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