7.28.00
The King Gambit

7.28.00
Civic Miseducation

7.28.00
Al Gore's L.A. Blues

7.27.00
The Estate Tax: Not Just Unfair

7.27.00
The Tax-Cutting Groundswell

7.27.00
The Cheney Glock-n-Spiel

7.26.00
Is John McCain Achilles?

7.26.00
Russian Roulette with Cops' Lives

7.26.00
Cheney: A Personal View

7.26.00
Texas Backfire

7.26.00
A Tough Zell

7.25.00
Clinton's Complete Mideast Failure

7.25.00
Puerto Rico and U.S. Elections

7.24.00
The Mother of All Surprises

7.24.00
Don't Mess with Texas, Al

7/28/00 2:45 p.m.
The King Gambit
He's betting on the better angels of our nature.

By Michael Long, director, White House Writers Group

tephen King is selling his new book via the Internet, and on the honor system. Anyone who believes in the power of markets in general, and libertarianism in particular, ought to be grinning with glee at this experiment, even as a bit of trepidation rises: Here is an individual who is putting his money where our mouth is, testing the conservative assertion that markets encumbered by little more than conscience will attract and produce enough discipline, quality, and profit to actually work.

King is offering a bargain at once so odd and old-fashioned that it sounds like one of the man's own plot devices. At the rate of about one chapter a month, the world's bestselling author is posting his novel-in-progress "The Plant" on his website. For every chapter a reader downloads, King requests that the reader send him a dollar. There's nothing to stop you from downloading without paying, no e-mail bombs waiting if you take the book for free, not even any registration screen to keep track of who takes a peek at the site. The chapters are absolutely available for the taking, as accessible as air.

King says that if at least 75 percent of downloads are matched by payment, he will keep writing. But if more than one in four downloaders ends up, as he puts it, "stealing from the blind newsboy," he'll end the experiment and go back to bindings and glue. Are we capable of being this civilized?

If "commerce by conscience" should work anywhere, it is in the realm of books and readers. Leaving aside condescending attitudes about King's pop-culture-taste audience (of which I happen to be a proud member), we are still talking about a group of people who at least occasionally turn off the TV in favor of turning pages — people who ought to appreciate the value of intellectual property. (One wonders what the payment rate would be if Napster set up a similar system — I'd bet on a majority of honest people in that case, too.)

Of course, King's fans are rabid, so they may yield to him a bit more allegiance in honoring the request for payment than other authors might enjoy. In fact, so many fans have asked King if they could send more than a dollar that he finally told them to go ahead. But still, it is unheard of for anything more than mints by the Sizzler cash register to be sold on consumers' honor.

It turns out that the man who has served up so many tales about evil men believes the very best about people.

The King gambit also makes clear just how many devices and procedures exist only because some people cannot be trusted. If we were all trustworthy, would we really need clerks to check us out in grocery stores? Keys for our car doors? Airplane tickets to get on a flight? Everything that exists to keep one human out of the affairs of another is there because some people are dishonest.

To be sure, King is not betting on absolute honesty from his audience — he's allowing a theft rate of 25 percent, remember. And there is an often-ignored but simple economic argument that it is sometimes cheaper to accept some theft than it is to pay to prevent it. And even if he doesn't make a dime from the deal, Stephen King won't miss a lunch (or want for, say, the cash to purchase Hawaii). But money isn't really the issue. For King, the exercise seems to be a way to explore and expand the future of publishing. But he has also — perhaps inadvertently — forced an answer to a fundamental matter of political philosophy.

If King's assumptions about human nature are correct, then the Left loses big. Their attitude is that we're never more than a few rigid rules away from Xanadu, and it is inconceivable to them that people are smart enough not to ruin a system that provides a thing they want; decent enough to pay for what they take; honorable enough to do the right thing for its own sake.

Those of us unafraid of optimistic extrapolation might say this: A win for King means most people are good at heart, not bad. They're honest, not crooked. They don't need regulators and rule mongers and state-sponsored lifestyle nannies to get through the day. They just need to be reminded that the world works better when we act on our honor.

It's an outcome that should rattle Al Gore so much it just might reduce him to a pile of splinters in a pressed suit.

So work for the side of the angels. Send Stephen King a buck.

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