Michael Lissack schools. In New York City alone, this project swallowed up $102 million last year, and has either saved no lives-if you listen to one group of experts-or saved at most five lives, if you listen to another group. That’s $20 million per life saved. A federal rule regulating wood-preserving chemicals has racked up a cost of $5 trillion per life saved. The banning of the pesticide Alar has cost U.S. apple growers as much as $200 million. It is impossible to put a price tag on the lives saved with that move, since there is a good chance that the ban increases mortality. Alar is only a very weak carcinogen, if it is in fact a cause of cancer in apple eaters at all. The higher prices for apples, mean- while, translate into reduced fresh fruit consumption and thus higher colon cancer rates. So, carried away by feeble-minded media hype and hypochon- dria, we spend billions fighting imaginary enemies. Of the $41 million the Centers for Disease Control spends on infectious diseases, only a fraction goes to looking for future killers. If an outlay of $1 billion a year on disease surveillance and vaccine preparedness could forestall another Spanish flu- size epidemic sometime in the next century, it would save 3 million lives in the U.S. at a cost per life saved of well under $1 million. Alas, there is no Meryl Streep to plead the cause before television cameras, as there was for the Alar ban. Liberals love to say things like ‘We’re just asking everyone to pay their fair share.’ But government is not about asking. It is about telling. And telling must have a higher standard.” During the decade which preceeded this book several clear illustrations of governmental theft appeared in the press. At the risk of over amplifying my point I am going to repeat a few. I use the older ones because they have proven themselves over time and are exempt from a “we don’t yet know all the facts” defense. Similar and more current stories abound but since it is the mindset they reveal which is critical not their details let us stick to the older ones. From the Wall Street Journal, one could learn that in August, 1994 “the government released a massive five-year study showing that the U.S. is losing only 66,000 acres of wetlands a year. This may have come as a sur- prise to EPA Administrator Carol Browner, who claimed before Congress only four months earlier that the figure was 300,000 acres. The EPA and
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