Immortality is Fully Deductible

"Who could presume to put a monetary value on a human life?" We've all heard that somewhere. It's a nice pious thought and maybe it was appropriate once. But in today's consumer economy, there's a price on everything, even on human life. The only problem is collecting:

Stephen Dennison was released from prison when he was 51. He had spent 34 years in the slammer for stealing five dollars' worth of chocolate-covered marshmallows. Doctors had decided that he was a "low-grade moron," which somehow justified imprisoning him 24 years longer than the ten years he could have drawn for his heinous crime. Dennison was not so moronic as to neglect to sue the state for $115,000 as partial compensation for "the lifetime he could never enjoy." He won. The state appealed and had the ruling overthrown. So Dennison went to the Supreme Court to see if he could collect for all his lost years at $3382.35 per year, a rate that would net $236,764.50 for a 70-year lifetime. In February 1970, the Court denied his appeal.

Thinking that perhaps the reason the Court had refused Dennison was that it couldn't relate to that $236,764.50 figure as being precise enough, I undertook to check out some of the prices life and, while I was at it, death are quoted at. I discovered that this was harder than it seemed.

Mike Kasperak, for example, paid $28,845.83 to have his heart replaced by Stanford's Dr. Norman Shumway. Precise enough, but a little confusing: He paid that for life but died instead. Was that $28,845.83 life cost or death cost?

Or take the Hebrew word Chai. It means life, and when you add up the mystical numerical value of the Hebrew letters that spell it, you get 18. On the Day of Atonement, synagogues solicit donations of at least chai--$18. You should live, in other words, long enough to be able to give another chai next year. But $18 for a human life? Next to $236,764.50, it seems a little on the modest side.

You'd think the people at the Defense Department would be of some assistance, since they're supposedly in the business of "saving American lives." But they're no help. Remember when they were trying to push the Sentinel anti-ballistic-missile system down our emplacements with talk about how many megalives all those billions of dollars would save? Well, I tried to find out just how many would have been saved--rounded off to the nearest 10,000,000. But no dice--the best they could do was "a lot." A lotta billions for a lotta lives. That precise enough for you?

Former Congressman Richard McCarthy, who broke the chemical-and-biological-warfare story, told me that the release of one quart of nerve gas would do away with every life within a 100-mile radius. So just pick a circle 200 miles across, count the number of people inside and divide by the cost of a quart of gack vapor to find the cost of each one of those lives.

As I nosed around, I discovered I wasn't the only one interested in the cost of life and the cost of death. In a country that spends nine times as much on funerals as on cancer research--and 332 times as much on defense--it's only natural that there is a medical researcher trying to figure out how much life costs so he can present the problems of human suffering and death to the Government in ways it could understand. Sure enough, Dr. H. Hugh Fudenberg, professor of medicine at the University of California Medical Center, concerned about the slowdown in medical-research appropriations for basic investigations in what he calls the life sciences, has come up with the cost benefit of research in terms of the dollar value of human life saved. The development of the polio vaccines, for example, cost $41,000,000. Dr. Fudenberg says that 154,000 cases of polio have been prevented by them; 12,500 people would have died and 127,200 would have been seriously disabled. The lifetime cost of income lost would have been over 12 billion dollars.

This cost-benefit approach to life and death seemed worth pursuing. When I read about Dr. Mary Ellen Avery, a professor of pediatrics at Montreal Children's Hospital who is concerned with rising infant mortality in the U. S., I asked if she could do a cost-benefit work-up on infant life and death. She said that our infant death rate is double Sweden's, that the mortality among nonwhite infants is double that among white infants. I asked her how much money would have to be spent, per infant, to lower infant death in the U.S. by one half. "The facts lead to the conclusion that reduction in poverty would be coupled with a reduction in neonatal mortality," Dr. Avery replied. "How much will it cost to eliminate poverty?"

One way of getting at the cost of a human life might be by breaking one down into raw materials and trying to sell them. The value of the resulting chemicals would be $3.50. But that figure sounds too much like a radio-quiz-show answer to suit me. "That's right! Three dollars and fifty cents! (Applause.) Now, here's a gift that'll make marcelling your hair so easy you'll wonder how you ever lived without it...." Of course, back in the heyday of the radio quiz show, the cost of do-it-yourself life would have been only 43 cents.

The $3.50 is an academic figure, anyway. Actually, your body isn't worth anything without you. But what about those stories of people selling their bodies to science--you know, the ones in which you get an almost unnoticeable tattoo with the name and address of the medical school to which your body is supposed to go? I asked a medical school's cadaver expert and he told me that, unfortunately, he had never heard of anybody getting cash for his body. In fact, tax experts assure me that if you will your body to a nonprofit research institution, you're not even entitled to an estate-tax deduction. The whole thing sounds like a shuck concocted by the tattooists' union.

The cost of life to a couple that wants to add one to its family depends on its fertility and, if it is infertile, on its religion. The basic cost of making a kid is about $1000--$500 for an obstetrician who will provide prenatal care and deliver the baby and $500 to $600 for the hospital. If the husband isn't fertile, the wife can be fertilized by artificial insemination: One New York doctor charges $350 to $500 with guaranteed results.

If no amount of money will enable a couple to make a baby, it can adopt one. If done through a charitable agency, this can cost nothing. A commercial agency such as New York's Talbot-Perkins charges ten percent of the husband's annual income, with a maximum of $1800. The average fee is $900. There's a discount for the second and third adoptions.

Would-be parents who are white discover that adoption is one area of American life in which Third World people have an edge. With abortion laws being liberalized, there just aren't that many unwanted white babies being offered for adoption anymore. So if you've got to have a white baby, it's a seller's market. Literally: There are plenty of sellers in the baby business. Las Vegas is a major center of the black-market baby trade. (continued on page 154) Immortality (continued from page 150) Most of the infants are headed for California, where prime white babies in mint condition go for $3000 to $7500 per baby. But the price you'll have to pay depends on what kind of white baby you want. A few years ago, a lawyer in Brooklyn discovered that he could undercut the competition in the Italian-baby business by importing the kids from Italian orphanages. What difference did it make where the kid was born, the parents-to-be figured--an Italian's an Italian, even if he isn't born in Brooklyn. The lawyer sold at least 168 babies over a four-year span at prices averaging $750 each before the authorities caught up with him.

These days, many white prospective parents deal in the so-called gray-market end of the baby business, in which lawyers offer to arrange an adoption with the mother and the prospective parents. The fees can run into thousands of dollars, not so much to pay for the legal steps involved as for the fact that the lawyers know where to find adoptable babies. Before locating the make and model baby of your choice, you may have to pay front money to a few lawyers--usually $100 each--before you find one who can actually line up a baby who meets your specifications. The fee depends on what your specifications are. The most expensive babies are Jewish. And the most expensive Jewish babies are girls. One New York couple reported that it paid $6000 to a lawyer--plus $386 round-trip California-to-New York first-class air fare for an adult companion for the child--for a baby girl with Jewish parents. The only person who could be more protective of her kid than a Jewish mother would have to be a Jewish mother who had paid $6386 for her--retail, yet.

Recently, the cost of life became an issue in California politics when Governor Ronald Reagan proposed stopping state health-insurance payments to unmarried pregnant girls. "The state," opined Reagan, "has no business providing a financial incentive for immorality." Abortions are legal in California and one third of them had been paid for by Medi-Cal. A. Alan Post, legislative analyst for the state of California, countered with the argument that if an unwanted child was born to a destitute woman, it would become a welfare charge whose cost from birth to maturity he calculated to be $15,000. A legal abortion would cost the state only $350 to $400. So the state was going to pay dearly for its exercise in self-righteousness, while it got into a new business: providing a financial incentive for illegal abortions.

We can get an idea of how stingy welfare payments are if we compare Post's estimate of the cost to the state of a young life with the cost of a privately financed 18-year-old. The Institute of Life Insurance took into account the total outlay for food, housing, clothing, transportation, medical care, recreation, education and, of course, "miscellaneous," and it says the average 18-year-old will run about $29,750 without a trade-in. That's for a kid who grows up in a family with today's average yearly income of $7500 to $10,000. And, according to financial columnist Sylvia Porter, as you move into a higher bracket, an 18-year-old in good condition can easily get into the $50,000 to $75,000 range. But look at it this way--you get what you pay for, right?

The cost of life is not an abstract notion: There are people who have to pay just to stay alive. The father of 20-year-old Eric Friedland, a Harvard student from Kings Point, New York, must pay $22,000 a year for injections of a clotting factor that stabilizes his son's hemophilia--$423.08 a week--without which he'd bleed to death internally. But Friedland is lucky; there's somebody to pay the bills. Even when insurance and charity pay part of the cost, most of the 100,000 or so hemophiliacs have to fork over $3000 to $10,000 a year for injections of human Stop Leak. There are also over 4000 Americans who use an artificial-kidney machine three times a week. Otherwise, they'd poison themselves internally. The treatment costs $20,000 to $40,000 a year in a hospital. But if you don't have the money, you get the treatment for free, right? Wrong. If you don't have the money, you may die. Five thousand five hundred people died last year--many of whom would have been saved had there been medics, machines and money. At one Minnesota hospital, you have to put $12,000 in escrow for the first year's care before it will put you on a machine. "A couple of people have felt they'd rather die than spend the amount of money involved," says one of the doctors there.

The practice of placing a monetary value on human life is nothing new, of course. The price of Negro slaves fluctuated with the value of cotton, from around $300 in 1795 to a high of $1800 for "prime field hands" in Georgia in 1859. A skilled black craftsman could bring twice that amount, a "prime woman" three quarters to four fifths, children and old people half and infants one tenth to one eighth. If a black man wanted to be free, all he had to do was buy himself from his master. Even assuming he could scam the money, though, he would discover something that emancipation didn't fix: Everything was just a little more expensive for black people--even themselves.

There also used to be an active trade in prostitutes in the U. S. Unlike slavery, however, it was thoroughly illegal. In 1910, the White Slave Trade Act made a Federal case out of buying and selling ladies of dalliance but didn't stop it. "The ease with which young and pretty girls can be bought for a paltry $50 and confined in questionable houses against their will," reported a New York daily in 1915, "was shown yesterday when Lieutenant E----bargained for and 'bought' three girls. He only paid ten dollars down on each--the balance was to be paid if the girls 'proved satisfactory.'"

The trade in female flesh petered out in the U. S. in the Thirties, but girls are still bought and sold as prostitutes elsewhere. In Thailand, Chinese traders deal in Amerasian girls of 10 to 12 years of age, the products of liaisons between American troops and Thai "hired wives." Prices range from $25 to $50 per child. After a story appeared in U. S. newspapers that the Pearl S. Buck Foundation had confirmed reports of children being bought and sold in Thailand, the foundation's director began to get letters from Americans who knew a bargain when they saw one. "Now," said the director, "I have to write them all and explain that we don't sell children."

It's been said that the Nazis put no value on human life. The truth is that they had a rather high estimation of what human lives were worth--at least in reichsmarks; but since they couldn't quite imagine anyone else being as estimable as they were, they chose to annihilate them wholesale instead. In December 1938, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht proposed to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees that it ransom 150,000 Jews for three billion marks (1.2 billion dollars): $8000 for the life of each Jew--at prewar prices, quite a bundle. While the committee was considering the Nazis' scheme, the offer was mysteriously withdrawn. It was meant to be outrageous; the thought that anyone would take it seriously had apparently not even been considered. But the idea of putting a price on the head of a Jew was contagious. The following year, 907 Jews attempted to escape from Germany on the luxury liner St. Louis. The emigrants planned to go to Cuba, where they could wait in peace to be admitted to the U.S. When the ship arrived in Havana, right-wing Cuban officials demanded a $1,000,000 bond for the emigrants and $350,000 in personal payoffs or they wouldn't admit the passengers: $1488.42 per Jew. The refugees simply couldn't cough up the cost of life. In a telegram, they appealed to President Roosevelt for asylum. There was no reply. In the great American tradition of brotherhood, compassion and hospitality, he allowed them to be sent back to Europe, where most of them died in concentration camps.

Because of the scale on which they inflicted it, the Nazis became acutely conscious of the cost of death. At the (continued on page 250) Immortality (continued from page 154) beginning of their extermination program, they found that it cost a lot to kill people. They tried firing squads and carbolic-acid injections in the heart before they discovered Zyklon B gas, the most economical genocidal agent to date. Ex-Nazis still find it hard to forget that cost-per-murder calculation. Last year, Franz Stangl, former commandant of the death camp at Treblinka, Poland, was convicted by a West German court of multiple murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Stangl had been discovered working in a Brazilian carassembly plant by Simon Wiesenthal, head of the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna, who has devoted his postwar life to tracking down fascist war criminals. Stangl's son-in-law, a former Gestapo official, had told Wiesenthal that he could supply information as to Stangl's whereabouts--for a suitable fee. How much, asked Wiesenthal, did he want? The answer was $7000, one cent for each of the 700,000 victims of Treblinka.

You know how they're always saying, "Your life isn't worth a plugged nickel," to people in TV Westerns? Well, you've got to spend an awful lot to make somebody's life worth that little--around $5000, at today's prices, to get someone iced in the classic gangland manner. During a four-year gang war in Boston that ended in 1968, $250,000 was spent to kill 50 or so mobsters. The reason this kind of death is so costly, even in wholesale quantities, is that while an important principle of the postwar American economy has become to eliminate the middleman, the watchword of the murder business is, "Let the middleman do the eliminating." You hire somebody who hires somebody who hires somebody, so that the third somebody doesn't know who you are. An A-plus job, with two or three middlemen running interference and a couple of boys flown in from Chicago to take care of business and dispose of the body so that it's never found, will run you as much as $10,000. But that just pays for the death itself. If you want to really make an impression on the victim before he dies, like having him ice-picked into eternity or having him almost strangled to death with piano wire a few times before going bye-bye, it will set you back another couple of Gs. (Depending on your accounting procedures, that $2000 could show up in your cost-of-life column.) If these prices seem a bit, er, stiff, a New York junkie will be happy to do the job for $500. At that price, however, the corpus delicti is F.O.B. wherever it falls. Smack freaks are too strung out to cope with the logistics of getting your ex-associate into a car, driving it to the wrecker, having it compressed into a solid if somewhat sticky scrap-steel cube, etc.

In a somewhat different class, there's Joseph Baron Barboza, a hired killer who turned state's evidence in Boston a few years ago. The murder for which Barboza was tried (he has at least 13 to his credit and was recently accused of yet another in California) paid him $7500, out of which he had to pay five hit men. Not long ago, there was supposed to be a $250,000 price tag on Barboza. Is that a cost of life or a cost of death?

The cost of death at the Rolling Stones' free concert at Altamont was somewhat cheaper. The Hell's Angels were hired to "guard the stage" for $500 worth of beer. One of the Angels is said to have killed Meredith Hunter. I suppose the cost of that death depends on how much of the beer the Angel drank.

Life-insurance companies are probably more conscious of the cost of life and death than anyone else. American families carry an average of $20,900 worth of life insurance. But that doesn't mean the cost of death to the life-insurance company is $20,900. Fifty-seven percent of life-insurance benefits are paid to the living--I mean the living living, the insured party, not his beneficiaries. We shouldn't be surprised to learn this. When you buy fire insurance, you get the money if you have a fire. When you buy automobile collision insurance, you get the money if you have a collision. So if you buy life insurance, you get the money if you live, right? Strictly speaking, if you have to die to collect, it should be called death insurance. This guy rings your doorbell, "Hello, sir, I'm from the Improvident Death Insurance Company and I'd appreciate just a few moments of your time...sir? Sir?"

Death benefits set a value on death that's hard to top. The widow of a 32-year-old Oklahoma rancher named E.C. Mullendore III, who was murdered in September 1970, may receive $18,750,000 from policies bought through a consortium of insurers. Tax-free, gang. But the world record may yet be set by a 60-year-old executive who bought a policy from John Hancock that'll pay $20,000,000. When it's paid off, it'll be the highest cost of death ever paid. The premium is $1,285,000 a year, so if this executive has the bad fortune to live past his 75th year, it'll be so expensive he'll wish he hadn't.

Which costs more--life or death? Occasionally, the costs of life and death are the same. In New York City, for example, a birth certificate costs the same as a death certificate: $2.50. More often than not, though, life costs more than death. It doesn't cost much to slit your wrists or stick your head in the oven, but New York City's Suicide Prevention League's telephone counseling service has to budget $75 to save the life of each caller.

Murder is a little trickier to figure out than suicide. The Manson trial cost the taxpayers of Los Angeles County $935,000. Did that add $133,571.43 to the cost of the death of each of the seven victims? Or $233,750 to the cost of the life of each of the four defendants? Speaking of the life of each of the four defendants, it's hard to believe that the ratio between the cost of life and the cost of death doesn't enter into the fact that California still has capital punishment. As a practical matter, a life sentence usually runs about ten years. The California Adult Authority estimates a cost of $4000 to keep an inmate in a California prison for a year; at that rate, the cost of life is $40,000, plus who knows how much inflation. The gas chamber, including $50 for the chaplain, runs only $600 per sniff.

The question of the relative costs of life and death has been taken up many times in court--in negligence cases, in which the defendant is being asked to pay damages to the survivors of someone who was killed or for the survival of someone who was injured. The highest judgment ever exacted for a death I found was awarded by a Chicago jury in 1965 to the kin of John P. Hollerich, a road builder and real-estate developer who earned $100,000 a year: $1,225,000 for dying in a plane crash. The highest amount ever awarded to a living accident victim was $3,650,000, every penny of a claim made by Keith Bush, a totally incapacitated 30-year-old former diesel mechanic from Nevada whose skull had been caved in when a bolt sheared and 1250 pounds of machinery fell on him. A Reno jury last December awarded him $3,000,000--half of this is to cover the cost of his care for the 40 years more he is expected to live--plus $500,000 to his wife and $150,000 to his three children. Perhaps the living get higher judgments than the dead because their claims are tried before a jury of their peers.

So far, 13 people have been frozen to -- 320 degrees Fahrenheit, pending medical resurrection. If you'd like to be cryogenically cooled, it'll run you $8500 in "bottling costs" (stiffs--and, boy, are they ever--are stored in what amount to eight-foot Thermos bottles), plus about $700 a year for replenishing the liquid-nitrogen coolant, maintenance and "postsuspension counseling on future developments." The maintenance costs are paid by the interest from a trust fund you can set up in your will; something like $14,000 in principal will do nicely. Curtis Henderson of the Cryonics Society of New York explains that the $14,000 isn't really out of pocket, since if you're revived, you get the money back.

Now that we're freezing clinically dead but cellularly alive people in the hope that someday medical science will figure out how to revive them, we can compare the costs of live funerals and dead funerals--the good, old-fashioned kind in which they write you off just because you don't have any vital signs and you've cooled off to room temperature. Americans spend an average of $1091.02 for each old-fashioned dead funeral, but this includes a lot of cheap exits. According to The Wall Street Journal, the official American way of death costs a good $2200 to $2500 in Nashville, for instance. The high cost of dying has gotten some Nashville undertakers so concerned they've come up with a new concept. They're building a $2,000,000 mausoleum 20 stories high that will combine mortuary, funeral and entombment facilities under one roof. They're going to charge only $1100 or $1200 for each body, so instead of displaying it in an expensive casket, they're going to lay it out in "the first major change in 20th Century funeral equipment"--something called "bedlike repose," which is available in "Contemporary, Early American, French Provincial and Mediterranean" styles that will "individualize each funeral, yet eliminate the status symbols and high cost usually associated with caskets." Corpses will be wrapped in fiberglass before they're sent upstairs.

Death can be a lot cheaper if you're not into postmortal furniture styles. There are over 100 burial societies in the U.S. that enable members to get the best possible deal on funerals. Payment of a membership fee--$15, typically--entitles you to a "basic funeral." In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, basics include a simple casket, transportation of the body to cemetery or crematory and the necessary legal papers, at a cost of from $100 to $185. Gratuity to clergyman is extra--figure $15 to $35. Burial costs start at $345.

If you really want to avoid being burned, cremation is the way to go: You can be incinerated for between $35 and $100. An urn could run another $50 to $500, but that's easy to beat: Get yourself strewn. Having your ashes scattered at sea costs between $25 and $60.

The cost of death could become very plain to you if your ailing rich uncle, who had just laid $1,000,000 on you for being such a loving nephew, were to suddenly kick off. All gifts over $3000 are taxable, so you'd have gotten only $756,557.50. But in order, I suppose, to encourage generosity, the IRS taxes gifts at a lower rate than bequests. The exception is the "gift in contemplation of death"--a transfer made within three years of passing on, if the purpose is to avoid paying the higher rate. So if poor Uncle Lou were to expire within three years, poor you would be out another $82,257.50.

Kidnapers have a way of forcing relatives of the kidnaped to ponder the cost of life and the cost of death. When the ransom money is handed over, the relatives have no way of knowing whether they'll get their loved ones back alive or dead. The principle seems to be: The more you pay, the less you get. Frank Sinatra, Jr., abducted in 1963, was returned alive after $240,000 was paid. Bobby Greenlease, six, was picked up at a Kansas City Catholic school in 1953 by a woman claiming to be his aunt. His father, a Cadillac dealer, paid $600,000, the highest ransom ever paid in the U.S. Bobby Greenlease, his father soon learned, was shot to death as soon as the money was received. Most countries apparently aren't as curious about the market value of children as we are: It was made illegal to pay ransom some time ago. Presumably, an exception could be made if the stakes were high enough. In 1967, former Congolese premier Moise Tshombe's private plane was highjacked from Spain to Algiers, where he was imprisoned without any charges being preferred, because of his role as a collaborator with European economic interests. He was on the verge of being ransomed by an old friend for no less than $10,000,000--borrowed in the U.S. and England, presumably from some of those economic interests--when he suddenly died of a "heart attack." So the highest individual cost of human life ever calculated never got paid.

In January 1969, then-Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford told Congress, "Clearly, the overriding goal of our collective defense efforts in Asia must be to assist our allies in building a capability to defend themselves. Besides costing substantially less (an Asian soldier costs about one fifteenth as much as his American counterpart)...." Though the good Secretary was uncommunicative as to the price tag on Asian life, Americans have been trading off dollars for human lives and deaths in Asia long enough for us to get a general idea of how much they're worth and to understand why the military thinks Asian soldiers "cost" less than American ones do.

Consider how much it costs when a C-141-transport pilot gets shot down and killed--$128,450 worth of training shot to hell. You'd have a hard time finding an Asian who was worth as much as an F-4-fighter pilot, whose training alone costs $203,160. This doesn't even count the $215 the military spends to prepare his body for shipment back to the States, let alone the flag for his casket ($6.52), transportation for his remains and escort officer ($469) and interment ($539). We Americans don't die cheap.

If you don't believe that Americans place a higher value on life--their own, at any rate--take a look at how much the South Vietnamese government pays the survivors of ARVN soldiers killed in action: $170, more or less, depending on how many kids he had. For every American soldier who dies, the survivors receive a "death gratuity" of from $800 to $3000, according to the dead soldier's rank, plus the proceeds of a $15,000 life-insurance policy.

The amounts we pay to the families of South Vietnamese whom we happen to kill accidentally prove that we are sensitive to the low valuation Asians place on life. The sums are carefully chosen not to be so high as to be insulting. Take the case of Nguyen Van Minh, 12, who was shot and killed a year ago as he was sitting on a high school fence waiting for class, supposedly after soldiers fired warning shots to keep other boys from stealing from an Army truck. We paid $170 for his funeral and $840 in compensation to his relatives. Or the $400 we paid the families of each of 11 people recently killed by mistake in Cambodia. The South Koreans fighting in Vietnam are even more anxious not to offend by offering too much for South Vietnamese lives. When ROK troops mistook a 13-year-old girl for a Viet Cong near An Nhon last December and killed her, they paid a discreet $130 to the little girl's parents.

But though life is cheap there, death seems to be a little on the expensive side--inflicting it, that is. The average B-52 strike in South Vietnam costs some $40,000,000, according to Francis Morse, associate professor of aerospace engineering at Boston University, and results in "a few hundred" casualties at the most. If we take that to mean 300, all killed, to be on the generous side, we're spending approximately $133,333 for each Cong we kill, or enough to set each one up with a regional franchise for McDonald's over here. Morse compares this with the heaviest raids of World War Two, which cost $20,000,000 each and inflicted about 30,000 casualties. Even if only every tenth casualty were a death, the Allies were spending a mere $6667 per death. That's inflation for you.

Yet the true cost of killing the enemy in Vietnam is even higher. In the seven years through fiscal 1971, we spent 119.8 billion dollars on the war. As James Clayton, associate professor of history at the University of Utah, pointed out in a Playboy article, Our Mortgaged Future, in April 1970, the long-term cost of veterans' benefits (as late as 1967, there were 1353 dependents of Civil War veterans getting more than $1,000,000 a year!), national-debt servicing and inflation will more than double the cost of the war. Almost 700,000 enemy are supposed to have been killed in Indochina. Divide that into, say, 240 billion dollars and you get about $343,000 spent to kill each hostile Vietnamese. When you consider that our body count is exaggerated (as Colonel Lucian K. Truscott III, U.S. Army [Ret.], son of the World War Two general, has admitted) and that the 240 billion dollars is probably a low figure, you can see that it would have been less expensive to buy each pro-Communist soldier killed a 640-acre horse farm in the Middleburg, Virginia, hunt country and a lifetime annuity than to kill him.

The Manhattan Project, out of which came the atom bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing an estimated 105,000 people, cost over two billion dollars--precisely $19,048 per dead Japanese. Now we can understand why the ultrahawks have always been in favor of using nuclear weapons to knock off the North Vietnamese: It's the only way to make death in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia nearly as cheap as life is.

As closely as I can tell, the cost of life is a little more than the cost of death more of the time, and the cost of death is a lot more than the cost of life less of the time. But the highest amount quoted for death--$20,000,000 to that overinsured executive--is just double the highest for life: the $10,000,000 that the friend was going to pay to bail out Tshombe. Somewhere between the penny that the ex-Gestapo informer set as the value of a Jewish death and that $20,000,000, we can peg the true cost. Personally, I wouldn't take either sum--nor pay it; I'm saving my money. For one thing, life and death aren't getting any cheaper. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, obstetrical fees were up 5.4 percent last year, funerals 3.6 percent. With the cost of life and the cost of death being inflated along with the rest of the economy, I'm looking into the alternative: the cost of immortality. A while ago, a classified ad appeared in The Wall Street Journal: "Immortality--price $5000." Since this is so much less than, say, the cost of being frozen alive--and sounded so much more comfortable--I answered it. It had been placed by a financially troubled school for brain-injured children that offered to name itself after a generous benefactor. "And yes, Mr. Taxpayer," I was told, "immortality, in this case, is fully deductible."

I wrote to ask whether I could take the deduction all in one year or whether I had to spread it out over eternity. No answer--yet.