual liberation. The introduction of the birth control pill in 1960 gave women much greater control over reproduction, putting them more on a par with men in the workplace. These liberating cultural and technological developments fueled the social and political eruptions of the 1960s and ’70s.

McLoughlin and Fogel both argue that the upheavals of the 1950s and ’60s were the beginning of the Fourth Great Awakening. Writing in 1978, McLoughlin argued that the Beats, the rise of interest in Asian religions such as Zen Buddhism, the growth of environmental consciousness, and the spread of “experimental life-styles” would “produce a new shift in our belief value system, a transformation of our world view that may be the most drastic in our history as a nation.” He even compared rock concerts to old-fashioned revivalist camp meetings.

In hindsight, this reading misinterpreted the turmoil of the period, which is better understood as a continuation of the arc of cultural liberation that began in the 1920s. But while McLoughlin was getting the period wrong, Dean Kelley was getting it right. Kelley, a United Methodist minister and an adviser to the National Council of Churches, presciently and controversially recognized a coming fundamentalist surge in his 1972 book Why Conservative Churches Are Growing. Membership in ecumenically minded mainline Protestant denominations was declining, he noted, while the doctrinal strictness and discipline of conservative denominations were attracting many Americans. Evangelical Protestant affiliation has grown from 17 percent to 20 percent of the American population in the early 1970s to between 25 percent and 28 percent today. Largely outside the purview of liberal intellectuals who were celebrating the counterculture, a social force was incubating that would eventually power the Fourth Great Awakening. These modern evangelicals were the direct descendants of Moody’s fundamentalists.

Proponents of conservative interpretations of Christianity felt themselves under attack by policies aimed at limiting public expressions of religious belief. In 1962 and 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that any requirement that prayers and Bible verses be read in public schools violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. In 1968 the Court declared that a state cannot ban the teaching of biological evolution in public schools. And in 1973 the Court found in Roe v. Wade that women had a constitutionally protected right to privacy that allowed them to end their pregnancies in the first trimester.

Initially most Protestant denominations did not react strongly to Roe, viewing abortion as a “Catholic issue.” In 1974 the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution reflecting the “middle ground between the extreme of abortion on demand and the opposite extreme of all abortion as murder.”

That moderation was not to last. Just six years later, the same group called for “appropriate legislation and/or a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion except to save the life of the mother.” The shift on abortion was part of a strong negative reaction to what the Southern Baptists saw as countercultural excesses undermining the Christian moral order.

Although McLoughlin dismisses President Jimmy Carter’s neo-evangelicalism as a dead end, Carter’s professed religious faith awakened his fellow evangelicals to the potential for political action. Carter wore his born-again Christianity on his sleeve, declaring that his religious convictions were “the most important thing in my life.” Although it is not much appreciated now, Carter used the abortion issue to mobilize his fellow evangelicals. He declared during the 1976 presidential campaign that “abortion is wrong,” and he signaled his support for the Hyde Amendment, which cut off federal Medicaid funding for abortions. As president he eliminated funding for abortions for women in the military. Carter was no conservative, but he helped America’s 60 million self-described evangelicals find their way out of the political wilderness. He functioned as a Moses pointing his co-religionists to the promised land of political potency, although it would be another man who would lead them there.

Power to the Pulpit
In 1979 the National Association of Evangelicals, representing 60 denominations and 45,000 churches, passed a resolution opposing abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, and homosexual rights. When the Democratic platform defended all three in 1980, evangelicals were horrified. That same year, Jerry Falwell, a 44-year-old Baptist preacher, founded the Moral Majority as a vehicle for evangelical Christians to influence national politics. After the 1980 election, Falwell claimed that the Moral Majority had 4 million members and that the organization had helped mobilize more than 10 million evangelical voters. With that election, the religious right made itself essential to the Republican Party’s political fortunes. The Fourth Great Awakening had entered its reform phase.

First the Moral Majority and then Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition launched political crusades against abortion, premarital sex, explicit entertainment, sex education, drug use, and homosexuality, all in the name of promoting traditional family values. For the first time since the 1920s, even evolution became a live political issue. Among other things, “traditional family values” meant restoring the authority of the husband in the family, because, as Falwell said, quoting Ephesians, “the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.” Falwell blamed women’s lib on a “minority core of women who were once bored with life, whose real problems are spiritual problems.” He added that “many women have never accepted their God-given roles.”

As in previous awakenings, concerns about sexuality were paramount. In the 1980s, Falwell and evangelical leader Donald Wildmon campaigned against the “distributors” of pornography, by which they meant ordinary stores with magazine racks. Responding to the anti-porn crusade, the Reagan administration created the Meese Commission on Pornography in 1985. The commission concluded that smut contributed to sexual violence and discrimination against women, and it sent letters to 12 chains of drug, grocery, and convenience stores threatening to list them as “distributors of pornography.” Subsequently, thousands of outlets yanked Playboy and Penthouse from their shelves. Some frightened stores even dropped Cosmopolitan and the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated.

The crusades were firmly bipartisan. In 1985 Tipper Gore, wife of Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.), and Susan Baker, wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker, founded the Parents Music Resource Center to attack rock music lyrics. At a 1985 Senate hearing, Baker testified, “The proliferation of songs glorifying rape, sadomasochism, incest, the occult, and suicide by a growing number of bands illustrates this escalating trend that is alarming.” In 1986 the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart joined the anti-rock crusade, declaring that music magazines were “pornography, pure and simple. They’re more dangerous than Hustler and Playboy.” In response to Swaggart, Wal-Mart pulled 32 rock and pop publications from its stores, including Rolling Stone, Creem, and Tiger Beat.

As gays began demanding greater acceptance, Falwell thundered, “If homosexuality is deemed normal, how long will it be before rape, adultery, alcoholism, drug addiction, and incest are labeled normal?” In 1981 he persuaded Congress to overturn a District of Columbia ordinance that would have decriminalized sodomy. In 1986, the same year a Gallup poll found that more than half of Americans considered homosexuality a sin, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s anti-sodomy law in Bowers v. Hardwick. Falwell crowed that the Supreme Court “has issued a clear statement that perverted moral behavior is not accepted practice in this country.”

Unlike their fundamentalist forebears, the evangelical crusaders of the Fourth Great Awakening have not demanded that the government leave them alone; they want to use government for their own ends. As Bill McCartney, founder of the Christian men’s organization the Promise Keepers, explained in 1997, “Social problems are moral problems, which ultimately have a spiritual cause.” This inverts the Social Gospel conviction that poverty, slums, and ignorance prevent people from leading
Christian lives. On this view it is impossible to solve social problems without embracing spiritual reform first. So the followers of the Fourth Awakening are enthusiastic supporters of faith-based tax-funded social programs. Although Congress has never approved these programs, President George W. Bush issued an executive order in 2001 to create the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. In 2005 it distributed $2.1 billion to support religious efforts, about 11 percent of all federal community grants.

The election of the “compassionate conservative” Bush in 2000 was the high water mark in the reform phase of the Fourth Great Awakening. The Bush administration embraced abstinence-only sex education in public schools and appointed evangelically motivated advisers to the Food and Drug Administration, where they opposed the agency’s approval of the abortion pill RU-486 and the over-the-counter sale of the emergency contraceptive Plan B. Asked if intelligent design should be taught in public schools, Bush answered that “both sides” ought to be presented. Bush also supports a constitutional amendment restricting marriage to two people of the opposite sex. And the president’s condemnation of foreign “evildoers” surely is informed by his Christian faith. (It wasn’t the first time the awakening had an impact on international affairs. Many evangelicals interpreted the rise of the state of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies indicating the impending return of Jesus and his thousand-year reign of peace. Thus it became “God’s foreign policy” that the U.S. should back Israel.)

But just as each of the previous awakenings cycled through revival, reform, and resistance, there is evidence that the resistance phase to the Fourth Great Awakening is now under way.

The Beginning of the End?
Awakenings don’t end with a bang. Their conclusions begin with nearly imperceptible political shifts signaling a political realignment.

One bellwether event was the tragic case of Terry Schiavo, a brain-dead Florida woman attached to a feeding tube. Her husband wanted to let her die, and her parents did not; keeping her alive had become a rallying point for the religious right. According to a leaked strategy memo written by a senior staffer for Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.), congressional Republicans thought the case would be “a great political issue” because “the pro-life base will be excited” by it. Republican legislators and President Bush rushed back to Washington on Palm Sunday in 2005 to pass a law preventing the removal of Schiavo’s feeding tube. As the courts promptly ruled that the tube could be removed anyway, polls showed Americans disapproved of Washington’s intervention by almost 2 to 1.

Nationally, animus toward gays is fading. In the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court overruled its 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick and found sodomy laws unconstitutional. A 2003 Harris Interactive poll found that 74 percent of Americans favored the Court’s decision. The same poll also found Americans opposed state laws regulating private, sexual relations between opposite-sex married couples (87 percent) and same-sex domestic partners (82 percent).

Gay marriage is still unpopular, but the trend is moving away from the fierce intolerance of the early Fourth Awakening. Since 1996 the Gallup Poll has asked Americans, “Do you think marriages between homosexuals should or should not be recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages?” In 1996 only 27 percent of Americans approved of same-sex marriages. By May 2007, 46 percent did, and 62 percent of those under age 35 favored them. Most state ballot measures to ban gay marriage still pass, but in 2006, for the first time, one failed, and the ones that succeeded did so by much narrower margins.

The drug war’s moralistic march into private life may also be slowing down: Since 1996, a dozen states have passed legislation approving the use of medical marijuana, and polls show that more than 70 percent of Americans favor such measures.

Americans now spend an estimated $90 billion a year on gambling, despite myriad prohibitions. And even as evangelicals rail against it, pornography has become widely available and highly profitable, with an estimated $13 billion in revenues in 2006. Meanwhile, its allegedly corrosive effects on society are hard to discern: Since the early 1990s, divorce rates, rape rates, and domestic violence are all down.

Attempts to restrain biomedical progress in the name of religious values are receding too. In 1998 researchers derived stem cells from five-day-old human embryos, provoking a firestorm of protest from anti-abortion crusaders. But by 2007 a Gallup poll found that 60 percent of Americans favor embryonic stem cell research. Congress has twice voted to expand federal funding for such work.

And the party of moralizers lost the congressional elections of 2006. Many voters, admittedly, were motivated mainly by congressional corruption—the Jack Abramoff and Mark Foley scandals—and the increasingly unpopular Iraq war. But in the run-up to the 2008 elections, the evangelical coalition seems even less influential than in 2006. The Christian right is weak and divided, its leaders unable to settle on a favorite candidate. Even after Mike Huckabee emerged as the leading social conservative in the race, he failed to duplicate his stunning upset win in the heavily evangelical Iowa and at press time he was fighting for his political survival against a candidate (John McCain) who famously called Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson “agents of intolerance.” Robertson himself went so far as to endorse former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, despite Giuliani’s three marriages and his pro-choice, pro–gay rights record.

One of the most reliable constituency groups of the Republican Party has been born-again Christians. In 2004, 62 percent of born-agains voted for George Bush. In February, the Christian marketing consultancy, the Barna Group, released a striking poll which found that 40 percent of all born-agains say that if the 2008 election were today they would vote for the Democratic presidential candidate and just 29 percent would choose the Republican candidate. Even more stunning is the shift among self-described evangelicals. In 2004, 85 percent voted for Bush, but now 51 percent are either leaning Democratic or are undecided.

The Other Scenario
Then again, the Fourth Great Awakening might simply be taking a left turn. While the fundamentalists have dominated this awakening for the last quarter century, the intellectual descendants of the Social Gospel movement also have been busy, particularly in the movements for healthy living and environmental reform. Some of these activists have an overtly religious outlook, while others continue the secularization of the Social Gospel that began in the Progressive Era.

Environmentalism arose as a movement just a few years before the Moral Majority, with an end-of-the-world undercurrent that harked back to the millenarian sects of the Second Great Awakening. Green millenarians do not expect a wrathful God to end the corrupt world in a rain of fire; instead, humanity will die by its own gluttonous, polluting hand.

Such apocalyptic visions were limned in Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, which predicted massive cancer epidemics as a result of chemical contamination of the environment. Paul Ehrlich asserted in his 1968 book The Population Bomb that in the 1970s “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” And the Club of Rome’s 1972 report The Limits to Growth announced the imminent, catastrophic depletion of nonrenewable resources. In the run-up to the first Earth Day in 1970, the ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “We have about five more years at the outside to do something.” The Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Even the staid New York Times editorial page warned of the human species’ “possible extinction.” It wasn’t so far from the evangelists’ fears of a literal Armageddon, embodied in books like Hal Lindsey’s best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth (1970).

Although all those predictions failed, environmentalism still exhibits millenarian tendencies. Former Vice President Al Gore has warned that man-made global warming is producing a climate crisis that might “make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet’s habitability for human civilization.” For Gore, global warming is not merely a technical question of how to produce the energy humanity needs without emitting greenhouse gases. It is “a moral issue.”

It is possible that environmental revivalism may supplant the fundamentalist aspect of the Fourth Great Awakening. If so, we may be in for a period in which campaigns for green reform programs dominate American politics. And it’s worth noting that some evangelical churches recently have embraced environmental issues. In 2004 the board of directors of the National Association of Evangelicals adopted an “Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility” affirming that “because clean air, pure water, and adequate resources are crucial to public health and civic order, government has an obligation to protect its citizens from the effects of environmental degradation.” Huckabee, the evangelical candidate, says plainly that he wants to be “a good steward of the earth”—and, to that end, favors an economy-wide “cap-and-trade” system to control greenhouse gases.

The heirs of the Social Gospel have also enthusiastically embraced and promoted modern campaigns for clean living. Contemporary anti-smoking campaigns resemble the old crusades against demon rum, particularly in the willingness to go beyond educational efforts and push draconian government controls. Campaigns against lifestyle diseases are just beginning. In 2006 New York City public health officials began requiring medical labs to report the results of blood sugar tests for all the city’s diabetics directly to the health department. This is the first time that any government has tracked people with a chronic disease. The New York City Department of Health will analyze the data to identify those patients who are not adequately controlling their diabetes. They will then receive letters or phone calls urging them to be more vigilant about their medications, have more frequent checkups, or change their diet. If nagging is not sufficient, more coercive steps may be taken. For example, in a 2004 editorial in the American Journal of Public Health, New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Friedan called for “local requirements on food pricing, advertising, content, and labeling; regulations to facilitate physical activity, including point-of-service reminders at elevators and safe, accessible stairwells; tobacco and alcohol taxation and advertising and sales restrictions; and regulations to ensure a minimal level of clinical preventive services.”

Scientifically unfounded fears about the danger of exposure to chemicals have displaced religious anxieties about spiritual impurity with new worries about bodily impurity. (They also have fueled new lawsuits and regulations. Excessive fears about exposure to secondhand smoke, for example, prompted the city of Belmont, California, to forbid smoking in private apartments.) The contemporary cult of the body, with its obsession with diet and exercise and its emphasis on beauty and perfection, has roots in the biblical notion of the body as a “temple of the Holy Spirit.”

Still, it’s not clear these attitudes have seized the public imagination. Despite all of the hullabaloo about environmental issues, for example, polls regularly show that they are at the bottom of most Americans’ concerns. A December 2007 USA Today poll found only 2 percent of Americans saying they would take environmental issues into account when deciding for whom to vote. Every year Gallup asks Americans to identify the most important problem facing the country. In 2007 only 2 percent of respondents mentioned the environment.

Smoking bans are proliferating, although the percentage of Americans who believe second-hand smoke is very harmful has not budged from around 55 percent since 1997, according to various Gallup polls. And while it is true that most Americans favor some restrictions on smoking in public areas, they are against total bans in workplaces, bars, and hotels. In fact, Americans remain largely tolerant of their fellow citizens’ lifestyle choices. A 2003 Gallup poll asked Americans if they respect someone more or less because that person smokes, drinks, or is overweight. Seventy-seven percent said that smoking makes no difference and 83 percent said the same about drinking and being overweight.

Liberated Spaces
Perhaps the best evidence that the evangelical phase of the Fourth Great Awakening is winding down is that large numbers of young Americans are falling away from organized religion, just as the country did in the period between the first two awakenings. In the 1970s, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that between 5 percent and 7 percent of the public declared they were not religiously affiliated. By 2006 that figure had risen to 17 percent. The trend is especially apparent among younger Americans: In 2006 nearly a quarter (23 percent) of Americans in their 20s and almost as many (19 percent) of those in their 30s said they were nonaffiliated.

The Barna Group finds that only 60 percent of 16-to-29-year-olds identify themselves as Christians. By contrast, 77 percent of Americans over age 60 call themselves Christian. That is “a momentous shift,” the firm’s president told the Ventura County Star. “Each generation is becoming increasingly secular.”

Just as movies and the pill enticed people out of the pews, so is modern technology making it harder to impose any single moral vision. In the old days, Roman Catholics could pressure Hollywood to adopt a Production Code decreeing that “no picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it.” Today the means to produce video entertainment are increasingly cheap and the methods of distribution are becoming more and more decentralized. The notion that a book could be banned in Boston—or anywhere with an Internet service provider—is laughable. Social utilities like Facebook and MySpace encourage the proliferation of virtual communities. Virtual worlds like Second Life enable people to privately experiment with different personalities and lifestyles.

Global trade, too, is making it harder to impose any single vision on a society. Attempts to restrict advanced biomedical treatments such as embryonic stem cell transplants will simply shift such activity to more tolerant jurisdictions. The next couple of decades will see the development of biotech and nanotech enhancements that dramatically extend the range of human capabilities. If they are outlawed in one country, more liberal ones will make them available.

In 1908 Clarence Darrow told the Personal Liberty League, “The world is suffering more today from the good people who want to mind other men’s business than it is from the bad people who are willing to let everybody look after their own individual affairs.” That has been true for a long time now, but we may finally be heading toward a better world—one where Americans are increasingly willing to live and let live.

Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey is the author of Liberation Biology (Prometheus).

Big Box Panic

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 12:34:00 EST

On the corner of Newbury Street and Massachusetts Avenue in Boston sits one of the famed architect Frank Gehry’s least inspired creations. “360 Newbury” is a big box of a building—appropriate considering that its first three floors have long housed big-box record stores—famous only as Gehry’s sole multi-tenant office building in the U.S. But for the third time in 10 years, its retail space sits vacant. Its last tenant, the British-owned music giant Virgin Megastore, broke its lease in 2006 after four unprofitable years hawking CDs and DVDs to local college students. A company spokesman promised “to seek an alternative location in Boston.” It has yet to do so.

Virgin snapped up the space in 2002, when the failing music retailer Tower Records vacated the building ahead of its long, protracted descent into bankruptcy. Back in 1987, when Tower Records launched its single largest megastore in the Gehry building, the future of Boston’s independent record store business looked grim. Vinyl merchants and industry experts predicted that most independent retailers would feel the pinch of the big box; megastores like Tower would have more stock on hand and, it was presumed, would offer significantly discounted prices. The three-story Tower Records & Video would pose a direct challenge to small, local stores like Newbury Comics, a comic book merchant turned record shop specializing in independent music, hard-to-find imports, and 7-inch records by local bands. To make matters worse, the new Tower store would be situated on the very same block as Newbury Comics.

But it wasn’t just the specter of Tower that frightened small retailers like Newbury Comics. The music business was experiencing rapid growth in compact disc sales, and chain stores were expected to become the dominant players. Giants like Recordtown, Strawberries, Coconuts, Musicland, and Sam Goody—most of whom have now either disappeared or seen influence decline—would come to dominate the industry, The Boston Globe predicted. Among independent stores, the Globe wrote, a “panic” was precipitating Tower’s arrival. So ominous was the thought of a big box music store in Boston that The New York Times covered the store’s opening, suggesting that the independents might as well throw in the towel, since Tower “has virtually no competition in its league.”

At the time, Newbury Comics co-owner Michael Dreese told the Globe that he too was “worried,” and that when all the chains had settled in—the British giant HMV would soon open a megastore across the river in Cambridge and another in Boston’s Downtown Crossing shopping district—“there is going to be blood all over the place.” It would, presumably, be the blood of the independents. The Times spoke in the past tense, suggesting that the indies’ demise was a foregone conclusion. “On the block where a punk-rock record store, Newbury Comics, once held sway,” the Times sighed, “a new Tower Records sells that kind as well as more mundane music and a wide assortment of videotapes.” The store would stock, a spokesman said, “60,000 cassettes and close to 50,000 CDs,” versus the typical average of “12,000 CDs and 13,000 cassettes.” Who could compete with that?

Well, Newbury Comics, for starters. “We had a huge competitive advantage knowing the local market,” Dreese now says. Today Dreese and his partner, both MIT dropouts, preside over a mini-chain of their own, with 27 stores in five states, while HMV, Tower, and Virgin are all distant memories in New England. As the market changed, centrally controlled operations such as the Los Angeles–based Tower proved vulnerable to smaller, more localized competition. “Virgin and Tower were exceptionally poorly managed and made poor use of technology,” he says. “Combine that with Virgin and HMV’s very British arrogance when they entered the market.”

As the chains floundered in the face of declining music sales, Newbury Comics nimbly altered its business model without abandoning its core constituency of indie music fans. Today, compact disc sales account for just below 50 percent of Newbury Comics’ revenue. DVDs are approximately 20 to 25 percent, and pop culture and sports tschotchkes—Boston Red Sox caps, Ozzy Osbourne action figures—cover the rest. Hiring a platoon of tattooed hipsters added an extra patina of authenticity to the shopping experience—something Virgin, HMV, and Tower didn’t offer.

According to Dreese, who spent much of his youth in London hanging around the original Virgin Record Shop’s lunch counter, Newbury Comics challenged the big boxes by liberally borrowing from the big-box business model, making aggressive use of “loss leader” merchandise (pricing items below cost to entice customers into the shop), competitive pricing, and a refined distribution system that used vast online databases. It moved into the Internet early, selling merchandise through both its own website and third-party Web stores such as Amazon and eBay. Dreese doesn’t worry much about downloads (iTunes, he says, has helped his business), and, as he recently told Boston Magazine, his focus remains on how to “keep beating Wal-Mart.”

The inability to adapt to local tastes and the failure to anticipate technological market shifts have been the Achilles heel of many big box retailers. When Wal-Mart was forced to shutter its vast network of German stores, a mystified company spokesman told a reporter: “We thought everyone around the world loved Wal-Mart.” (The International Herald Tribune quoted a baffled Wal-Mart shopper in South Korea, where the company has also abandoned operations, wondering, “Why would you buy a box of shampoo bottles?”) The chain had made the mistake of assuming that full-spectrum retail dominance is achieved by virtue of size alone, without regard to cultural and regional difference.

That error is common not just among chains but among their critics. Market leaders do not always react in a timely and profitable manner to shifts in taste and technology. While big-box retailers have enormous competitive advantages—sui generis leverage with distributors and manufacturers, unparalleled capital resources, immense political influence—they also face a distinct disadvantage in adjusting themselves to local preferences.

‘Its presence had a magnetic effect on the caffeine crowd.’
Just ask Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. In 1998 community activists in Harlem bemoaned the supposed retail segregation that concentrated so many Starbucks cafés in midtown and lower Manhattan while ignoring the traditionally minority-dominated neighborhoods north of 125th Street. “In my opinion,” one local activist told The New York Times, “people in this area do deserve to get the goods and services they would get in other areas.”

Starbucks responded to critics through its “urban coffee opportunities” program, opening a store in Hamilton Heights, a majority Hispanic neighborhood with a significant black minority population. But after a few years doing lackluster business, the chain’s Seattle headquarters determined that the store wasn’t worth saving and pulled the plug on the franchise. Elsewhere in the city, upper-middle-class New Yorkers were taking aggressive action against supposed corporate usurpation, staging protests and “direct actions” against Starbucks outlets that, they said, were homogenizing their neighborhoods. In Hamilton Heights, the protests went the other way. According to The New York Times, “residents mobilized to save their Starbucks,” pressuring corporate headquarters and community leaders because the store was providing jobs and, they hoped, would ultimately boost property values.

When the shop finally shuttered, a local community leader observed that Starbucks “was not attracting the neighborhood support because of a lack of cultural affinity. Most of the people [in Hamilton Heights] don’t go to hang out in a cafe. If they hang out, they hang out on the sidewalk. And it’s mostly old men talking about the old days.” Instead, residents preferred Dominican coffee from La Flor De Broadway Café, a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop with no seats, no Bob Dylan CDs on sale, no chrome espresso machines at $300 a pop. They do, however, serve a strong 80-cent cup of coffee.

In 1998 Jon Cates faced a similar challenge from Starbucks. Located in the bustling Westport neighborhood of Kansas City, Cates’ Broadway Café, a haunt of local hipsters, students, and artists, discovered that the Seattle coffee goliath was slated to open an outlet on the same block. The café’s supporters sprung into action, papering the windows of their new neighbors with leaflets and eventually appealing to the city zoning department to stop development. When that was unsuccessful, the shop’s owners collected thousands of signatures in protest. But that too failed, and Starbucks opened for business, confident in its ability to steamroll Cates.

Three years later, Cates reluctantly conceded to a Wall Street Journal reporter that his business was thriving. Rather than defeating the outsiders with zoning regulations, they won with old-fashioned competition: “Starbucks helped our business, but I don’t want to give them any credit for it.” Eight years after Starbucks invaded Westport, Cates has actually expanded his business, opening a coffee bean roastery in the neighborhood that supplies other independent cafés in the region.

Phoenix Coffee Co. in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, an independent café who battled Starbucks for five years, also found the Seattle competition a boon for business. Phoenix’s co-owners Carl Jones and Sarah Wilson-Jones told Cleveland’s Sun Press that “While Starbucks was there”—the store has since shuttered—“our business grew by 20 percent a year. We’ve been grateful the corporate giant moved in, since its presence had a magnetic effect on the caffeine crowd.”

By understanding local tastes, Newbury Comics, Phoenix Coffee Co., La Flor De Broadway Café, and Kansas City’s Broadway Café demonstrated that localization, customer care, and authenticity are far more effective means of fighting larger rivals than agitating for anti-chain legislation. Had Broadway Café owner Jon Cates initially looked at historical precedent, rather than petitioning city hall, he perhaps would have understood that David slays Goliath with encouraging frequency in the history of American business.

‘One third of the grocery business of the nation has been wrested from the independent store.’
Across two pages of the April 28, 1928, New York Times, reporter Evans Clark observed breathlessly that American corporations were engaged in a ruthless campaign of economic expansionism and were making “deep inroads into the retail store business” abroad. Lurking behind the ubiquitous Boots Pharmacy signs in England, Clark wrote, was the invisible hand of American capitalism: The chain was owned by the New York–based conglomerate United Drug Company, which, by 1928, operated 10,000 outlets in the United States and 800 in the United Kingdom.

American business reached far beyond the traditional trading boundaries of the Anglosphere: “the familiar red signs of a well-known domestic five-and-ten-cent chain appear both on London and Berlin street corners; the laboratories of a St. Louis chemical concern turn out American mouth wash in Madrid; the plant of a Detroit manufacturer assembles American autos in Osaka…fifty-four theaters in Brazil are now linked in a continuous chain of management with movie palaces in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.” In certain areas of industry, the Times ruefully observed, “American companies have practically monopolized output and sales.”

Three months later Clark returned to the pages of the Times, this time to warn readers of big business’s domestic plot to “displace the neighborhood store” through predatory pricing and sweetheart distribution deals. Beneath an image of a cigar-chomping capitalist casting a malevolent gaze over a map of America, Clark signaled the death knell of the neighborhood enterprise, arguing that the “storekeeper of today is a corporate executive, who presides over chains of a thousand.

Yesterday the corner tobacconist’s was just a tobacco store and nothing more. Today chances are it’s one link in a chain of tobacco stores whose length is the breadth of the continent.…One third of the grocery business of the nation has already been wrested from the independent store around the corner…and is now in the hands of great corporations which claim the nation is their customer.”

The trade journal Printers’ Ink expressed similar concern for the neighborhood store: “Think a moment. What has become of the old corner tobacconist? Answer: United Cigar Stores. What has become of the old ‘home-cooking’ restaurants in so many cities? Answer: Child’s, $12,000,000 (backed by Standard Oil) and Thompson’s, $6,000,000—to say nothing of several others. Big Business (United Drug Company and Riker-Hegeman) already dominates the drug stores of New York, Boston and Chicago.”

If one excises the references to tobacconists and long-forgotten retail giants like Woolworth’s and Butler Brothers, the doom-laden rhetoric of the 1920s sounds strikingly familiar; the anti–big box activism of recent years—directed primarily against retail giants such as Wal-Mart and Barnes & Noble—has its antecedents in the activism of the 1920s, the apogee of the first wave of anti-chain fear. As the business reporter Anthony Bianco argues in his anti–Wal-Mart book The Bully of Bentonville: “For many people over thirty, the phrase ‘the corner store’ continues to be powerfully evocative of an establishment where the person across the counter knew you and would even extend credit if you were a bit short, a place that was as distinctively personal as its proprietor’s fingerprints.”

But this idealized view of the past isn’t entirely accurate, as the anti-chain crusaders of the 1920s would have been quick to point out. In Land of Desire, historian William Leach describes the small town of Marion, Ohio, in 1929. In “the town where both President Warren G. Harding and socialist leader Norman Thomas grew up and all the houses had front lawns,” writes Leach, “there were two Kresge’s, two Kroger grocery stores, three chain clothing stores, two chain shoe stores, one Woolworth’s, one Montgomery-Ward, and one Penney’s.”

By 1914, the burgeoning chain system boasted over 20,000 individual stores. An industry audit that year listed United Cigar Stores Company as the largest chain, with over 900 shops. The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) had 800; Woolworth’s 774. The Riker-Hegeman drug chain had 105 stores and, the auditors noted with alarm, was “growing at the rate of more than three a month.”

These numbers would expand dramatically in the coming decades. By 1929, over 25 percent of all retail sales were transacted in a chain store. As Clark wrote in the Times, “Competition [in the grocery business] is no longer between the chains and the independents—the independent grocer has ceased to exist as a real factor in the grocery market—but between the chains themselves. Over half the grocery business is done by chains in Boston, Baltimore, Washington, Chicago, Kansas City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and eight other leading American cities.”

By the 1930s, 10 percent of chain store grocery business was transacted through a single corporation (A&P), which at the height of its power controlled a massive 16,000 outlets. As the business journalist Charles Fishman, author of The Wal-Mart Effect, points out, “At its peak, A&P had five times the number of stores Wal-Mart has now (although much smaller ones), and at one point, it owned 80% of the supermarket business.” This alarmed not just the local competition, but manufacturers too, as large chains began producing their own branded products. In a letter to independent grocers, one breakfast cereal producer warned that “Any jobber is blind who shuts his eyes to the increasing menace of the chains, a menace to your business far more than to ours.”

Of the grocery chains considered “menaces” during the 1930s, few remain in business. Today A&P maintains just over 100 stores. They were swiftly replaced by even bigger goliaths, such as Kroger and Wal-Mart. In 2006, according to the research firm Retail Forward, Wal-Mart was the largest grocer in the country, transacting around 16 percent of all food and beverage sales.

‘The number of chain stores in any community should be limited by law.’
Industry groups mustered more than pressure campaigns in their battles against the chains of the past. They also called for laws to “defend” local stores—to stop the spread of Kreske’s, Sears, A&P, and various regional chain druggists. Recent legislation attempting to hinder the expansion of big-box retailers has roots in a long history of legislation—most of it nullified—against chains.

While anti–big business agitation has a long pedigree in America, it wasn’t until the 1920s when the chain became the prime target of both left- and right-leaning politicians. As early as 1922, the Los Angeles City Council tabled a resolution mandating that “the number of chain stores in any community should be limited by law.” Sen. Royal S. Copeland (D-N.Y.) bemoaned the influence of big business on the old neighborhood, urging lawmakers to pass legislation to protect small businesses: “When a chain enters a city block, ten other stores close up. In smaller cities and towns, the chain store contributes nothing to the community. Chain stores are parasites. I think they undermine the foundations of the country.”

Future Supreme Court member Hugo Black, then a Democratic senator from Alabama, told his upper-chamber colleagues in 1930, “Chain groceries, chain dry-goods stores, chain clothing stores, here today and merged tomorrow—grow in size and power. We are rapidly becoming a nation of a few business masters and many clerks and servants. The local man and merchant is passing and his community loses his contribution to local affairs as an independent thinker and executive. A few of these useful citizens, thus supplanted, become clerks of the great chain machines, at inadequate salaries, while many enter the growing ranks of the unemployed.”

By the late 1920s, politicians realized that populist rhetoric directed against chain stores was a political winner. In 1928, Sen. Smith Brookhart (R-Iowa) called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the “chain menace.” After a six-year investigation, the agency published its findings. While siding against the alarmists—there were no true monopolies in retail, the commission determined—the report’s complaints will sound familiar to today’s Wal-Mart critic: merchandise sold beneath cost, strong-arming manufacturers, employees paid low wages. The study also provided unintended advice for the local merchant, observing that “less service [is] given to customers by chains.”

In 1928, the Supreme Court struck down the Pennsylvania Drug Store Ownership Law, an anti-chain ordinance that required drug stores to be owned by pharmacists, not corporations. The court ruled that the law’s stipulation of who could own a business was “repugnant to the Constitution.” That year 13 states attempted to pass anti-chain legislation.

In 1938, Rep. Wright Patman (D-Texas) introduced legislation to tax any chains with over 10 outlets in a single state. Its provisions, one industry observer noted, “were drastic enough to have put many a chain out of business.” The chain tax, Chain Store Age editor Godfrey M. Lebhar calculated, would have a disastrous effect on large retailers. If Patman’s bill had passed, the Woolworth Company would owe approximately $81,000,000—in 1938 dollars—in taxes, even though the company’s net profits amounted to $28,000,000. “In the case of the A&P,” Lebhar wrote, “with approximately 12,000 stores in 40 states at that time, the tax would have totaled more than $471,000,000.” The bill never made it out of committee, but the stage was set for future legislative attacks on the chain system.

‘The retail book trade cannot live against the competition.’
Today’s independent booksellers and their supporters fret about an Axis of Evil consisting of Amazon, Borders, and Barnes & Noble—and with good reason. Today, independent bookstores account for just 15 percent of the market, down from 80 percent in the early 1970s. The American Booksellers Association (ABA), which represents over 3,000 independent stores, filed suit against publishers’ “unfair” use of volume discounting in 1995 (they settled out of court) and again in 1998 against Barnes & Noble (the ABA settled on a $16 million payment of its legal fees and dropped the suit).

But the ABA too could assuage their fears by looking to historical precedent, when both publishers and smaller shops attacked chain discounters with blind fury. As far back as 1872, Publishers Weekly argued that publishing houses selling directly to consumers—and often offering free shipping to boot—would sound the death knell of the local bookstore: “The retail book trade cannot live against the competition of manufacturers and either the competition or the retailers must cease to be.”

In 1900, the R.H. Macy’s department store sued the ABA for refusing large retailers the right to sell books below cost, which, the group contended, would “ruin the small bookstore.” Macy’s, which has long since left the bookselling business, used paperbacks as loss leaders—another way of enticing customers in the increasingly crowded Manhattan department store market. Fourteen years after filing suit, New York’s Supreme Court decided in favor of Macy’s, awarding the company $140,000 in damages.

But it was a pyrrhic victory for Macy’s, which would be repeatedly targeted by the ABA in decades to come. 1934 brought the National Recovery Administration’s “codes of fair competition,” including a “bookstore code” that disallowed discounting of books until six months after their release. In 1935, much to the ABA’s dismay, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the codes unconstitutional.

Later that year, New York’s state legislature passed the Fair Trade Act, which would force Macy’s to abide by its resale price maintenance agreements with certain publishers and to cease loss-leader discounting. The New York State Supreme Court invalidated the legislation the following year, with a judge declaring, “The act attempts to give to private persons unlimited power over the property of others.” When the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the decision on appeal, finding that the state’s Fair Trade Act was indeed constitutional, Macy’s exploited a loophole in the law exempting book clubs from discounts. Thus, Macy’s Red Star Book Club was born.

During the 1930s campaign to punish stores selling below cost, a Carnegie Corporation report complained that the business of bookselling had inexorably changed—it had become a business: “The old-fashioned bookstore was a charming place, but charm alone will not solve the problem of modern book distribution.…Hard though it may be to face the fact, the bookstore of today cannot primarily be a place for those who revere books as things-in-themselves.” An ABA representative later complained to a Senate committee that “non-book-minded merchants” were killing the industry and “price-cutting, unless stopped, will ultimately eliminate the personal bookstore from the national scene and in turn will have a serious effect on the quality of our national literary production.”

This, of course, has yet to happen. Chain stores are still the undisputed kings of bookselling, but their sales figures have remained flat in recent years. Meanwhile, the ABA announced in 2004 that “independent bookstores’…sales increased, in terms of both dollars and number of units sold, capping a three-year period of sustained growth,” citing an Ipsos BookTrends study. In 2004, an ABA spokesman told The Wall Street Journal, “Even though there are fewer stores, the survivors are doing better.” As for our country’s literary production, 2005 saw 172,000 books published in America, a dramatic increase from the 39,000 released in 1975.

Today’s attempts at anti-chain legislation follow a similar pattern—and have, in most cases, met a similar fate. Maryland’s anti–Wal-Mart law, which mandated that the company spend at least 8 percent of its payroll on health care, was recently voided when a federal judge ruled that “state laws which impose employee health or welfare mandates on employers are invalid.” In 2006 the Chicago city council passed a resolution requiring stores of at least 8,300 square meters in floor space and earning at least $1 billion in revenue annually to pay a “living wage”—approximately $13 per hour—only to see the rule vetoed by Mayor Richard Daley. In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a similar law that would have forced Wal-Mart and other big box stores to provide health care benefits for their employees, arguing that “singling out large employers and requiring them to spend an arbitrary amount” on insurance would have no appreciable effect on “the health care challenges we face.”

‘Wal-Mart’s growth formula has stopped working.’
But if legislation has done little to restrain the chains, the marketplace has regularly cut them down. Contrary to many activists’ assumptions, America has not been condemned to centuries of retail uniformity. Quite the contrary: The 21st century consumer has greater choice and access to a wider assortment of products than any time in American history.

In a country of such colossal wealth, price and convenience are not the only factors affecting consumer choice. Even among Starbucks executives, who single-handedly created a market for espresso drinks in the Unites States, there exists a deep fear that it won’t be an aversion to paying $5 for a cup of coffee that will inhibit the company’s growth but a backlash against the chain’s focus on standardization. In February 2007, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz fretted in an internal email (later leaked to journalists) that “the automation that is helping to drive the company’s expansion is sucking the romance out of the Starbucks experience.” Starbucks isn’t going to disappear any time soon, but as Business Week recently pointed out, the chain “is suddenly besieged by tough competitors.”

The same is true of Wal-Mart, a dominant company showing signs of wear and overextension. In 2006 it posted a mere 1.9 percent growth in same-store sales—that is, sales in outlets that have been in operation a year or more. It was the slowest rate since the company’s inception. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, the retail analysts Darrell Rigby and Dan Haas suggested that the smaller chains “are managing to coexist and even thrive in the same forest with Wal-Mart.” Business Week recently reported that “Wal-Mart’s growth formula has stopped working,” arguing that “America’s largest corporation has steered itself into a slow-growth cul de sac from which there is no escape.” Richard Hastings, a senior analyst at the retail rating agency Bernard Sands, agreed, telling the magazine that we were seeing “the end of the age of Wal-Mart. The glory days are over.”

Maybe. But stores like Wal-Mart will always be with us, just as they were when they were called Woolworth’s or A&P. If Sam Walton’s creation disappears, it will doubtless be replaced by a more clever, more modern adaptation of the business model he popularized. It is likely true, as big-box critics contend, that stores like Wal-Mart will always dominate certain sectors, thus threatening the existence of many smaller competitors. But chain stores often create markets that didn’t previously exist, both by forging new trends (like the $10 new release CD, quickly adopted by Newbury Comics) and by provoking a backlash against the alienating experience of big-box shopping. There will always be those that find Wal-Mart inauthentic, those that prefer the punk rock ethos of a Newbury Comics to the Deep South values of Wal-Mart, with its habit of censoring CD covers and song lyrics.

360 Newbury, graveyard of Virgin Megastore and Tower Records, recently announced that it would be renting its first two floors to the electronics and CD retailer Best Buy. After years of doing combat with big boxes, Newbury Comics’ Dreese doesn’t betray the slightest worry about the latest competitor. “We’re the last man standing in Boston,” he says. It’s a safe bet that, sometime in the near future, he’ll be peering down the road, watching another megastore packing a moving van.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor at Reason.

The Best Musical Since A Chorus Line?

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 15:19:00 EST

If Shawn Macomber can be trusted, it's Walmartopia.

Walmartopia begins with Vicki Latrell, a present day single mom, working at Wal-Mart with her sassy teenage daughter, waiting on that ever-elusive promotion. Whether Vicki fails to climb the management ladder as a result of Wal-Mart’s patriarchal power structure, or because whenever her manager leaves the sales floor she stops working to belt out songs Aretha Franklin-style while her chronically tardy teenage daughter idly complains their boss is a “creepy Christian crypto-fascist,” isn’t clear.

Yes, yes, it sounds like Marc Blitzstein was cryogenically frozen and forced to write a "contemporary" play by blinking his eyelids. Read on.

Alas, the gang that couldn’t sweep straight stumbles into a presentation by an evil scientist who has found a hole in the time-space continuum allowing Wal-Mart execs to see future consumer trends. Sam Walton’s reanimated, discombobulated head—don’t ask—orders the Latrells thrown into the time warp.

The Latrells land in a neon future dystopia that makes Blade Runner and THX 1138 look like The Adventures of Milo and Otis. The aforementioned mindless automaton population marches in lockstep singing refrains such as “We were born to consume/from the cradle to the tomb.” Wal-Art puts on pro-consumer productions like The Phantom of the Mart School-Mart teaches kids to “shop, stock and mop.” Walton’s head, not Rupert Murdoch, provides the daily propaganda now, while Security-Mart runs the police state and Prison-Mart. Given the milieu, it’s a safe bet to say Social Security has also been privatized.

Buy your tickets here. Only nine days left!

Workers of the World...What?

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 11:43:00 EDT

In July, the snazzy futuristic Burj Dubai gained the official title of the tallest building in the world. But more importantly, it’s currently the world’s tallest unfinished building. And this week it looked like the capstone might be significantly delayed when thousands of non-citizen workers went on strike for the first time in the United Arab Emirates, following up on a construction worker riot last March.

In the United Arab Emirates, striking is outlawed and labor union formation is forbidden. The workers sought a wage increase of between $140 and $270 a month (the average income in Abu Dhabi is $29,175), improved transport to construction sites, and better housing. The foreign workers are usually tied to a single commercial outfit, and live in housing blocks owned by the company or the government.

The strike was resolved with a carrot and a (big) stick, as Dubai started proceedings to deport 4,000 workers while simultaneously promising to crack down on employers guilty of health and safety violations. On the terms of the deal, workers promised to return to work today. (Some returned to work yesterday, and the government claimed the strike was officially over, but at least 2,000 workers at Sun Engineering & Contracting and Construction Co. remained off the job site as of this writing.)

Senior labor ministry official Humaid bin Deemas told the Arabic newspaper Emarat Al-Youm there would be a “deportation of 4,000 laborers who went on strike and committed acts of vandalism.” He added, "The laborers do not want to work and we will not force them to."

Which is fair enough. Since foreign workers frequently can’t stay in Dubai without employment, being deported is the inevitable consequence of firing. They’re mostly from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and most send money back to their families.

Actually, thanks to the booming Indian economy, many workers are ready to go home. In June, the government offered free one-way plane tickets to illegal workers hoping to leave. There were 280,000 applicants.

Still, it’s refreshing to see unions doing what they were designed for: aggregating workers and agitating for better conditions using a resource they actually own—their own labor. They’re bravely acting without the benefit of the special government protections that unions enjoy in the U.S. and Europe. In fact, they’re striking in spite of government aggression against them, and against significant odds.

The businesses in the UAE were not given the choice of dealing with strikers on their own terms, so the situation in Dubai was far from a pure labor market interaction. And business and government are so intertwined in the UAE that it may not have occurred to them to ask for it.

In fact, the strikers were mostly demanding that existing government decrees on worker welfare be enforced. Last fall, United Arab Emirates prime minister and the emir of Dubai Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum issued requirements for improving the lot of foreign workers, which resulted in the shutting down of about 100 businesses that failed to comply in the last year.

But yesterday the chief of police in Dubai promised to do better. "The bosses of construction firms which fail to provide appropriate working conditions to their staff will be taken to court," General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim said in a statement.

"Dubai police will carry out inspection tours of workplaces to check whether businesses are respecting the instructions of Prime Minister and Vice President Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum."

This is just one in a series of recent stories about Dubai’s bumpy road toward Westerization and/or modernization. The United Arab Emirates boasts “the most modern legal system among the Arab countries,” which is a little like being the most talented Spice Girl (they’re back on tour soon, by the by). And you have to give them some credit for not killing the strikers, even if unionizing remains illegal for now.

It’s been a while since unions in the U.S. undertook anything so brave or impressive.

At the same time that workers in Dubai were striking, U.S. television writers were gearing up to strike over rights to DVDs and Internet downloads. This leaves the American people facing the tragic prospect of a season of 24 with only 9 hours.

In Ireland this week, teaching assistants for special ed classes struck, with special needs kids stuck at home while pay and the terms of teacher evaluations were squabbled over.

In celebration of November, the French planned a month of strikes to defend the right of people in certain professions to retire with a pension at 50 years old.

Meanwhile, 11,000 employees of the Kroger grocery store chain are teetering on the edge of a strike because of proposed pay increases—an increase of 10 cents and hour for baggers and 95 cents an hour for department heads—are too low. The union also said it was worried about the funding of pension plans. Kroger points out that it is experiencing intense competition from Wal-Mart, whose workers are not unionized.

Kroger advertised for scabs at $10 to $15 an hour, but it was reported that the striking workers expected solidarity from other unions, who wouldn’t cross the picket line to make deliveries, work, or shop.

If workers really wanted to show solidarity with their beleaguered brother and sister laborers, rather than hitting the Wal-Mart for their 6-pack tonight instead of the Kroger, they might look to the workers in Dubai, who are carrying on the tradition of the original union organizers rather more impressively than they are. Workers of the world unite, indeed.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor for reason.

Free Drugs!

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 12:32:00 EDT

Last July, Wal-Mart launched a $4 prescription drug plan, offering a month’s supply of about 140 generic medications for the cost of a Happy Meal. According to the company, “The medicines represented are used to treat and manage conditions including allergies, cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes. Some antibiotics, antidepressants, antipsychotics and prescription vitamins are also included.”

Wal-Mart’s competitors quickly responded. Target matched the $4 cost. Struggling retailer Kmart priced a number of generics at $15 for a 90-day supply. A spokesman for the Florida chapter of the left-leaning Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) conceded that such competition is good for the state’s seniors. “Whatever their intentions are,” he told Florida’s Herald Tribune, “if they can somehow offer cheaper prescription drugs and drive others to do the same, that would be great—particularly for the uninsured, who really face a huge obstacle in prescription drug costs.”

A year after Wal-Mart initiated the $4 program, Publix, a Florida-based supermarket chain, bested the deal. In August, Publix CEO Charlie Jenkins Jr., with Florida’s Republican Gov. Charlie Crist in tow, announced that the company’s pharmacies would offer seven common antibiotics, which it says account for more than half of the generic pediatric prescriptions filled at the store, for free. At all of the company’s 684 pharmacies, customers can walk out with a 14-day supply of common oral antibiotics such as amoxicillin at no charge and with no requirement to buy other products.

At Publix’s press conference, Crist praised the decision, noting that the private sector’s involvement in making drugs affordable to low-income families and the uninsured was “a great trend.” Indeed it is. As BusinessWeek recently wrote, the Wal-Mart–initiated price war has “brought transparency to the retail drug arena. Until recently, when a drug’s patent expired, pharmacies would charge as much as they liked for the generic version.”

In some states, the race to offer ever-cheaper generics is facing entrenched resistance in the form of anti–predatory pricing laws. Wisconsin’s Depression-era Unfair Sales Act, for example, mandates a minimum markup on the wholesale price of products, and 12 other states have similar laws against loss leaders.

More Cheap Drugs

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 11:18:00 EDT

According to the AP, Wal-Mart is to widen the number of drugs covered by its $4 prescription program.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is expanding its national $4 generic prescription drug program by about 10 percent, adding drugs for some new conditions.
The world's largest retailer said Thursday it has added drugs covering glaucoma, attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, fungal infections and acne.
Two prescription birth control drugs and one fertility drug were added at $9, reflecting a higher cost that the company said could not be brought down further.

Wal-Mart's aggressive pricing has provoked a mini price war, with competitors like Kmart and Target also using $4 prescription drugs as loss-leaders. In August, Florida-based supermarket chain Publix announced that they would give away seven popular antibiotics for free.

More on Wal-Mart's "innovative" new health insurance policies for its own employees here.

Living Wages for Thee...

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 10:47:00 EDT

The workers who clean Baltimore's Camden Yards baseball stadium are planning a hunger strike to protest their $7 per hour wages. The stadium is the largest employer of the city's homeless day laborers. The kicker, though, is that the Maryland legislature recently passed a "living wage" bill, setting the minimum at $11.30 per hour. But while the bill covers any business with state contracts in the Baltimore area, the state government is exempt, and Camden is owned by the state of Maryland.

Such double standards aren't new to the living wage debate. The labor activist group ACORN is largely credited with jump-starting the national living wage movement. But ACORN itself has a notoriously shabby record when it comes to paying its own workers. In fact, not only did the group once sue the state of California to exempt itself from the very living wage it helped the state to pass, ACORN actually used free market critiques of the minimum wage in its brief (ACORN argued that if it had to pay existing workers more, it wouldn't be able to hire more workers).

As for Maryland, this would be the same state that attempted to pass legislation directed solely at Wal-Mart because of the allegedly low wages and benefits Wal-Mart pays its workers. Average starting wage at Wal-Mart: Just under $10 per hour. Average Camden clean-up worker pay: $7 per hour.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Sam Walton

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 09:02:00 EDT

They beat a hasty retreat from the German market, chalking up over $1 billion in losses, but at least Wal-Mart made this photograph possible:

Via Club for Growth.

Last year, reason's Kerry Howley wondered if the retail giant had peaked.

Myths of Hurricane Katrina

drothsch@gmu.edu (Daniel Rothschild) — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 12:50:00 EDT

In his opening column to the recent issue of Time devoted to New Orleans, managing editor Richard Stengel reports that his impressions of the city's recovery efforts are based on "conversations with everyone from Mayor Ray Nagin to jazz great Terence Blanchard."

That sounds impressive, but truth be told, "everyone from the mayor to a famous jazz musician" isn't a terribly wide range, and misses a good deal of the city. The tendency of journalists to look first to political leaders-who, to say the least, usually have other motives for pushing a narrative-and big names explains why so much of the media has gotten post-Katrina New Orleans so wrong. Turning first to the great and the good to get the story is an easy mistake to make in a society where everything from the foods we eat to the way we garden is subject to the whims of the ruling class.

But leadership isn't something you are elected into. There have been plenty of leaders on the Gulf Coast over the last two years. It's just that their names don't roll off the tongues of magazine editors, or appear in newspapers or campaign ads.

If there's any good news to come out of the recovery effort it's that people in the hurricane zone have learned to become less reliant on political saviors and more reliant on themselves. In May 2007, the highly-regarded University of New Orleans Survey Research Center released their annual survey on quality of life in Orleans Parish. For "the first time in twenty years," the survey reported, "something rivaled crime as the ‘biggest' problem facing New Orleans." That problem was dissatisfaction with the local political leadership-just one-third of New Orleanians approved of Mayor Nagin's performance in office.

This isn't terribly unsurprising. Political leaders simply don't have the knowledge or-thankfully-the power to conceive, plan, and execute the rebuilding of entire communities after a disaster. Every community, neighborhood, and street is unique. The most effective solutions are being found locally, mostly in spite of government efforts, not because of them. The real problem, as economists Sanford Ikeda and Peter Gordon suggest, is not that political leaders aren't doing enough, it's that they're doing too much, and doing it poorly. There's too much centralized control preventing people from finding the solutions that best fit their own communities.

The best leadership comes from the bottom up, not the top down. And it's the neighborhoods that have been able to forge community leaders-from volunteers, entrepreneurs, sometimes even compassionate bureaucrats willing to bend the rules-that have shown the most signs of progress.

In Waveland, Mississippi, for example, the manager of the local Wal-Mart worked with the company's corporate officials to open a store under a tent in the parking lot, then later opened a convenient, easily accessible "Wal-Mart Express"-the first-ever store of its type-designed especially for post-Katrina Mississippi. Such creativity and on-the-fly adaptation and innovation on-the-fly would have been inconceivable from FEMA, which kept physicians from treating wounded evacuees because they weren't registered with the federal government, and kept firefighters away from those in need until they completed sexual harassment training, and courses on FEMA's history.

Down the road in Bay St. Louis, I spoke with resident Alicia Cool, who told me she reopened her flower shop because "without business you can't have people wanting to come back and stay here." Despite the devastation all around her, her perseverance paid off. Her sales went through the roof. While flowers wouldn't at first blush seem to be something people of limited means in the process of rebuilding would want to purchase, they became, she explained, a symbol of beauty and normality in an environment devoid of both. Tim Williamson, the president of the Idea Village, an organization that helps would-be entrepreneurs get their footing, has seen many such stories. Entrepreneurs know that they're rebuilding more than their businesses, he says. "The story's going to be written, I think, that the entrepreneurs restarted New Orleans.... They did it on the back of their own spirit and on their own funds."

Even within the various bureaucracies leaders can flourish, though it's often those who break free of the red tape, and try to forge their own way. Even then, it isn't easy. One example is Doris Voitier, the superintendent of the St. Bernard Parish Schools. Voitier became something of a local hero when she realized that functional schools were critical to getting residents to move back to the parish. She decided she'd figure out a way to open them, bureaucracy be damned.

Enter FEMA. FEMA officials told Voitier she'd need to have a "kickoff meeting" before she could open the schools-where she'd meet not with parents, or students, or teachers, but with a federal environmental protection team, a historical preservation team, and the "404-" and "406-mitigation teams" (terms which refer to specific sections of the Stafford Act, the law that covers federal disaster response). And it wasn't a "meeting" so much as an introduction to the vast bureaucracy that was FEMA's "education task force," basically a list of barriers Voitier would have to clear before she could start classes. Voitier says she sat in the meeting thinking, "Can't somebody help me get a school started and clean my schools?"

Voitier decided to cut her losses and reopen the schools without FEMA's help. She says she adopted a "the heck with you guys" approach. "We can do it, we'll make it happen, and we'll send you the bill." Before Thanksgiving, Voitier opened her first school, and 334 students attended the first day of classes. By the last day of the year, there were 2,360, and over 3,000 on the first day of the next.

For her heroic efforts to reopen her schools, Voitier would later be investigated for misappropriation of federal property. When a local fire chief determined a FEMA trailer was unsafe for classroom use, Voitier made do, and used the facility to housewashing machines for her teachers, who were living in their own trailers in the school's parking lot. This change in use was sanctioned by the appropriate FEMA field official. But when that official rotated out, he failed to file the appropriate paperwork, leaving the next official under the impression that Voitier had changed use of a federal trailer without the government's permission. The horror.

There are other stories of local leaders stepping up. Neighborhood associations are a good example. LaToya Cantrell, who by day works for an education non-profit, turned the 75-year old Broadmoor Improvement Association into a leading example of how to organize a neighborhood to rebuild. She reached out to universities and corporations who offered expertise and volunteers for the effort. Broadmoor now has rebuilt 75 percent of its homes, and is constructing a community center. But the bureaucrats have gotten in the way here, too. The neighborhood association wants to open a charter school in an abandoned school building. The parish school board, fighting further the decay of its authority, is doing everything it can to prevent them.

Less than a mile to the north, the Mid-City Neighborhood Organization is trying to bring businesses into the community, matching prospective business owners up with retail space and working with commercial developers to ensure that they're attuned neighborhood concerns.

The commonly held notion that post-Katrina recovery effort has been hampered by a lack of leadership is true only if "leadership" refers only to political leadership. There, there's not only a lack of leadership, but a stifling bureaucracy that's smothering real progress. Across the Gulf Coast, there are real people taking real risks, trying to buck the obstacles thrown in their way, and many are seeing real results. Some are motivated by profit, others by love of their neighbors, or a sense of community. But they aren't posturing, or complaining, or speechifying. They're acting.

We've heard a great deal about the leadership problem in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast over previous month. Make no mistake, there is one. But the problem is not that city hall, the state house, or the U.S. Congress aren't doing enough. It's that they're doing too much, and preventing the real leaders-the organic leaders springing up in community centers, school halls, and business districts-from making their own decisions, informed by their own, localized wisdom and experience, about how to rebuild.

Keeping it Real

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 02:20:00 EDT

Chinese authorities seized 46 toy guns from a Shanghai Wal-Mart. The guns reportedly violated a law that says they must be painted bright colors. "The toy guns sold in Wal-Mart are too real, and such toys can be harmful to children by easily inducing them to violence," said one official. Wal-Mart could face fines for stocking the toy guns.

Who's Afraid of Mergers?

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 06:33:00 EDT

Someone once said that the best way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it vigorously, thus making its flaws visible to all. Federal regulators may not induce repeal of the antitrust laws, but they show a talent for making the statutes look obsolete.

It's widely accepted that one of the crucial functions of government is to protect against monopolists and cartels. Left to its own devices, many critics of capitalism believe, the market would allow voracious corporations to collude, joining forces to hold consumers upside down and shake the nickels out of their pockets. To ensure that free markets operate for the benefit of all, we are told, the government has to strictly police mergers to keep any company from gaining an unfair advantage.

That is what it claims to be doing in two different sectors. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin has expressed serious qualms about approving a wedding between the only two satellite radio companies, Sirius and XM. The Federal Trade Commission is going to court to block a merger between two organic grocery chains, Wild Oats and Whole Foods.

In both cases, the rationale is that fewer companies will mean fewer choices and higher prices. But consumers who want what these firms provide have more options than the Milky Way has stars. If a couple of those stars cease to exist, nobody will notice, and besides, new stars are born every day.

Organic food consumers would not be the suffering captives of this new company. The business is growing like an organic weed. Every grocery store has a raft of offerings, and chains from Wal-Mart to Trader Joe's are fighting to get their share of sales. If the bigger Whole Foods price-gouging, customers can easily find other sources for what they want—from farmers markets to online suppliers.

The key government error is defining the market as a narrow sector isolated from other sectors that provide reasonable substitutes. That same mistake explains the FCC chairman's aversion to the satellite radio deal, as well as the letter from 72 members of the House of Representatives claiming it would have "devastating" consequences for listeners.

As it happens, the alternative to one satellite radio company may not be two companies but none. The existing ones have accumulated some $7 billion in losses between them. The merger may allow them to reduce costs, so they can eke out a profit and stay in business.

Raising prices would not be easy, since consumers have plenty of affordable options. Music fans can listen to terrestrial radio, pop in a CD, find an Internet feed, turn on an iPod, flip to the cable TV music station or check out unknown talents on YouTube.

Web radio may not get as much attention as Howard Stern, but it has four times as big an audience as XM and Sirius combined. In his alarm about the proposed merger, Martin has mistaken a mouse for a moose.

The truth is, markets are more complex and dynamic than regulators assume. Bill Clinton's Justice Department tried to break up Microsoft before it enslaved us all, but the feds got far less than they wanted. Microsoft, however, has found out that even a virtual monopoly doesn't guarantee prosperity. Despite controlling more than 90 percent of the market for computer operating systems, the company's stock price has been flat for the last decade—while Apple, which has only a tiny share, has increased in value 15-fold since 2003.

Meanwhile, other companies, notably Google, have trounced Microsoft in other areas. Over the last decade, says Thomas Hazlett, a professor of law and economics at George Mason University, "Microsoft has seen its market position erode, and it has virtually nothing to do with the antitrust case."

The point is not that corporations will never try to suppress competition, as Microsoft is accused of attempting with its new Vista operating system, which it recently agreed to alter in response to a complaint from Google. The point is that they will usually fail, because of the many choices available to the buying public—and that on the rare occasions when they succeed, the success is invariably fleeting.

Even corporations that gain dominance find that no matter how they connive, they can't escape competition. In a market economy, today's fearsome predator is tomorrow's frightened prey.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Discuss this article online.

Sprawling Towards Gomorrah (or Not)

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 12:59:00 EDT

Stalwart sprawl defender Robert Bruegmann says sprawl's glory days are over:

Even many of the most basic facts usually heard about sprawl are just wrong. Contrary to much accepted wisdom, sprawl in the U.S. is not accelerating. It is declining in the city and suburbs as average lot sizes are becoming smaller, and relatively few really affluent people are moving to the edge. This is especially true of the lowest-density cities of the American South and West. The Los Angeles urbanized area (the U.S. Census Bureau's functional definition of the city, which includes the city center and surrounding suburban areas) has become more than 25% denser over the last 50 years, making it the densest in the country.

This fact, together with the continued decline in densities in all large European urban areas, coupled with a spectacular rise in car ownership and use there, means that U.S. and European urban areas are in many ways converging toward a new 21st-century urban equilibrium. In short, densities will be high enough to provide urban amenities but low enough to allow widespread automobile ownership and use.

If sprawl is dissipating organically, the haunting fear that we shall exurb-anize into socially isolated, polluting, Wal-Mart dependent misanthropists (until urban planners save us, that is) may fade as well. But so should the assumption that low-density living is some pure expression of the American soul. To some extent sprawl is going to be the result of huge government subsidies to drivers in the form of roads, and it's not clear that this particular government initiative makes people better off. Long commutes, for example, negatively affect measures of subjective wellbeing (pdf).

reason on sprawl here , here , and here .

Blue Light Special

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 05:04:00 EDT

Last month, my cheapskate landlord showed up at my door to install new, environmentally friendly (read: cheaper) light fixtures in my kitchen. Earlier that week, my building's "green living team" hosted a bulb swap in the apartment lobby, offering newer, more efficient bulbs in exchange for the current contents of my light sockets. Both were boldly following in the footsteps of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez.

Cuba began pushing out incandescent bulbs two years ago, sending youth brigades around the island to swap out bulbs with the goal of relieving some of the stress on the nation's decaying, overtaxed power grid. My landlord sent contractors instead of a youth brigade. But the contractors were young and Hispanic, so close enough. The difference between my landlord and Castro, of course, is that my landlord can't fine me or throw me in jail if I prefer to stick with old-fashioned light bulbs. But all that may be about to change, with light bulb ban legislation pending in California, Connecticut, Illinois, and the U.S Congress.

The old incandescent bulbs most people still use are essentially unchanged from the date of their invention by Thomas Edison at the end of the 19th century. They emit about 15 lumens (a measure of brightness) per watt. A newer, currently available 20-watt compact fluorescent bulb produces about the same amount of light as a 100-watt incandescent bulb. A manifest improvement for those, like Castro, trying to save on electricity bills and relieve stress on an overtaxed power grid. But when someone decided that potential energy savings from lighting would be an important step in saving the planet from global warming, the trouble really started.

The U.S. is just starting to hop on Castro's well-lit bandwagon, but Hugo Chavez has us beat. In Venezuela, the light spilling out of the slums in Caracas has taken on the bluish tint typical of florescent lighting, as Chavez's strange environmental crusade marches on. In imitation of Castro-and in spite of his country's total dependence on oil exports for fiscal survival-Chavez has given away more than 45 million bulbs domestically, saying they this is part of his plan to save the planet from America's "greed for oil." Prensa Latina put a positive spin on the new, unfamiliar light, praising the "white light thrifty bulbs that besides saving energy gives a fresher lighting."

Of course, American users of soon-to-be black market bulbs aren't really facing jail time. But merchants selling incandescent bulbs could be subject to hefty fines if pending legislation passes. And it isn't just aesthetes who have complaints about the compact florescent bulbs. The new bulbs aren't perfect yet. They contain mercury, which means they have to be disposed of carefully. Sure to follow hard on the heels of requirements to use the new bulbs will be regulations about how new bulbs are to be discarded, including fines for people who try to smuggle bulbs out in the garbage with the wine bottles. Though there is no evidence that the bulbs themselves pose any risk, hypercautious modern parents may prefer to keep mercury out of their homes entirely-an option they won't have under the proposed legislation.

By forcing alternatives out of the market, the new legislation will reduce incentives for lighting companies to keep innovating in an effort to push down prices. If they don't have to compete with incandescents, which cost about a quarter each, the R&D shops at companies manufacturing compact fluorescents can feel a little more comfortable when they take a long lunch on a workday.

Massive giveaways by environmental groups and Latin American dictators notwithstanding, once the bulbs become legally required in the U.S., some of us will have to buy them. The difference between a bulb that costs a quarter and one that costs three dollars may seem minor to most people, but the average American house has 50 light sockets, so the small price increase can add up. Even with Wal-Mart pushing hard on buyers and suppliers, the prices have stayed relatively high so far. The most commonly quoted figures say that they bulbs pay for themselves in savings on the electricity bill after about 500 hours of use, but renters or people who move frequently may not be around long enough to recoup costs.

The bulb ban has already been screwed into place in Australia, which recently announced a plan to gradually ban old-fashioned bulbs. The EU began its phase out of old-style bulbs just weeks ago as part of a plan to reduce overall power consumption.

California, always on the vanguard of legislation to control the little things in daily life, has managed to have a sense of humor about the ridiculous spectacle of legislators decided what kind of light bulbs we should have in our homes. California legislator Lloyd Levine is calling his bill the How Many Legislators Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb Act.

Many of the versions of legislation at the state level show the classic hallmarks of big business-big government collusion: In North Carolina, House Bill 838, introduced by Democratic Rep. Pricey Harrison, bans the sale of old-fashioned incandescent bulbs by 2016. Coincidentally, this is the same year the leading manufacturer of the new, energy efficient bulbs plans to stop manufacturing incandescents altogether.

Now the U.S. House of Representatives has its own legislation to force out incandescent bulbs: "The last thing we want to do is force legislation down people's throats," Rep. Don Manzullo (R-Ill.) said at a press conference. But the goal of reducing energy use requires legislation as a "focal point that you look at to try to move the country forward."

"It takes a combination of courage and leadership from the state and federal government to make things happen," said Earth Day Network president Kathleen Rogers.

But she's wrong. My cheap landlord, Wal-Mart, virtually every environmental group, and the companies that manufacture the new bulbs are all already showing the courage and leadership to "make things happen" with advertising, giveaways, and free installation. Legislators who command us to adopt energy efficient light bulbs are foolishly redundant at best, like the general who gives orders to pillage after his troops are already rampaging through the city. At worst, they're freezing technological development, colluding with big business, and forcing more expensive products on the households that can least afford them.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor of Reason.

Congress to Wal-Mart: No Bank. Not for You.

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 08:50:00 EST

Some of us hoped that losing their majority might cause the Republicans to rediscover their limited government principles. Others predicted it'd be more of the same -- that the GOP would just try to out big-government the Democrats.

Here's another piece of evidence for the cynics.

I've found that anything described as "bipartisan" almost always means bad news for libertarians.