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(Note: version 2.04g of PKZIP was used to create this authentication message.) SDN is the major distributor of Shareware and Copyrighted Freeware and users who extract files from an SDN file with the current version of the archive utility ARJ, should see: *** Valid ARJ-SECURITY envelope signature: *** SDN International(sm) SDN#01 R#2417 This file is an SDN International(sm) Author-Direct Distribution. It should be verified for the SDN Security Seal by the FileTest utility available at The SDN Project AuthorLine BBS 203-634-0370. (Note: prior to about May, 1993, SDN used PAK to archive its distributions and its authenticity message differs from the above.) Trust only genuine AFI-packaged archives ... anything else may be just that: ANYTHING ELSE. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ISSN 1054-0695 SHAREDEBATE INTERNATIONAL ========================= Volume 3(4) Winter 1993/1994 Diskette number 13 (BBS Filename: DBATE013) Roleigh H. Martin, Editor Copyright 1993 by Applied Foresight Inc. All Rights Reserved. (Material by Individual Authors May Be Copyrighted Differently) Published by Applied Foresight, Inc. P.O. Box 20607 Bloomington MN 55420, USA CompuServe ID: 71510,1042 ----------------------------------------------------------- -- A Freeware Diskette-Magazine of Nonfiction & Fiction --- ------- Original & Reprints -- Published Quarterly ------- ------ ------ ----- "An International Debate Forum for Computer Users --- -------- Concerned about the Present and the Future" ------ ----------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------- +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ From the Editor's Desk: Hello again! I had originally planned to focus on the actual legislation of the Clinton Health Act this issue, however as seen in the supplement to the last issue, which contains the full non-graphic text of the Act, it is very long. I have not finished reading this horrendous legislation in time for this issue. However, for those concerned about their own health care and that of their offspring, you should read it and heavily complain. The dirt is in the details and you can be sure that the glossy overview given the legislation by the press and the White House do not focus on the dirt. The press has led me to believe that legislation won't be voted on until well into 1994 so I hope to have a review of the legislation by the first quarter issue next year (1994). As to why the press is over 99% on the side of the State versus being on the side of the citizen, this issue does present the best insight into why that I've ever read. The late Warren Brookes is reprinted courtesy of the Cato Institute and is our lead essay. The other essay in this issue is from a great science fiction writer, L. Neil Smith, courtesy of another science fiction writer and acquaintance of mine, J. Neil Schulman. (J. Neil Schulman is also an electronic publisher of liberty oriented fiction and non-fiction and a past contributor of original and reprinted material in ShareDebate International.) L. Neil Smith's paper is also a speech and addresses the need for libertarians to capture the heart and soul of fiction lovers (of books and film). He also mentions the same thing about conservatives too. Even if one feels that L. Neil Smith is too much of a libertarian for their taste, he is correct in his assessment and there is definitely a need for libertarians and conservatives to create popular movies and novels. A SIDE NOTE ON HOW AFFIRMATIVE ACTION KILLS On a side note, take note of this alarming thing that is detrimental to citizens of all races that the Clinton administration is trying to sneak by. According to George Will somewhere in the middle of 1992 (I should have written down the date on the tear sheet of this column), in his column entitled "This administration resembles that of LBJ," he wrote: "The 1991 Civil Rights Act supposedly outlawed race-norming. But Section 403 of Clinton's education bill calls for a system of assessment and certification of skill standards that utilizes 'certification techniques that are designed to avoid disparate impacts (which for the purposes of this subparagraph, means substantially different rates of certification) against individuals based on race, gender, age, ethnicity, disability or national origin.' This is race-norming (and gender-norming, etc.)." (Since then, in an American Spectator article that I've misplaced, there is mention that Clinton legislation is also trying to get the government to create national job standards that are non- discriminatory--you know, where almost anyone could pass the dumbed-down standards--for most jobs in the private sector. The intent is to have civil rights law suits use these standards instead of those used by employers now--which vary from employer to employer and rightly so--with the end result being that employers will have to hire by the population density numbers. The end result will be that cities and inner-ring suburbs will be vacated by businesses quickly in a rush to get away from this madness. If blacks think they have it bad now, it's only going to get worse and all because of liberal madness. In mentioning the source above, The American Spectator, I'm reminded of a great bumper sticker that I've seen advertised: "DON'T BLAME ME -- I READ THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR.") Affirmative action and race-norming is, de facto, reversed-racism. Until now, it has been perceived as a form of injustice hurting mostly the victim (White or Asian). However, Tucker Carlson in the November 3, 1993 issue of the Wall Street Journal (p. A15), writes that affirmative action, dumbing down entrance tests and residency-requirements (inspired as a sneaky form of affirmative action) have destroyed the effectiveness of the Washington, D.C.'s police force. All three changes have been those favored by civil rights leaders. On a per-capita basis, Washington, D.C., is a leading murder city with over 376 murders at the time of the column. However, in the 1950s, Carlson notes, "it was not uncommon for detectives to solve all the district's murder cases in a given year." Now, according to the Washington Post, "police failed to arrest anybody in nearly half the city's murder cases between 1988 and 1990. And for the 1,286 killings during those years, only 94 people were convicted of first-degree murder." What do you want to bet that more blacks are being killed indirectly, but definitely by such, civil rights enactments (affirmative action, changing residency requirements, dumbing down entrance tests), than were ever killed by the KKK? As a minority-race family member, I am 100% opposed to affirmative action and similar civil rights strategies (changing residency requirements and dumbing down entrance tests). Most so-called black civil rights leaders are nothing more than spoon-fed Uncle Toms' who are doing minority groups far more harm than the most racist White groups have ever done. (By "racist White groups," I'm limiting myself to private sector groups -- I agree with Epstein--see below--that the worse racism in the past to overcome was that institutionalized by government.) I highly recommend the works of Jared Taylor ("Paved with Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America", 1992, New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers), Richard A. Epstein ("Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws, 1992, Cambridge: Harvard University Press), and the books of conservative black economists Walter E. Williams and Thomas Sowell. SHAREDEBATE AND PARKINSON'S LAW In debate topic 8 introduced in issue 2, 1990, "Entrepreneurial Democracy, a multitude of legislative improvements were suggested, including letting legislators vote in privacy to allow them to vote their conscience rather than per lobbying pressure. By itself, it wouldn't be the best improvement, as most legislators are lawyers and hence to isolate legislators from other occupational influence could be detrimental. However, voters would quickly catch on that legislators would have to be judged by their team- results and their past-occupational perspective, so I could go along for such a single improvement. Anyway, in the American Spectator, June 1993, in an appreciation of C. Northcote Parkinson by John Train, this idea is brought up again. It reads "Parkinson thought that both the American and British legislative systems were seriously defective, and proposed a solution: secret voting. 'You may be aware,' he once said to me, 'that until the nineteenth century, popular elections took place in public, on the 'hustings.' A man would spring up and cry, 'I vote for Sir James!' Obviously, this invited every sort of pressure and bribery, and in due course popular votes were made secret. In the legislature voting remained public. Why?" I'm not claiming that I beat Parkinson to the punch with my suggestion. However, it puts me in with very good company, even if I stumbled onto the idea second (or third, etc.). IN ENDING THIS EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION Both speeches in this issue are outstanding, and I know you'll like this issue! Until next year and Happy Holidays! ### +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The National Press and The Statist Quo by Warren T. Brookes Reprinted from Cato Policy Report September/October 1993, Volume 15(5) by permission of David Boaz, Editor Cato Policy Report, 1000 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington DC 20001 Cato Policy Report Editor's Note: The late Warren T. Brookes was a columnist for the Detroit News and author of The Economy in Mind. He delivered this speech to the Cato Institute's Benefactor Summit in April 1989. On January 28, 1980, President Ronald Reagan completed what President Jimmy Carter had started. He deregulated the price of oil and ended the "oil shortage." With that single stroke of a pen, he also began the demise of the current career activity of at least 1,000 journalists and writers around the country, and more than a hundred in Washington alone, who were then specializing in the "energy beat." Within a year, the nation and the world were in a demonstrably developing oil glut, prices were easing down, and OPEC was in such disarray that by 1986 Vice President George Bush was begging the Saudis to keep oil from falling below $10 a barrel. To put it bluntly, the energy news beat has all but disappeared. If the current Energy secretary were to call a news conference to talk about the nation's energy problems, he'd have trouble getting a quorum in his private office, and the reporters' first question might be to ask his name. I have cited that example for only one reason: it illustrates something I have observed over the last five years since I moved from Boston to Washington. The national press is not liberal, per se, so much as it is statist. That is, it is committed to the promotion of an ever more intrusive government presence in every aspect of our lives, except, of course, the press and media themselves. However, contrary to popular opinion, its commitment is not ideological as much as a matter of what Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan has defined for the world, namely, "public choice," the idea that politicians and bureaucrats face a different set of incentives than do actors in the private market. The press shares those public-sector incentives. It was no accident that when we began the war on poverty, poverty was falling every year by about 5 percent, but within two years that steady progress was stopped and within five years it was reversed. Hundreds of billions of dollars and two decades later, we have permanently institutionalized poverty at a higher and more disastrous and socially debilitating level. Yet what should we expect when we created a vast institutional system whose very existence depends not on reducing poverty but on keeping it going, and expanding? Now, just as the bureaucracy is motivated by its institutional prerogatives and incentives, so the press, which covers their activities and programs, is equally motivated by institutional self-interest. The motivations coincide from A to Z. Government-Media Symbiosis The press is quite rightly perceived to be the principal watchdog of government, while the market is the principal watchdog of the private economy. Any activity that moves out of the market and into the purview of government exchanges the watchdogs of the market for the watchdogs of the press. Indeed, government must have a watchdog precisely because it is not ruled by the disciplines of the market. Unhappily, just as the government needs the press to watch and cover it, so the press needs government for its beat and its sources (not to mention, in Washington, its circulation). This is why the press makes a pretty lousy watchdog, because it is too easily and completely housebroken into a lap dog watching out for its master's basic self-interest-for the simple reason that its interests are so exactly parallel to those of government. If you doubt that, I ask you merely to consider how exactly the rise of the national press corps in Washington has paralleled the rise in the power and interventionism of the federal government (see accompanying table). In 1936 only 2,355 pages of federal rules and regulations were published in the Federal Register, the total congressional staff numbered fewer than 2,100, and the Washington press corps could gather, en masse, a few hundred strong in a modest meeting room in the Mayflower Hotel. By 1956 the Federal Register was publishing 10,528 pages of new rules and regs a year, the congressional staff was up to nearly 6,000, and the Washington press corps had doubled. By 1968 the Register was publishing nearly 21,000 pages a year, the congressional staff was more than 11,000, and the Washington press corps was up to nearly 1,600. Then the Great Society really exploded, and in 1980 the Federal Register published an astonishing 87,000 pages in a single year, and the congressional staff was over 17,000 not counting any of its numerous support agencies (Library of Congress, General Accounting Office, Congressional Budget Office, and Office of Technology Assessment). ----------------------------------------------------- Growth of Government and the Washington Press Corp Federal Wash- Federal Congress- Expend- ington Capitol Register ional itures Press Press (Pages) Staff (% of GNP) Corp Gallery 1936 2,355 2,087 10.2 437 398 1956 10,528 5,938 16.0 873 697 1968 20,068 11,180 20.5 1,581 996 1976 57,072 16,062 22.1 2,556 1,144 1980 87,012 17,300 22.5 3,026 1,340 1987 57,882 19,982 23.7 3,937 1,960 1988-8 53,376 20,370 22.2 4,529 2,000 Sources: Congressional Research Service, Hudson Media Guide, Office of Management and Budget, and Federal Register ----------------------------------------------------- Not surprisingly, to cover all of the vastly increased confrontation, chaos, and general all-around corruption of power, the Washington press corps had soared to a little over 3,000. So instead of watchdogging and containing the massive explosion of government, the media became its biggest cheerleader, and one of its principal beneficiaries. The "statist quo" was expanding at a geometric rate, and the press was happily aboard the federal gravy train. We see that statist tendency in microcosm in what is called the "boys on the bus" syndrome in political campaigns--the press following a candidate tends to promote him. And why not? If the candidate is hot, the reporter's coverage is featured, and his role expanded. If the candidate is failing, the covering press corps faces a drought. Thus they want to believe his or her handouts and stroking because it is in their individual self-interest that their beat get stronger, not weaker, that their candidate win. It is safe to say, for example, that Judy Woodruff is a national news figure today because she unabashedly hitched her fortunes as a local Georgia TV reporter to Jimmy Carter's 1976 candidacy. A more recent example: In June 1988 the state of Massachusetts was collapsing into fiscal insolvency, borrowing large chunks of costly short-term money, $200 million to $300 million at a crack every four weeks just to meet current payrolls. In just two years, Massachusetts had turned a $900-million 1986 surplus into a $500-million 1988 deficit, sure proof that contrary to Michael Dukakis's rhetoric, the state's budget had not really been balanced since 1986. The fiscal and economic crisis and the obvious mismanagement behind it escalated noisily in the Boston press, from March to October, so much so that Dukakis had to spend two weeks in August on the road in Massachusetts just to save his home state. Yet, aside from the Wall Street Journal and Detroit News editorial pages, and my own nationally syndicated columns, there was hardly a peep about that fiscal nightmare in the national press, and especially not from the boys on the Dukakis bus. No wonder voters were shocked when George Bush displayed that late October Boston Herald front page with the headline "What a Mess!" Even then the networks dismissed that story as the baseless ravings of a Murdoch right-wing newspaper with-out any credibility. Dukakis was instead portrayed as a fiscal wizard who had balanced 10 budgets, and made the state economy turn around. Early in 1989 Standard and Poor's placed Massachusetts on the "critical watch list" after the state announced it was borrowing another $650 million just to meet current local aid and payroll commitments. The state is facing a $700-million tax increase and another $1-billion gap for 1990, and Dukakis now has a 19 percent positive job rating, the lowest in state history-just six months after he came within seven points of winning a national election as the Massachusetts miracle worker. Now, had the national media reported the developing fiscal calamity even as much as the liberal Boston Globe did, Bush would easily have won a major landslide, perhaps even 49 states, and very well might have won a Republican majority in the Senate. But, not only would that have been bad for ratings and circulation in the campaign, it would have been even more dangerous to the Washington establishment (including the press) bent on a larger government enterprise. It was not a Democrat vs. Republican thing as much as a "Potomac Preservation Society" enterprise- -the active pursuit of the statist quo. No wonder Dukakis's humongous average spending rise of 11 percent a year--more than double the nation's--was repeatedly called "fiscally conservative." Sadly, most of the Washington national press beat is nothing more than an extension of the campaign bus. The success of government statism is inextricably linked to the size of the news beat. If you are covering the Interstate Commerce Commission for the Journal of Commerce, you do not say the obvious, namely, that the agency is irrelevant and should have been abolished eight years ago. Some 30 trade-press and news reporters and half a dozen newsletters depend on that agency beat. If you are covering Congressman John Dingell's Energy and Commerce Committee, you do not expose his lynch-mob bullying of witnesses, or his terrorist inquisition of the ultimately exonerated Ted Olson, or his use of questionable investigators, or his protection of obsolete government agencies and regulations, or his stonewall against drug testing for railroad unions and Teamster drivers. If you did, your sources on that vast and powerful committee would disappear, your access to its powerful chairman would end. Columnists can live with that. Reporters can't. So, if you want to stay on the beat, you stroke those in permanent power, whether they are in the bureaucracy or on incumbent-dominated Capitol Hill. You may well think the 50 percent pay raise was outrageous, but you keep your mouth shut until the local radio talk shows force you to note "growing public sentiment against it." Then you gripe in public columns that those rabble rousers are not "serious journalists." Just as government's basic incentive is always to accrue power, funding, and personnel--that is, to aggrandize itself, to expand its turf--collaterally, its watchdog, the media, quickly discovers that the bigger and more powerful government becomes, the bigger and more powerful the media become. With more and more turf to watch, more and more watchdogs are needed. At first, some watchdogs may occasionally bite their masters and make a mess on their turf, but such watchdogs are quickly turned into protectors by the threat of taking away their daily food. You do not bite the hand that is feeding you very often before you are sent to the press pound. The Media's Crisis Beat Moreover, most watchdogs soon discover that the more government intervenes in any and all aspects of our lives, especially the economy, the more crises, controversies, and mayhem there are to report and to analyze. In short, such intervention nearly always generates more grist for the media mill. To ask a government bureaucracy to resolve a perceived societal or economic problem is, by definition, to give active incentives to a group of powerful people to make the problem worse, and their biggest ally will be the press for whom crisis and catastrophe are dietary staples. When the government created the energy crisis by imposing price controls on oil and gas, thus giving OPEC the only underpinning it needed, the press immediately began to do the government's work, to hype the size of the problem, define and expand its dimensions, obfuscate its origins, and above all, attack the private producers as the culprits of conspiracy. It probably never dawned on 99 percent of those who climbed onto that "energy beat" that the problem was entirely the creation of government policy and that the fastest way to end the "crisis" was to get government out of the way. When that thought did occasionally occur, it was quickly dismissed and correctly perceived as institutionally suicidal. Instead, we were treated with a seven-year escalating drumbeat of demands for more and more government action, up to and including the actual takeover by government of U. S. oil business (can you imagine the crisis that would have created?), not to mention the endorsement of a whole series of policy actions that seemed to have the diabolical design of making the crisis worse. Does anyone recall, for example, the so-called oil entitlement program by which we taxed price-controlled domestic producers for every barrel they shipped, and then gave that tax penalty to East Coast importers for every barrel they imported so as to "equalize the domestic price"? Except for a few stray columns by free-market economists, the national press was wholly oblivious to that astonishing government policy, which deliberately punished domestic production and rewarded OPEC. Small wonder they were stunned when, the moment after deregulation, the price of OPEC oil began to fall and production of domestic oil began to rise. Not surprisingly, when President Reagan ended oil price controls, those on the energy beat without exception predicted a disaster of greed, with gasoline prices headed for $3.00 a gallon and oil prices to $60 to $100 a barrel. Even the industry in Texas believed the predictions; it went out and put 4,000 drilling rigs to work and began looting savings-and-loans to build new office buildings. Happily, but also sadly, the media were incredibly, awfully wrong--because, from their own public policy perspective, they could not imagine how any important problem, especially one that they had become so expert in "covering," could be solved by killing government's role, when that meant killing their own role as well. There is an even more recent example. Last month the Agency for International Development (AID) released a remarkable 160-page study that showed that foreign aid had not merely been ineffective but had done positive harm. The larger the aid, the bigger the harm. Yet instead of reaching the obvious conclusion that we should abolish most of the $15-billion foreign aid program--not to save money but simply to reduce human tragedy-AID protected its bureaucratic turf by arguing that the program should be reformed. It's no surprise that the same conclusion was reached by the House Foreign Affairs staff--or that the conclusion reached by the dozen or so key Washington reporters assigned to the foreign aid and lending beat was identical. Not one of them pointed out that the AID report had confirmed the 40 years of world-renowned development research of Peter Bauer showing that foreign aid is counterproductive to economic growth and development, because governments are the biggest inhibitors of market-based policies, and giving governments aid merely encourages them to do more harm. But reporters who depend for their beat on the people doing that harm are not likely to revere or refer to Bauer. Indeed, the AID report itself conspicuously left all reference to Bauer's massive seminal work on the subject out of its four-page bibliography, which is a little like a basic economics text never mentioning Adam Smith. If you understand all this, you will also understand why the two dirtiest words in the national press parlance these days are "deregulation" and "privatization." Today, for example, polls show that even though airline accident and fatality rates have been cut by 50 percent since deregulation and real fares cut by nearly 30 percent, 60 percent of the American people believe deregulation has made the airlines less safe and more costly and want reregulation. They learned that from a relentlessly reregulationist press. Is the Post a Company Paper? Similarly, even though privatization is sweeping the socialist world, it has been virtually stalled in the United States. In 1988 a distinguished presidential commission delivered a ringing and well- documented endorsement of a whole series of privatization initiatives, from repealing the private express statutes (that preserve the postal monopoly) to private contracting for prisons to extending private choice in education. Unfortunately, that report disappeared without a trace. It got one modest story in the Washington Post and a 30-second sound bite on network news, where it was mostly dismissed as an ideological last bequest of a dying administration, written by zealots. Yet the chairman of the commission was a lifelong liberal Democrat named David Linowes, brother of the famous Sol Linowitz, a media foreign policy darling. Linowes frankly confessed over lunch one day his amazement that his message was almost totally shut out by the Washington Post, which had earlier given another commission he chaired favorable exposure. I suggested to him that the Post had a fundamental public-choice conflict with the whole direction of his report. The Post, after all, is the "company paper" for the nation's number-one government town. Anyone or anything that threatens government's basic role is definitely a threat to the Post's own lifeblood. After all, to "privatize" is to take something out of the public view and concern, to return it to the nonpolitical sector, to depublicize it, if you will. Privatization, then, is the quintessential threat to the quintessential government press. Small wonder the press has not told the American people that over the last five years Congress has passed 76--repeat 76--bans to stop the administration from even studying the cost-saving potential of privatization of everything from the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Bonneville Power Administration to the veterans' hospitals, the federal prisons, the Postal Service, you name it. One who has even applauded that congressional book burning is the Post's Hobart Rowen, a strong free-trade advocate but one of the leading critics of privatization. To call Rowen a liberal misses the point. To call him a statist is more precise. Which is to say that 40 years on the Washington economic beat have conditioned him to think in terms not of abolishing the regulatory and financial institutional arrangements he covers day by day but of making them work better. That is why, incidentally, he gave short shrift to his former colleague William Greider's brilliant book Secrets of the Temple, which exposes the anti- democratic and institutionally dangerous power of the Federal Reserve and savages an institution that the Washington financial news corps treats with total reverence. Indeed, if you don't treat it that way, they shut you out of the loop and your usefulness as a financial or economic journalist can be destroyed. That is why you will almost never see reporters (as opposed to columnists) challenge Fed policy. Even though the Federal Reserve is directly responsible for the greatest economic disasters of U.S. history--from the Great Depression to the Great Inflation to the Great Crash of 1987--it has never gotten bad press. In 1984, when the Fed unaccountably drove interest rates and the dollar up by nearly 20 percent to cool a long-awaited recovery, it directly caused 100,000 farmers and several hundred banks and S&Ls to go broke. Yet in all the thousands of lines of bathos prose on those victims, the role of Fed policy was virtually never mentioned. That is because, if you are covering the Vatican, you do not beat up on the Pope. If you are covering the Curia on C Street, you worship at its altar--or you don't get back in the front gate. These sacrosanct institutions, the Fed, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, after all, are the full-time beat of Bart Rowen and his Washington financial news colleagues, their bread and butter. To challenge their existence would be to question their own life work, and incidentally the life work of the Washington Post whose being is tied to the fortunes of expanding government. Not only does the Post's circulation flow directly from a metropolitan area grown rich entirely as a result of an expanding federal government role in the economy and world, but its readers in the permanent bureaucracy are also its principal news sources. You do not idly bite the hand that is not only feeding you but ponying up $2.50 a week to read you, and supporting hundreds of pages a week of classified and display advertising. That does not mean that the Post will not slap the wrists of government workers and politicians. That it often does with great gusto and consistency and value. I applaud them for it, but I have also noted that the overwhelming focus of the Post's most aggressive pursuits is the anti-statists. The Post will almost never undermine the committed statist or the essential role of any government bureaucracy, or call for its abolition or defunding. The paper's perspective is usually to try to get the bureaucracy "more adequately funded." That explains the Post's massive and continuous campaign, especially in 1988 and 1989, to sell the need for higher taxes to "reduce the deficit." Its editorial and news writers are too smart not to know that every tax increase has simply generated higher levels of spending. Nor can they ignore the fact that since 1985 the big federal deficit has forced the steady reduction in federal spending as a share of GNP to its lowest level since 1979. That is precisely why the Post boldly called in 1988 for a $140-billion tax increase to "eliminate the deficit." Surely the Post is too wise not to know that a $140-billion tax increase will so cripple the economy as to make the deficit double. But it also knows that any tax increase will push spending back on the upward track. Why would the Post's position be any different? The massive expansion of the Washington establishment, which has in just the last three decades created five of the six richest counties in America, has been matched by two correlative happy developments: first, the demise of the less statist Washington Star, and second, the soaring and dominant circulation and advertising position of the Post as one of the most profitable news organizations in America. The Press and the Reaganites Should it really surprise anyone that the entire symbiotic statist quo network viewed Ronald Reagan and his tax-cutting, government-cutting ideas with such fear and loathing? Sadly, the Reaganites, like the Bushies, foolishly thought the Washington press corps would soon get used to their exciting new revolution and give it a chance. David Stockman agreed to have breakfast every week and bare his soul to the Washington Post's Bill Greider because Greider had convinced him he would be making history. He sure did. But he also discovered, as others did, that it was more in his financial self-interest to trash the president than to defend him. The Post, like the networks, has the power to confer celebrity and vast personal capital on those who share their own statist agenda, and to destroy those who do not. That is why, in most cases, politicians elected by middle-of-the-road to moderately conservative constituencies move to the statist quo left when they get to Washington, unless they are from safe Republican districts. House Speaker James Wright comes from a solidly conservative defense-minded, anti-tax district in Texas. Yet he has steadily voted more and more liberal. Thus, despite a repeatedly checkered ethical record since the early 1960s, Wright has grown steadily in political celebrity. When Newt Gingrich took him on a year ago, he couldn't find 10 Republicans to sign his petition for an ethics investigation until after Common Cause (one of the most statist lobbies in Washington) finally said it was a good idea. When Wright came to Congress, he routinely scored less than 30 with the left-wing Americans for Democratic Action. Today, he routinely scores in the 80 to 90 percent range. His pattern is duplicated in one moderate district after another. The statist incentive is obvious: To grow as a politician, you need national press. The press needs more statism. You may run at home as a moderate or even as a conservative, but when you get to Washington you speak and vote the line that will get you most favorable media exposure. In Washington, if you attack the statist quo, you will either not get any exposure or you won't like what you get. That is why the comparatively few true Reaganites had to be quickly destroyed when they came to town in 1981. After all, if Reagan really had succeeded, the Washington press corps' and the Post's power and influence would have diminished, not risen. But with their vast army of leakers in permanent bureaucracy with instant access not only to the details of current policy actions but to the regulatory records of the once-corporate Reaganites, the Post and its faithful fellow lap dogs in the national press had life-and- death control over the Reaganites' careers. With 60,000 to 80,000 pages of new rules and regulations published every year, it is virtually impossible for anyone of any accomplishment in the private business sector not to have violated consciously or unconsciously one or more of that vast network of legalistic traps, from occupational safety to the environment to corporate cost accounting for taxation and securities issuance--the list of potential hazards is infinite. Now you know why some 240 Reaganites left the administration "under a cloud." Only a handful ever did anything like break a real criminal law--and most of those cases involved perjury before Congress, which is very nearly an oxymoron in itself. In most cases, they were forced to leave when some story mysteriously appeared in the press suggesting they might have violated some rule or regulation, not in government but in their private business lives. Never mind that in virtually all of those cases, exhaustive investigation and even costly litigation failed to turn up a criminal or even an unethical act; the public careers of those individuals were permanently ended. That's how we lost Jim Beggs, the brilliant and honest head of NASA, six weeks before the Challenger disaster. He was suddenly confronted by charges that were eventually dropped because they proved to be wholly scurrilous, but not before nearly three full years of litigious horror. Beggs's crime? He was a strong proponent of privatizing more and more of NASA's mission. To put it bluntly, the permanent Potomac establishment let it be known early and often that they would not give up without harm or foul--and within a short time most of the anti-government steam of the early Reaganites had disappeared. As a result, while the expansion of the press corps and its turf was slowed somewhat under Reagan, it continued nevertheless, rising to the latest count of 4,529, even as the staffs on Capitol Hill have risen to more than 20,000. While the Federal Register has been cut back to fewer than 60,000 pages a year under Reagan, that's still triple what it was just 20 years ago. Yet that massive press corps is almost completely a docile herd, following superficial stories and leaving vast areas of government action uncovered. When I first moved to Washington as a columnist in 1984, I was astonished to discover how easy it was to break stories about government waste and scoop the Post. I could recount at least two dozen times when I did stories that the Post was later forced to report in more detail. Yet in all cases, I knew that the Post or other national press types had those stories. Again and again, I would be amazed at how long I could sit on them safely before publication without fear of being scooped. Case in point: on June 10, 1987, Bill White, then the Democratic member of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, was scheduled to present a report to the House Banking Committee that proved conclusively that 95 percent of the Texas S&L failures were due to fraud and corruption. Suddenly, as he was about to present that message, Chairman Fernand St. Germain got a courier message from Speaker Wright's office, and St. Germain dismissed White's testimony entirely. You would have thought that the beat reporters would have front-paged the story the next day. Nothing. Two weeks later I found out about the incident from an FHLBB staffer, picked up the White testimony from its press office, and broke the story on July 9 as part of a series--a full month after the event. The Wall Street Journal and the Post carried the story on July 13. I later realized that, in many cases, those stories hurt my access to the higher levels of government agencies, or to congressmen or senators whose turf I was savaging. If I had been a reporter on those beats, I would have been out of a job. My editor would have been forced to transfer me to another beat. I began to realize that the permanent bureaucracies own the Washington press corps, because that press corps desperately needs them and their turf for survival. Now you know why we have drifted into a 98 percent incumbency. That, it seems to me, is the ultimate confirmation of the Founding Fathers' strong concern about the dangers of a central federal government--their belief that government works best at the most local level. The End of the Statist Quo There is a logistical reason for that and it underlies the press's predilection for the statist quo. At the city and town level there are approximately 25 bureaucrats for very elected official. Not much press watchdogging is needed. At the state level there are about 320 bureaucrats for every elected official. More press watchdogging required. At the federal level the ratio is 5,900 to 1. A veritable press army couldn't restrain them. That means that elected officials in Washington are as hopelessly the captives of the permanent bureaucracy as are the individual beat reporters and their editors. Reporters and editors who attempt to challenge those odds are automatically risking the basic resource on which they depend, information, leaks, access. Our bread is now so buttered by government, we have become its agents. And because government is almost invariably the source of our nation's problems, the press has become part of the problem, not of the solution. Short of a real political revolution, there is only one answer to this mess, and it is on the horizon. That is the worldwide information revolution and financial market integration that are rapidly making national governments obsolete. They are also making the national press obsolete. One final example to illustrate: Last January politicians huffed and blustered back into Washington determined "to do something" to stop the rising tide of leveraged buyouts. That bluster has now virtually disappeared. The reason is simple. A host of expert witnesses has exposed congressmen to the reality that in the world financial markets not only has it become impossible to prevent such deal making (without shooting ourselves in the foot), but that most of the deal making has been remarkably healthy in restructuring the nation's top-heavy corporate bureaucracies. Fortunately, in a world where information is now capital and capital is now information, legislated protection is not merely dangerous, it is inevitably irrelevant. Corporations that have overconglomerated and no longer perform soon discover that parts of their systems are worth more than the whole. Financial markets are now incredibly quick to capitalize on such undervaluations and rectify them. The resulting restructuring is not pretty--indeed, it is often bloody--but it has generated the greatest rise in U. S. manufacturing productivity in postwar history. As George Gilder predicts in the last chapter of Cato's An American Vision, the information revolution sweeping the world today will have the effect of decentralizing power back to the individual, and away from statist politicians. The personal computer means that more and more the world economy is in us--in our hands. Rather than our being helpless pawns in a world economy, we can now participate in a 24-hour rolling referendum on the stupidity of governments and politicians. Individual power and self-government are the wave of the future. Bureaucratic power and fiat are the dying wave of the past. Just as the networks are now falling apart because of competition of non-network and local media, the national press corps is rapidly degenerating into a dinosaur still looking to revive the once Great Society, to preserve the statist quo. They may be successful for a few more years in protecting their diminishing turf, but they are as obsolete as the huge marble-lined bureaucratic halls they now protect and cover. The public is beginning to understand that government as we have known it in the last 50 years of its institutional heyday is a relic and a millstone. We have seen the statist quo and we know it doesn't work. But don't expect the national press to admit that and rush to cover its own demise. ### +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The following is the transcript of a speech given at the December 1987 Future of Freedom Conference held at the Pacifica Hotel in Culver City, California. Copyright (c) 1987 by L. Neil Smith. All rights reserved. Reprinted via permission of J. Neil Schulman, President SoftServ Publishing Services, Inc., who supplied me with many reprintable items that he had gained reprint and distribution rights to. SoftServ has its own 24-hour bbs, the SoftServ Paperless Bookstore at its NEW PHONE NUMBERS: 213-827-3160 (modem) and 213-827-7259 (voice). They are ready again to receive your modem calls 24-hours a day at speeds up to 14,400 baud, and voice calls weekdays between 10:00 AM and 6:00 PM Pacific Time. (SoftServ's modem line [213-827-3160] is initialized to accept calls from U.S. Robotics Courier HST modems at speeds up to 14,400 baud in HST mode. If you have a V.32 9600 baud modem, please call the voice line [213- 827-7259] with your modem, since the modem on the voice line is initialized to accept calls from V.32 modems at speeds up to 9600 baud. If you have a US Robotics Courier HST DUAL STANDARD modem, you can connect at HST rates on either number. But please note: the voice line accepts modem calls only if you can touchtone in the number 25 after the phone picks up, to tell our phone to connect you to the modem. Without a 25 after the phone picks up, the system has no way of knowing if it's a voice call, a modem call, or a fax call, and nothing will happen.) *************************************** UNANIMOUS CONSENT AND THE UTOPIAN VISION or I DREAMED I WAS A SIGNATORY IN MY MAIDENFORM BRA by L. Neil Smith The relative invisibility of Libertarianism after 40 years of backbreaking, heartbreaking labor, has little to do with any lack of money, ideas, personnel, or anything else Libertarians may occasionally whine about. It isn't the fault of an evil northeastern Liberal conspiracy. Nor, as the more timid among us often recommend, is it reason to tone down Libertarian rhetoric, to soften principle or its expression, to make it more conservative or "practical" in approach. All of that has been tried, again & again. What Libertarians lack, in their hearts & minds, what they fail to communicate to others, is a vision of the new civilization they intend creating. It may be sufficient motivation, for Libertarians, that America today, politically, economically, socially, is repulsive. It may be enough, for Libertarians, that what they propose is morally right. It is not enough for others. Most people require a fairly concrete picture of the future which will motivate them to learn what Libertarians mean by "right" & "wrong", & inspire them to work toward its fulfillment. It may appear contradictory that the achievement of practical ends relies on fantasy. Nothing could be further from the truth. What Libertarians need is a foot in the door. There's no conflict between imagination & realism, any more than there is between "radical abolitionist" & "moderate gradualism". Each has a role in the creation of progress. Neither can afford to try operating without the other. Division-of- labor is more than an abstract economic principle, it's a matter of life or death for the cause of individual liberty. Utopianism, far from being a hindrance or embarrassment, is a vital, effective means toward that goal. Libertarians take their own philosophy too much for granted. Their concept of what it can accomplish is too abstract. They wrongly assume others can see its potential as clearly as they do. They often fail to see it themselves. As a remedy, they must ask themselves, each day for the rest of their lives, certain fundamental questions. Why are we Libertarians? What do we wish to accomplish? What constitutes success? By what signs will we know we've won? What's in it for us? What's in it for me? What do I really want? Their present answers range from the negative to the obscure. 'Well, you know ..." "Because I want to see that bastard (the idea's to insert the bastard of your choice) get what's coming to him!" "Because what's going on now is wrong & I want to stop it" "Because I'm afraid civilization's gonna collapse unless we do something". A common variation noted by Dave Nolan is, "Because I know civilization is going to collapse --& I wanna be around to say 'I told you so'!" The best of this rather unsatisfactory lot I first heard from English Libertarians who said, "Because, even if I were convinced my efforts would came to nothing, I can't honestly imagine doing anything else." I'd like to share with you some of my answers. Before I began spreading them around through my novels, they were somewhat different from those of most Libertarians. To the extent that I'm a fanatic, they're responsible. They're what drive & motivate me. They're the reason I'll keep disturbing the peace until I'm hauled off to some 21st Century Super-Dachau & lasered to death, or the pigeons are paying respects to my statue in some private city park. One, of course, comes from years of filling my head with "garbage", pulp science fiction in which I watched cultures, societies, whole galactic empires created, tinkered with, torn down, & built all over again by talented (& some not-so-talented) yarn-spinners who, like me, were obsessed with finding out what makes civilizations tick. They taught me that the future is malleable, mutable, sometimes even by one person standing at a sensitive-enough leverage point. I've been looking for that leverage-point ever since. I have an idea what I want the future to look like. I want a principal role in its making. In short, I have my own Utopian dream, rooted in the Libertarian philosophy of Unanimous Consent. I want to see it come true soon enough to enjoy it myself. That's what I really want. Many years ago, Joan Baez commented smugly that there are no right-wing foIk songs. I'd noticed the same thing, but as a professional guitar player busily compromising his new-fledged Objectivist principles to the Goldwater campaign, I was disinclined to gloat about it. There are no right-wing Utopias, either, no novels of the colorful Buckleyite future. The conservative view of heaven is the status quo ante --a dead, flat, black-&-white daguerreotype of a past that never existed. Any status quo will do, as long as it ain't Red. If people are tortured in banana republic jails, it's acceptable as long as they're not Communist jails. If a long train of abuses & usurpations are visited upon individual freedom in this country, it's fine, as long as they're not left-wing abuses & usurpations, & even better, if they're in the name of National Security. Traditionally, Utopia is the territory of the left. Imaginative stories gave ordinary people images of what had previously been abstractions, & this had more to do with the progress of socialism than anything Marx, Engels, Lenin or Geraldo Rivera ever did. The dictionary, in a burst of candor, defines Utopia as "the ideal state where all is ordered for the best, for mankind as a whole, & evils such as poverty & misery do not exist": not only self-contradictory in practice, but more than sufficient reason why Utopia is a province populated, almost exclusively, by the enemies of freedom. However, the word "Utopia" only became synonymous with ''impossible dream" when the internal inconsistencies, the inherent cynicism, the utter failure of socialism became unmistakable to everyone. In some instances, its sterile, no-exit character was already visible in the pages of otherwise optimistic Victorian novels before it became political reality, & Utopia bored itself to death. Socialist victories in the real world became disasters, creating economic, social, & military devastation, smashing the Utopian promise along the lay. Thus Utopian novels fell out of print when idealists on the left stopped believing their own fairy tales. Dispirited, disoriented, beaten in a way they never understood, reduced to petulant nihilism, they couldn't dream any more. Rather than being exceptions, today's few, sad, threadbare left-Utopias make the case. Read B.F. Skinner's *Walden Two*, for its constipated lack of scope. Examine Ursula LeGuin's *The Dispossessed* for its injured socialist perplexity. Try Arthur Clarke's *The Songs of Distant Earth*. He's peddling shopworn goods & he knows it. He ought to, he lives in Mrs. Bandaranaika's Sri Lanka! The great tragedy is that, when Left Utopia fell into dishonor, it took all the rest with it. Shattered socialist dreams have discredited any dreams at all of a rational, humane, social order. Libertarianism was born an orphan in an age of disUtopias like *Brave New World*, *1984*, & Eugene Zamiatin 's *We* . Ayn Rand wrote disUtopias, *Anthem*, *Atlas Shrugged*, *We The Living*, admirably showing us the dirty, bloodstained underside of collectivism's brilliant promises. But she & others like her made too few promises of their own. She pointed out a great deal to avoid, but very little to aspire to, which, I submit, is piss-poor motivational psychology. Before I began writing, there were semi-Libertarian Utopias, glimmers in the works of Robert Heinlein & Poul Anderson, the short stories of Eric Frank Russell, brighter, more explicit pictures drawn by H. Beam Piper & Jerome Tuccille. But somehow they failed to stick to my philosophical ribs. Nor were our "basic" Libertarian works much better. Where most Utopian fiction failed to be Libertarian enough, Libertarian non-fiction failed to be Utopian at all. Where was the glowing promise in John Hospers' *Libertarianism*, Murray Rothbard's *For A New Liberty*, Roger MacBride's *A New Dawn*, or David Friedman's *The Machinery of Freedom*? Where was the excitement in Paul Lepanto's *Return to Reason*, Harry Brown's *How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World*, or Bob Lefevre's *This Bread Is Mine*? Where was the color in Hazlitt's *Economics in One Lesson*? Where was the fire in any of them? Was it enough merely to be satisfied that most of our "beginner's books" weren't too boring? If Rand had written *The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress*, or edited its pessimistic ending, if Heinlein had written *Atlas Shrugged*, pacing it like *Door Into Summer*, Dave Bergland would be in the White House right now, auctioning off the furniture, because we'd have captured people's imaginations. Their hearts & minds, money & votes would have followed faithfully behind. People want Utopia. They've watched Star Trek until the emulsion wore off the celluloid & helped Star Wars outgross World War II, because Kirk, Spock, & Luke Skywalker assure them that there is a future, one worth looking forward to, in which human beings (& other critters) will still be doing fascinating, dangerous things. Having a good time. It says here 84% of us got hooked reading *Atlas Shrugged*, which I've described as anti-Utopian. But it wasn't just to watch civilization crumbling around my ears that I waded through that kilopage. Its fascination was in an all-too-brief glimpse of a small, working, slightly kinky Libertarian society. *Atlas Shrugged* is mainly disUtopian, but, in the end, every bit as cheery as Piper's *A Planet For Texans*, & almost as delightfully bloodthirsty. Those of you who haven't read my novels may well ask what kind of Utopian vision I think Libertarians ought to communicate. Once, in a moment of mixed premises & moral depravity, I defined it in terms of "freedom, immortality, the stars". No, I didn't dig that out of the pages of The National Enquirer, I meant freedom in the Libertarian sense of society without coercion, immortality as a foreseeable extension of individual freedom into time, & the stars as an equally logical extension of that freedom into space, as human beings reach for what seems to me to be their evolutionary Manifest Destiny. For our purposes, Utopia might just be a place where people look forward to getting up in the morning. I do have more specific desires, a more detailed dream. It's expressed in the Covenant of Unanimous Consent which I first wrote as a kind of substitute for the Constitution & the Bill of Rights & later included in my science fiction novel of the Whiskey Rebellion, The Gallatin Divergence. The Covenant now circulates in more than forty countries, thanks, among others, to Dagny Sharon & Libertarian International. It has Signatories in a majority of the states & provinces of North America. I wouldn't be surprised if the desire & dreams expressed in the Covenant are similar to your own. If we differ, it's because I don't believe it pays to be bashful about it. We must share the dream with others, so they'll begin to work toward fulfilling it, too. For practice, let's try building a Utopia right now. You already know the rules. Morally, in this future society, each individual is free to live his or her life as an end in itself, & to defend it against anyone who would compel otherwise. Ethically, this is accomplished by adopting a single custom: individuals are forbidden (the specific mechanism, you'll appreciate, is still being debated) to initiate force against others. Socially & economically, a voluntary exchange of values, rather than force, is the customary basis for human relationships. H.G. Wells used to start with the premise "What if ...?" What if you could travel to the Moon in a gravity-proof ball? What if you fell asleep & woke up 200 years later? What if you found a way to become invisible? I have a what if for you. What if one Commandment, "Thou shalt not initiate force", became the fundamental operating principle of society, soon enough for all of us to see it? For the moment, we'll skip over how we got to Utopia from disUtopia, although it is the critical question. That's not quite the cop-out it seems. We're trying to envision a new society uncontaminated by a previous social order. In science, this is called a controlled experiment. In writing, this is called poetic license. On the other hand, our Utopian vision, what it says to us & to others, can be a major force, in itself, in getting us from here to there. So I guess that makes things even. We'll also skip over the possibility, some say inevitability, of thermonuclear war or a spectacularly unpleasant economic & civil collapse. There are reasons, as you'll see later, why I'm unconvinced of the inevitability of it all. In any case, it'll either happen or it won't. If it does, we'll either live through it or we won't, & we'll succeed in carrying off the Millennium, with or without an introductory catastrophe, or, in the long run, like John Maynard Keynes, we'll all be dead. A frequent error Utopia-builders make, understandably, is leaving items they're unaware of out of their extrapolation. In the surviving Utopian mutation of the leftist repertoire, Doomsday predicting, Paul Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, the Ozone boys, & most science fiction writers make a mistake amidst their orgasmic cries of disaster: they aren't figuring on Signatories to the Covenant in particular or Libertarians in general. Before we get smug, remember I said this is our fault. Look how it happened: think of all those "Buy Gold, Buy Silver, Buy Irradiated Garbanzo Beans" ads, pamphlets, & seminars we're so fond of. In our projections of the future, we've made the same mistake --we forgot about us! Aren't we gonna affect the future? You bet your dried war-surplus fruit preserves we are! The shape of the future is always determined, just like the present was, by two factors, almost exclusively. The first is the virtually unlimited power of the individual human mind, & of the free market system which is its most monumental achievement. The second factor, often forgotten, is no less important: the inefficacy of evil. It won't surprise anyone at this conference to hear of the power of mind & market. The human mind may inhabit what one cynic called "a sort of skin disease on a ball of dirt", but its grasp encompasses the span from subatomic particles to the intergalactic void. The mind alone is the reason our species became dominant on this planet in a microsecond of geologic time. Yet, aren't we confronted every day with the victories & gloatings of evil? How can it be inefficacious when it owns the world? Let's ask what condition humanity, its culture, technology, & economy would be in, if villains always won. Hasn't there been overall progress in the human condition over the last several thousand years? Would there have been Scientific Method, an Industrial Revolution, a Declaration of Independence, a Non- Aggression Principle, or a Covenant of Unanimous Consent if evil were all that omnipotent? Despite the most hyperthyroid governments, the most pointlessly murderous wars, & the most disgustingly despicable badguys in all of history, 20th Century America offers the highest standard of living & the greatest individual liberty that has ever been available. None of this any testimony to government, war, or badguys, but to the human mind & the ineptitude of its enemies. The mind & market always find a way. The point liberals, conservatives, & many Libertarians always miss is that this isn't any reason not to ask what kind of world a truly uninhibited human mind would create, economically, socially, technologically. The three areas overlap, but we'll begin with economics. The economic future will be as different from our times as ours are from pre-industrial eras. No one in 1687 could imagine freedom from the constant threat of death by starvation, exposure, or disease, which characterized those times. Few in 1987 can visualize a future of vastly greater wealth, world peace, & no bureaucrats to pry into every moment of their daily lives. Historical blindness works both ways, of course. Those born in the future will react with a mixture of embarrassment & amusement when we try explaining to them. The insane were once beaten, tortured, & chained, a practice that seems ludicrous & terrible to us. The IRS will seem equally barbaric to our grandchildren. We'll try to tell them, but they'll attribute it to senile dementia & never really believe us. With taxation gone, not only will we have twice as much money to spend, but it will go twice as far, since those who produce goods & services won't have to pay taxes, either. In one stroke we'll be effectively four times as rich. There's no simple way to estimate the cost of regulation. Truckers say they could ship goods for one-fifth the present price without it. Many businesses spend a third of their overhead complying with stupid rules & filling out forms. The worst damage it does is to planning. Since you don't know what next year's whim of Congress will be, how can you plan? Plans that require ten, twenty, fifty years to nature? Might as well forget them. Let's figure that deregulation will cut prices, once again, by half. Now our actual purchasing power, already quadrupled by deTAXification, is doubled again. We now have eight times our former wealth! What kind of world will that result in? Future generations won't remotely grasp the concept of inflation, or that the State once imprisoned people for competing with its own counterfeiting operation. They'll be used to a stable diversity of competing trade commodities, gold, uranium, cotton, wheat, cowrie shells, which will not only flatten a lot of wildly swinging economic curves, but give newspapers something to print besides government handouts: "Cowries sold late on the market today at 84. Oats & barley at 42. Uranium at 87." 87 what? Sheep, gold grams, kilowatts, gallons of oil, who cares, as long as they're free market rates, determined by uncoerced bidding, buying, & selling? Hardly anyone, of course, will carry sheep, seashells, or barrels of oil around with them. 21st Century barter will be carried out on ferromagnetic media in electrical impulses. But I suspect a few of us surly old curmudgeons, having spent our lives being swindled with paper & plastic, will insist on something in our pockets that jingles. Young folks will look knowingly at us & wink. The future, as I see it, canes in segments: first, continuation, for however long, of things as they are, counterpointed by our increasing success at convincing people of the necessity & desirability of Unanimous Consent. Having sold people on freedom, we'll make changes from whatever's left of what we have now to a truly free society: degovernmentalization of culture & the economy characterized by an eight-fold increase in individual purchasing power, & an end to the importance of the State in our lives. Eight times richer, we'll be free to do whatever we wish with our new wealth. Why stick with black & white when you can have color TV in every room? Why drive a '77 Ford when you can afford a brand-new Excalibur? Why eat hamburger when you can have steak & lobster every night? Increased spending appears in the economy as increased demand, leading, despite government economists, not to shortages, but increased production --somebody's gotta make all those TVs, Excaliburs, steaks & lobsters --which creates other delightful consequences. With all that loose money, there's new investment in established companies & zillions of new ones trying to satisfy everyone's newfound consumer greed. New factories will spring up, old ones expand, obsolete machinery will be junked & new installed. More people will be working, producing goods & services demanded by a newly-rich population. As labor becomes scarcer, wages will skyrocket, hours shorten, work-weeks truncate. "Headhunters" will flourish, not only stealing managerial talent, but bribing assembly workers to desert for even better wages, conditions, & benefits. Unable to figure out what happened, unions will dry up and blow away. Despite increased wages & benefits (leading to more buying, demand, production, & jobs), prices will plummet as demand drives industry to greater efficiency. Plants now standing idle half the time will operate fullblast around the clock. Society will be geared to operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Against a chronic labor shortage, capitalists will take measures like free training, day-care, occupational therapy. Everything socialism expected from government, the market will provide, as companies compete ruthlessly for workers. Companies desperate for our talents will have to change their petty, coercive manners. Restraints on your freedom, insults to your intelligence, will disappear, simply because, for once, they need you, not some anonymous, numbered, plug-in module, but you. Oh, they'll resist. They'll try imports & foreign labor, but it'll be their undoing, as living & working standards - & expectations --arise abroad. And free world trade will have another effect: increased demand, increased production, more jobs & lower prices. Monotonous, isn't it? They'll try more automation, but that's another trap because it always results in more --not less -- employment. For every quill-pushing 19th Century clerk perched at his desk, how many computer designers, engineers, manufacturers, assemblers, installers, repairmen, number jockeys, & key-punchers are there today? For every buggy-whip maker, how many folks involved in automotive ignitions? And automation has another side-effect: it increases production, which lowers prices. In a free society, the availability & quality of goods & services increases constantly while prices drop. Wages & living standards improve continuously. What we now call a "boom" is normal & permanent, &, with no government around bloating the currency, good times have nothing to do with inflation. The "forced draft" advances in technology we associate with war are a snail's pace, when an entire people is free to pursue the buck with all ten greedy little fingers. Which is why them future whippersnappers'll think we're hallucinating about the bad old days of price-control, strikes, inflation, tariffs, & the IRS. And they'll want to know why we didn't buy out those pestiferous oil-sheiks with our lunch money. Most problems are trivial, viewed in the proper perspective. The high-tech solution to our strange desire for flat clothes wasn't a bigger, more complicated automated ironing-board, but simply clothes that stayed flat. The wrong perspective can lead to disaster. In the 1890s, according to Bob LeFevre, the government decided, Club of Rome fashion, that mere private corporations would never withstand the costs of prospecting, drilling, extracting, refining, & distributing petroleum. Therefore, oil should be a State monopoly. A book I have from the 50s opines that no single government could finance an expedition to the Moon & it would be done by the United Nations. (If you think Challenger was a mess, think what that would have been like.) These predictions should be kept in mind whenever we contemplate the inevitability of disaster or the impossibility of our dreams. The only prediction we can make safely about the future is that it will be far more fantastic than we can safely predict. We now live in a cramped, narrow, depressed culture, largely unaware of its limitations simply because there's never been anything better. Faced with sizeable problems, we mistakenly view them from the level to which we're limited by this society. Solving our problems demands a vastly wider scope. We have to learn to think big, bigger than we've ever dreamed or dared. Take the objection that firing 15 million bureaucrats would cause a depression. They're unlikely to support us if it means doing away with their own jobs. LP candidates keep a low profile on this subject. But think big: as Hospers pointed out, millions of GIs were absorbed into the post-WW II economy without a ripple, despite less than free market conditions. We can get the Utopian message across, even to government workers, with a slogan like Australian John Zube's "Vote Yourself Rich". A booming free market has chronic labor shortages. No one will have to persuade bureaucrats to enter the private sector. They'll desert in hordes. The State will shrink like the little dot when you turn off your TV, & vanish. Other crises are amenable to the same sort of reasoning. I'm not a very enthusiastic catastrophist, although current government liabilities seem to spell doom for Western civilization. Social Security is short several trillion bucks, & it no looks like the early 21st Century will go down in a flourish of Molotov cocktails. In 1666, a great London fire wiped out a third of the total wealth of England, a catastrophic loss amounting to 10 million dollars. Could it be we're using the wrong scale to assess our problems? Trillions seems like about as much money as there'll ever be, but "seems" is a pretty conditional word. We still have enough time to create a market so vast & strong that several trillion dollars seems trivial by comparison. The Utopian vision will buy us time & hasten the day when a free economy straightens out the messes left by our predecessors. Trade & automation will shoot living standards up dizzily. Those prone to Future Shock are in for a rough ride. New materials, production methods, life-styles & opportunities will arise by the myriad every day. Every hour. Already in our times, a manufacturing counter- revolution is occurring. Investment casting, laser & electron discharge cutting, detonic welding, computer- controlled machining, are decreasing the plastic & cardboard in our lives, increasing titanium, steel, & glass. There may be fewer stampings & spotwelds over the coming decades, more solid forgings. At the same time, plastics seem more like steel & glass every day, while cardboard gets stronger & longer lasting. As uranium was once thrown aside to get at lead & tin, we're stumbling over untold sources of wealth, energy, & comfort. Nations won't just emerge, they'll splash like the over-ripe melons Marx mentioned, but in a different way than he intended, into the 21st Century. Marshall McCluhan's one-horse Global Village will turn into Times Squared. New territories opened by the free market will make over-population one of the future's biggest jokes. Antarctica, Greenland, Northern Canada will feel the plow & deliver up their wealth. The floor, surface, & cubic volume of the sea, the Moon, Mars, the Asteroids, the rest of the Solar System, & open space itself will be subdivided. Even if total population reaches 40 billion --or 400 billion --we'll have more elbow-room than we do now. In the coming century, poverty & unemployment will be a dark, half-believed nightmare of the remote past. Elaborate discussion of private charity will be academic in a world where any basketcase who twitches once for yes & twice for no is desperately needed for production quality control. They'll put chimps & gorillas on the payroll. Killer whales & dolphins will be buying split-level aquariums on the installment plan. Pollution will be another dead issue. No competing industry can afford the waste of energy & materials. Without an EPA to "protect" us, individuals will sue polluters, because every square inch of the Earth will be private property. Not that there won't be wilderness --when they auction off the National Forests, I'll be right there, bidding with the other hunters & fishermen. Heaven is being able to fire a rifle in any direction from my front porch & not hit anyone but trespassers. As with charity, our concern with police & security is a waste of breath. Peace will break out uncontrollably. Cops will be re-trained for office- jobs. With victimless crime laws repealed, cities populous & prosperous again, 99% of the crime we endure will vanish. Our descendents won't understand how it became an issue. Middle-class values are market values. Wider respect for property, education, & long-range planning will mean less crime. A single mugging in Central Park will get four-inch headlines in New York's several dozen newsplastics. In the absence of laws against duelling, people will be more polite to each other, less inclined to offer unwanted advice. Either that or, thanks to natural selection, they'll soon have faster reflexes. Lacking gun control to protect them, the few criminals left won't live long enough to transmit their stupid-genes. The next century will give us a welcome look at the other side of a familiar paradox: people free to carry weapons usually don't need them. Prisons will be abandoned when those who never did anything to hurt anyone are released. The rest will be out working to restore their victims' property or health. Crimes against persons & property, including murder, will be civil offenses, with volunteer agencies acting for those without relatives or friends to "avenge" them. Restitution may even be possible for murder, given techniques of freezing corpses for later repair. Those who commit irrevocable murder will suffer the cruelest punishment of all: exile to a place where there's a government! Our opponents' concern with conglomerates & monopolies is as misplaced as ours with charity & crime. Before the 19th Century government invasion of the market, super-companies had reached optimum size & were beginning to shrink. Today, although government keeps competition off their backs, huge companies must divide themselves into dozens of competing subsidiaries in order to survive. Increased competition will doom these dinosaurs, break up concentrations of wealth & paper frozen by securities & tax laws, & produce companies smaller than today's. Survivors will be stuck with the boring old laissez-faire task of pleasing as many customers with the best quality goods & services possible at the lowest possible prices. It's possible you're way ahead of me by now, & you may have noticed I haven't been following my own advice. All these predictions have been pretty abstract & impersonal. Now it's time to answer the question "What's in it for me?" Basically, we're all going to have our cake & get to say "I told you so", too. Right off, the free market boosts our purchasing-power eightfold, & this, of course, is only the beginning, although I hesitate to risk your willing suspension of disbelief by estimating wages & prices several decades into a Unanimous Consent boom. So let's just way we now have eight times as much disposable wealth. Even this modest multiplier offers us a range & choice of goods & services unimaginable today. Your basic material well-being will be easier to maintain when a loaf of Grandma's Automated Bread goes for a nickel & steak for 20 cents a pound. $2 shoes? Wristwatches at a dime a dozen? How about suits & dresses for ten bucks, disposable outfits for a dollar? The toughest decision may be durability versus disposability: an imposing 2087 Rolls-Rolex Fusionmobile good for generations, or a plastic Mattel- Yugo easily discarded when you're tired of it; a Saville Row three-piece ironclad business suit, or a toilet-paper toga. Increased leisure-time & lots of loose money will mean what it always has, more emphasis on expensive, hand-crafted, one-of-a-kind items. We all may wind up running second, third, or fourth businesses on the side, which means more jobs, more buying, & so forth. How about spending two to four grand on a home that's built to last, helped out by the slump in land prices when government holdings hit the market? The trend will be back to single private dwellings, on substantially larger lots, paid for in full out of this month's paycheck. If you can afford a home in the city & another in the mountains or at the beach, why not? An unhappy note for Howard Roark. Higher Living-standards will encourage a most unRandish human vice for embellishment. They'll bring back the Baroque, Roccoco, Victorian gingerbread, medieval gargoyles, & the new times will bring their own elaborate forms, as well. Aztec Modern, anyone? Choose between a $500 automobile, a $2000 airplane, or some combination. Without government support for highways, we may all be soaring to work on rocket- belts, & Laissez-Faire Airlines will fly you anywhere in the world for twenty bucks. Highways & railroads will benefit from a free market. Speed, safety, & efficiency will improve. 60-lane, 300 mile-per-hour ribbons of plastic will power your electric car by induction, provide guidance if you want to read or watch TV, dissipate rain, fog, ice & snow. Or, as I predicted in The Probability Broach, highways may evolve into contoured swaths of grass for steam-powered hovercraft. Or both. Or something entirely different. Our grandchildren will have a good laugh over the "Energy Crisis" of the last decade, which diehard Carterites are presently trying to revive, not just because the shortage was purely political in nature (which will puzzle them) but because free market technology will ultimately make fossil fuels obsolete. Fusion, using water for fuel, lasers or particle accelerators for sparkplugs, & producing, as its only by-product, clean, inert, useful, helium, will be running our civilization the day after government gets out of the way. Fusion is the thermonuclear reaction that powers the stars. Quasars are billions of times more energetic, & we don't know what powers them. When science & industry are free of interference, we may find out, & energy will be practically limitless, virtually free. I could go on for hours discussing miracles you can read about in Popular Science, Analog, or any of the 15 novels I've written. I've elaborated on them to this extent because I believe they're only possible under free market conditions, which explains why we never got the picture-phones & flying automobiles which science fiction promised us in the 30s & 40s. Read those other publications with that caveat in mind, you'll get the idea. More important are the social, psychological effects of liberty. I can't tell you what it's like to be free, having never had a chance to try. I'd be up against the unpredictability of human action any Austrian economist or quantum physicist delights in lecturing about. Those few leftists who still believe in a static notion of how things ought to be, which they're willing to impose at bayonet-point, work their butts off making society dull & boring. In Unanimous Consent Utopia, the one rule is that no one imposes his views on anyone else, which makes for an open-ended culture, impossible to describe in detail. There's no single Libertarian future, but as many different futures as there are individuals to create them. For each Sunday-supplement guess I could make about who'll take care of the street lights or paint the stripes down the middle of the road, coming generations will produce thousands of answers not even remotely similar to mine. Our future may be weird & confusing, but it'll never be dull & boring. So instead, try an experiment with me, one that'll give you a clearer picture of the future than I could draw in another hour or another hundred hours. Lean back in your chair. Relax. Imagine now that you'll never have to worry about money again. Never again for the rest of your life. You'll never waste another golden moment of your precious time tearing your hair, biting your fingernails, or shredding the inside of your mouth over paying the bills. There is no limit to what you can afford. It's no longer a significant factor in your plans. Now say quietly to yourself: "All my life, I always really wanted ___ ''. Fill in the blank. Finish the sentence yourself. Only you know what it is you always really wanted. "All my life I always really wanted ___ ''. You may be surprised. How many things have you denied yourself, never even acknowledged, because there wasn't enough money? Because your dreams were consumed to feed the bureaucrats, build bombs, atomic submarines, & government office buildings? Unanimous Consent will change all that. Everything you always really wanted could be yours, if you were free. Retirement? Save it out of pocket change. Kid's education? New home, car, boat, plane? All of the above? Nothing more than ordinary, easily-accessible dreams which will hardly dent the family budget. If you were free. "All my life, I always really wanted ___ ". Is it illegal? A machine gun to mow down beer cans on a lazy country afternoon? A nickel bag that really costs a nickel? An android sex-slave? A dynamite collection? A date with a one-legged jockey? Driving your car at 185? It's yours, as long as you don't hurt anyone. If you were free. "All my life, I always really wanted ___ ". The number of Signatories to the Covenant of Unanimous Consent is doubling every year. Everything you always really wanted can be yours before the 21st Century is three decades old. The only thing the Covenant can't give you, the only goods it can't deliver, is power. And through that one "failure", that single "sacrifice", we achieve everything else. "All my life, I always really wanted ___ ". That, my fellow Libertarians, is the promise of Unanimous Consent, an invention so fundamental, so potent, revolutionary & unstoppable, that Scientific Method & the Industrial Revolution pale by comparison. Now you understand why I'm a fanatic, why I must make you a fanatic, why, doubling our number every year, we must create an entire nation, a whole world of fanatics. I'm fighting for everything I always really wanted! That's what's in it for me! That's what Unanimous Consent is all about! Everything. You. Always. Really. Wanted. To the traditional strategies of our movement, education & politics, add a third, Unanimous Consent Utopianism, which will break trails for the other two. While others teach & run for office, I'll continue writing science fiction. Educators & candidates will find, as they're already finding, that their students & voters came to them because of promises I made them. That's the only way our future's going to happen. We're going to win as soon as we recognize, as soon as we communicate, as soon as we act on one simple fact. In order to "capture the hearts & minds" of America & the world, in order to have the major part in determining what the future is going to be, we must first pull off a coup d'etat in the Province of Utopia. "All my life, I always really wanted ___ ''. It's as simple as that. It really is. ### +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ End of this section of ShareDebate International; Information about the magazine, distribution policy, copyright statement, subscription and/or back-issue orders is in the file, SI_MISC.TXT +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++