READERS WRITE

Let’s take a moment to honor fallen U.S. Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown

While world attention has been focused on President Obama and the G-20 wrestling with the global financial crisis, let’s take a moment to honor fallen U.S. Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown and the corporate leaders and staff who died in an airplane crash in Croatia, April 3, 1996. Brown was a keen advocate of commercial diplomacy, and his trade missions promoting joint ventures and markets for U.S. goods were legendary. He was a firm opponent of protectionism.

As a U.S. foreign service officer working on reconciliation in Bosnia under the Dayton Accords, I witnessed Brown in action in Tuzla, Bosnia, appealing to sectarian leaders to embrace free enterprise for economic development of the war-torn country. Brown articulated convincingly the merits of American economic legacy. Had Brown survived, the U.S. political landscape may have been much different today. He would have been a valuable asset in resolving the global economic and financial crisis.

EARLE ST. AUBIN SCARLETT

Atlanta

Health care: We must do better

A letter writer (“Government health care not the answer,” @issue, April 1), apparently representing a special interest group, distorts Jay Bookman’s argument in his March 27 blog entry that the current health care system is ineffective and does not provide fair coverage for all citizens. The letter writer states that using profit as a basis for providing or denying medical coverage is not “evil” and produces a better health care system than one based on public interest.

This implies a false choice. There is a role for making a profit in the reforms being promoted in today’s marketplace of ideas, including Bookman’s. But the fact that the system in place in the U.S. is more costly and less effective than systems in typical developed countries is well established. We can and must do better.

Like the letter writer and members of Congress, I am fortunate enough to have adequate health care coverage. However, many productive members of society do not. These are the people who have “no choices, and nowhere else to go.” It is time to make decisions that affect all of us on the empirical principles of efficiency and effectiveness, not distorted arguments from special interest groups and those wearing ideological blinders.

TIM RALSTON

Atlanta

Reduce weekend MARTA service

Instead of eliminating MARTA service Friday, wouldn’t it make more sense to reduce service by 50 percent on both Saturday and Sunday? Thinking that eliminating Friday service is a viable option could be MARTA’s biggest problem.

PATRICK MALONE

Snellville

Social stigma on out-of-wedlock births is gone

I could not disagree more with the letter “No simple solutions to problems we face” (@issue, March 29) in response to a Jim Wooten column (“New culture: Cruel joke on fatherless kids,” @issue, March 22). The letter writer’s solution to skyrocketing out-of-wedlock births is “education first: readily available birth control next.” I am so tired of hearing this. What will we educate them about? Do you honestly believe they don’t know where babies come from?

Kids have had “raging hormones” for a long time. The difference is that in my day, we knew that if a girl became pregnant it would be a life-changing mistake. We were afraid, and that is one of the only effective ways to combat raging hormones. More often than not, we made the right choices.

Today, at least in some subcultures, this fear has mostly disappeared. The social stigma is gone. Families and peers celebrate pregnancies without being “judgmental.” The culture does not hold men responsible. The government safety net has removed the immediate economic danger of single motherhood. The result is that, for both men and women, the risk has been reduced and is no longer a deterrent. Hormones rage and the children who are born pay the price.

JEFF BURROWS

Marietta

Law holds speeder accountable for bad decision

As a driver who normally travels five-plus mph over the speed limit and is “pushed” by other drivers down many rural highways, and as a mom of a 19-year-old son who has made bad decisions behind the wheel, I cannot believe a sheriff could have “grave concerns” about the super-speeder law and the effect it will have on the poor (“Super speeder law will have terrible, swift effect on poor,” @issue, April 7).

There are worse examples of what could happen to a single mother who is late for work and passes a slow-moving vehicle at 76 mph in a 55-mph zone, far beyond the $400 or so it will cost and the potential of having her driver’s license suspended and insurance canceled. How many bad decisions is a person allowed to make before they are held accountable for their own actions?

TERRY GILL

White