The Libertarian Editorials (May 1979)

Thermostat fascism

AND SO MR. CARTER moves America closer to fascism, that word used here in its strict economic sense and not with the militaristic, ultra-nationalistic and racialistic ingredients added by the National Socialists in Hitler’s Germany. With the one hand Jimmy giveth—the lifting of price controls on domestic crude oil—and with the other he taketh away. The President’s proposed tax on “windfall profits” (meaning the profits that come to companies currently most easily scapegoated by demagogues) will function as another ingredient in the gradual governmental takeover, along fascist lines, of the American economy.

While socialists direct their energies to “nationalizing” industry, fascists devote themselves to “regulating” industry: the net effect is the same. Those who produce are subservient to those, in government, who supervise; and the government, whether it calls itself a People’s Republic, or a social democracy, or the United States of America, slices away at the private sector and enhances the power of government, all this in the name of The People.

Jimmy Carter is in the direct line of his predecessors and is merely continuing the process begun decades ago, but he’s the current occupant of the kitchen and the heat is all his. But the President has refined further the rhetoric of “sacrifice” by which those who came before him attempted, with considerable success, to instill a massive sense of guilt in the American people and establish in the national psyche a sense of the necessity of putting up with induced inconveniences for the alleged benefit of all. Mr. Carter’s recent speech on energy told us one important truth—we’ll have to pay more for oil—but wrapped that hard reality in a gauze of deception, evasion, and hyperbole. Instead of moving immediately to the complete deregulation of the oil industry, which would inspire a significant increase in exploration and lead to a great increase in our energy supply, the President insists on hampering the industry with his “windfall profits” tax and his proposed requirement that the industry “use their [sic] income to develop energy for America, and not buy department stores and hotels, as some have done in the past.” The assumption is that the industry needs Uncle Sam to direct it to what it has long wanted to do, as if only our protector in the White House could lead the companies to the proper path.

A close reading of Mr. Carter’s April 5 speech reveals the dramatic use he prefers these days to make of the rhetoric of sacrifice. He places himself high atop the white horse that he intends to ride as he leads the masses to happiness and increased irrational hatred of big business, and he flips in little homilies to remind us of his homely virtues. Let us all, without fail, lop 15 miles a week off our driving. Let us organize car pools. Let us—but here attend carefully to the exact words:

“I have asked Congress to grant me standby authority in four areas, one of which is to require that thermostats in all commercial buildings be set no higher than 65 degrees in winter and no lower than 80 degrees in summer. As soon as I get that authority, I will use it.”

In short, during working hours everyone will be too cold to work efficiently in the winters and dripping wet in the summers. Will this also include the Oval Office?

William Buckley once joked that we might on some unpleasant evening hear the President of the United States tell us that the government would come into our houses to regulate the thermostats. President Nixon merely “urged” everybody to keep their homes at his presidentially determined temperatures; President Carter asks Congress for authority to make commercial buildings do his bidding. Will he ask Congress for authority to make us to the same at home? Give him time.

Better still, let’s not give him time. This is but one, though an important one, of the many ways the President would have us cringe before Big Brother. It is not yet too late to lobby Congress to stop Jimmy Carter in his tracks.

—DB

Liberalism amok

AS IF THERE WEREN’T enough to worry about, we must regretfully announce that one Phillip Green, a member of the editorial board of the Nation, has discovered a new and fearsome menace. Writing in that august journal (“America Amok,” March 31, 1979), he reveals that “the honorable notion of rights,” so important to libertarian thought, “is in danger of declining to an ignoble status, so multifold is the assault on our sensibilities of everyone’s ‘right’ to do what they [sic] damn well please without giving a fig for anyone else’s needs or concerns.” If the reader somehow hasn’t noticed this assault, Mr. Green provides a list of horrid examples.

To begin with, “A local restaurateur, incensed at proposals to enforce a ‘public places’ antismoking ordinance, says angrily that ‘I got a right to do what I want’”—presumably with his own restaurant; have you ever heard the like? But there is more. “Dog owners everywhere are in a rage over attempted or theoretical deprivation of their ‘rights’ (or their dogs’ rights?) to surround their neighbors with a barricade of excrement.” “Cult” leaders insolently demand the protection of “religious liberty” and some Oklahoma Congresscritter boasts of ignoring the 55 mph speed limit, in a “virulently mean-spirited revelation of a determination to spread visible and expensive pollution to the farthest horizon possible in the pursuit of mere personal convenience.” And still more: at a certain “eastern university, male homosexuals are alleged to have taken over one of the university’s washrooms and are said to be subjecting wandering ‘straights’ to unpleasant sexual harassment.” Just what this “harassment” consists of isn’t nearly as important as the fact that “the local countercultural weeklies are deluged with comments about the ‘right’ (the right?) of everyone to ‘have their own space’ to ‘do their own thing’; that the ‘space’ has been paid for and is meant to serve all residents of the Commonwealth equally is apparently of no matter.” Yes, clearly the Dark Ages are upon us.

But Mr. Green, as befits one who teaches political science at Smith College, doesn’t stop with this catalogue of horrors but points out the cause: “serious organs of thought and opinion, not to mention the omnivorously unprincipled mass media, take social solipsism seriously at the level of intellect.” Exhibit A is Inquiry magazine, which “opposes national health insurance on the familiar ground that ‘we’ know better than ‘government’ does; and [whose editor] replies to an inquisitive reader that he can’t think of a single way in which ‘bureaucracy’ has helped us obtain the means of a good life. Can such nonsense be uttered innocently?” Of course not. Certainly not by “the egregrious Milton Friedman,” who (horrors!) “can be awarded a Nobel Prize after announcing on BBC-TV that the British, who compared to Americans engage in a wider range by far of political debate and fearless intellectual discourse, are ‘less free’ than Americans because their government [not “government”? Will he use the quote marks when the Tories return to power?] takes a bigger tax bite.” (Such “nonsense”!) Nor by Robert Nozick, author of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, “a philosophical treatise whose elegance can’t conceal the child-like cry of ‘let me alone’ that underlies it.” That the book “is nominated for the National Book Award [Green was obviously in the washroom fighting off those nasty homosexuals when the social solipsist vote actually won Nozick the award] and Nozick written up as a serious political commentator in The New York Times Magazine” only underscores how parlous are the times. For behind the scenes, manipulating the foolish Nobel Laureates and vendido Harvard professors (Nozick even has tenure! How that must torture Mr. Green …), are the evil capitalists, seeking whom they would devour:

Can all the self-styled libertarians, opponents of “Big Government” and the like really be unaware that merely individual rights, unrestrained by defined limits, common moralities and rules of justice, are nothing more than rationalizations for the right of the strong and well-possessed, and the subordination of the weak and propertyless? We expect businessmen routinely to lie to us about the real balance of power in society; they know that when the assertion of individual rights replaces community reasoning about the limits of behavior, it is might and might alone that “makes right.” Can their intellectual frontmen really be unaware of that? One remembers that Nozick’s book, when it first came out, was being avidly read in the Nixon White House, and some found it paradoxical that a “libertarian” tract should appeal to the most oppressive, authoritarian regime in American history. But there’s no paradox in that: Haldeman, et al., must have understood perfectly well that tyranny of the powerful and propertied is always the result of laissez-faire.

It is a vision to freeze the blood and stupefy the mind; the hordes of inconsiderate smokers, Moonies and sodomites, with their gas-guzzling cars and their big-bowelled dogs, incited by a handful of renegade academics in the pay of Wall Street, advancing upon all that is good and true and liberal to trample it underfoot. Perhaps we shouldn’t judge Mr. Green too harshly. After all, if Paul Samuelson can blame Ireland’s Great Potato Famine on laissez-faire (the English, of course, strictly respected the property rights of the Irish when they stole their country), Green can blame it for the ancien regime (he did claim that tyranny is always the result of laissez faire, after all!). We won’t even tax him with all the revisionist historians, such as the socialist Gabriel Kolko, who has demonstrated rather conclusively that the modern Corporate State is a creature of government—dating back to the so-called Progressive Era when the state gave the robber barons the cartelizing power they couldn’t get under laissez faire; continuing through the New Deal (pity we can’t do more than mention an anecdote provided by Murray Rothbard: shortly before FDR’s inauguration, it seems, financier Bernard Baruch gave the Brain Trust a translation of Fascist philopher Giovanni Gentile’s current opus; they were supposedly delighted by it … The sound you hear is Mr. Green bursting a blood vessel. Tough. He who lives by intellectual guilt by association—tying Nixon around Bob Nozick’s neck, for example—will perish by it); and even to the present day. And any comment we could make on what he seems to think is a conclusive defense of the welfare state—“I, like most middle- (and low-) income people would not have the faintest idea how to go about allocating present income for only vaguely discerned future needs”—would only be a cheap shot. But really: it is wondrous to behold how perfectly Green misses the mark. Every one of those horror stories is an example of how various people are responding to the mismanagement by government of its so-called public property (or their own private property, as in the case of that hapless restaurateur who enrages Green so); and Green rants about “individual and collective selfishness.” “Serious organs of thought and opinion” are discovering that this mismanagement is universal, and Green calls it “social solipsism.” Economists and philosophers are beginning to realize that the solution lies in breaking free of the corporate welfare/warfare state and striking out towards new social institutions based on freedom and individual right—towards libertarianism—and poor Mr. Green, like all too many of his comrades, responds with hysterics, invective, and lashing himself to the mast of the foundering ship of state and yelling “Gemennutz geht vor Eigennutz” (“The Common Good Before the Individual Good”; an old Nazi slogan). Verily, in this day and age it is the liberals who have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

But do Green and his fellows really expect to go down with the ship? “In the short run,” he concedes, “it might appear politically suicidal to oppose what seems like the wave of the near future, but that is a short-sighted conclusion.” Though dog droppings obscure the sky, still “Somewhere, somehow, governance always does and must take place,” and “a recapture of the egalitarian, democratic spirit” may someday be possible if the liberals but hold fast to their principles (such as they are). And this is a real possibility. But ideologicaly blinkered as he is, Green overlooks one fact; libertarians do not concede that “governance always does and always must take place.” While the keepers of the liberal flame repair to their mountaintop, railing at the “selfish” masses, libertarians have a golden opportunity to irremediably destroy “governance”, or at least cripple it permanently, and fulfill the ambition which the Left has long abandoned: replacing the government of men with the administration of things. All we have to do is give the people sound reasons to go yet further down the road they are already predisposed to travel. When Green and the Nation finally decide to come down from the mountain and address the masses once more, they shouldn’t be surprised if the masses tell them to shove it.

—BB

The new draft lobby

IT IS BEING ORCHESTRATED brilliantly, this preparation of the country for a renewed selective service. The military honchos with the privates mowing their lawns are pushing the draft; the trigger-happy Congresshumans are scurrying about their offices whipping their servants into shape to draft the appropriate legislation; and the born-again wheeler-dealer himself, big John Connally, perhaps just a bit tuckered out after a long hard day shaking hands in Massachusetts, allows as how those who oppose a revived draft aren’t quite American enough for him.

And you thought we had been through all this once before? We have been through it before; but like adolescent pimples, the nastier notions of the all-encompassing State keep popping out again on the political horizon. At the time of our half-hearted adventure in Vietnam (the war, you recall, that we were just about to win if only X number of troops and Y number of dollars were poured down the hole), a goodly portion of the self-styled “anti-war” protesters were in reality protesting their own vulnerability to the draft. Call it unpatriotic, call it yellow, call it the font of wisdom, call it the higher virtue, call it anything you like: but recognize that when the draft went, so went the anti-war movement, into self-elimination. It just disappeared, because the youngsters protesting the war hadn’t then, and haven’t now, much of a sense of political reality, but they know the difference between being alive and being dead; why, they even mumbled that “speed kills” while enjoying the drugs they assumed wouldn’t kill them.

Pull back just a bit from the ideological confrontationist mentality, and worry less for a moment about whether we should or should not have been in Vietnam, and consider only the mind-set of a young man who doesn’t know what the hell the war is all about, but really much prefers to stay at home and neck in the back seat of his car with his girl. It is not, all things considered, an unreasonable preference, is it?

Not that there aren’t plenty of gung-ho types who want very much to join the navy and see the world, or join the army and learn a trade, or join the marines and imagine that they’re John Wayne, or join the air force and surpass the speed of sound. I touched here earlier (LR March) on the mentality of those who want to coerce every American youth into some sort of “national service,” be it military or civilian. One hopes that the latter idea, pushed primarily by the very liberal pols and their hangers-on, will die its deserved death. But the notion of reviving the draft has a more powerful lobby, and even with efforts now proposed to insist on the drafting of women too (as a way of killing the measure if it comes to a vote in Congress), the push is on. The Joint Chiefs are acting jointly to get a draft underway lickety-split, and the born-again wheeler-dealer (the term is Bill Loeb’s but it’s too perfect for John Connally to remain the sole property of the Manchester Union Leader) is not alone among serious presidential aspirants in seconding the motion and furthering the abysmal notion that the only way this country can defend itself is by enforcing military service on the unwilling.

Balderdash. Many functions now performed by military people could be performed by civilians, and let the generals mow their own damn lawns. Higher pay, more congenial living arrangements, and a more technologically sophisticated military is called for in the 1980s: the draft is the easy way out and the bad way out. It helps condition Americans to accept Big Brother’s call as the same as America’s call. It is a rotten idea and it should be opposed, vigorously, by liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and any others who love their country but don’t think their country has an automatic option on their lives.

—DB

Balancing the budget

THE CONGRESS HAS about as much desire to further the chances of a balanced budget amendment to the United States Constitution as it has to limit its members’ earnings from outside sources: it has no such desire at all. All of our Constitutional amendments have joined the Constitution in one of the two ways the document provides for its own alteration. Congress has approved a proposed amendment and sent it then to the states for ratification. The alternative method, a Constitutional Convention, has never been used since the first one wrote the fundamental document and altered the form of our country’s government.

Now twenty-eight states have requested a convention to consider such an amendment, two more appear likely to do so very soon, and only four more must so act before the Congress is obliged to go along with the idea. According to a New York Times survey, eighteen of the remaining twenty states appear indisposed to act favorably on the call for a convention; so even the most fervent supporters of the idea recognize that the final states may not jump on the convention bandwagon in the near future.

Meanwhile, Congress is itself finally taking the idea of such an amendment seriously. The Powers are hostile to it, but many of the conservative Senators are working hard to get such an amendment passed in Washington so it can be submitted to the state legislatures for ratification. Their reasoning is both substantive and procedural: they want such an amendment for its presumed benefit to the economy and its obvious popularity with an increasing number of taxpayers; and they have some reservations, ranging from mild to severe, about the possible consequences of a convention.

While the proponents of the budget balancing amendment insist that a convention summoned to consider such an addition to the Constitution could consider no other proposed amendments at a convention, many others, including some who favor the idea of requiring the Federal government to balance its budget, fret about the possibility, however slight, that once a convention assembled it would be open season on the whole Constitution.

Since this is virgin territory there are no precedents, and there is no unanimity among Constitutional scholars about the matter, whatever one may think about the proposed amendment, one might at least harbor some qualms about returning to 1787 and perhaps tinkering with the entire Constitution, even though no change could take place until three quarters of the states had ratified it. Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, who considers a balanced budget amendment “both unnecessary and unwise,” caught the irony of the situation when he noted: “It’s a sorry state of affairs when the American people are demanding a constitutional convention because they don’t trust us, and we are saying, ‘No, you can’t have one; we don’t trust you.’”

The American people tend usually to leave governance to those elected for the purpose. Only rarely do the people attempt an end run around the politicians, though the device of the referendum is becoming an increasingly popular one, indicating, as Senator Hart says, that some significant portion of the people do not trust the pols.

Maybe the Congress will make its own end run around the current neo-populism by doing something dramatic about taxes. Now and again a tax “reform” bill wriggles through Congress, only to emerge as a reform in name only, in actuality merely a shuffling around of the burden of taxation. The people, to whatever extent that shifting entity can be identified, seem to be saying that the burden of taxation is at or near the unbearable point. Perhaps Congress will get the message before a convention becomes a reality. But if past is prologue, the solons will play ostrich, the game they they know best.

—DB

Puritans’ progress

MUCH AS I DISTRUST willingness of Californians to run to the initative process whenever they are mightly annoyed, I must say there is one such measure I would like to see prevail. This is the attempt by a small group of citizens to get rid of San Francisco’s wholly redundant “vice squad.” I wish I had thought of the idea myself.

The vice squad initiative was thought up by the Libertarian Party of California, and announced at a recent press conference. The measure would make it illegal for the city Police Department to maintain a vice squad.

The vice squad is assigned to handle what are often called “victimless crimes,” such as prositution, gambling, public homosexual conduct and adult entertainment and bookstores. The initiative also repeals various vice ordinances in city law, including the new anti-pornography ordinance recently put into law by Mayor Dianne Feinstein.

In order to appear on the November ballot, 10,500 signatures must be obtained by August 6. At last report, 2500 signatures had been collected.

Vice squads have never made any sense to me, and they make less sense year by year. Especially do they make little sense in a town like San Francisco, where the Puritan tradition has lost its tenacity in most places. One place where it still notably obtains is in the Police Department, where Irish-American puritanism still holds sway in important upper echelons.

As I have maintained since the early ’60s, vice squads are merely armed preachers. They enforce morals, which is not properly a function of police administration.

The argument that vice squad cops are better employed in combatting crimes of theft and assault is a cogent one, but it is essentially irrelevant. Vice squads are just wrong, period. And I sense a growing consensus among the voters of this town that this is so.

My guideline in this whole matter of sumptuary laws and their enforcement has been the works of John Stuart Mill, in the introduction to his great work On Liberty. Said Mill: “The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty or action of any of their number is self-protection.”

What vital interest, one may ask, is served by having grown men in uniforms round up whores in flats, gamblers in the back of cigar stores, or people performing proscribed sex acts in the bushes? Or nailing them for selling dirty books? Give the proposition a think or two and I think you will see the merit of getting the cops out of the morals business, once and for all.

In this country, the whole thing started with those admirable New England settlers who set out to “purify” the Church of England. These Puritans knew the answers to everything. They would not only keep the peace, they would also cut down on the everyday pleasures of their neighbors.

The great puritan-smiter of our times, H.L. Mencken, memorably nailed their chief tenet—“The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” In pursuit of their version of the great society, the early Puritans made penal offenses of fornication, profanation of the Sabbath, drunkenness, games of chance, blasphemy and the performance of works of a theatrical nature.

Some of these things eroded as civilization gained on an increasingly mixed culture in this country. We no longer prohibit actors and actresses, but the heavy residue of the vice squad remains. Society still wants, or thinks it wants, these burly boys with service revolvers to keep other people from doing things they want to do that are not properly the concern of law.

The Libertarian Party is opposed to all governmental restrictions in both economic affairs and personal ways of living. I hope their initiative goes well this time around. It has the force of an idea whose time has come.

—Charles McCabe

(reprinted by permission of the San Francisco Chronicle) © Chronicle Publishing Co. 1979