Sigh. I really wasn't trying to pick a fight with one of my favorite authors. Anyway, let me explain myself in more detail. The statements to which I was referring are these:

A. "PAUL: I've always been for legalized drugs... The only area that causes me concern is when kids are involved... When parents with no medical knowledge decide to prescribe for their children, it's no longer their own life they're playing Russian roulette with, it's the little guys' lives, and they trust them to do what's best.... the thought of cavalier parents who think they know it all prescribing for their little ones ... man, that makes me reeeeeal queasy.

"SUNNI: ...how many caring parents really would be cavalier? ...

"PAUL: Too many know-it-alls, yes, and certainly far too many time-squeezed. The kid's got a bellyache, forgot to make an appointment, got to get the brother to soccer practice, oh, hell, put some Donnatal into him and see what happens..."

I may be reading you wrong, Paul, but you seem to be advocating some form of governmental regulation of the medical treatment of children, because you think too many parents are irresponsible. Yet what makes you think the regulators, and the bureaucrats who carry out their orders, will be any more responsible, on the whole? After all, their incentive to do the right thing is much, much lower than it is for the children's own parents, and their actions are very often driven by politics.

B. "Humanity includes a large population of jackals -- mean, sneaky, cowardly creatures held in check only by fear of reprisal. Remove that fear and they run wild...."

This statement is true but misleading. There are 280 million people in America and 6 billion people in the world; even a tiny fraction of a percent of such large numbers can give large totals. So even if only a small fraction of a percent of the populace are jackals, and only a tiny fraction of the populace are ever victims of violent crime, the newspapers will still have no lack of horror stories to report.

What I've read of evolutionary psychology seems to suggest that the jackals should be a small (though inevitable) minority. My own experience in over 40 years of life, living in urban areas in four states, also points to "jackals" being relatively scarce -- I have met very, very few people I would describe that way. I have met a somewhat larger minority whom I would describe as great human beings, and the great majority I would describe as basically decent folk.

My main point is this: the decent folk outnumber the jackals by a large margin.

C. "Remove the big stick and you hand a bunch of little sticks to the worst of us."

The worst of us -- the most dangerous jackals -- already have the big stick; they run the government! All other criminals are two-bit crooks by comparison. The United States federal government robbed Americans of $3.7 trillion in 2004 -- far more than the sum total of all property crime committed in America that year, and probably larger than the total of all property crime committed in the world. Janet Reno tortured and killed 80 innocent American men, women, and children at Waco. Harry Truman snuffed out over 100,000 innocent lives at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. George Bush has murdered somewhere between 30,000 to well over 100,000 Iraqis with his invasion and conquest of Iraq. The Bushes and Clinton killed 1.5 million innocent Iraqis with their brutal economic sanctions (a form of war directed at civilians instead of military targets).

Even the body count of the man who may be the worst private-sector mass murder in history -- Osama bin Laden -- is dwarfed by these numbers. So forgive me for not worrying so much about penny-ante private-sector monsters when the government we suffer under is run by industrial-scale murderers.