ON NPR OF ALL PLACES:

The Rules (Joe Wright, 10/28/02, NPR's All Things Considered)

Commentator Joe Wright went to an experimental school when he was a child. At first, they had no rules, but as time went on, the instructors needed to add rules so that things didn't get out of hand. When he was older, he moved to San Francisco, where there were lots of adults who were trying to get rid of rules. But Joe found that sometimes you need rules -- not a lot, just a few. (4:00 minutes)

This is an audio file of an exceptionally good commentary by a first year Harvard Medical School student about how his experiences in a free form school and among gay men in San Francisco convinced him of the need for rules. I'm too slow to get the exact quote but towards the end he notes that Europe has tons of rules, so no one follows any, while America has fairly few, so we take them seriously. That's a striking insight, one that relates directly to the counterintuitive fact that the more government we have built up the more lawless our behavior has become. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 29, 2002 8:08 AM