Market Correction

26 September 2007

News Editor, WTOP Radio
Washington, DC

To the Editor:

For a second straight day your reporters - when covering candidates for next year's election - referred to "the presidential sweepstakes." I'm struck by this term's familiarity and appropriateness.

As with sweepstakes for cash, the odds are difficult. At the beginning of each election cycle, everyone but an incumbent President faces long odds of winning. But the pay-off from winning this sweepstakes is life-changingly huge. The winner immediately gains such goodies as buckets of prestige, a splendid house, a 747 jet, bodyguards for life, torrents of influence and power, and rock-star-like fame.

Just as each person who enters the Publishers' Clearinghouse Sweepstakes does so because he or she hopes to win incredible personal benefits, so, too, with Presidential candidates: they enter overwhelmingly for themselves, not to serve the rest of us.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University

25 September 2007

Editor, The Boston Globe

To the Editor:

Like Thea Shapiro, I oppose the war in Iraq (Letters, Sept. 25). But I strongly disagree with her suggestion that conscription is an appropriate means of relieving existing soldiers of their duties. If the war is, as she claims, one "that we now know was started on false pretenses and that has no prospect for ever ending," forcing young people to fight such a war would be especially reprehensible.

Why is Ms. Shapiro willing to trust the same people who started this war with the additional power to confiscate years of life from young Americans?

Further,
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux