The Economics of Liberty

5 Threats and Outrages

End the War on Drugs

Joseph Sobran

Though the prestige of literal war has plummeted, we find ourselves embroiled in various metaphorical wars: on poverty, on terrorism, and, most urgently, on drugs. Describing a grandiose political drive as a “war” (especially when it’s too nebulous to be plausibly called a “plan”) seems to be an appealing way for politicians to express inspiring resolve and to imply that total victory is feasible: problem X, we are encouraged to infer, will soon be banished forever. All it takes is concerted will, which is what “war” stands for.

But wars against abstract enemies, as opposed to determinate human enemies organized in polities, have a way of bogging down. The war on poverty has left us with two intractabilities, poverty itself and a huge anti-poverty apparatus. We can end neither poverty nor the war against it. No light is visible at the ends of these tunnels. And no wonder, since poverty really means, in America, relative poverty, which exists whenever people are free to make money at their own rates. If the natural disparities of wealth are regarded as a public scandal, the government can award itself an open-ended mandate to attempt the impossible. The goal of victory will of course trump all concerns about budgetary constraints or property rights. “Victory” need not ever be defined, except as the hypothetical absence of a condition that is all too visibly present. (Or even invisibly present: the late Michael Harrington set the fashion of speaking of “invisible poverty,” which, like the Emperor’s Clothes, may only be discerned by those whose consciousness has been raised.)

As for the war on terrorism, nobody even knows how to commence it, unless by declaring Iran the embodiment of terrorism and dropping a few bombs.

Drugs are an even more elusive adversary. Most recreational drugs derive from plants that may be grown in endless remote expanses outside American jurisdiction and imported at countless points by various ingenious means. There is no single headquarters, hence no target for warfare. Only comprehensive control will do.

Or will it? Illicit drugs have proved uncontrollable even in our most intensely controlled domains: prisons. Which has provoked the observation that if America were turned into a totalitarian system, where the powers of the state were absolutely unlimited, the black market in drugs would still flourish.

Police work always limps after energies that bound over laws. It takes several policemen to catch a single criminal, unless he operates from a stationary address. This ratio means that law and order always depend primarily on voluntary compliance by the overwhelming majority of the populace. When a critical mass of citizens disregards the law, law enforcement is futile. And the drug-selling and consuming sectors of America are as fluid as they are enormous.

Like all soldiers, our drug warriors will naturally feel that they aren’t getting enough support when they aren’t winning. From their point of view, this is perfectly rational. Their unconditional assignment is to win, period. That’s what war means. But the “war” isn’t serious. It’s rhetorical, a gesture of determination we don’t really feel, though we feel we ought to feel it. The men who actually do the fighting, at great risk, are frustrated by the gulf between our professions of hatred for the enemy and our unwillingness to provide anything approaching the means needed for victory.

And at the drug Pentagon, the senior strategists will call, like generals, for more funding, more troops, more national will. Our drug czar, William Bennett, keeps proposing increasingly drastic measures, and it’s predictable that he and his successors will continue egging us on with periodic reports of both the encouraging “headway” we are making on this or that front (casual drug use is down this year, for example) and horrifying iterations of the total dimensions of the problem.

Ah, the problem. In America every evil is a “problem,” therefore soluble. But as James Burnham used to say, “When there’s no solution, there’s no problem.” To be sure, individuals have drug problems. It’s meaningless to speak of a national drug problem. What we have is a national complex of drug-related evils we’re confusedly treating as a single entity.

The most salient of these evils is the violent crime associated with distributing drugs and paying for personal drug habits. The gang violence of Prohibition was comparatively sporadic; and today, though legal alcohol consumption generates more violence than legal drug use ever will (narcotics retard violent impulses), whiskey is distributed without incident. But the craving for drugs and drug profits, a double craving perversely sustained by law, results in millions of crimes against persons and property—daily killings in large cities, four million burglaries per year, for instance. This, at least, is a genuine problem, in the sense that it’s susceptible of amelioration. Llewellyn Rockwell estimates that decriminalizing drugs would cut street crime 75%. If so, the debate should stop right there.

All this is not meant as an advertisement for drug use itself. Americans have legitimate worries about what decriminalizing drugs would mean. More drug consumption? Yes. Present laws do deter some people, a fraction of whom would acquire drug problems if the law stopped deterring them from use. Many others would sample drugs without becoming addicted or disabled. It’s hardly conceivable, though, that drug abuse would produce anything approaching the hundreds of thousands of deaths now caused by alcoholism and tobacco use. Moreover, legalized drugs would certainly be less lethal than black market drugs, for the same reason that Jim Beam is safer than moonshine, as Mark Thornton of Auburn University has pointed out.

What about kids? Wouldn’t decriminalizing drugs mean more young people with drug problems? Maybe not. The opposite might be true. If drugs were legal for adults but forbidden to minors (with tough penalties for selling or giving them to the underaged), the price of drugs would be too low to make the risk of breaking the law worthwhile. Age-stratified legalization might well segregate the very young from drug consumers, in a way that the present black market does not.

Probably the deepest reservation most Americans feel against decriminalizing drugs stems from the identification of the moral with the legal. We feel that what is immoral ought to be illegal, and that what is legal must be morally approved. But, after all, we managed to repeal Prohibition without making drunkenness an inalienable right. Drunk drivers go to jail; alcohol abuse can be grounds for dismissal and divorce. There lurks in each of us the irrational fantasy of America turning into a nation of stupefied addicts. Few are old enough to remember when today’s controlled substances were uncontrolled, and nobody spoke of a national drug problem. Opium, cocaine, and other drugs, readily available, were sometimes abused, but were never associated, in the public mind, with violence. (It took the law to create that connection.)

Informal social sanctions, as always, did most of the work of governing society. They will do the same when Americans are forced again to take responsibility for their own behavior, without federal agencies to keep watch on their voluptuary habits. Most of us would go on living as we have, without the drugs that are currently banned; most of the rest would come to terms with drug use, avoiding serious abuse.

It’s an accident of circumstance that when most of us think of illegal drugs, we picture villainous purveyors: pock-faced dictators, ghetto toughs. This association makes talk of war on drugs emotionally powerful. But nobody today thinks of Al Capone and gin together. The end of Prohibition broke the link between alcohol and organized crime. Decriminalizing drugs will break up similar fatal clusters. Continuing the bogus war will only saddle us with both a criminal drug subculture and a consumptive drug bureaucracy, equally and symbiotically permanent.

Mr. Bennett is receptive to the idea of decapitating drug dealers. That gruesome and worse-than-useless suggestion perfectly expresses the logic of the war on drugs. We’d do well to recall Hydra, whose severed heads grew back doubled. The Hydra of drug crime has many times more heads now than when we started. We can’t kill it. Maybe we can domesticate it.

Drugs and Adultery

Llewellyn H. Rockwell

Europeans accuse Americans of being childocentric, and I guess I’d have to plead guilty. My nine-year-old adopted daughter, Alexandra, is the apple of my eye, and of my heart.

I fought for the right (i.e., for the Right) before she came into my life. But now I fight even harder, because I worry about the country she will inherit. I want her, and other children, to live in a society that is moral and free, and that looks as much as possible like the old American Republic, unsubverted by the welfare-warfare state and its cultural and religious apostasy.

As a paleolibertarian, I don’t see the federal government as useful in achieving this, except in the negative sense of preventing crime, invasion, etc.

That does not mean I approve, as too many libertarians do, of everything I wouldn’t outlaw. I see the traditional family as the essential building block of society, for example, so I wish Elizabeth Taylor hadn’t married nine times. But I wouldn’t put her in jail for it.

I worry about drugs and children, but I’m convinced that when kids don’t become addicts—and the vast majority do not—it has everything to do with parents and religion, and little to do with accessibility. Even in my quiet town, drugs are available to any young person who wants them, despite the police and the federal War on Drugs.

The choice is not between a society that is drug-free or drug-ridden. We have the latter already, despite billions in spending, thousands of agents, and hundreds of restrictions on our personal and financial liberties. (In fact, I would argue that just as Prohibition increased drunkenness, so the drug war has increased drug abuse.) Instead the choice is between a society where these problems are exacerbated by government, and one where they are not.

If I could wave a magic wand and make illegal drugs disappear, I would gladly do so. But I do not have that wand, and neither does the government. The government does have a gun, however. But—just as during Prohibition—it is not capable of using it to suppress the traffic in things enough people want, whether for good or ill.

The government cannot suppress adultery, for example, even though breaking the marriage covenant, with its consequent divorce, damaged children, and other shattered moral values, does even more harm than drugs.

Let’s suppose that, knowing this, Jimmy Carter had launched a War on Infidelity.

The Federal Marital Enforcement Administration—in cooperation with vice squads at state and local levels—would institute national spying, and impose long prison sentences on those caught. Motels would be under surveillance, and couples would have to provide proof of marriage to check in. Mail would be opened and phones would be tapped. There would be 800-number informer lines. Even parties would be watched. Who knows what could go on?

Next would come a massive federal education program, with grants from the National Institute of Marriage to favored intellectuals and activists. Roseann Carter would ask us to “Just Say No” to illicit liaisons, and the IRS would use them as an excuse to restrict financial privacy, since cash could be used to fund adultery without leaving a paper trail.

Would any of us think that family values could be protected, let alone enhanced, by such a system? Federal tyranny undermines all our values, no matter what the excuse. Yet many Americans support fighting drugs in this manner, with exactly the same success that a federal marital crusade would have. Or rather, with even less success, since the war on drugs also reaps a harvest of violent crime.

When it comes to drug use, people tend to fall into four categories: (1) those who would not use drugs even if they were free as well as legal; (2) those who might experiment in some limited way, but would never become addicts; (3) those who can become abusers, but can also be helped by moral and educational counselling; and (4) “natural” addicts.

Categories one and two are not societal problems. Category three should be the target of our anti-drug efforts, and medical and moral healing. Category four probably cannot be helped by any human means.

As the last nine years have shown, the government cannot make these pathetic individuals abstain. But it can make sure that they visit their misery on the innocent.

Even a massive, and massively funded, drug war, complete with shootouts in American streets and invasions of other countries, hasn’t prevented these people from getting what they want, nor other undesirables from getting rich providing it.

After nine years of crackdown, we have more than double the amount of drugs available, by the government’s own statistics, and they are more potent. Just as Prohibition gave bootleggers the incentive to produce high-profit, high-proof alcohol rather than less profitable (but milder) beer or wine, the drug war has led to the U.S. producing, for example, the most potent marijuana in the world. Not Jamaica. Not West Africa. But Northern California.

Even though the government cannot suppress these substances, it is capable of raising the price, thus making sure that drug dealers get rich while the innocent are mugged, burglarized, and murdered.

Street crime is at horrific levels in our major cities. It warps the lives of decent people, with the poor and elderly living in permanent terror.

If decriminalizing drugs meant nothing more than drastically cutting street crime—and it would—we should support it. We can’t prevent addicts from using drugs, but we can make sure that they harm only themselves, while freeing the police to concentrate on crimes against innocent persons and their property.

There are many vices which ought not to be crimes. Enforcing the moral law against these vices is the job of families and churches, not politicians. To put the Cranstons and Quayles of the world in charge is to abdicate our individual responsibilities, to fail abjectly, and to move closer to authoritarianism.

It’s no coincidence that recent anti-drug laws have eliminated the remnants of domestic bank privacy, restricted the honest use of cash, allowed unreasonable (and unconstitutional) searches and seizures of private property, constructed computer dossiers on every American, and expanded the powers and size of the IRS. And now the State Department is pushing a United Nations drug treaty that would establish an international police force and tax agency.

In 1912, when all now-banned substances were legal, there was no “national drug problem,” but only individual abuse. Widely sold medications, alleged to be “good for any ailment of man or beast,” consisted of opium and alcohol, yet our cities were safe.

Then America had no welfare state, no globaloney, no Federal Reserve, no income tax, no urban terror, and no drug laws. It had strong families, strong churches, a strong culture, and a strong social order. It was no utopia—we still suffered from the effects of Northern imperialism, for example—but it looks mighty good from today’s standpoint. And it looks all of a piece.

Would Legalization Increase Drug Use?

Lawrence W. Reed

If drugs were legalized, says drug czar William Bennett, drug use “would skyrocket.” George Will echoes him. They offer no evidence for this claim, of course. Judging from America’s last experience with Prohibition, they are probably wrong. If we ended the War on Drugs, drug use might even decline.

In his 1963 book How Dry We Were: Prohibition Revisited, Henry Lee gives us a fascinating and instructive account of what happened when alcohol was prohibited from 1919 to 1933.

When Prohibition was enacted, everyone predicted the dawn of a New Moral Era. Dr. Billy Sunday said: “The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.”

And George Will agrees: “The fact is that Prohibition worked. Alcohol consumption during the twenties declined.” The reality is otherwise.

Lee’s facts and figures show, as we might expect, that prohibiting alcohol simply drove its production and consumption “underground” and even had the perverse effect of increasing both. Many people drank more than ever, or for the very first time, just because the stuff was illegal. “Men were drinking defiantly,” writes Lee, “with a sense of high purpose, a kind of dedicated drinking that you don’t see much of today.”

One place where they drank was the “speakeasy.” In Rochester, NY, for instance, 500 licensed saloons in the days before Prohibition gave way to twice as many speakeasies when booze was outlawed. On Eagle Street in Albany, there were 18 speakeasies; before Prohibition there were only three saloons.

Public drunkenness was illegal both before and during Prohibition, but in Detroit, drunkenness arrests increased steadily from 6,590 in 1920 to 28,804 in 1928. Drinking even increased among members of Congress during the Prohibition!

During daylight, “Prohibition did cut down the amount of drinking,” says Lee. “Probably because it was illegal, people preferred to do their imbibing at night, more than making up for their daytime abstinence.”

Another indication of all the booze sloshing around in the 1920s was “the most spectacular agricultural event” of the decade—the 470% increase in corn sugar production. The stills were operating at full tilt; neither the revenuers nor Elliott Ness’s “Untouchables” put much of a dent in their growth. In 1929, one state alone confiscated more stills than the nationwide total in 1913, while the grand total of all state and federal seizures was a dozen times higher.

America’s total national “drunk tab’’ during Prohibition was in the neighborhood of $2.9 billion (in 1929 dollars), putting the bootleg liquor business “right up in the category of steel, autos, and gasoline.” Millions of first-time drinkers were brought into the underground.

Lee is backed up by the most respected analyst in the field, economist Clark Warburton, whose data in his The Economic Results of Prohibition (1932) come from law enforcement officials, consumers, and producers. He shows that alcohol use increased dramatically during Prohibition: liquor, from .3 gallons per capita to 1.86 (520%); wine from .44 to .87 gallons per capita (97%); and beer from 1.26 to 6.9 gallons per capita (447%). During Prohibition, America went on a drinking binge, and, says Warburton, the data for spirits may be underestimated.

Prohibition also made the liquor much more potent (as with drugs today) and alcoholism much more common. After 11 years of Prohibition, wrote British author G.K. Chesterton, “Alcoholism has never threatened disaster as it is threatening America today. It isn’t normal that girls at 16 should go to dances and drink raw alcohol.” Alcohol-induced deaths appeared and increased. Of the 480,000 gallons of liquor confiscated in New York state during one Prohibition year, 98% contained poisons.

Bennett and Will are wrong. Prohibition didn’t work, and meanwhile, taxpayers were picking up the bill for the massive enforcement effort. And though decent people might have used alcohol, they didn’t manufacture or distribute the illegal stuff, leaving those lines of work to some of the sleaziest and most violent crooks in our history. Crime rates soared in the “Roaring ’20s,” most of it Prohibition related.

My guess is that if we outlawed soda pop, we could produce a similar effect. Bootleg cola-from-a-still would flow like water; people would pay a high price for illegal root beer; criminal gangs would supply it; and the feds would spend billions fighting the soda-pop cartel.

Making drugs illegal only increases their lure, and with the profits available in the drug trade, there is more incentive to advertise and get others hooked.

Experience strongly suggests that drug abuse, like alcohol abuse, is a demand problem. Attacking it from the supply side is inherently futile and even counterproductive.

Lower prices, which legalization would bring, always increases the quantity demanded. But probably just about everybody who wants to use drugs is using them now. People can get them easily, even in federal prisons. There simply is no pent-up demand among those who are not currently drug-users. And legalization would end the “forbidden-fruit phenomenon,” in which some young people are attracted to drugs precisely because they are illegal.

Bush and Bennett want people to stop abusing drugs. I couldn’t agree more. What they haven’t explained, however, is just exactly why this latest stepped-up attempt at Prohibition will work any better than the last time we tried it.

Mickey Leland: Humanitarian?

Llewellyn H. Rockwell

If the ancient Roman maxim—“Of the dead, say nothing but good”—has any application, it is to private citizens. Not to politicians, and certainly not to politicians who whitewash tyranny. Yet we are being subjected to the virtual beatification of Congressman Mickey Leland.

Despite his sad death while on a junket in Ethiopia, Leland was no hero. An open Communist sympathizer, he was known as “V.I. Leland” to at least one of his colleagues. Another told me: “I wouldn’t be surprised if he had been an actual Communist Party member.”

Leland, whom Fidel Castro called “my close friend,” made a dozen trips to Havana, where he praised the “achievements” of the Cuban government and the “intellect” of its leader.

Another of Leland’s friends was Mengistu Haile Mariam, the military dictator of Ethiopia. As Michael Johns of the Heritage Foundation points out, Menguistu is responsible for “a state-sponsored holocaust: the death of more than a million people. He is in the same category as Cambodia’s Pol Pot.”

Leland made five taxpayer-funded excursions to Ethiopia “in a noble cause—trying to feed the hungry,” said President Bush. And indeed Leland helped persuade Congress and the Reagan and Bush administrations to send more than $800 million in food and other aid to Ethiopia for famine relief. Leland also campaigned for closer relations with the Ethiopian government. But was this really noble, and was it really relief?

Washington columnist Chris Matthews, former aide to Tip O’Neill, says Leland was a great humanitarian because he “could sit with a dictator like Ethiopia’s Mengistu and try to find common ground.” As a “good diplomat,” at lunch with Mengistu—instead of complaining about the food—he would “dig right in.” Matthews says he had the “courage” to “do the right thing, to fight the right causes.”

Excuse me, but even in Washington this ought to be seen as rubbish. Mengistu—who modeled his regime on North Korea’s—deliberately starves people to death. As even the Washington Post once admitted, the Ethiopian famine was caused by the “Mengistu government’s farm collectivization and resettlement policy,” and not by the weather. But we would never have known it from Leland.

Just as apologists for socialism used to blame 70 years of bad weather for the Soviet food shortages, Leland said lack of rain was Ethiopia’s problem—that and lack of U.S. taxpayers’ money.

The West just doesn’t understand Col. Mengistu, Leland used to say. But in truth we understand him all too well. Like Stalin in the Ukraine, the Ethiopian Communist Party uses control of food during a government terror famine to ensure its power.

The abolition of private agriculture did part of the work. Then families who opposed the government, or who belonged to tribes that are traditional opponents of the ruling ethnic coalition, are “resettled” by force in desert areas and left to die without food or water.

How could Leland not know this? And knowing it, how could he have averted his eyes? He denounced the oppression of black people in South Africa, yet supported virtual genocide in Ethiopia.

Leland knew that the Ethiopian Communists use U.S. aid—plus millions more from rock concerts and other loony-left fundraising events—to feed party enforcers and to punish the government’s enemies. He knew that such aid only fastened a totalitarian government more tightly on the back of the Ethiopian people.

To advocate U.S. aid to the government of Ethiopia—as Leland so single-mindedly did—is to be an accessory to mass murder. For the people of Ethiopia aren’t threatened by “hunger” as an abstract, but by government-caused hunger, and Mickey Leland endorsed its perpetrators.

Even in Washington, where all standards are laughably low, giving other people’s money to Stalinist killers shouldn’t count as humanitarianism.

Some real humanitarians include: Mother Theresa helping those in need, Ludwig von Mises spending his life showing only freedom can prevent starvation and other disasters, and Thomas Jefferson leading a revolution against government oppression. Dining with mass murderers isn’t included.

Like so many congressmen, Leland put a foreign government ahead of American taxpayers—in his case, a particularly monstrous government. We can mourn his death, but we can also mourn his misbegotten ideology.

Leland was a counterfeit humanitarian who supported what Isabel Patterson called the “humanitarian with the guillotine.” It does the cause of justice no good to pretend otherwise.

Choice in Schooling

Sheldon L. Richman

The choice-in-education movement has been building momentum in recent years. But it is now in danger of being co-opted and eventually destroyed by the Bush administration. If the education bureaucrats in the federal government succeed, this will be a setback for quality education and for parents and children everywhere.

The Washington Post summed up the problem even before George Bush took office: “The Reagan administration came into office talking a lot about ‘parental choice’ in education; what the phrase meant was tuition tax credits, voucher plans or, toward the end, magnet schools. Now President-elect Bush and others who talk about ‘choice,’ as they strive not to fumble the ball of a still-accelerating reform movement, mean something different and less ideologically blood-soaked. The kind of ‘choice’ gaining attention...is a more limited type of plan....”

While this editorial gave the Reagan administration more credit than it deserved (see below), the main point was correct. Two months after his inauguration, Mr. Bush, the “education president,” abandoned the cause of real choice in education, as well as a campaign promise and the GOP platform, and endorsed a plan for ersatz choice. In rejecting tuition tax credits, he used that catch-all excuse for not reducing taxes: the federal budget deficit won’t allow it. Bush here was using the pernicious doctrine of “tax expenditures,” by which money left in the hands of the taxpayers is regarded as government spending. The government cannot afford to let parents keep their own money to spend on the education of their choice, Bush was saying.

His alternative? “I think everybody should support the public school system.” But what about parents who dislike the quality of the government’s schools and want something better for their children? The “education president” told a group of students, “If, on top of that [the public schools], your parents want to shell out in addition to the tax money, tuition money, that’s their right, and that should be respected. But I don’t think they should get a break for that.”

A “break”? Here President Bush takes the “tax expenditure” doctrine to insulting limits. Parents permitted to keep their own money to spend as they see fit on their children’s education would be getting a break, a subsidy, a privilege.

As this shows, the failure to think in principles leads so-called pragmatic politicians ultimately to surrender what they claim are cherished values.

When the government lets parents keep their own money, it is neither a subsidy nor a government expenditure. It can only be construed that way if the government, not the producers, is the legitimate owner of all income. But, at least according to the founding principles of the United States, we are not supposed to believe that. The doctrine of tax expenditures is an especially un-American idea.

Moreover, it is sad to see the notion of choice in education twisted so out of shape. It did not begin with Bush. As with so many other things, the Reagan administration’s reputation in this area is clearly undeserved. Although Ronald Reagan claimed to be a champion of the choice-in-education movement, he betrayed it by failing to halt—and indeed by furthering—the centralization of education in the United States.

After campaigning on a promise in 1980 to abolish the Department of Education, which Jimmy Carter had set up as a favor to the National Education Association in payment for its endorsement, he of course did not abolish it. On the contrary, his first secretary of education was the establishmentarian Terell Bell and the department’s budget grew.

His second secretary was neoconservative William J. Bennett (now drug czar), who, while talking about choice in education, proposed a national curriculum. The conservative’s lack of outcry against this idea was deafening. Other “innovations” by the Reagan Department of Education included an annual national report card on school performance and a national board for teacher certification. Nationalization is hardly the direction in which we should be going.

President Bush, unlike Reagan, won’t even pay lip-service to freedom in education. His abandonment of tax credits for tuition was immediately recognized as a blow to the choice-in-education movement. Predictably, the vice president of the Los Angeles teachers union was enthralled. “That’s outstanding news,” said Frances Haywood. “It’s a great departure from the stance of the Republican Party.” The spokesman for the Los Angeles Archdiocese was understandably crestfallen: “I’m disappointed. This president has called himself the education president, and he’s ignoring a sizable segment of the American population in not recognizing the needs of parochial school students.”

The most pernicious part of all this is how choice in education is being distorted into something very different. What the Bush administration means by choice and competition is the following: parents should be allowed to send their children to any government school in their school district. In some cases, state and other funds would follow the students to their chosen school. The rationale is that this would make the schools competitive. Poor schools that lost students would lose money. Good schools that gained students would gain money.

The problem with the idea is similar to the problem with market-socialism schemes: it is an attempt to play competition. School administrators would not be risking their own capital, and they would have every reason to believe that the government authorities would not let a poor school go bankrupt. Imagine what will happen when inner-city schools see most of their students leave. Will all the money really go with them?

Any “solution” that merely tinkers with the government schools, without making private schools a real option for parents, is phony. And the only way to make private schools a real option, and to create true competition, is to let parents get a refund of their tax money when they pay tuition. Whether this is done through tax credits or vouchers is less important than other considerations, for instance, that the government not impose a curriculum on the private schools or certification requirements on teachers.

This is the only way to get innovation in education. It is also the only way to have real local control of education. Local control in a political context is a chimera, as we’ve seen over the years. Elected school boards are always captives of education bureaucrats, who are in turn part of a national education establishment tied to the federal bureaucrats. The tendency will always be toward nationalization of education, even if it is nominally local.

In a system in which parents can use private schools without paying twice, there is real local, parental control. The mechanism of control is obvious. It’s called consumer sovereignty: parents can withdraw their support, and children, from a school at any time and shift them to competitors.

To make this system complete, compulsory-education laws—a form of conscription—would be abolished, recognizing that there are countless ways to get an education. Nothing that the education bureaucrats dream up could compare with a truly competitive system, which is why they are trying to divert our attention with their ersatz schemes.

This also disposes of the hot debate about whether values and religion should be taught in the schools. Parents would be free to pick the school that reflects their own ethical and religious outlook. Since no tax money would be involved, no one could claim that values were being imposed on anyone’s children.

Finally, there is the old canard that the reason we have government schools in the first place is that the market was unable to do the job right. This story has been shown by many scholars to be bogus. Privately provided education was abundant, inexpensive, and good beginning in the colonial period of America. The same was true in Great Britain. Education entrepreneurs were responsive to consumers and they educated many people. Literacy was high.

One education historian, Robert Seybolt, writes, “It is a significant fact in American education that the curriculum developed most rapidly in the private schools” and that “curricular response to popular educational demands was initiated by private, rather than public enterprise.” “In the hands of private schoolmasters the curriculum expanded rapidly,” he says. “Their schools were commercial ventures, and, consequently, competition was keen.” This “element of competition,” forced the private schools “to add new courses of instruction,” and “constantly to improve their methods and technique of instruction.”

Contrary to the education establishment’s version, government schools were not set up because schooling was scarce. The were set up because only government schools could fulfill the social-engineers’ agenda. The agenda included the homogenizing of American culture, which was said to be threatened by immigrants and Catholics. The motive was not educational, but jingoistic.

It is hard to ignore this history when viewing current events. The Bush administration’s commitment to government schooling can’t be explained by a desire to better educate students: too many decades of failure have gone by to think that government could do that. It is better explained by a desire to more efficiently crank out homogeneous, servile, taxpaying citizens. The choice-in-education movement will have to continue without any help from Washington.

The High Court Stems the Tupperware Threat

Sheldon L. Richman

America is the land of free speech and press. The principle is enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution: Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech and of the press. Any school kid knows this—well, there was a time when any school kid knew it.

Okay, the government has made exceptions. If the expression is deemed obscene it is not protected. And Congress has outlawed the destruction of American flags, such as the kind you can buy in the five-and-dime. But speech and press are substantially free, right?

How about so-called commercial speech?

Commercial speech has for decades been treated differently from regular speech. For example, cigarette ads on television and radio have been banned by Congress. And the government has rules regarding the kinds of claims advertisers can make, even when they aren’t fraudulent. Billboards are frequently banned from public highways. And as Michael Gartner, president of ABC News, pointed out, “if you say ‘Buy Finnegan’s Ice Cream,’ that has less protection than if you say ‘Ice cream is good for you.’” The Supreme Court wrote in 1978 that commercial speech enjoys “a limited measure of protection, commensurate with its subordinate position in the scale of First Amendment values” and is subject to “modes of regulation that might be impermissible in the realm of noncommercial expression.” (Emphasis added.)

Maybe I’ve missed something, but the First Amendment seems not to have a scale of values. It says simply “Congress shall make no law....” There is something palpably anticapitalistic in the law’s view that speech leading to a commercial transaction is inferior to other kinds of speech. During the Industrial Revolution the old aristocracies regarded commerce as base. This attitude lives on at the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1980 the court affirmed the distinction between commercial and noncommercial speech, and it set out standards for regulation of the former. Essentially, the government could regulate, the court said, to advance a substantial government interest so long as the regulation was the least restrictive possible.

This was bad enough, but it didn’t take long for the court to erode its own standard in favor of a much more permissive one. In 1986 the court upheld a prohibition in Puerto Rico against casino advertising aimed at local residents. It seemed unconcerned with whether the prohibition was the least restrictive method.

Then just last June the court openly abandoned the “least-restrictive” test for the ambiguous “reasonableness” test. The State University of New York (SUNY) prohibits businesses from operating on SUNY campuses, except for those providing food, books, etc. Nevertheless, a student held a Tupperware-style party in a dormitory. Present was a saleswoman with a housewares company, American Future Systems, Inc. The campus police asked her to leave and when she refused, she was charged with trespassing and soliciting without a permit. Some students sued SUNY for violating their freedom of speech.

The students won in the lower courts, but then the case landed in the Supreme Court. In an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court upheld the law. Scalia wrote that the court’s past decisions only require—quoting the Puerto Rico case—a “‘fit’ between the legislature’s ends and the means chosen to accomplish those ends,” a fit “that is not necessarily perfect, but reasonable.”

While even the “least-restrictive” test allowed regulations out of spirit with the First Amendment, the new test of “reasonableness” is even worse. One at least can show that a regulation is not the least restrictive by coming up with something less restrictive. But how can one rebut the government’s assertion that a regulation is reasonably related to its objective? Scalia has moved this area of the law from the (relatively) firm to the hopelessly soft.

Free commercial speech advocates are nervously watching another case now before the court. It involves a lawyer accused of violating an Illinois law forbidding lawyers from advertising themselves as “certified” or as “specialists.” The lawyer, Gary E. Peel, noted on his letterhead that he is certified by a trial-lawyers’ group. And interest groups in the United States are agitating to have Congress ban alcohol and cigarette advertising altogether, and the House has held hearings on a bill to prohibit tobacco ads that could be seen or heard by anyone under 18 years old.

Thanks to the Supreme Court, the future does not look good for free capitalistic speech. It is worth remembering that this is the one they call the Reagan Court.

Welcoming the Vietnamese

Murray N. Rothbard

From its inception America was largely the land of the free, but there were a few exceptions. One was the blatant subsidies to the politically powerful maritime industry, trying to protect what has long been a chronically inefficient industry from international competition. One of the initial actions of the first American Congress in 1789 was to pass the Jones Act, which protected both maritime owners and top employees. The Jones Act provided that vessels of five or more tons in American waters had to be owned by U.S. citizens, and that only citizens could serve as masters or pilots of such vessels.

Times have passed, and whatever national security considerations that might have required a fleet of private boats ready to assist the U.S. Navy have long since disappeared. The Jones Act had long become a dead letter. But let a law remain on the books, and it can always be trotted out to be used as a club for protectionism. And that is what has happened with the Jones Act.

Unfortunately, the latest victims of the Jones Act are Vietnamese immigrants who were welcomed as refugees from Communism, and who have proved to be thrifty, hard-working, and productive residents of the United States, working toward their citizenship. Unfortunately, too productive as fishermen for some of their inefficient Anglo competitors. In the early 1980s, Texas shrimpers attempted, by use of violence, to put Vietnamese-American competitors out of business.

The latest outrage against Vietnamese-American fishermen has occurred in California, mainly in San Francisco, where Vietnamese-Americans, legal residents of the United States, have pooled their resources to purchase boats, and have been engaged in successful fishing of kingfish and hagfish for the past decade. In recent months, in response to complaints by Anglo competitors, the Coast Guard has been cracking down on the Vietnamese, citing the long-forgotten and long unenforced provisions of the Jones Act. While the Vietnamese-Americans have been willing to pay the $500 fine per citation to keep earning their livelihood, the Coast Guard now threatens to confiscate their boat-registration documents and thereby put them out of business. The fact that these are peaceful, legal, permanent residents makes all the more ridiculous the U.S. government’s contention that they “present a clear and present threat to the national security.”

Dennis W. Hayashi of the Asian Law Caucus, who is an attorney for the Vietnamese fishermen, notes that all of them “are working toward citizenship. They were welcomed as political refugees. It is noxious to me that because they have not yet sworn allegiance to America there is an implication that they are untrustworthy.”

In the best tradition of Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake,” the government replies that the Vietnamese are free to work on boats under five tons which would be fishing closer to shore. The problem is that the Vietnamese concentrate on fish that cater to Asian restaurants and fish shops, and that such kingfish and hagfish have to be caught in gill nets. So why not use gill nets in small boats closer to shore? Because here, in a classic governmental Catch-22 situation, our old friends the environmentalists have already been at work. Seven years ago the environmentalists persuaded California to outlaw the use of gill netting in less than 60 feet of water. Why? Because these nets were, willy-nilly, ensnaring migratory birds and marine mammals in their meshes. So, once again, the environmentalists, speaking for the interests of all conceivable species as against man, have won out against their proclaimed enemies, human beings.

And so, seeking freedom and freedom of enterprise as victims of collectivism, the Vietnamese have been trapped by the U.S. government as pawns of inefficient competitors on the one hand and anti-human environmentalists on the other. The Vietnamese-Americans are seeking justice in American courts, however, and perhaps they will obtain it.

The Double Danger of AIDS

Richard Hite

AIDS is bad enough, but the government is making it worse. The feds are using this horrible disease as an excuse to expand at our expense. Already, they have used it to justify legislative and judicial interventions in employment, insurance, research, and education. And there is worse to come.

Consider the case of the Florida company that—concerned for the safety of its other employees—dismissed an AIDS-carrier. The AIDS-infected employee sued, won $190,000, and forced his employer to rehire him. The court claimed AIDS is a handicap that cannot serve as a reason for discrimination.

Why? Because Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 allegedly prohibit it. Section 504 states that firms receiving federal funds, very broadly defined, cannot discriminate against an individual with a physical handicap, and the courts have classified AIDS as a handicap—the only communicable disease so defined.

There are at least two things wrong with this. First, it restricts the right of employers to choose their employees freely, which leads to an array of bad economic consequences. Second, people with AIDS are given privileges that are withheld from other diseased persons, such as those with cancer or heart problems.

Today, an employer properly has the right to discriminate against cigarette smokers. He may refuse to hire smokers for any number of reasons, including to appease nonsmokers who don’t like smoke, or who fear its possible health effects. Similarly, an employer should have the right to discriminate against AIDS carriers, whether to calm other workers or to reduce the marginal chance of contracting AIDS.

There are other legitimate reasons employers might not want to hire AIDS carriers. For example, they may fear drastic increases in health insurance premiums. By not being allowed to discriminate, employers may have to cut back on insurance to others, or eliminate it entirely. When employers spend time training new employees, they are investing scarce resources now in expectation of a return later. Why should they invest resources in training AIDS-infected persons who unfortunately offer little potential for a long-run return?

Nor will laws against AIDS discrimination stop employers from discriminating. These laws will only lead to different sorts of discrimination. In order to screen out potential AIDS carriers, employers will tend not to employ members of groups perceived to be at high risk. That is, they will be less likely to hire single, male, black, poor applicants, and those they think might be homosexual.

By shifting their discrimination toward those who they think may be in a high-risk group, employers will tend to favor applicants who are married, female, white, non-poor, and apparently heterosexual. That’s why it makes sense for employers to have the freedom to require that all job applicants take an AIDS test.

The government-AIDS mania has also infected insurance. In 1986 the District of Columbia forbade insurance companies to discriminate against those who are “AIDS infected, perceived to be infected with AIDS, or perceived to be at high risk to AIDS infection.” That is, non-AIDS carriers have to subsidize AIDS carriers through higher insurance premiums.

To fulfill their very important economic function, insurance companies must operate on the principle of calculated risk. It doesn’t take much calculation to assess the possibility of paying out large sums to AIDS-infected persons. The total could reach $50 billion in the next five years.

If the practice of forcing insurance firms to cover AIDS grows, premiums will become so high that most people could not afford them. It’s all too likely that government will then step in to “help” the victims of “uncaring” profit-minded businesses with more programs and regulations.

AIDS has been especially hard on the U.S. taxpayer, with the government shelling out more than $1 billion per year for alleged research and education. Recent bipartisan bills before Congress would increase the amount to $3 billion per year by 1990.

Research accounts for $600 million of this total and education about $450 million. And there is no shortage of organized groups anxious to be added to the public payroll. Medical researchers are one, and the American Medical Association is currently lobbying hard for more AIDS funding.

Between 1981 and 1987, 67,000 cases of AIDS were reported and 30,000 people died of AIDS. Yet 65,000 people die of heart disease every month. Surgeon General Everett Koop estimates that 270,000 cases of AIDS will occur by 1991. Yet by 1991, there will be one million new cases of cancer. Even if I accepted a federal role in health, and I do not, I still have to wonder why huge sums of taxpayer money should be spent on a disease which affects such a small portion of the population, and which is preventable by behavior changes.

Practitioners of “unsafe sex” and intravenous drug users should be allowed to make choices like everyone else. But they, and not the taxpayers, should assume the risks for the consequences of their actions. If the government spends billions to find cures and provide insurance for AIDS-infected persons, maybe it should do the same for high-wire walkers and human cannonballs.

As economics would predict, government has misallocated the money it spends on AIDS. Most has gone to notoriously inefficient and bureaucratized government labs or government-run labs, while the FDA harasses private vaccine development. But the key is that there is a lot of money to be made by the government-medical-industrial complex. And the same goes for the $450 million that Washington wastes annually on AIDS “education.” A recent survey of D.C. residents found that 86% knew that AIDS is primarily spread through intimate sexual contact. However, 33% did not know that a blood transfusion can transmit AIDS, 39% did not know that sharing needles transmits AIDS, 16% thought toilet seats can transmit AIDS, and 28% thought drinking glasses can carry AIDS. The half billion is, as usual, largely going for salaries in the bureaucracies and grants to Beltway-bandit consultants who lobby for the funding to begin with. AIDS education would be much more effective if carried out by profit-motivated advertising.

If the government would simply get out of the way, the private sector would have a chance to provide preventative and curative measures. In the meantime, AIDS will continue to endanger us, not only medically, but with the violations of liberty perpetrated in its name.

The Megaeconomic Threat

Llewellyn H. Rockwell

The government spends billions of our dollars to tell us how wonderful it is. Too bad the truth-in-advertising laws don’t apply, for this is one of the great frauds in American history.

Washington has inflicted appalling taxes, spending, regulation, and inflation on us for more than 75 years. The excuse has been economic stability and social welfare. But the result has been an erratic economy and a poorer people. (Of course, government as an institution is more stable and prosperous, and so are the private interests that live off it, but that is another story.)

The disinterested observer might think it was time to junk federal planning and give the free market a try. But Washington has a better idea. It wants to help run a World State.

In the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes urged the creation of global institutions to bring the benefits of Keynesianism to the entire planet. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were two of his offspring, intended to redistribute wealth worldwide through foreign aid and central banking. Keynes didn’t achieve his dream, thanks in large part to an American public opinion distrustful of internationalism. But the Keynesians never gave up, and in recent years they’ve been making unsettling progress.

Under the aegis of the Bank for International Settlements—the self-styled “central bankers’ bank”—is now regulated on a global basis. And the Bush administration is pushing for world regulation of the stock, bond, and futures markets. The administration is also promoting—with the other G-7 industrialized nations—international cash controls, international financial police, [international fiscal controls] international tax collusion, and a UN treaty to make confidential banking a crime. With Washington’s backing, Europe is moving towards One Big Government by 1992, with a European central bank to manipulate the world monetary system run the world monetarily in conjunction with the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan.

The liberal New Republic calls this “unipolarism,” although it notes that proponents of world government “now avoid the eerie idea of ‘world federalism’ and espouse instead more subtle sources of order.” The magazine touts the influential World Policy Institute (WPI)—once more honestly called the Institute for World Order—and its advocacy of global central banking, world inflation, and internationally managed trade.

Especially influential, notes The New Republic, is David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, which advocates a different version of unipolarism: what The National Review calls “a dominant condominium of capitalist powers ruling the world.” The Trilateralists put more emphasis on military power than the liberal WPI, but both agree that national sovereignty should, in every meaningful sense, be eliminated.

“Megaeconomics,” a term coined by WPI economist Walter Russell Mead, is Keynesian “macroeconomics” raised to a world level, and emphasizing the “community of nations” instead of the “narrow self-interest of individual nations.”

Economically, of course, this is crazed. The “megaeconomics of unipolarism” will fail even more catastrophically than the macroeconomics of multipolarism. The Federal Reserve creates domestic inflation and business cycles; global central banking will give us worldwide monetary depreciation and depressions. World regulation will build global cartels just as domestic regulation does at home. And coordinated fiscal expansion will mean more efficient looting of private resources for world politicians, bureaucrats, and special interests to spend on themselves.

When the federal government unconstitutionally seized policy making from the states, we lost much of our economic freedoms. If world bodies pick up where the federal government leaves off, our future will be grim indeed.

Once these global institutions are erected, to whom will they be accountable? How will we influence the “world community”? A grass-roots letter-writing campaign to the G-7 or the World Bank?

We all know how hard it is to make our voices heard at city hall, let alone in the state capital or Washington. A world government would be immune to influence from middle-class taxpayers, which is part of its appeal.

Writing in Omnipotent Government in 1944, Ludwig von Mises worried about “the substitution of cooperative intervention of all or many governments for the independent interventionism of every national government.” He pointed out that domestic intervention creates “a class of bounty receivers and a more numerous class of bounty payers.”

“The domestic conflicts engendered by such policies are very serious indeed,” he says. “But in the sphere of international relations they are incomparably more disastrous.” Mises concludes: “It would be difficult to imagine any program whose realization would contribute more to engendering future conflict and wars.”

We in the United States can stop world government. But to do so, we must educate ourselves about the moves now taking place, educate our fellow citizens, and seek to stop the growth of our own big government—and then roll it back.

Controlling the World Economy

Graeme B. Littler and Jeffrey A. Tucker

International trade and investment are growing—and that’s great news for consumers, investors, and companies. But there’s a dark side: politicians and bureaucrats are internationalizing their controls.

Some pundits believe that the global marketplace has permanently outrun the ability of governments to control: “It is no longer possible or desirable to control borders, manage trade, manipulate currencies, or otherwise interfere with global commerce,” says supply-sider George Gilder. “The fabric of relationships among American, Asian, and European businesses is woven too tight.”

Certainly government interference with global commerce is undesirable. But to claim that it is “no longer possible” is naive. Governments never relinquish power unless forced to; wherever the economy leads, governments are sure to follow.

Now that so much of the economy is international, governments have found new ways to interfere. Here are just some of them:

Cash

To intervene, governments need complete and accurate information about sources and directions of cash flows. The U.S. government has largely met this requirement domestically by building a huge network of computerized financial dossiers on American citizens. The misnamed Bank Secrecy Act, for example, requires bank customers to reveal information about themselves (name, age, SSN, amount, etc.) on a Currency Transaction Report (CTR) if they withdraw or deposit more than $10,000 in cash. (The de facto ceiling is much lower.) These forms are then sent to government agents for careful analysis.

The CTR enables the government to monitor both cash and non-cash transactions. Banks already must keep photographic records of all checks. Combined with the CTR, this creates a permanent paper trail that the government can access at any time. Real criminals can escape because they know these requirements inside and out. But they are not the intended targets. The real victims are law-abiding citizens who want their rightful privacy.

Now that cash is flowing over the borders and into the world economy, the government wants to put a tail on it. It is currently negotiating several international agreements that would extend the state’s power to keep track of global financial affairs. They include:

1. A Global CTR. A U.S.-sponsored treaty being negotiated in the UN right now would require a global CTR. The provision is buried deep within the treaty, which is supposedly directed against drugs.

2. A Global Currency Control Agency. President Reagan signed a bill in November allegedly to fight the drug war, which calls for the “Treasury to negotiate with finance ministers of foreign countries to establish an international currency control agency.” With no public notice or debate, the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency recently made a deal with the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) to swap information on cash flows. The target is supposedly “international financial crimes,” but under exchange controls, that would include an honest American wanting international diversification and privacy.

3. The War on Offshore Banks. The U. S. government is seeking to eliminate private overseas banking. Investigators from Congress’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) have been junketing around the globe for three years, interrogating businessmen and warning banks to obey. The PSI recommends in a recent report, for example, the ratification of a United States-sponsored UN treaty to force all banks worldwide to disclose information on clients automatically and simultaneously. Says the report: the United States should impose “sanctions against those havens who [sic] express no interest in treaty negotiations” including limiting “direct airline flights to and from the havens.”

4. A Global Tax Treaty. If the U. S. Senate passes a treaty that was drafted and passed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) at the behest of the U. S. State and Treasury departments, it will take a giant step towards a world IRS. The “Administrative Convention on Tax Matters” will establish a global tax-collection agency, responsible for collecting and keeping track of everything from income taxes to local property tax. All major industrial countries are members of the OECD.

Capital

For months after the October 1987 stock-market crash, we heard calls for more securities regulation. In the past, this might have meant new restrictions on American stock markets. But with international capital markets, and around the clock trading, regulators know that investors can easily move abroad to freer markets. So the regulators have decided to pursue global controls.

In November 1988, SEC Commissioner David Ruder outlined what London’s Financial Times described as “the first authoritative blueprint for the creation and regulation of a truly global market system.” The plan was announced at the annual conference of the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSC).

The increasingly powerful IOSC is working with other international bodies—such as the Bank for International Settlements and the OECD—to standardize controls over banking, accounting, and securities. Although moves toward standardization can reflect greater competition in the free market, these particular changes are not the result of market competition. Standardized regulations will only increase the power of regulators to interfere with the international flow of investment capital.

The SEC is also working to exchange information on securities transactions. The SEC’s principal tool is the “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) which establishes formal mechanisms for swapping information and requires regulators to conduct investigations on behalf of foreign regulators. The SEC has already reached MOUs with Canada, Britain, Japan, and Brazil. It has information-swapping treaties with Switzerland, Netherlands, and Italy. And the recently passed Insider Trading Act gives the SEC authority to conduct investigations on behalf of foreign governments even if the activity in question doesn’t violate U.S. law.

The Committee on Government Operations, which oversees the SEC, agrees with the SEC that it needs authority to deny “uncooperative countries” (i.e., those with bank secrecy laws) access to U. S. securities markets. The Committee also recommended that the SEC—in conjunction with the State, Justice, and Treasury departments—develop “a system of linking trade and other benefits to foreign government cooperation with the SEC and other U. S. agencies.”

On another front, the SEC is banning electronic trading links between foreign and U. S. stock exchanges unless is can swap information and conduct surveillance with foreign regulators.

Money and Banking

In the heyday of the gold standard, politics and money were largely separate. Not so with today’s flat money and central banking.

In Reagan’s first term, the administration largely followed a policy of “benign neglect,” which allowed the dollar to rise and fall according to the dictates of the world-money markets. In Reagan’s second term, the president abandoned this policy and replaced it with government-managed “reference ranges” for currencies. Governments and central bankers agreed to buy and sell one another’s currencies to keep them trading with a specified range. As a result of these agreements, central bankers spent $120 billion to support the dollar during 1987.

The upshot will be the re-fixing of exchange rates within a world of fiat paper money. Fixed-exchange rates were harmful even under the Bretton Woods system (1945–1971), and they will be even worse if implemented today. Under Bretton Woods, world currencies were at least indirectly tied to gold. Today, the only limit to money and credit expansion is the central bankers’ fear it will cause their respective currencies to depreciate relative to others. If the Fed expands dollars too quickly, traders can dump dollars and move into yen or marks. The prospect acts as a brake on inflation.

Fixed-exchange rates remove that restraint by forcing global currencies into a pre-set trading relationships. Then inflation is spread uniformly throughout the world economy while the culprits avoid detection.

Current trends in Europe toward monetary and banking integration foreshadow what could eventually happen worldwide. Twelve European currencies have been packaged into a single unit called the European Currency Unit, or ECU. The ECU has already become the world’s fourth largest trading currency; ultimately, it could replace all of Europe’s national currencies. European financiers and governments are lobbying to make the ECU the single currency and to create a European central bank. This will permit Europe-wide inflation. Eventually, the same steps could be taken to unite the yen, ECU, and dollar into a single world-wide currency.

Thinking Globally

Economic integration is a desirable goal. But political integration will only mean more powerful government under even less citizen control. Political borders have limited governments’ jurisdiction to fixed geographic regions. When governments seek to extend their control over borders, liberty is threatened. What is true domestically is also true internationally: free markets work best when they are unhampered by government control.

The Dangers of “National Service”

Sheldon L. Richman

One of the most talked about pieces of legislation these days is a bill, sponsored by Sen. Sam Nunn (D-GA), that would set up a so-called national service program. The Nunn bill would induce young people into military or civilian service by promising vouchers worth $10,000-$12,000 for every year of service. The vouchers could be used for college tuition or a down payment on a house.

As currently planned, the program would be voluntary. No one would have to participate. But Nunn would also end existing student-aid programs (in itself a good idea), making national service more of a necessity for poor people than for the affluent.

There is a grave danger that this program will be seen as uncontroversial, will quietly get through the Congress, and will be signed by President Bush. The media have been setting the public up for complacency. For example, on a recent MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour (on PBS), Nunn defended his program against three “critics.” The word is in quotation marks because each began his remarks by lauding the underlying principle of national service, before taking issue with some minor details of the plan. Could the show’s staff not find one real critic?

What are some of the faults with Nunn’s program? The problem is deciding where to begin. The premise of the program is that young people owe something to their country. This debt, so the argument would go, cannot be discharged except by having them be at the service of the government for a year or two. The first thing to note is that a voluntary program is a weak reflection of the premise. And this is why the program would not remain voluntary for long. After some time, proponents of national service will notice that the program is filled mostly with poorer people who have no other way to get money for college or a house. The more affluent can avoid the service because the inducement doesn’t work for them. This will be denounced as unfair and out of spirit with the intent of the program. Amendments to make it universal and compulsory will be proposed.

That a voluntary program is just the first step to a compulsory one is reason enough to reject the Nunn plan. But it is not all, for even if it could never become compulsory, there are reasons to reject it.

First, what of the government’s promotion of “civic duty”? It directly contradicts the moral foundation of free society. In such a society the government may not promote a moral code beyond the minimum of respect for individual rights. Anything more infringes freedom of conscience. Yet under the Nunn plan the government will spend $5 billion a year (not including the cost of the vouchers) to promote the idea that young people owe a duty to the state or society.

A good case could be made that the notion of service owed to the state or society is characteristic of 1930s European despotism, but in this context it is enough to say that the government should have nothing to say about it. If people want to perform service for their communities or country, there are countless private organizations in which they can do it. But it is well beyond the scope of limited government for it to tax people in order to induce others to perform service. Any taxpayer who objects to the idea that one has unchosen obligations to others would thereby have his conscience violated. (Needless to say, a compulsory program would be an even more egregious usurpation, because the government would be claiming an ownership right to a portion of the time of its citizens. This would be temporary slavery.)

The discussion so far has given too much away to the national-service advocates, for they imply that one does not create social benefits through private market activity. That of course is absurd since to be successful in the marketplace, one must be sensitive to the needs of others. Even if one’s only motivation is personal profit, one cannot help but benefit others while pursuing it. That surely should discharge any obligation to the satisfaction of the national-service advocates. The reason it doesn’t is that service to society is not the same as service to the government. As we will see, the national service proposal, because of its political nature, would have little to do with one’s fellows and much to do with serving special political interests.

There are specific economic problems with the Nunn plan as well. How will the government decide where to allocate the labor services it will have at its disposal? In the free market, entrepreneurs observe prices for inputs and outputs to discover worthwhile investments. They then bid for the labor needed to execute their plans. If the wages they must pay are within the constraints set by final consumer valuation of the product, the enterprise is viable. If the wages are outside those constraints, this is a signal that others are willing to bid more for the services. The wage market, in other words, provides indispensable signals for the rational allocation of labor and resources.

This system of signals would be of no interest to the administrators of the national-service program. The program would not face a profit-loss test and it couldn’t go out of business, because the people who finance it—the taxpayers—could not withhold their revenue if they were displeased. So its standards for allocating labor would be different from those of entrepreneurs. What standards would it use? More than likely it would use the usual bureaucratic standards that we observe in other government programs. Blind to the signals that indicate the consumers’ preference for resources, the bureaucrats assigning personnel would favor projects that can further their careers and prestige. For example, we could expect to see an inclination to favor organizations in the districts of congressmen who sit on the committee that approves the budget of the national-service program. Not every choice would be that obvious, but the principle underlying the program’s decisions would be the same.

While the government program would be assigning people to jobs without regard to market signals, those people would be unavailable to entrepreneurs trying to satisfy consumers. The smaller labor pool would lead to higher wages, which in turn would make some enterprises uneconomical. Consumers would thus face fewer choices and higher prices.

Proponents of national service will surely object that the people in the program would perform needed services. But before we can say that a service is needed, we must see what the market says about it. There are many ways to provide a given service; the only way to know how to provide it is to let the price system work. A national-service program would circumvent the price system.

On the program’s own terms, there are nagging questions. Why are young people the target? If people owe service because of the benefits they have gotten from society, it would seem that older people, who have collected more benefits than the young, have a greater obligation. Yet the program ignores this. Moreover, time off for national service would seem to be a greater hardship on young people, who are eager to set out on their own and begin their careers, than people already established in their work. Could it be that despite their rhetoric about the opportunity to serve, this is just another way for adults to control “kids”?

Perhaps a more serious indictment of such a program is that it would shift responsibility for many social problems away from their source, the government. The people who promote national service say that the poor would be helped by it. But this country has a permanent underclass because of countless regulations and restrictions—licensing, the minimum wage, rent control, to name a few—put in place by the same government that now is said to be able to help the poor by instilling the dogma of national service in America’s young people.

The Mandated-Benefits Scheme

Sheldon L. Richman

If there is a salutary side to the mammoth federal budget deficits of the Reagan years, it is that they have somewhat inhibited those who would otherwise be proposing big new spending programs. When the government is already $250 billion in the red, it’s harder to make a case for spending billions more for some pork-barrel project or another.

In the old, pre-Big Deficit days, interventionists would think nothing of proposing that the government provide a variety of goodies to the allegedly suffering masses: health care, food stamps, and the like. But with the budget in such disarray, what’s a social engineer to do? Never fear: those who lust after your paycheck are not so easily beaten. They have come up with a formula that must seem to them as potent as any witch doctor’s magic chant: mandated benefits.

If we can’t have the government pay for things outright, the reasoning goes, let’s have it mandate that others—employers—provide them. Budget outlay: zero. Ingenious!

The first of these mandated benefits has already been enacted. With the blessing of then President-elect George Bush, Congress ordered that businesses give 60-days’ notice to unions before closing a plant or executing a big layoff. The next mandated benefit will likely be health insurance. A bill sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy would require employers to provide health coverage to all employees working 17 1/2 hours or more a week. This idea has been adopted in Massachusetts and was part of Michael Dukakis’s late presidential campaign. Other mandatory benefits being talked about include parental leave.

Of course, just because a program doesn’t cost the federal government anything does not mean it is free. Medical insurance is not found superabundant in nature; someone has to pay for it. The only question is who. The simplistic answer is that employers will pay. Let’s trace this out: Assume that employers must pay $200 a month per employee to provide health insurance. Where does that money come from? Obviously it will come out of the worker’s pay. Any expenses associated with a worker—Social Security, workman’s compensation, unemployment insurance, medical benefits—are part of that worker’s compensation package. Providing insurance on top of the workers’ current pay would be to give them a raise. But if a raise were economically justified for all workers, the competitive labor market would already have bid wages up to the amount of the health-insurance premium.

Many people have trouble understanding this, but there is nowhere else for the money to come from. As the great economist W. H. Hutt wrote in The Strike-Threat System, worker benefits are “amenities which are purchased, so to speak, for the worker out of his earnings, by a decision which he is unable individually to influence.... The partition of labor’s remuneration between pecuniary and nonpecuniary forms is obviously independent of the factors which determine labor costs.... Fringe rights and benefits are an alternative to cash receipts....”

Employers could try to raise prices to recoup the added cost from consumers. But that is not a promising move. Presuming that consumers have no more money than before the law was passed, they won’t be able pay more for all that they buy. So they will cut their demand for products. That will cause firms to lay off employees or even go out of business. These workers will not only be without health insurance, they will also be without wages. Mandated benefits become mandated pauperism.

Perhaps the interventionists think employers should pay for the benefits out of their profits. But what is the justification for the forced transfer of property from employers to employees? Moreover, when profits drop, so do investment, business expansion, and opportunities. Mandated benefits would channel investment from labor-intensive to capital-intensive industries and to countries that are more hospitable to business. All of this would hurt workers here.

So the ingenious plan goes awry somewhere, and the interventionist mind can’t understand why. A radio commentator who favors mandated benefits, after being confronted with these arguments, said in exasperation, “Why can’t employers just treat it as a cost of doing business?” That’s precisely what employers will do. To the interventionist, a cost of doing business is a mere bookkeeping phenomenon without consequences. The interventionists thinks wages, and all prices, are arbitrary inventions of businessmen. If businessmen don’t want to provide these benefits, it’s because they’re stingy.

But wages are not arbitrary; they are set by the market. Along with the prices of all factors of production, wages are reflections of how badly consumers want the product or service in question versus all other products and services in the market. A firm cannot pay workers more than their contribution if it is to stay in business. If the law requires it, some workers will be paid more only at the expense of others who will be paid not at all. The law will have distributed wealth not from business to labor, but from one set of workers to another. This is presumably not what the idealistic proponents of mandated benefits had in mind.

As we’ve seen, mandated benefits violate the freedom of choice of workers by dictating the form their compensation must take. If the law requires health insurance to be provided, the benefit will displace money income that the employees otherwise would have gotten. Some employees, however, prefer cash to insurance—for instance, young, healthy workers and those who already have coverage through parents or spouses. These people will be worse off, thanks to this “humanitarian” legislation. Mandating benefits is wrongheaded when you consider that workers already have the freedom to convert some of their wages into benefits. Ordinarily, employers would have no objection; on the contrary, they might prefer that workers spend their money on things aimed at keeping them healthy. The legislation removes the workers’ choice.

Similarly, a mandated 60-days’ notice for plant closings is an expense that will be made up one way or another: lower cash salaries, fewer jobs, fewer plants, etc.

In a competitive labor market, some firms may choose to bear a portion of the extra burden in the hope of keeping their workers from being bid away. In this case, mandated benefits will reduce competition because the relative burden is greater for smaller firms than for big ones. Union pressure has already led many big firms to provide mandated benefits. It may be in their interest to have the government force smaller firms to bear similar costs to reduce the threat of competition.

Mandated benefits are a fraud perpetrated on the workers of America. The proponents never say outright that they believe workers are not good judges of how to spend their incomes and should have less choice in the matter. But that is what is implied by their proposals. As Hutt wrote, “When the magnitude and form of the non-cash part of labor’s remuneration are a matter of governmental decision, the danger of the politically weak being sacrificed is very real.”

Animal Crackers

Llewellyn H. Rockwell

Ancient pagans at least worshipped a golden calf; their modern counterparts in the animal-rights movement cherish crustaceans.

Recently PETA—People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals—bought six lobsters from a Chinese restaurant in Maryland to prevent their being “killed, dismembered, and eaten.” PETA then flew the “liberated lobsters” to the Maine coast, where they were released into the Atlantic. (And where, we can hope, they made a nice meal for sea bass and other natural predators.)

That sort of harmless if loony activity affects only donors to PETA’s $6 million budget. But the animal liberationists have a more ambitious agenda; they want to outlaw any use of animals in food, research, or clothing. And they don’t hesitate to use violence to bring this about.

After all, says Ingrid Newkirk, director of PETA: “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” Adds Alex Pacheco, PETA’s chairman, “We feel that animals have the same rights as a retarded human child.”

Such a view, especially in the 20th century, has consequences. Animal Abu Nidals have bombed medical research labs, torched fried-chicken restaurants, burned down fur stores, burglarized turkey farms, stolen medical records, assaulted zoo employees, and vandalized butcher shops.

To animal rightists, it’s a matter of simple justice. All are “acceptable crimes” if they save the lives of animals, says PETA’s Pacheco. Vicki Miller, head of the Canadian Animal Rights Network, even looks forward to the prospect of “a vivisector shot in the street.”

As long as the rotten RICO law is on the books, why doesn’t the Justice Department stop persecuting innocent stockbrokers and indict the organized crimes of these bloodthirsty vegetarians? If they want to eat bean sprouts and wear plastic shoes, fine, but they should leave the rest of us alone.

The animal rights philosophy holds that bug or bird, manatee or man, we are all equally valuable to Mother Nature’s ecosphere. But this is paganism. The Judeo-Christian tradition teaches us that God created the earth and all its creatures for mankind. They are ours to eat, wear, use, and enjoy.

What I want to know is why, if animals have the right to life, animal activists aren’t out making citizens arrests of natural predators? Why aren’t they interposing themselves between, say, a Kodiak bear and a salmon?

For some reason, intra-animal eating doesn’t bother them. Only we aren’t allowed to eat fish or meat. If these pantheists get their way, prepare to carve a 20 lb. roast tofu next Thanksgiving.

The Humane Society, which used to be relatively moderate, now says bacon and eggs are the “Breakfast of Cruelty.” PETA calls McDonald’s “McDeath” for serving cheeseburgers, and activists scrawl that epithet on restaurant walls.

Along with outlawing the use of cows for their meat and leather, or even raising them for milk and cheese, animal rightists want to ban the eating of fish, chicken, and even snails. Eating “our fellow creatures is cannibalism,” one told me. They also want to forbid the sale of goosedown pillows, wool suits, and silk blouses, for geese are plucked, sheep are sometimes nicked when sheared, and the occasional silkworm is “boiled to death.”

Silkworms are not the only insects favored by the crusaders against “speciesism,” the “vicious belief that humans are the master race,” an activist told me. A bug-free kitchen is also out. Cockroaches too “have a right to live,” and serve the environment by being “efficient little garbage collectors.”

Next on the agenda: microbe rights. A Canadian activist told the Toronto Globe and Mail that “viruses such as smallpox should be reintroduced as part of the earth’s natural ecosystem.”

Naturally, the animal ideologues such as PETA oppose the use of rabbits to test cosmetics, even if it means skin problems or eye disease for women. And, says Pacheco, animal tests must be banned in medicine too. Human welfare should take a back seat to the lab rat, as modern research against cancer, Alzheimer’s, strokes, and heart disease is forbidden. “It is not a large price to pay,” a PETA employee told me.

At this time of the year, the greatest ire is reserved for fur. Steve Siegal, director of Trans-Species Unlimited, even advocates spraypainting any woman with a fur coat in imitation of Swedish anti-furrists. Others use razor blades to slice up fur coats on display. And PETA also advocates chanting “fur is dead” at women in fur coats, who presumably think otherwise.

Minks, foxes, and other fur-bearing creatures are raised in “animal Auschwitzes,” a PETA aide told me. These animals are “maltreated while alive, killed cruelly, and worn in savagery.” Morally, this is no different from Ilse Koch, “the Buchenwald commandant who made a lampshade out of human skin.”

Aside from the nature of this rhetoric, which offers an interesting glimpse into the animal-rightist soul, this is disinformation. Fur ranchers must treat their animals well. If they don’t, they will have sick animals, and as any pet owner knows, that means unattractive fur.

Even though most fur coats are made from commercially grown animals, trapping is also used. This is necessary for animal husbandry, but it also serves other purposes. Bears destroy bee hives; coyotes kill livestock; beavers flood farmland and roads; and foxes, minks, and weasels attack poultry.

Thanks to violence and propaganda, fur sales have been in a recession in the United States for three years. In northern Europe, fur sales also fell, but they have since bounced back. May the same happen here, especially as the glorious pelts from the arctic areas of the Soviet Union become more available under perestroika.

For Christmas, PETA urges us to sing carols to zoo animals “to draw attention to their imprisonment.” I have a better idea. To aid a beleaguered industry, we should give fur this Christmas. We can make another human happy and at the same time outrage the animal idolaters.

What a warming thought as we sit down to slice our nice rare Christmas roast beef.

Christian Economics

Carl C. Curtis, III

American evangelicals are approximately 20 million strong, and, despite their current bad press, still claim to be a powerful force in American politics. But there is another force among the evangelicals that has not received as much publicity as the religious Right, but which has proved its potency among publishers, editors, and pastors. This is the evangelical Left.

Listen to one of their leading lights, Ron Sider, in a Christianity Today article entitled “Mischief by Statute: How We Oppress the Poor.” The capitalist West, because of its private property and markets, is “dooming more people to agony and death than slavery did” and keeping a “stranglehold...on the economic growth of the Third-World.” In case Christendom missed his point, he later expanded his argument to a book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.

And Sider is not alone. He is joined by an international cadre of professors and pastors determined to spread the Good News of socialism. Andrew Kirk of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity and author of The Good News: The Kingdom’s Coming dreams of the future socialist state. In that golden age, the government will establish not only a minimum wage, but a maximum one as well. Unemployment benefits will match the minimum wage—a happy prospect for those who prefer not to work—and all money earned above the maximum will go to charity via “steeply progressive” taxes. Leaving aside the fact that this dream system is practically in effect in our country, Kirk apparently thinks every man, woman, and child will be healthy, wealthy, and wise under his inspired scheme. Whether or not he also believes, as Sourier did, that the sky will periodically rain lemonade, he does not say.

According to Kirk, justice and hope are not to be found in the capitalist formula, but in Marxism, “the only place where man finds his own real humanity by discovering that of his neighbor.”

Much of what Kirk says was echoed by Jose Miguez Bonino, whose book Christians and Marxism has also influenced Left evangelicals. He too finds free markets to be fundamentally opposed to biblical teaching. “The basic ethos of capitalism is definitely anti-Christian: it is the maximizing of economic gain, the raising of man’s grasping impulse, the idolizing of the strong, the subordination of man to the economic production.... In terms of their basic ethos, Christians must criticize capitalism radically, in its fundamental intentions.”

Bonino has often spoken of his infatuation with Marxist theory. And not the “ideal” variety we hear so much about (but never see), the kind that eschews the abuses of Lenin, Mao, and Castro. In fact, he says he is impressed by these three totalitarians and “their deep compassion for human suffering and their fierce hatred of oppression and exploitation.”

The French theologian Jacques Ellul opines in his book Money and Power that money is evil because it “creates a buying-selling relationship” necessarily subordinating men to itself. He further observes that “in every case (i.e., every transaction) one person is trying to establish superiority over another.” Evidently, Ellul has never heard about the Austrian concept of mutually beneficial exchange. To him, sellers act only from the basest of motives. “The idea that selling can be a service is false; in truth the only thing expressed by the transaction is the will to power, a wish to subordinate life to money.” Those unfortunate enough to buy Ellul’s book must draw their own conclusions about his “will to power” in performing such a base act.

Though it is true that the writers and intellectuals cited here are largely in Europe and Latin America, their influence in America is as powerful as it is noxious. American evangelicals have been imbibed the brew concocted by their foreign mentors.

We might have reason to despair were it not for an equally active and infinitely more reasonable group of writers providing a rear-guard action against these socialists. In this group, one of the clearest writers and most consistent proponents of Austrian economics is Dr. Ronald H. Nash, professor of philosophy and religion at Western Kentucky University. His recent book Poverty and Wealth: The Christian Debate Over Capitalism successfully challenges the evangelical Left and makes the Christian case for free markets.

Nash recognizes a constant theme running through the books of the evangelical Left: the “zero-sum game.” This is the contention, common to socialists everywhere, that free exchange is a type of exploitation. Nash shows how this thinking violates reason and common experience, and Nash demonstrates how free exchange—which depends on the cooperative judgment of individual subjective value—promotes mutual happiness and peace within society. This may seem obvious to readers familiar with Ludwig von Mises or Henry Hazlitt, but it is something many evangelicals deny.

Nash is also quick to pick up the evangelical Left’s adulation of the state. Is this, Nash asks, Christian? Are we to put our faith in the coercive power of the government? Are we to think that a handful of men can decide questions of market pricing, proper preferences, the production and distribution of all goods and services, in offices in Washington, London, or Moscow? Such men would have to possess the knowledge of God or at least of Angels. And that is of course precisely what men do not have and what Christians throughout the ages have been admonished to remember they can never have.

A brief acquaintance with the writings of Kirk, Sider, Ellul, Bonino, and the others might tempt one to think them errant on the subject of economics, but otherwise well-intentioned Christians. A closer examination must lead to another conclusion. These men are not simply misguided. They are socialists: materialistic, dishonest, and totalitarian to the core. Theirs is not the love of God, but the love of the state, and it is imperative that they be exposed for what they are.

Breaking Up the Opinion Cartel

Llewellyn H. Rockwell

Where have all the ideological battles gone? When I first became politically active as a young conservative in the middle 1950s, everyone on our side—including those in Washington—knew that freedom was our goal and big government our enemy. Every student argument, every political battle, was couched in those terms. Today, that sentiment seems almost to have disappeared.

Too many agree with George Bush when he condemns the “divisiveness” of politics and praises the “new breeze” that will make the “old bipartisanship...new again.” And, indeed, since January, hot air from the executive and legislative branches has blown serious discussion of ideas out the window. In Washington, it is hard to find more than a marginal difference of opinion on any issue.

Fred Barnes in the New Republic calls this is a “new era in American politics and government..., an era of consensus, conciliation, and compromise.” “Serious ideological disputes are a thing of the past,” he said. “Republicans and Democrats have narrowed their differences on big issues. Their fights are now over small and often barely relevant issues, or over personalities.”

Barnes says the latest anti-consensus era lasted from 1965 (when Lyndon Johnson broke his campaign promise and escalated the Vietnam war) to 1987 (when the Iran-Contra scandal petered out without doing any damage to Ronald Reagan).

One can quarrel with his dates, but not with Barnes’s analysis. Since Bush and the new bipartisanship arrived, we’ve gotten agreement on the S&L bailout, the Brady Plan bank bailout, a higher minimum wage, a massive increase in environmental regulation, gun control, and budget prevarication that’s unusual even for Washington.

Running through all these policies, and making a thousand points of light in our pocketbooks, is the triumph of interests over values. If there is value in a free market, individual liberty, private property, and truth, then we have to oppose the Brady plan, gun control, budget fraud, and all the rest. But, since interests rule ever more openly in Washington, the S&L bailout and the rest of these bipartisan plans sail through, reminding us that bipartisan means they have both their hands in our wallets.

Fred Barnes is wrong when he describes the origins of the new bipartisanship as part of an inevitable cycle. In fact, it is a result of what Walter Lipmann once approvingly described as the government’s “manufacture of consent.”

Our country has a wonderful lack of official restraints on freedom of speech and press. But we combine that with a narrow range of respectable opinion, which is no coincidence. The officials, academics, media owners, and pundits who define that narrow range constitute a deliberate opinion cartel.

All governments, and the elites that live off them, want to control public opinion. Most do it through open censorship and official propaganda. Ours uses subtler and therefore more effective techniques to insure that we do not oppose the host of programs that take money from producers and hand it out to non-producers—government and its friends.

Professor Noam Chomsky, a famed linguist, explains it this way: “Where obedience is guaranteed by violence..., it is enough that people obey; what they think does not matter too much. Where the state lacks adequate means of coercion, it is important to control what people think as well.”

“In wartime,” said Winston Churchill, “truth is so precious that she should be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” Maybe that’s to be expected, but Washington follows this rule in peacetime as well. And how wonderful that it does, says Professor Everett Ladd, a specialist in public opinion: this is “the essence of statecraft.” The government “must...engineer democratic consent.”

Despite the myth of government-press antagonism, the national media are all too useful in this effort. Typically, the media simply recycle government handouts, from Keynesian economic projections to phony statistics on the size of the federal deficit.

Here are just a few of the issues on which consent is engineered by the opinion cartel, but which desperately need a public hearing if we are to secure human liberty:

Income tax. The income tax distorts production, reduces prosperity, violates property rights, and trespasses on financial privacy. It provides 40% of a federal budget now more than twice the size of Jimmy Carter’s, but no one questions it.

Central banking. The Federal Reserve debauches the purchasing power of the dollar, distorts interest rates, creates the business cycle, and privileges big banks. It does more harm to savers and investors than any other agency, but it too is unquestioned.

Deficit. The economically destabilizing federal deficit used to be defined as the annual increase in the national debt. For the purpose of disinformation, it now means only the official deficit, while the real red ink is almost twice as large. For the S&L bailout, the Bush administration wanted the borrowing “off-budget.” The Democrats wanted it “on budget,” but not to count against the already leaky Gramm-Rudman ceiling. No one in Washington says the budgetary emperor is naked.

Minimum wage. The unions have waged a two-year campaign to raise the minimum wage, which will throw marginal employees out of work and strengthen the competitive position of overpaid union crews. One expects Teddy Kennedy to support this nasty business, but so does the Bush administration. The only argument is: how high? No one opposes any increase, let alone the repeal of this malodorous law.

Federal spending. The government spends more than $1.1 trillion a year. Where does all that cash end up? Very little provides the “services” we’re allegedly taxed for. The poor, for example, receive a tiny portion of the welfare budget, with the vast majority going to special interests. It is the same in every area of the government.

Bureaucracy. Washington, D. C., is crawling with the most overpaid and underworked people in the world. Almost all the bureaucrats at the departments of Education, Labor, Commerce, Health and Human Services, etc. do virtually nothing. And the few who do work usually gum up the economy for the rest of us. But no one talks about eliminating these unconstitutional departments.

Environmentalism. We are all supposed to prefer taxpayer-financed wilderness to human economic development. But why should the majority pay to support the aesthetic preferences of the few? The environmental movement openly seeks bigger government and poorer people. Should the “rights” of plants and animals really take precedence over the rights of people?

These and other issues are vital to America’s future, yet they are never discussed. The opinion cartel bars them from the public forum.

Yet it is not our job to convert the cartel, which is probably impossible. It is to work around it, in the academic world, in public policy, in the media, and with the general public. Here, unlike in Washington, we’re making progress.

The average American is convinced of a sort of popular public choice: that most politicians are corrupt, and that they seek their own interest over the common good. It is not a giant step to convincing the people that these same crooks and clowns should not be running our economy and our lives. The popular opposition to the Congressional pay raise shows what can be achieved.

Not that it will be easy. We have been losing this battle for too long, and the thought police are ever on guard, not only to fool us, but to keep the American people passive and apathetic.

But I don’t believe that a consensus in Washington on ripping us off is permanent. Nor do I agree with Fred Barnes that “Americans, it turns out, like big government.” They have only been fooled and cowed into it. Breaking up the opinion cartel is therefore the first step toward mobilizing a people that still longs for liberty.

Lyndon Baines Bush?

Llewellyn H. Rockwell

George Bush may deride ideology as the “vision thing,” but he has one too, and it’s statist.

Ronald Reagan presented himself as the people’s representative to the government. George Bush, a long-time federal functionary who identifies with the government, sees himself as representing it to the people.

Standing before Congress and the nation in January 1990, the president promised to talk, not about the “state of the government,” but about the “state of the union.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t see any difference.

For here was a Republican president, to the cheers of Republican Congressmen, promising a fatter welfare state. No wonder Tom Foley was pleased; George Bush sounded more like LBJ than Ronald Reagan.

The government’s “challenge,” said the president, is “a job for everyone who wants one” (and welfare for those who don’t), government child care for working mothers (yet another slap at the traditional family), a “roof over the head” of every homeless person, schools where no one fails, cheaper medical care, and zero drug use among young people. He didn’t promise us longer lives and stronger teeth, or maybe I missed that part of the speech.

A Republican president, from a party that used to oppose federal aid to local schools—let alone the Jimmy Carter-NEA Department of Education—now crows over “record-high” federal spending while “announcing America’s education goals.”

What is this, Bolivia? In America, we have many goals—individual, family, business, and community—and none of them is set by Washington. We don’t elect a president to tell parents in Alabama or North Dakota, how to educate their children. The very idea is authoritarian and un-American. Yet this Republican president proposes to establish a national curriculum and monitor all children “at the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades” against these bureaucratic norms.

And to those who might cut the Social Security tax, or reform any part of that Ponzi scheme, the president says: don’t “mess” with it. Which seems an appropriate verb for this New Deal welfare program. The Republicans cheered that line too.

The “environmental president” is also transfiguring the EPA into the Department of the Environment (but without any more “bureaucracy or red tape,” he said with a straight face). He proposes to spend billions more on the non-growing environmental bureaucracy; on the “greenhouse-effect” eco-pork scam; and on “America the beautiful”: planting one billion saplings, none of them members of Congress.

The president wants higher spending on HUD and its HOPE (Home Ownership for People Everywhere); the National Endowment for the Arts; the Department of Transportation’s “magnetic levitation” trains; foreign aid; export subsidies for big business; the IRS; and much, much more.

“The anchor in our world today is freedom,” said George Bush, even as he cut away at the anchor rope, since every dime taken to Washington diminishes the freedom of the people.

Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers believed that government which governs least, governs best. None of them can have envisioned the Rev. George Herbert Walker Bush telling us: Come unto me, all ye that are heavy laden, and I will give you jobs, homes, child care, education, and trees.

And not to worry about the cost: “the money is there.” The money is really here, of course, but to make sure it gets there, the president is also adding 3,667 new IRS agents. Kinder and gentler ones, no doubt.

For someone whose attention span is greater than a politician’s promise, this has uncomfortable echoes. Twenty-five years ago, another president from Texas gave his first state of the union address. He too was a “conservation president” and an “education president.” He too was a apparatchik who gloried in “public service.” He too had been schooled on Capitol Hill.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was a different sort of man, of course. He didn’t inherit his wealth—he stole it. And he also stole elections. But in his 1965 state of the union speech, LBJ too was a preacher.

He told of a Great Society where government would “increase the beauty of America,” cure environmental problems, end poverty, and provide free medical care to Social Security recipients.

That president promised a new Department of Transportation, to build “high-speed rail transportation,” more federal aid to education, subsidies for “the achievements of art,” and a new Department of Housing and Urban Development for cities where people can find “significance.” In short, a government that would “enable our people to live the good life.”

The Bush-Johnson analogy isn’t exact, of course. After all, LBJ’s budget 25 years ago was, in constant dollars, less than half of George Bush’s budget, and the Johnson budget deficit was 3% of today’s. And Johnson was fighting the Vietnam war, not facing a non-existent Warsaw Pact.

But both presidents displayed the messianic streak endemic to big government. Yet it is not up to government to help man find “significance,” nor to make us virtuous. That is the job of philosophy and religion. Nor can government give everyone a job, a roof, an education, and security in old age. That is the job of the market. The attempt of government to do so is bankrupting us, morally and fiscally. Bureaucratic planning doesn’t work any better here than in Eastern Europe.

It is no coincidence that since LBJ’s first state of the union, the underclass has grown, the family has been undermined, morality has diminished, and the economy has been shackled by regulation. America is, in almost every sense, a less great society.

Yet even LBJ, crook that he was, might not have given more money to the federal agency that gave us Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” and Robert Mapplethorpe’s pornography. But George Bush did.

It’s instructive to read the Constitution. Unlike today’s federal documents, it’s short, well-written, and easy to understand, and it describes a citizen president very different from the imperial figure who presides over us today.

The president’s job is to protect the borders, and enforce constitutional laws. That’s it. He is not national goal setter, nor commander-in-chief over the lives of the American people.

The Environmentalist Threat

Llewellyn H. Rockwell

The New Socialism

The last Stalinist, Alexander Cockburn, has gone from attacking Gorbachev (for selling out Communism) to defending Mother Earth. His new book, The Fate of the Forests, is both statist and pantheist.

Cockburn, a man who supposedly cares about peasants and workers, instead decries their cutting down the Brazilian rain forests to farm and ranch. People are supposed to live in indentured mildewtude so no tree is touched.

Cockburn is part of a trend. All over Europe and the U. S., Marxists are joining the environmental movement. And no wonder: environmentalism is also a coercive utopianism—one as impossible to achieve as socialism, and just as destructive in the attempt.

A century ago, socialism had won. Marx might be dead, and Lenin still a frustrated scribbler, but their doctrine was victorious, for it controlled something more important than governments: it held the moral high ground.

Socialism was, they said, the brotherhood of man in economic form. Thus was the way smoothed to the gulag.

Today we face an ideology every bit as pitiless and messianic as Marxism. And like socialism a hundred years ago, it holds the moral high ground. Not as the brotherhood of man, since we live in post-Christian times, but as the brotherhood of bugs.

Like socialism, environmentalism combines an atheistic religion with virulent statism. But it ups the ante. Marxism was at least professed a concern with human beings; environmentalism harks back to a godless and manless Garden of Eden.

If these people were merely wacky cultists, who bought up wilderness and lived on it as primitives, we would not be threatened. But they seek to use the state, and even a world state, to achieve their vision.

And like Marx and Lenin, they are heirs to Jean Jacques Rousseau. His paeans to statism, egalitarianism, and totalitarian democracy have shaped the Left for 200 years, and as a nature worshipper and exalter of the primitive, he was also the father of environmentalism.

During the Reign of Terror, Rousseauians were what Isabel Patterson called “humanitarians with the guillotine.” We face something worse: plantatarians with the pistol.

The Old Religion

Feminist-theologian Merlin Stone, author of When God Was a Woman, exults: “the Goddess is back!” The “voice of Gaia is heard once again” through a revived “faith in Nature.”

Gaia was an earth goddess worshipped by the ancient Greeks and James Lovelock, a British scientist, revived the name in the mid-1970s as appropriate for “the earth as a living organism” and self-regulating “biosphere.”

There is no Bible or “set theology” for Gaia worship, says the Rev. Stone, now making a national tour of Unitarian churches. You can “know Her simply by taking a walk in the woods or wandering on the beach. All of Nature forms Her scriptures.” Industrial civilization is “acne on the face of Gaia,” says Stone, and it’s time to get out the Stridex.

Ancient pagans saw gods in the wilderness, animals, and the state. Modern environmentalism shares that belief, and adds—courtesy of a New Age-Hindu-California influence—a hatred of man and the Western religious tradition that places him at the center of creation.

Environmentalism also has roots in deism—the practical atheism of the Enlightenment—which denied the Incarnation, made obeisance to nature, and saw mankind as only one of many species.

Early environmentalist John Burroughs wrote: we use the word “Nature very much as our fathers used the word God..., a Nature” in whose lap “the universe is held and nourished.”

The natural order is superior to mankind, wrote ecologist John Muir more than a century ago, because Nature is “unfallen and undepraved” and man always and everywhere is “a blighting touch.” Therefore, said the human-hating Muir, alligators and other predators should be “blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of a dainty.”

Christianity, adds ecologist Lynn White, Jr., “bears an immense burden of guilt” for violating nature. It brought evil into the world by giving birth to capitalism and the Industrial Revolution.

Since we must think of nature as God, says William McKibben, author of the bestselling End of Nature, every “man-made phenomenon” is evil. We must keep the earth as “Nature intended.”

To punish man’s desecration, ecologist Edward Abbey urged anti-human terrorism in his influential novel, The Monkey-Wrench Gang. And the fastest-growing group in the Gaia liberation movement, EarthFirst!, uses a monkey wrench for its symbol.

Founded by David Foreman, former head lobbyist for the Wilderness Society, EarthFirst! engages in “ecodefense,” from spiking trees (which maims loggers) to sabotaging road-building machinery to wrecking rural airstrips. One of its goals is cutting the world’s population by 90%, and it has even hailed AIDS as a help.

Foreman is in prison pending trial for trying to blow up electrical pylons in the desert (using, I’m sure, environmentally safe bombs), but his example lives on. One of the respected, mainstream environmentalists, David Brower—former head of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth and the Earth Island Institute—urged that land developers be shot with tranquilizer guns. As McKibben says, human suffering is much less important than the “suffering of the planet.”

We must be “humbler” towards nature, and use technology like “bicycle-powered pumps.” McKibben—who lives on an expensive Adirondack farm—wants the rest of us “crammed into a few huge cities like so many ants” because “it’s best for the planet.” We shouldn’t even have children, for “independent, eternal, ever-sweet Nature” must be disturbed as little as possible.

McKibben admits to one sin: he owns a 1981 Honda. But a man who lives a properly ascetic life is “Ponderosa Pine,” as recently celebrated in the San Francisco Examiner (with no mention of the “tree corpses” needed to print the paper).

A life-long leftist, Pine—whose real name is Keith Lampe—was an apparatchik of the black-power Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (which didn’t have many students or much non-violence) and a founder of the Yippie Party. He rioted at the 1968 Democratic Convention and has been arrested nine times for civil disobedience.

Converted by Allan Ginsberg to environmentalism (and, one hopes, to nothing else), Pine split with his wife and twin sons. She had complained about his “Tibetan vocal energy science”—a continuous, hour-long, top-of-the-lungs shout each morning as an act of “communion with Mother Earth.”

With his civil disobedience campaign against logging, and environmental news service, newspaper columns, and newsletter (more dead “tree flesh”), Pine has been extremely influential, though there is some dissent about his demand that we go barefoot to be in “more intimate touch with the earth.” And David Brower denounces the Pinian nom de terre; did he, Brower asks angrily, have “permission from the Ponderosa pines to use their name?”

But even Brower agrees with the knotty Pine’s crusade to collectivize the United States, return us to a primitive standard of living, and use the Department of Defense to do it. “I want to change the military’s whole focus to environmentalism,” says Pine. “Greetings,” Uncle Sap might say, “You will hereby report to the Big Green One.”

Nature Without Illusions

Ron James, an English Green leader, says the proper level of economic development is that “between the fall of Rome and the rise of Charlemagne.” The “only way to live in harmony with Nature is by living at a subsistence level,” as the animals do.

The normal attitude for most of human history was expressed by the Pilgrims, who feared a “vast and desolate wilderness, full of savage beasts and men.” Only a free society, which has tamed nature over many generations, enables us to have a different view.

“To us who live beneath a temperate sky and in the age of Henry Ford,” wrote Aldous Huxley, “the worship of Nature comes almost naturally.” But “an enemy with whom one is still at war, an unconquered, unconquerable, ceaselessly active enemy”—“one respects him, perhaps; one has a salutary fear of him; and one goes on fighting.” Added Albert J. Nock, “I can see nature only as an enemy: a highly respected enemy, but an enemy.”

Few of us could survive in the wilderness of, say, Yellowstone Park for any length of time (even though the environmentalists let it burn down because fire is natural). Nature is not friendly to man; it must be tempered.

Environmental Hysteria

Because they know that the vast majority of Americans would reject their real agenda, the environmentalists use lies, exaggerations, and pseudo-science to create public hysteria.

Poor. The environmental movement is cheering the criminal indictment of the Exxon Corporation for the Alaska oil spill, its possibility of more than $700 million in fines. The one shortcoming, say the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, is that Exxon executives won’t be sent to prison.

Exxon cannot be allowed to get away with an “environmental crime” which despoiled the “pristine wilderness of Alaska,” says Attorney General Richard Thornburgh. But the legal doctrine underlying this indictment is inconsistent with a free society, notes Murray N. Rothbard.

Under feudalism, the master was held responsible for all acts of his servants, intended or not. During the Renaissance with growing capitalism and freedom, the doctrine changed so there was no “vicarious liability.” Employers were correctly seen as legally responsible only for those actions they directed their employees to take, not when their employees disobeyed them. But today, we are back in feudal times, plus deeper-pocket jurisprudence, as employers are held responsible for all acts of their employees, even when the employees break company rules and disobey specific orders—by getting drunk on duty, for example.

From all the hysteria, and the criminal indictment, one might think Exxon had deliberately spilled the oil, rather than being the victim of an accident that has already cost its stockholders $2 billion dollars. Who is supposedly the casualty in the Justice Department’s “criminal” act? Oiled sand?

If I may use the environmentalists’ own language: oil is natural, it’s organic, and it’s biodegradable. It will go away. (Although if it didn’t, it wouldn’t exactly be the end of the world.)

Wetlands. One of the great engineering achievements of the ancient world was draining the Pontine Marshes, which enabled the city of Rome to expand. But no such project could be undertaken today; that vast swamp would be protected as wetlands.

When John Pozsgai—an emigrant from communist Hungary—tried to improve some property, he found this out. After buying the former junkyard and clearing away the thousands of tires that littered it, Pozsgai put clean topsoil on his lot in Morrisville, Pennsylvania. For this, the 57-year-old mechanic faces three years in prison and $200,000 in fines. For his property was classified as wetlands under the Clean Water Act.

After ordering a bureaucrat to “get the Hell off my property,” Pozsgai was arrested, handcuffed, and jailed with $10,000 bail. Quickly tried and convicted, Pozsgai is appealing his brutal sentence, which the prosecutor said would “send a message to the private landowners, corporations, and developers of this country about President Bush’s wetlands policy.”

John Pozsgai has a different view: I thought this “was a free country,” he told the Washington Post.

Rubbish. William L. Rathje of the University of Arizona says there have always been garbage disposal problems. The difference is that today we have safe and efficient methods to deal with them, if the environmentalists would let us. They warn of a country covered by garbage, but in fact Americans generate less than Mexico City today or America 100 years ago. And 62% less than the environmentalists claim.

Most landfills will be full in ten years or less, the environmentalists warn, and that’s true. But most landfills are only designed to last ten years. The problem is not that they are filling up, but that businessmen are not allowed to create new ones, thanks to lobbying by the environmental movement.

The environmentalists complain most about disposable diapers and fast-food containers, revealing their anti-family and pro-elite biases. But Rathje discovered that fast-food containers and disposable diapers take up only 1.1%, with all plastics totalling less than 5%. The real culprit is paper—especially telephone books and newspapers.

We’re ordered to save our newspapers for recycling, so the market is flooded with newsprint. In New Jersey, this drove the price of used newspapers from $40 a ton to minus $25. Collectors once bought old newspapers. Now people must pay someone to take it away.

Bureaucrats, acting at the behest of environmentalists, want us to recycle as a sacrament of the earth religion, not because it makes economic sense.

Yet it is only through a free price system, as Ludwig von Mises demonstrated 70 years ago, that we can know the value of goods and services. We must privatize the entire garbage system. Only then can we know if it is economically efficient to recycle.

Alar. Just before the publication of a National Research Council study extolling fresh fruits and vegetables (why do government scientists get paid to repeat what our mothers told us?), and pooh-poohing the trivial pesticide residues on them, the environmentalists arranged an ambush.

A PR man for the Natural Resources Defense Council was featured on 60 Minutes, points out syndicated columnist Warren Brookes, and Ed Bradley denounced Alar as the “most potent carcinogen in our food supply.” This was disinformation, though Bradley hasn’t been given the Rooney treatment (though we will undoubtedly see naturephobia and speciesism made Official Thought Crimes.)

Alar—used safely since 1963—helps ripen apples, keeps them crisper, and retards spoilage. Using an EPA-mandated dosage of 22,000, the maximum intake of even an apple-crazy human, one rat out of the thousands tested developed a tumor. This was the extent of the “scientific proof” used not only to harm the manufacturer, Uniroyal, which had to pull Alar off the market, but the entire U.S. apple industry.

A saner voice—Dr. Sanford Miller, dean of the medical school at the University of Texas at San Antonio—noted that “the risk of pesticide residues to consumers is effectively zero.” But apple sales dropped, and apple growers lost more than $250 million, with many driven into bankruptcy.

Says Dr. Miller: 99.9% of the pesticide carcinogens now eaten by humans are natural. If the Alar standard were applied to all food, “we would starve to death, because we would have to ban” everything. As man-made pesticides and fungicides are banned, we are endangered. “Fungi produce the most potent carcinogens in nature.”

Baking? Fifteen years ago, environmentalists warned that we faced a new ice age unless the government took immediate and massive action. Today, using much of the same data, they claim we are endangered by global warming. Increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will melt the polar icecaps and coastal areas will flood. As temperatures increase, Dallas will become a desert and Baked Alaska more than a dessert.

The proposed solution to this “Greenhouse Effect” is, surprise!, more government spending and control, and lower human standards of living. President Bush’s new budget has $375 million for greenhouse research.

Yet the “net rise in world surface temperature during the last century is about one degree Fahrenheit,” nearly all of it before 1940, notes syndicated columnist Alton Chase. “And the northern oceans have actually been getting cooler. The much-vaunted ‘global warming’ figures are concocted by averaging equatorial warming with north temperate cooling.”

There is, in fact, virtually no evidence of global warming, and even if it were to take place, many scientists say the effect would be good: it would lengthen growing seasons, make the earth more liveable, and forestall any future ice age.

Ozone. A similar hysteria has been raised about the ozone layer. High in the upper atmosphere, it is supposedly “Mother Earth’s sunblocker” keeping us from being fried. Yet the scientific evidence is far from convincing.

Even less convincing were the “holes” that opened up over the poles, justifying the proposed abolition of refrigeration, air conditioning, and spray cans as harmful to the ozone layer. The holes turned out to open and close naturally. But the ozone panic has yet to subside.

Acid Rain. S. Fred Singer calls the acid rain issue “a billion-dollar solution to a million-dollar problem,” but is it even a million dollar problem?

The official story is that northeastern forests are being eaten away by acid rain caused by sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions, and that we need a giant spending and regulatory spree to keep the earth from being dissolved. The Bush administration is proposing to spend up to $10 billion in this cause.

Aside from the assumption that nature has the right to rainwater of a certain pH, there are several problems: (1) no one knows what causes acid rain. A giant and expensive decrease in sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions has not diminished the acidity of rainwater in the northeast; (2) rainwater can be normally acidic; and (3) no one knows if acid rain is really harmful. There is even some evidence that acid rain helps most species of trees!

As a general rule, we should oppose any proposed public works program to cure alleged environmental ills. It is probably a scam. And even if the problem is real, more government is hardly the solution. More government is, in fact, the most serious danger to the human environment.

We need a system that allows property owners, if their trees are damaged by acid rain—and again, this is unproven—to bring suit. We do not need more bureaucrats spending more of our money on the special interests.

The environmentalists are adept at choosing language—acid rain is a perfect example—that implies we are all going to die unless some expensive government program is undertaken now.

A slight and perhaps routine increase in acidity does not mean that sulfuric acid is dropping from the sky, only that the litmus paper turns a different color.

Animal Lovers and People Haters

One of the fastest growing and most radical parts of the environmental movement is the animal rightists. They too worship nature, but make a cult out of animals whom they equate to human beings, and in fact place above us.

Baby Seals. About ten years ago, we were subjected to a barrage of photos and news stories about big-eyed seal pups hunted for their fur. Greenpeace stirred a worldwide propaganda campaign, and the European Community and others banned the import of the pelts.

This not only wiped out the livelihood of the natives who hunted the seals, but it harmed the fishing industry. With no hunting to keep the seal population under control, the animals are devouring increasingly scarce fish and damaging nets.

Some bureaucrats are proposing a government seal hunt (no private hunters, of course), but the environmentalists have prevented it. Meanwhile, stocks of cod and other fish continue to drop. Do the environmentalists care? We “shouldn’t eat anything with a face,” one told me.

Flipped. The environmentalists’ Victim of the Month is now the dolphin. Some of the animals are caught inadvertently by tuna fishermen, but Flipper reruns on TV must have convinced millions of Americans that dolphins are more intelligent than their Uncle Fred, so the environmentalists have been able to persuade them to spear the tuna industry.

Santa Barbara, California, has declared a Dolphin Awareness Day; school children all across America are engaging in letter-writing campaigns (those who still can, despite the government schools); and San Francisco kids are denounced if they bring tuna sandwiches to school.

The Audubon Society, the Humane Society, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), and a host of similar organizations want an end, in effect, to the organized tuna industry, and they may get it.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act, passed by Congress and signed by President Reagan in 1981, imposed convoluted regulations on the industry in the name of saving dolphins. But that’s not good enough, says Congresswoman Barbara Boxer (D-CA): dolphins “have creative centers larger than humans.” Or at least larger than members of Congress. So new federal restrictions are needed.

The livelihood of tuna fishermen, with the life savings of whole families invested in expensive boats and equipment, are irrelevant. The environmentalists admit that they also cherish the tuna, and want it protected from fishermen, but it will have to wait. Charlie hasn’t had his own TV show yet.

Extinction. From the snail darter to the furbish lousewort, every existing animal and plant species must be kept in existence by the government—claim the environmentalists—even if human rights are violated. But why?

Most of the species that have existed since the creation, from trilobites to dinosaurs, are now extinct through normal processes. Why not allow this to continue?

If, for scientific or entertainment purposes, some people want to preserve this species or that on their own land and at their own expense, great. Zoos and universities do this already. But the rest of us should not be taxed and regulated, and have our property rights wiped out, to save every weed and bug. The only environmental impact that counts is that on humans.

Fur. In Aspen, Colorado, voters defeated a proposed ban on fur sales, but in most places it is the furaphobes who make themselves felt, especially since they are willing to use almost any tactic.

They spray paint women in fur coats, slash coats with razors, and burn down fur stores. Last year, they put incendiary bombs in the fur-selling areas of department stores all over the San Francisco Bay area. Police suspect the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), which has been charged with using identical devices elsewhere. But such is the environmentalist influence in the media that there was little publicity.

ALF, which the California attorney general calls a terrorist organization, admits it seeks “to inflict economic damage on animal torturers,” from fur sellers to medical researchers.

Medical Research. A physician researching Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, Dr. John Orem, “conducted groundbreaking—and painless—research on cats,” notes Katie McCabe in The Washingtonian, “until his lab was trashed by the Animal Liberation Front.” Children may die as a result, but ALF says: so what? Anything is justified to stop the use of animals.

Congress listens respectfully to animal-rights lobbyists, and has passed legislation making medical research more expensive. One amendment from then-Sen. John Melcher (D-MT) requires researchers to protect the “psychological well-being” of monkeys (whom Congressmen must feel close to) at an estimated cost of $1 billion.

This plays, however, directly into the hands of people-killers. Who knows how many cures will go undiscovered because of these restrictions? Thousands of babies have been saved because we know about the Rh factor, which was discovered through the use of rhesus monkeys. But animal rights advocates say it is better that babies die than that monkeys be used to save them.

Even Rep. Bob Dornan (R-CA) has pushed animal-rights legislation that would add billions to medical research costs. Not that he goes all the way with these people. Although named “Legislator of the Year” by the radical PETA, Dornan still “wears leather shoes.” Until PETA outlaws them, that is, for the animal rightists see cow leather as no different than human skin.

Fred Barnes reports in the New Republic—itself pro-animal rights—that the Bush administration has buckled under animal rights pressure (Barbara is rumored to be a supporter) and “strongly opposed” legislation empowering the FBI to investigate terrorist attacks on medical research facilities.

In a cover story on the subject, New Republic senior editor Robert Wright says he was converted by the “stubborn logic” of the animal-rights movement, although he—like Dornan—doesn’t go all the way. He still believes in “the use of primates in AIDS research.”

Ants and Swans. The animal rights lobby wants them to outlaw any use of animals in medical research, food, or clothing. There is “no rational basis for saying that a human being has special rights,” says Ingrid Newkirk, director of PETA. “The smallest form of life, even an ant or a clam, is equal to a human being.”

The “murder of animals,” says Alex Pacheco, chairman of PETA, is equivalent to the “murder of men.” Eating oysters on the halfshell makes you Charles Manson.

Recently there was an uproar in southern Connecticut. The state’s wildlife division had proposed, in the face of an out-of-control swan population, to “shake eggs.” The swans—large, heavy, aggressive birds with no natural predators in the area—were attacking children. The swans couldn’t, of course, be hunted, so rangers were deputized to rattle fertilized eggs to prevent hatching. But thousands of residents protested this violation of the swans’ rights.

Let’s get serious, says Newkirk: “Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughter houses.”

The Politics of Environmentalism

From FDR to the present, the Democrats have been bad on environmentalism. It played an important part in the New Deal and the Great Society (Lyndon Johnson called himself “the Conservation President”), and any day I expect to see the Democrats name trees as what Joe Sobran calls an Officially Accredited Minority, with a certain number of seats (plastic, of course) in their national convention.

But environmentalism got its political start under the original liberal Republican: Teddy Roosevelt. As no one who knows Washington will be surprised to learn, there were special interests at work.

When the federal government established the national park system, and locked up millions of acres, it made other land—held especially by the timber and railroad interests associated with J. P. Morgan, Roosevelt’s mentor—much more valuable. Some of these interests were the funders of the original conservation lobbying organization.

Unfortunately, Richard Nixon continued this tradition when he established—by executive order—the Environmental Protection Agency. Not surprisingly, the EPA’s budget has been dominated by sewage-treatment and other construction contracts for well-connected big businessmen. But small and medium businesses, and the American consumer, have suffered from its endless regulations.

And now the EPA is to be elevated by President Bush—the “Environment President”—into a cabinet department. Typical of what we can expect is just one provision of the president’s new Clean Air bill, which gives the EPA dictatorial power over any American business whose products might be harmful if burned. “This is a grant of centralized economic control,” says Tony Snow in the Washington Times, “since just about any product can harm human health when burned.”

Just as “the failures of centralized economic control” become obvious in other parts of the world, “we are about to embrace it” through environmentalism. “Forget about hammers and sickles,” says Snow. If “collectivism takes root in the United States,” we can thank “George Bush-types, bearing sincere faces and saplings.”

President Bush has also proposed a New Deal-style $2 billion program to plant a billion saplings, none of them members of Congress.

Are we short of trees? No, but the president is “genuinely fond of trees,” says a White House aide. And although no one thinks it will “cure the Greenhouse Effect,” it’s “symbolic of his commitment to the environment.” America’s foresters, farmers, landowners, and homeowners don’t know the proper number of trees, but Washington, D.C., does.

The president has also endorsed a host of anti-gasoline provisions in the Clean Air bill, and higher CAFE standards (fleet-wide economy regulations) that will have the effect of mandating lighter and therefore more dangerous automobiles.

All other things being equal, the heavier the car, the safer it is in a crash. Present CAFE regulations have caused an estimated 50,000 deaths in the kiddie cars Washington has designed for us. There can be no moral or economic justification for raising the CAFE regulations (especially when they ought to be abolished), except to appease the environmentalists who would just as soon outlaw cars as individualist fripperies and make us all ride in mass transportation—until machines are abolished.

World Government and the Environment

Some problems, like alleged global warming, are so enormous, say the environmentalists, that only world government can solve them. And the one-world-types who infest the national Democrats and the resurgent Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party are glad to comply.

Establishmentarian Elliot L. Richardson, writing in the New York Times, says that “nothing will be done” environmentally “without an institutional mechanism to develop, institute, and enforce regulations across national boundaries.”

To build “a global Environmental Protection Agency,” perhaps run like “the United Nations General Assembly,” that could levy taxes and impose controls to make sure there is “equitable burden sharing,” the U.S. government must lead the way in the “interest of the entire world community.”

Ever since Woodrow Wilson, liberals have been infected with the idea of world government. With the melding of the European Community and the coming establishment of its tax authority and central bank, the Trilateralist ideal has come closer.

Patriotic Americans must reject this globaloney, and not only on grounds of national sovereignty. We know how difficult it is to deal with city hall, let alone the state or federal government. A world bureaucracy would be a taxing, meddling nightmare. Well-connected international lawyers like Elliot Richardson would do well, but the average American would get it in the neck.

The Economics of Environmentalism

Once we reject utopianism, and realize that—for example—eight million people can’t live in Los Angeles and have air like rural Colorado’s—we can set about solving real environmental problems through the only possible mechanism: private property and the price system.

When the price system functions freely, it brings supply and demand into rough equality, ensuring that resources are put to their most-valued uses. To the extent that government meddles with prices, it ensures waste, hampers entrepreneurship, and makes people poorer.

If coffee—for whatever reason—becomes scarcer, its price goes up, which tells consumers to drink less. If more coffee comes on the market, its price goes down, telling consumers they can drink more. Prices thus constitute a system of resource conservation.

But environmentalists pretend—like Soviet central planners—to know economic values without prices. They claim we are “running out” of everything, and thus we need government controls on consumption. But if we really were running out of, say, oil, its price would skyrocket, telling consumers to use less and entrepreneurs to seek substitutes.

Neither do the voluntary eco-restrictions work as intended. The environmentalists are forever telling us to be poorer and use less water, less gasoline, less toilet paper, etc. But if they reduce their consumption, it lowers the price for the rest of us, and we can use more. (P.S.: don’t pass this on to the environmentalists; it’s the one favor they do the rest of us.)

When anything is commonly owned—like air and water—we see all the bad effects of socialism. People abuse the resource because they do not have to bear the price.

To solve this problem, anyone who is personally harmed, or his business damaged, by air pollution ought to be able to sue to stop it, and receive damages. But the federal government intervened in this common-law process in the 19th century to favor special interests, making it impossible, to take a real example, for a farmer to sue a railroad whose spark emissions burned down his orchard.

The federal government also nationalized the coasts and waterways specifically to smooth the way for industrial special interests.

If, as is the case with many waterways in England and other countries, people had property rights in the streams and rivers running through their land, they could prevent pollution just as they prevent trash dumping in their front yard. And if fishermen and homeowners held property rights in the coasts and adjacent waters, they could prevent pollution and properly allocate fishing rights.

The recent hysteria over African elephant tusks was another problem of property rights. If people were allowed to raise elephants and sell their tusks—as even the Zimbabwean government pointed out—there would be no more and no fewer elephant tusks than there should be. The same principle applies to all other resources. If left in common ownership, there will be misuse. If put in private hands, we will have the right amount: supply will meet demand.

An example of market conservation was the Cayman Turtle Farm in the British West Indies. The green sea turtle was considered endangered, thanks to over-harvesting due to common ownership. The Farm was able to hatch eggs and bring the hatchlings to maturity at a far higher rate than in nature. Its stock grew to 80,000 green turtles.

But the environmentalists hated the Cayman Turtle Farm, since in their view it is morally wrong to profit from wildlife. The Farm was driven out of business and the green turtle is again on the endangered species list.

Greenomics. Greens—like all liberals—justify government intervention because of what economists call “public goods” and “externalities.”

A “public good” is supposed to be something we all want, but can’t get, unless government provides it. Environmentalists claim everyone wants national parks, but the market won’t provide them, so the government must. But how can we know, independent of the market, that everyone does want these expensive parks? Or how many parks of what sort?

We could take a survey, but that doesn’t tell us the intensity of economic demand. More important, it is not enough to know that people want, for example, diamonds. That means something economically only if they are willing to give up other things to obtain them.

Amazingly, liberal economists have never developed a way to identify these so-called public goods, so—objective scientists that they are—they use intuition. Paul Samuelson’s favorite example was the lighthouse, until Ronald Coase demonstrated that private entrepreneurs had provided lighthouses for centuries.

If we realize that only the market can give us economic information, the alleged problem of public goods disappears.

Absent government prohibitions and subsidies, or competition from “free” parks, the market will ensure that we have exactly the number and type of parks that the American people want, and are willing to pay for. Moreover, if we sell all the national parks, we can pay off the federal debt.

An “externality” is a side-effect. Your neighbors’ attractive new landscaping is a positive externality; their barking dog is a negative one. One is a blessing, the other an irritant, but you voluntarily purchase neither.

Environmentalists say, for example, that trash is a negative externality of consumerism. So they advocate more regulation and bureaucracy to solve it. Yet the free market solves this much more justly and efficiently through property rights. Privatize everything and the externalities are “internalized,” that is, those who ought to bear the costs do. But to environmentalists, human prosperity is itself a negative externality.

Chicken or chicory, elephant or endive, the natural order is valuable only in so far as it serves human needs and purposes. Our very existence is based on our dominion over nature; it was created for that end, and it is to that end that it must be used—through a private-property, free-market order, of course.

The environmental movement is openly anti-human and virulently statist. Is it any coincidence that the Nazis exalted animals, nature, and vegetarianism above humans, civilization, and civilized eating, or that our environmentalists have an air of green goose step about them?

The environmentalists must be opposed—if they will excuse the expression—root and branch.