Resident Scholar Joseph Antos

Resident Scholar Joseph Antos has been named to the Wilson H. Taylor Chair in Health Care and Retirement Policy. Antos researches health care policy, Medicare, and private health insurance at the Institute. He is the coauthor of The Youth Labor Market: A Dynamic Overview (1979), and his articles have appeared in American Economic Review, Health Affairs, Monthly Labor Review, and Industrial and Labor Review. The chair, recently endowed by CIGNA Corporation, honors the firm's longtime chairman and chief executive officer, Wilson H. Taylor. Taylor has been a member of AEI's Board of Trustees since 1989 and served as Board chairman from 1994 through 1998.

Jagadeesh Gokhale, a senior economic adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, has joined AEI as a visiting scholar researching tax incidence and public finance. Gokhale's work has appeared in publications such as the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity.

Scott Gottlieb, M.D., writes in the New York Sun (November 5) about policy inefficiencies and inconsistencies within the Food and Drug Administration (FDA): "Mark McClellan was recently appointed to become the FDA's commissioner after a two-year vacancy at the top. His first act should be asking regulators to commit all their guidance to writing. It would end a lot of the agency's opacity and its regulatory inconsistency. Perhaps the greatest of all these misfortunes may be the culture that has grown up inside the agency that seems to tag certain diseases as morally superior to others, and therefore deserving of special regulatory interest. This is especially true for AIDS. . . . It's proof anew that the agency's regulators respond to patients' needs, but only under the thumb of political pressure."

Encounter Books has published Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics, by Leon R. Kass, M.D., which Sherwin B. Nuland reviews in the New York Times (November 17): "Kass has written an important book. Whether or not one agrees with the basic elements of his thesis, it is impossible to ignore the brilliance or the conviction with which he supports it. . . . There can be no clearer exposition of the moral complexities of twenty-first century biotechnology than has been provided by Leon Kass's intellectual depth and graceful style."

In an article in the December issue of Commentary, Joshua Muravchik argues that President Bush must support his first national security strategy statement with decisive actions: "Having devised and presented a strategy apposite to the threat confronting the United States, George Bush must demonstrate the skill, courage, and determination to execute it. And there will be obstacles aplenty, not least from the critics whose ranks multiply with every sign of presidential wavering and whose warnings and plaints sound uncannily like those faced in an earlier age by Harry S. Truman when he launched the policy of containment."

Resident Fellow David Frum

Early this month, Random House will release David Frum's book The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush. Frum, now a resident fellow at AEI, also recently became the back page columnist for National Review. In an article for that publication (November 25), he advises against press leaks on national security issues: "You might think it's against the law to publish top-secret documents. It's not. You might think it's illegal to receive top-secret documents and pass them on. Again: It's not. Government employees have a duty to protect secrets in their care. Beyond that, so long as he is not actually spying for a foreign power, no American has any legally enforceable duty to his government's security. Does this matter? Not according to our journalists. For them, the right to leak is one of the bulwarks of American democracy. . . . But mightn't easy access to potentially lethal information about America's vulnerabilities also be a useful weapon for dictators?"