# Opening Shots (Apr. 1980) **URL:** **By** Bill Birmingham **Published:** April 2, 1980 --- “Every part of the government seems to want its own police force.” Every part of the government, in the last analysis, is devoted to exploiting the taxpayer, but there exists something called the Foreign Bondholders Protective Council which specializes in oppressing the foreign taxpayer. Specifically, it is charged with pressuring foreign governments, notably those of China and the USSR, to extort even more money from their subjects so as to pay off the bonds issued by their predecessors. The FBPC emerged from its sewer recently during Congressional hearings on granting China most-favored-nation trade status, insinuating that giving China favored-nation treatment would cost the Council its “leverage” in getting her to repay the Kuomingtang’s debts. Consider the infamy of it: The long-suffering Chinese people, seeking to relieve their miserable poverty by selling to relatively freer Americans are told they may not do so unless they submit to increased tax-oppression by their present rulers, in order to repay the fat cats who financed the oppression of their old rulers. (Remember that the next time you hear some politician quacking about the “captive nations.”) That’s what comes of treating government securities—which are essentially nothing but loans made to gangsters in exchange for a share in their loot—as legitimate obligations. But they aren’t, and those who buy them not only do not deserve repayment, they deserve (assuming they are not witlings) all the contempt and loathing with which we today regard the jackals who financed the slave trade, or bought shares in pirate ships. Reed Irvine’s _Advocacy in Media_ (most commentators misspell the first word of the name) breathlessly reveals “the 4 top Carter appointees who gave Nicaragua away to Marxism \[sic\]” in an article reprinted by Richard Viguerie’s _Conservative Digest_. The source is an interview by the _Houston Chronicle_ with the deposed Nicaraguan tyrant Anastasio Somoza (well, no one can accuse him of “liberal bias”) who claims “the U.S. was part of a plot to place their strongest ally and supporter in the hands of the Communists.” Indeed, one of the alleged Gang of Four, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, supposedly threatened to deport Somoza unless he pressured his stooge—beg pardon: successor—to resign. “Those s.o.b.’s,” ranted the former dictator, “could, at their discretion, handcuff me, put me on an airplane and send me back to Nicaragua to face a Communist firing squad.” That Somoza deserves exactly that for his crimes—or even that his crimes were real and not a diabolical hoax of “the Communists”—is, for Irvine, a mystery as profound as the quark: as is the fact that none of the Washington newspapers repeated “Somoza’s stinging charges.” Keep an eye peeled for Satcom III, the one-ton, $20-million satellite which RCA had launched to relay cable TV programs, and which NASA managed to lose four days after launch. The _Los Angeles Times_ (December 4, 1979) quoted cable entrepreneur Ted Turner’s explanation of the mystery: “He suggested that, considering how ABC, CBS, NBC and the National Association of Broadcasters \[to say nothing of the FCC\] have lobbied in the past to ham-string cable television’s development, perhaps they pooled their resources to buy ‘some missile system to shoot down the satellite.’” > (“I’m only joking,” Turner quickly added.) The right to kick vending machines is the latest addition by the National Labor Relations Board to the rights of the workingman. The Board recently heard two cases of employees who had been fired for mistreating machines at their work-places. Observing that “vending machines are most imperfect creatures, subject to being abused without penalty, when they malfunction,” the NLRB ordered the workers rehired. Perhaps they didn’t notice that the same observation describes (or should describe) the National Labor Relations Board. The Department of Energy has plans to put 10,000 electric vehicles on the nation’s roads and highways by 1986, and, as is customary in such undertakings, has drawn up an environmental impact report to uncover hidden dangers. Chief among these, it seems, is that electric cars are quiet; so quiet, in fact, that the DOE says they must be made noisier to warn unsuspecting jaywalkers. And if that doesn’t work, they might require (as England once did of the railroads) that each electric car be preceded by a man on horseback, carrying a red flag. Tom Rusk and Randy Read, two San Diego psychiatrists who run “stress-reduction workshops” for public employees, “see a clear pattern emerging: Middle-class Americans in public-service jobs are about to revolt.” Actually they’ve always been revolting, but now they are rising up angry over—you guessed it—“Proposition 13 fever.” It is they, Rusk and Read opine on the _Los Angeles Times_ op-ed page (December 9, 1979. Get a copy if you can; it is a truly appalling document), who “bear the brunt of every cutback. Either their job is at stake, or their job is to make the cuts, or they must accomplish their job despite the cuts, because we, the public, won’t accept any reduction in services.” (Actually we, the public, want them to do the job they never performed, but that would be too traumatic to bear.) As a result, Americans now regard bureaucrats with “something close to contempt. In turn, many civil servants feel alienated and abandoned.” Strikes, sickouts and slowdowns (but how could they tell?) abound; as well as “an increase in police shootings in many jurisdictions” (which may constitute 3.6 percent of all homicides) which shows the true nature of our public “servants” for all to see, even though Rusk and Read choose to remain blind. This “profound class struggle … between civil servants and their ‘employers’,” between the robbers and the robbed, is such a delightful prospect that it would be a shame if it existed only in the fevered imagination of these two butterfly-men; who, we must remember, have a class interest of their own in persuading our rulers that their hirelings need “stress reduction.” This seems as good a place as any to commend to you the work of Mr. Stephen Chapman, staff writer for _The New Republic_, who serves as a voice of libertarian sanity in that neoconservative wilderness. His “Washington Diarist” column of December 8 is a fine example. There, he attacks “the growing nostalgia for the deposed Shah,” remind-ing us that he was in fact a truly loathsome monster. After a graphic description of the practices in the Shah’s torture chambers he notes: “Some Americans may feel our failure to . . . do what? send in troops? in support of such a cherished ally was not so shameful after all.” And more: Chapman denounces the smarmy George Will, and Chapman’s own magazine, for suggesting that “the ayatollah could be squashed by a battalion of marines or a few well-placed double agents.” Those days are gone forever, says Chapman, and he’s all in favor of it: “As it happens, back when we were running things, we didn’t do a very good job of serving the interests of freedom and democracy. . . . It may occasionally be unpleasant and even infuriating that the rest of the world prefers not to live under American puppet governments, but one would be hard-pressed to argue that the rest of the world is appreciably wonse off for the refusal.” And for lagniappe, he attacks _The New Republic’s_ “symptoms of guilt over our opposition to US involvement in the war in Vietnam.” Noting that the American war effort was “hideously destructive of the people and countries we purported to be saving” he observes: “It is not always possible—in Vietnam or in Iran—to avert tyranny. Sometimes the best we can do is avoid giving it active support. Even that would be a big improvement over what we have done before, and what people like Will and Edward Luttwak—and some editors of TNR, apparently—would have us do now.” Remember “sunset laws”? They were very big around 1976 or so; President Carter, 87 Senators, and 200 Congresscritters all endorsed various schemes that would automatically kill every government program after _x_ years unless Congress specifically reauthorized it. According to _The Washington Post_, the current thing is a “sunset law” without a sunset. One version being considered in the House Rules Committee would let the various Congressional committees pick the programs they wanted to review and give them a deadline to make recommendations. Programs that weren’t reviewed, or weren’t recommended for termination, or weren’t explicitly terminated by a vote of the full House (and Senate)—the vast majority, of course—would continue. Farcical as such a proposal is, it probably wouldn’t be much worse in practice than the various state “sunset” laws, under which the overwhelming majority (199 out of 200, in one case) of the state programs and agencies automatically “reviewed” are automatically approved. At least the House version would, if passed, discredit “sunset” once and for all, and serve as yet one more example of the futility of attempting to roll back the state, other than by voting Libertarian.