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Big Brother, Big Business
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
January 1, 1984
Here's a rare little story a la George Orwell, in tribute to his book 1984., trying to warn us about Big Brother. It comes from a friend of mine at the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) a California think tank. It seems ever so timely for some New Year's resolutions.
It's about a real live student of the late 1960s and early 1970s at Yale University where he worshiped the Marxist gods of academe. Ten years ago he saw h is former idols falling flat on their faces, so for both theological and political reasons, he set a goal thereafter to find an American institution practically and ideologically suited to combat organized Marxism. A New Year's "resolve," so to speak, to alter some of his academic preconditioning.
He analyzed the size and thoroughness of the huge U.S.S.R., the most powerful purveyor of Big Brotherism (i.e., Marxism) in the world today, and decided something similarly huge was necessary to combat it. His Marxist background also left him with the belief that in the end, property, and lots of it, would be the only force opposing anti-property forces. Fighters for freedom might fade, he thought, but the beneficiaries would surely defend their property fortresses.
His first vehicle for opposing Marxism was the large corporation, one of which he joined as an executive speechwriter with the further assignment of developing an "academic affairs" program which could put some philosophical backbone into members of top management and explore their values and political goals.
Five years later this young Yale grad reports that his new "realism" - to fight Marxist fire with corporate fire - proved a real flop. Why? Because many business executives are sold on a big government-big business alliance, or what he calls "Marxism with an American face." Given the alternative of a free market or selling the free enterprise soul by grabbing and lobbying government protection they head for Washington, D.C.
Remember Marx's old slogan, "Workers of the World Unite!" The speechwriter says it could be now: "Big businesses of the world unite - with government." This insight along with a few "partnerships" and a few "protections" for schools, churches and cultural institutions may well render them independent in name only by the year 2000.
Other students who have had similar experiences at several major corporations see it as particularly risky for believers in a free society to still look to big business as an anti-government force. "The rule-of-pen among some conservative writers," writes the young Yale University graduate "is that federal officials and corporate executives are still strange bedfellows, and that big business in general must be defended. But to those with both corporate experience and anti-Marxist understanding, we have met the enemy and he is inside the corporate walls as well as over the horizon....
Many conservatives still perceive centralized government on the left, corporations on the right. But it's more accurate to have the government-business processes on the left and decentralization on the right. Such a spectrum would place very large corporations where they belong, at center-left, thus showing why central government officials and corporate executives are becoming such big buddies." (One is reminded of how California's Proposition 13 tax revolt a few years ago was so vigorously opposed by big business, big unions and government.)
"If the corporate conservative alliance must be broken," writes my young friend, "then what institutions of size and strength remain to oppose Marxism?" The answer? "Well, really, none. But there are alternatives," he says. "If we break away from the stereotypes of materialistic thinking. If we stop thinking in big blocks - force and counterforce.
"Instead we must consider the power of spirit and the desire for freedom which shows up best among individuals, not in large organized collectives."
How did little groups of Christians gain freedom from Roman imperial ideology 2,000 years ago? How did little bands of liberty lovers oppose the British empire 200 years ago? "Conservatives could start answering these sorts of questions." says the former Yale student-Marxist and five-year corporate speechwriter, "and stop wasting their time constructing apologia for centralization," i.e., of big business and big government.
But to do this conservatives and businessmen must read and do their long overdue and neglected homework. This is what my young friend was doing at the IHS when he re-read Orwell's classic on Big Brother.
Why don't you re-read it, too? Before it's too late. You could start a great book and a great year. Both named -- 1984.
Hurrah for Hansen, Jackson
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
January 8, 1984
Do you remember when Idaho's Second District congressman, George Hansen, went to Iran to try to secure the release of all those U.S. hostages? Do you remember how his spectacular trip was treated by the major news media?
'Twas all bug disgraceful wasn't it? And President Carter's Department of State refused even to talk to him.
Now then, compare the same media's treatment of presidential aspirant the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his recent effort to secure the release of one U.S. pilot. Conservative, anti-Communist Hansen's media treatment was mostly snide if not downright ridicule. Liberal leftist Jesse Jackson's treatment was hype, high praise and, if not adulation, at least super-high visibility for the super-mouthy Democrat candidate. Certainly we all feel good about the downed pilot's return, but the media double-standard is enough to gag a buzzard.
But there's some good news, too. Hansen is in the national news again. This time to attempt a rescue of seven families whose husbands are virtually held hostage right here in the old U.S.A. in the state of Nebraska.
Fortunately the gutsy congressman has succeeded in focusing some national attention on seven men in jail in Cass County, Nebraska, for putting their children in a Christian school which was not certified by the state government.
The men were arrested just before Thanksgiving. Judge Ronald Reagan (no, not that one) immediately went on vacation, so they sat in jail over the holidays. He knew what he was doing as he was brought in from outside the county specifically to "try the case, and break the resistance of the church." Interestingly, the county court refuses to charge them with a crime. A crime, you remember, is protected by such Constitutional provisions as the Fifth Amendment, but in Nebraska (it seems to be reserved mostly for murderers, rapists and Communists who love to plead "the Fifth.")
The wives have fled the state of Nebraska and are living across the border in Iowa. The pastor of the Faith Baptist Church and formerly headmaster of the school is the Rev. Everett Sileven. He, too, is a fugitive of Iowa.
According to Gary North's newsletter, Remnant Review, the Nebraska police, "tried desperately to catch the women and their 12 children." If the civil authorities had caught them, their children almost certainly would have been taken from them and put into foster homes. This increases the parents' incentive to comply with rules and regulations, of course.
"This isn't a failure to communicate," says North. "What we have here is a war between religious groups for the control of tax money, and even more important, for control over the minds of those who will be asked by the state in the future to provide even more tax money." (North's "religious groups" no doubt include the state.)
Congressman George Hansen was at the Nebraska kangaroo court hearing along with the hard-nosed attorney on his staff, Jim McKenna. Hansen said that even his experience in Iran did not move him the way the Nebraska affair did.
Hansen has written to President Reagan and Attorney General William French Smith urging them to investigate this "outrageous travesty of justice." According to the Daily News Digest of Phoenix, Ariz., the term kangaroo court is too mild to describe the Nebraska inquisition saying, "The court refuses to appoint an attorney for them (the families), and 40 attorneys in Nebraska who have been contacted have refused to represent them. The men were not permitted by the county prosecutor to appear at the hearing to state their case. The arresting sheriff testified on their behalf.
"But you haven't read about any of this have you? It's not news. It has nothing to do with Cabbage-Patch dolls," says the Daily News Digest. (One exception: The Register, an Orange County, Calif., newspaper does have a reporter on the scene - the only reporter covering the event full-time, even including local Nebraska reporters.)
This writer takes his hat off both to the Rev. Jackson in Syria and to the Rev. Sileven of Nebraska with their respective hostage crusades. Still, if it were not for men such as two congressmen: Hansen and his fellow congressman-protester, Ron Paul of Texas, our children might all be held hostage by now in schools managed completely by - Big Brother, right here at home.
(One has to wonder where Idaho's own Superintendent of Public Instruction Jerry Evans will be on all this. Last year he told me he only wanted to compel registration of Idaho's religions schools so he could report to the feds.) Egad!
We Need to Tell Our Story
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
January 15, 1984
One of the phenomenal events of our time is the absolutely astronomical sums of money spent by "our" government. Almost nobody seems to see what's happening, or, if they do see, to care much in terms of assuming much responsibility - individually.
First of all this massive expenditure is shifting our society from a privately owned and controlled society, bad as that may be, over to a publicly owned and controlled country which is worse. It's worse, that is, if one considers communist politics and methods to be harder and bloodier on the little guy than individualist-capitalist politics and methods.
So what? Well, this brings me to the controversial subject of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Cuba, Mexico and others, all of whom are experiencing much communist ideological pushing and shoving. While the U.S. media strangely tends to play it down, there is a contest of ideas (hence the word, ideology) at work. In this arena of the fight, our side is most certainly not winning. Whether one measures by the number of left-leaning professors in the idea camps and campuses all across America or otherwise measures by the number of market-economy capitalist-leaning professors - we're losing the idea war. Webster's dictionary says, "ideology is the study of ideas, their nature and source." Quite an important arena, don't you agree? But it's a bad word on campus.
Now then, the ideology held by our opponents in the Soviet bloc and their intellectual leader, Karl Marx, holds that communism and capitalism cannot both exist side by side - "one or the other must be destroyed." Their opponents, the so-called free world, led by the U.S.A. (mainly the Department of State) and today's intellectual leaders are telling the story: "We are just like them." But not so, at least in terms of detente and friendly trade and cultural exchanges.
Last week former national security advisor to President Carter, Zbignew Brezinski said we are making headway with Red China (he calls it the People's Republic of China) "... but we must remember that they are very, very sensitive about the island of Taiwan." Jumpin' catfish! Get that: ... THEY (my emphasis) are sensitive ... - of course they are "sensitive." Why wouldn't they be? Taiwan (Free China) has raised their citizens' standard of living to where it's a huge embarrassment to mainland China. The citizens' economic and political freedoms are overwhelmingly greater than in Red China, though by no means completely free as we'd perhaps like.
Still, "our" side's spokesmen tend to say, merely, that we should be sensitive to them. Wow! How about their being sensitive to us? For example, why was the U.S.A. so "sensitive" to the Marxist-Communists in African-Rhodesia?
We were, you know? We threw out their leader Ian Smith, our friend, and helped install the Marxist-Communist government now called Zimbabwe. We, together with Great Britain, did that. We did it again in Nicaragua when Somoza was a friend, if not an entirely welcome, dictator. Thanks to the policy "we" in the U.S. government pursued, we now have an unfriendly, repeat unfriendly, communist dictator. Now the U.S. is shipping aid to the rebels in Nicaragua and fighting the very government forces we helped install. Good grief! (We recently gave $35 million to Zimbabwe.)
Now we chase back and forth to El Salvador trying desperately to determine who are the good guys who should get our aid and who are the bad guys we're against. And so it goes all around the world, more or less, with the possible exception of Grenada, a good subject for another day.
Okay! So what do we do? What should we do? Well, why do you suppose nobody, who is anybody, asks the question and demands answers on big media or, for that matter, asks even on middle media: "What are we trying to do all over the world?" Under Democrats we win one and lose two; under the GOP we win one and lost two. Why?
Well, let me ask you, gentle reader, when was the last time you could see that America's foreign policy was pushing ideas? The free market, private property and severely limited government ideas - the guts of market-capitalism? That's what America is all about. Instead we're admonished to "be sensitive" to communist ideology.
The latter word being a bad one, except, perhaps, in the walnut-paneled offices of America's big government-franchised banks who've sold multi-billion dollar loans to countries already "sensitive" for years to communist ideas.
Next week: "A way to mount an offense."
American Policy AWOL
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
January 22, 1984
Last week it was promised in this column to suggest why United States foreign policy has been failing for years, indeed is still failing and, further, to offer some ways (since we're up to our fanny in alligators) to drain the swamp.
First of all, it's necessary to remember that since its creation the Soviet Union has always and persistently tried to increase its sphere of influence by any means, and at any price.
It is equally important to notice that during all these decades there has been no consistent Western policy to meet this challenge - all the while the Soviet juggernaut, both intellectual and military, has rolled on and on in many fronts including especially Cuba, Africa, South America, Mexico and now Central America.
This writer has for years tried and tried to get some attention focused on the intellectual constipation that seems still to dominate our own government's military and intellectual policies both foreign and domestic.
Two reasons exist, I think, which account for our malaise or apparent myopia: (1) Lack of understanding of the theoretical and practical nature of the Soviet system among U.S. decision makers and their allies and (2) the generally defensive, if peacefully, policy toward the Soviet bloc aimed at preserving the status quo.
I have long advocated that we could not score in our "ball game" competition against Soviet Russia with only our defense team out on the so-called ball field. Sooner or later we must put in the offense team. The best defense is still a good offense. But, so far, the liberals who virtually own and control the entire U.S. military and intellectual decision-making process seem hell bent on using only the U.S. defensive team. I mean by this that we should first know what our country stands for and then - stand for it. And let the damn Communists compete in the arena of ideas out in the open, i.e., the free society against a slave society.
In other words, let's contest to win world opinion against a country (an idea) which must build a Berlin Wall and shoot its people who want to leave. The U.S., which may have to use armed guards to keep outside people from escaping into (repeat, into) its several states, however, still cannot seem to win the ball game of ideas. Something just has to be wrong - with us. I'll forego a "ball game" comment on the military hardware contest simply because - how in hell do bombs make sense when we seem struck dumb in the arena of ideas?
For example, the Soviets provoke, aggravate, then promote unrest, hatred, envy and, of course, socialism in Nicaragua, El Salvador and elsewhere in Central America - then after they've sold their ideas (read, ideology), they ship in the guns, ammunition and hardware. So far it seems only U.S. Sen. Steve Symms understands the idea war. Yet each time he comes back from El Salvador the rhetoric is 80 percent military and 20 percent ideas. It ought to be the other way around. But if we ever do see a U.S. idea expressed by a U.S. official it's usually favoring some form of - more government.
And our move is always after the fact, i.e., after the Communists or Marxists have already ideologically destroyed individualism, capitalism and free market ideas, if indeed any, per se, ever existed.
"The concept of ideological war," according to the super-bright Russian dissident. Vladimir Bukovsky, "makes it clear that no amount of weapons (nuclear or conventional) ... no friendly dialogue and wholehearted offer of cooperation can stop ideological expansion of a system built for that purpose. (He means the U.S.S.R.)
"And the danger of any defensive strategy is that it leaves the initiative in the hands of the aggressor ..." The latter creates "realities" suggests Bukovsky, while the defender with its peaceful intentions and political pragmatism, "... will be obliged to recognize those realities."
This defensive policy, when applied to the Third World, forces the West to support "stable" dictatorial and authoritarian regimes as lesser evils, thus preparing the ground for new Soviet advances.
"The ironic truth," so says Bukovsky, who spent 12 years in U.S.S.R. prisons and so-called psychiatric hospitals, "is that the myth of the irreversible character of communist expansion exists simply because nobody ever challenged it seriously."
Next week: It's cheaper to be smart.
Quit Bankrolling Our Arch-Enemy
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
January 29, 1984
Should the United States launch an all-out offense against the Soviet Union? Some people reply, "Well, they seem to be launching an offensive against us. Their KGB agents are everywhere. The rascals lie, shoot civilian airliners, use poison gas, spread hatred and violence, and generally stir up trouble whenever they can."
Of course, just who is stirring up trouble? The U.S., too, has lots of CIA agents ostensibly trying to defend America's "interests." One thing is clear, however, and that is the Soviets know what they are for, and who, and what. And who they are against. Almost nobody challenges that. But I believe that America under both political parties knows very little about the Soviet system.
For example, the Russian government's system was and is built for offensive purposes and it is very inept and inflexible when it's on the defensive. "There's no need to invent a special ideology for a Western offensive," according to Vladimir Bukovsky, the famous Russian defector, "democracy is already accepted by most populations as a better system."
One does not have to be able to speak Russian to see that the cost to the U.S. of a democratic offensive, although huge, would be nothing compared to the cost of armaments, or military hardware. All of this is not even to mention the actual cost our government has and continues to have in financing the Russian government wheat deals, pipelines, truck factories, etc.
If they are not our "enemy" then why do we spend approximately $250 billion (printed money) per year, repeat per year, in our military budget to save us from the Soviets? Our side must be absolutely nuts.
U.S. Sen. Steve Symms says it's too bad the feds have a printing press to make money when Idahoans have to make it the hard way. Maybe he's wrong. Look at all the people who would be put out of work if Symms stopped their printing all that paper dough - to pay for military hardware.
Still, the suspicion lingers that columnists Nathaniel Pierce and Erwin Schwiebert would surely be protesting the printing press money if it were all that bad. But they don't! Why? Well, without a printing press Schwiebert couldn't have his United Nations' blank check for Third World socialist do-gooders and Pierce wouldn't have so many nuclear trains to lie in front of.
But back to how the U.S. could get smart. Examples abound, but for instance: the Helsinki Agreement called for a free flow of information and the participating countries (including the U.S.S.R.) were supposed to amend their internal laws accordingly. The Soviets did not. Indeed, they confiscated "forbidden" books and threw the possessors in jail.
Instead of screaming like a mashed cat at this obvious violation of the agreement, Mr. Toon, America's then-ambassador in Moscow, issued an order forbidding American employees to receive such books through the embassy, or to distribute them among the Soviet population. Thousands of examples exist, yet the liberals, the American Civil Liberties Union, and others, who hate the Rev. Jerry Falwell's anti-communist crusade, find time only to accuse the conservative preacher, not the Soviets, of wanting censorship. Good grief!
If our side (assuming both Republican and Democrat administrations are, indeed, on "our" side) should decide to take the idea-offensive, giving help to genuine liberation movements throughout the Soviet bloc and among Soviet-dominated nations, without embarrassment or fears of Soviet reaction(s) we'd win hands down. We'd be using terms such as capitalism, individualism, free market, private property, human rights, freedom to choose and for citizens to vote with their feet, a la Thomas Jefferson, Adam Smith, Alexis de Toqueville and, especially this year, George Orwell and others. Success would be achieved both morally and politically as well as militarily.
For example, massive help to freedom fighters in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc., would undoubtedly make it more difficult for the Soviets to support Central American communist guerrilla movements, or send their troops to Poland or stir up troubles in Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon and elsewhere.
The Soviets mean business. They sell ideas and they play hard ball. They win. Still the news media's main grief, lately, is with politicians like Charles Wick who's been taping a few telephone calls in Washington, D.C. Rather, they should grieve over just why the hell there's so much power, hence so much secrecy, concentrated in one town.
Next week: Whose side are we on, anyway?
Spade's a Spade in Any Language
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
February 5, 1984
This is the last of three columns promising to deal with the Soviet Union versus the United States in foreign policy. They tell how our own budget could be drastically reduced - how we could be intensely competitive and more effective both morally and politically, as well as militarily.
Aside from the war of ideas for which the U.S. has usually offered some pap such as a democratic version of fascism (simply defined: a sometimes private ownership, but always government control) the Americans lose on other fronts, too.
For example, the Soviet Union has invested a lot of political and ideological efforts into what the famous Russian dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky, calls "... a movement for the independence of Baluchistan, Afghanistan." According to the Daily News Digest, a super-sharp and perceptive newsletter from Phoenix, Ariz.: "The West - most conspicuously the United States - has failed utterly in not setting up an Afghanistan government-in-exile in the West!"
Thus instead of using the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan to punish them for their aggressions, the West has left all the cards in Soviet hands, and in the near future, will have a far more dangerous situation in a sensitive area in a foreign land. Instead of weakening the Soviets, Western "stand still" policy has given the international mobsters added strength.
Bukovsky really made a fascinating observation last fall: "At the beginning of his presidency, Jimmy Carter made a masterly move, apparently without even understanding the full meaning of his action. He sent a letter to Brezhnev and a letter to dissident, Sakharov, in a more or less equal way, thus recognizing officially the opposition in the U.S.S.R. "de-facto" and equating its importance to that of the (Russian) governmental apparatus." The former Russian citizen-maverick, Bukovsky, has outlined his ever-so-perceptive views in his Samizdat Bulletin (Box 6129 San Mateo, Calif. 94403) entitled On the Promotion of Democracy in Communist Countries.
To digress a moment, the term "democracy" has unfortunately come to be used, in this country at least, as a kind of catch-all word. Bukoveky's use means: non-totalitarian. It is not necessarily proper to determine every truth by counting noses as today's knee-jerk liberals seem hell-bent to have us do. The word does not appear anywhere in our founding father's major documents. Yet its use has all but substituted the idea of voting rights in place of property rights - the socialist's basic idea.
Now then, Bukovsky, who spent 12 years off and on in Soviet prisons and mental hospitals, suggests to the U.S. that, "It is crucial not to treat the Soviet Union as a monolith, but to appeal over the heads of the rulers of the Soviet population and to its independent forces thus giving them increased authority."
But Bukovsky, for all his perceptions and excellent insights, seems not quite to understand the U.S. "governmentality." It (we) can hardly understand dealing in any fashion whatsoever with people, vis-a-vis individuals. That is to say, the U.S. seems only interested in "dealing" with government(s) be they socialist, communist, fascist, welfare states or democratic, whatever that's come to mean.
In any event, how does one, indeed, get off this kick we're on of only dealing "government to government?"
Answer? By getting back to private ownership, that's how. Free market capitalism cannot function without it. Hence again, our foreign policy's basic error of omission.
Still, Bukovsky offers us a common sense, intelligent, spectacular and pragmatic way out: "In the propaganda arena, it is important that the content of the Voice of America and Radio Liberty broadcasts is not too cautious and inoffensive. If the representatives of a free nation can't call a spade a spade - a dictator is a dictator, after all - then why speak at all?
"The ideological offensive against the Communist empire and the promotion of freedom and democracy is a formidable, but worthwhile, task." (And, I might add, infinitely cheaper).
"The knowledge of dissidents who have escaped that (U.S.S.R.) prison should be tapped to target the weaknesses of that system more accurately, and it should be attacked and brought down."
But our great universities have for over 40 years helped make the U.S. foreign policy so pathologically irrational that other highly educated people think there must be something clever hidden in it. Perhaps that's why Boise State University President John Keiser and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jerry Evans wants yet another $20 million for higher education. Maybe, if they spend enough money, they'll find something clever hidden in it.
Profs Had Right to Speak
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
February 12, 1984
"Is our nation's noble 100 year experiment with public education a failure?" According to Press-Tribune columnist Paul Harvey, the evidence says yes.
There has been so much written about public education's never-ending problems, if not complete failure, I won't bore you, gentle reader, with more of the same except to say that Boise State University's (BSU) President John Keiser recently gave his school's image a new - slant. Or, rather, perhaps he revealed an old one - censorship. He sent scathing letters of denunciation and apparently threats of termination to two BSU professors after they publicly proposed (are you ready for this?): free enterprise for public education.
Four Idahoans wrote a vigorous defense of the two libertarian, hence, minority, economics professors. The protest letter, written to President Keiser, should be made public. From my rough-draft notes, since I was a co-author of the letter, here it is essentially as it was written:
"It was a delight to see two of BSU's economics professors in concert with other Boise citizens, a group called 'Choice in Education', offer their opinions on how to achieve 'quality' education. Of course we are referring to Drs. Allen Dalton and Donald Billings and their publicly advocating free enterprise in education. The latter is similar to a proposal offered by Novel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and positions taken by at least two other libertarian economists and Novel laureates since 1974.
"The dark side of this incident was the severe nature in which you (BSU President Keiser) not only embarrassed these professors, but according to the news media, (you) went so far as to severely reprimand them with a public press conference. Besides the rather obvious conflict of interest you have in defending public education, as a paid employee thereof, your zealousness to suppress public expression of private-sector alternatives to the (severe) problems we face in public education can only be compared to the book-burners of days gone by.
"It is our opinion, and the opinion of many we have visited with, that had these two professors been part of a group asking for increased tax monies for public education, no complaint would have been made against them. Isn't it really the free-market, private advocacy position they were representing that angered you and caused you to act so intemperately and against the two (libertarian) professors' academic freedom?
"Perhaps you would have had some cause to reprimand these professors if they had overtly held themselves out to be representing BSU's official position, but that was clearly not the case. There was no mention in the news that the views of these individuals were the official opinion of BSU, nor did anyone we visited with even remotely understand such to be the case. (By the way, Dr. Keiser, do you always make it clear when expressing your own pro-statist views on education that they are definitely NOT the views of Drs. Billings and Dalton and others?).
"Your choice not to approach this matter with intellectual balance (or intellectual anything else), but instead with emotionalism and censorship would seem to reflect very poorly on BSU, not only as an institution which is insensitive in its treatment of its employees, but also as an institution trying to suppress ideas such as those warned about in George Orwell's Big Brother novel, 1984. One can only assume this action has a deleterious effect on obtaining quality instructors by indicating a willingness to harass them.
"If the objectivity of BSU is important to you, Dr. Keiser, it is our opinion you should apologize to these gentlemen (free-marketeers Billings and Dalton). Since having heard both of them speak publicly for the free market many times, we feel they are a credit to BSU and quite possibly give it a better reputation for philosophical balance than it deserves." End of letter.
In addition to myself the letter was signed by (alphabetically) Monte Munn, C.L. "Butch" Otter and Ken Young. As members of the Conservatarian Council we try to give recognition to those precious few Idaho teachers who favor capitalism over socialism.
Thanks to this sort of leadership from Keiser and the Idaho educators' labor union, teachers of free market capitalism may yet be holding class in an old AT&T telephone booth - after EXTREME public disclaimers, of course.
Thank Goodness for - Apathy
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
February 19, 1984
On the highway between Caldwell and Nampa is a huge advertising sign, i.e., a reader board. Its placement, ever so close by the road, almost shouts its message: "Apathy is our bitter worst enemy." I say hogwash!
One assumes the owner of the business means well; means to catch potential customer's attention with thoughts of: "If only more people would vote - surely things would not be in such a mess." One supposes he means, by mess, a political mess about which there's no doubt great agreement.
At risk of being misunderstood, however, let me suggest to you apathy, that is, voter apathy, just may be the little man's best (if not his only) defense against lousy, power-seeking politicians and do-gooders.
For example, last month I saw the television broadcast of a huge gathering of many of the nation's power elite. They were in an enormous meeting hall, about 50 or 60 of the nation's politicians and news tycoons, etc., including former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. There were most of the big TV star news commentators so familiar for lo' these many years on the prime time evening boob tube. Seldom in a decade are we treated to so many big nationally known luminaries, both Democrat and Republican, all with great long face and frowned forehead.
What was the great problem for discussion? Did Soviet Russia shoot down another unarmed civilian airliner? Did they invade another defenseless country with poison gas? Did Castro re-invade the tiny island of Grenada? Or did the Rev. Jesse Jackson decide to run for president of the United Nations instead of the United States? What, indeed, brought so many august big shot men and women of national fame and fortune together with such awesome solemnity?
It was actually a declaration of war. Yes, a war on apathy. If you will, voter apathy. The American voters were staying away from the polls - in droves. And the politicos were about to have apoplexy. This is the first time in my over a third of a century of close political observations that the average voter (or if you like, non-voter) really got the attention of the political establishment. I mean, really got it.
Well, what happened? As you might guess the leaders' suggestions ran the whole gamut - on only one side, of course.
From monetary reward for voting (the carrot) to punishment for not voting (the stick). Or, said another way: "fight apathy." While I did not quite see the entire program, I saw most of it and it was gawdawful. The players were to a man (and woman) consistently and devastatingly hung up on "more" votes. Not "better informed" votes, mind you, but merely more. That's what politics is all about, unfortunately.
Not one tycoon or one news media mogul ever pressed the question to his colleagues: "What are some rational reasons why so many voters stay away?" No one offered the obvious: Ego-trips, intellectual dishonesty, peer group pressure, group-think and lack of courage to go against the grain. Many voters who cannot explain why they stay away sense the reason. They know they're being had - not how. So rather than "go along" they stay away from the polls. Since the elite establishments real monkeyshines (this may be wittingly or unwittingly) will not stand the light of day they label it "apathy," and decry it as bad citizenship in an effort to shift the blame.
The political version of the question was better stated by Karl Hess, one of Goldwater's speech writers back in 1964, "Will men continue to submit to rule by politics, which has always meant the power of some men over other men, or are we ready to go it alone socially, in communities of voluntarism, in a world more economic and cultural than political ...?"
Conservatives, for example, yearn for a government or "leadership" with the power to restore order and to put things - and people - back in their places. They yearn for political power. Liberals yearn for a government that will bomb the rich and balm the poor. They too yearn for political power.
The bleating of our nation of sheep against "apathy," especially as if it were our "bitter worst enemy," is a platitude at best. At worst, it plays right into the hands of those forces who, for good or evil, think they can manipulate the masses. So far, they have.
So far, too, no thanks to much of the media and sometimes the business community who pander to the political ignorance of the masses, there's one great group the manipulators cannot manipulate. These are the ones who fight city hall, so to speak, with voter apathy.
And predictably enough, they're driving the national politicos up the wall refusing to play with loaded dice. Perhaps this explains government's growing, if quiet, drive to make voting compulsory.
Ludwig von Mises said it much better: "The average man is both better informed and less corruptible when buying in the market place than when voting in political elections." For some strange reason the media almost never interviews scholars from the libertarian side which the above Mises quote exemplifies.
The Free Press Not Always Fair
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
February 26, 1984
Last week's mail brought me an anonymous letter which at first sort of amused me, then on second thought began to irritate me a bit.
The subject centers around the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry (IACI) task force on higher education in Idaho. The big business group raised privately something like $200,000 to make a survey of Idaho's problems in higher education. The IACI report's critics tend to see its recommendations as remarkably statist and parallel to most big government solutions to everything under the sun, namely, more money, lots more, and more buildings.
Well, more could be said and no doubt will be, but men and women of goodwill can expect to gain from reasoned debate - given reasoned "reporting," which brings me to the anonymous letter.
It contained two newspaper clippings of political columnists Rod Gramer and his semi-retired predecessor, John Corlett, both of whom were wrecking havoc on an "opposition report" critical of the IACI task force's recommendations. The opposition report by education consultant Samuel Blumenfeld is entitled An Analytical Critique of (IACI's) Higher Education in Idaho: A Plan for the Future. Preliminary Recommendations of the Idaho Task Force on Higher Education. The critique was commissioned by the Center for the Study of Market Alternatives (CSMA), Caldwell, a the suggestion of the Idaho Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tom Stivers.
Anonymous letters are thought by many to be a cowardly way out, especially if they're insulting, but this one was not, well not very, anyway. The hand printed note said, "If this is an example of your libertarian thinking how dumb can you get?" Unfortunately, the not very forthright letter writer gave the two political columnist's unduly negative opinions the benefit of the doubt. Still the question lingers: How many other readers were suckered into believing the two super-liberal columnists?
Gramer's critique of the Center's critique can best be charged off as a young left-leaning journalist's attempt to cater to his peers. His column's most cogent effort to damn was "They (CSMA) mainly are ignored, because they are on the right wing fringe in a state with a surplus of mainstream conservatives." Poor fellow, that Gramer. Private sector ideas probably do seem on the "fringe" to him, i.e., so seldom does he ever hear one of his news media peers mention the term. But he does seem kind of sincere.
Corlett, however, is another matter. His column blasting, bombing, flailing and squalling against even a political glance in the direction of private alternatives to anything whatsoever is at least predictable. Corlett has been writing perhaps too long about politics and politicians whose forte is successful attempts to suck and blow in the same breath. For example:
His column's scathing attack on the Blumenfeld critique states flatly that he's also been "a critic of public schools for more than 30 years ... but I've never denigrated the public-school and higher-education systems." Aside from his transparent attempt to assign the term "denigrate" to those honest critics of the government school monopoly, Corlett could never bring himself to criticize anything the government runs, that is, if there were even a tiny chance that the private sector might do it better.
All of which is not to suggest both Gramer and Corlett do not have a right to express their opinions. But Corlett's retirement years seem not to have mellowed him at all. His fanatic opposition to Blumenfeld's non-government school alternatives has set afire his ideology with an old journalistic trick, i.e., the use of quotation marks to misled.
Blumenfeld's report chided the IACI task force as he said they were recommending "... essentially two separate systems: one for the smart and one for the dumb." Blumenfeld did not approve of this.
Corlett's "use" in his column of the quoted words from Blumenfeld's critique (page 9, paragraph 3) though not a lie seem clearly intended to mislead the reader to infer that Blumenfeld, rather than IACI's Task Force, was pigeon-holing students as "less bright" and even "dumb." Tut, tut, John. For shame.
India has its sacred cows and America has its freedom of the press and "free" education. Now, thanks to my anonymous, if not every high class, letter writer I begin to see how they tend to converge. Carl Sandburg summed it up thusly: "In the average newspaper there is not a complete suppression of stories the sacred cows don't want printed. But rather what happens is that the stories get printed with stresses, colorations and emphasis that favor the sacred cows."
Blumenfeld's report is a fine analytical critique of a system nearly consumed by bureaucratic group-think. It's controversial because, as Sandburg might have suggested, sacred cows do not like being lassoed.
Education Mindset Hard to Penetrate
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
March 4, 1984
As you know, the Idaho Legislature is in session so - look out. One of the hottest controversies is almost an annual affair, that is, where and how to find enough money for the government schools. This time it's not primary or secondary, but higher education in the headlines.
So what's new? Well, this year "his majesty's loyal opposition" has risen to respectfully question our "sacred cow."
The focus surrounds the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry (IACI) who funded an expensive state survey done largely by an out-of-state commission hired for that purpose.
The IACI recommendations were entitled, Higher Education in Idaho: A Plan for the Future. They were published and are presently the focus of a rather elaborate lobbying effort at the Legislature to sell the multi-million dollar IACI plan suggested by their "task force."
The plan, ostensibly to correct Idaho's "problems in education" and bring about "quality education," called for mainly: more money for professors' salaries, a system of (more) community colleges and some legal changes so that the state could charge an increased price-tuition. (The task force suggested students should perhaps pay a limit of one-third the cost of their "higher learning" and the state pay two-thirds).
But the Center for Study of Market Alternatives (CSMA), a Caldwell-based organization, tended to see the IACI task force's recommendations (84 pages) as far-too-familiar sounding. Most recommendations we've come to expect from the bungling bureaucracies of the government have said: "We've got a bad problem. Let's solve it by throwing a fistful of money at it." Usually somebody else's - taxes, of course.
Rep. Tom Stivers, Speaker of the House of Representatives, thought the other side of the IACI argument, should be heard. He asked CSMA to come up with that "other side," in the interest of a better public and legislative dialogue. He hoped for one not quite so typically one-sided and, perhaps, along the liens of private institutions and alternatives and competition.
So the Center commissioned noted author and educational consultant Samuel Blumenfeld of Boston, Mass., to make "an analytical critique" of IACI's plan for higher education in Idaho. The 18-page report was published favoring private school and market alternatives. A news conference was held to announce it and a big controversy followed. It's still on.
As you might imagine, since probably 90 percent (not all) of the media is extremely liberal and statist these headlines were more or less typical, but in my opinion grossly untrue: "Close colleges, Idaho told" (Spokane); "Caldwell group advocates educational elitism in Idaho" and "Education-report critique hurts center's credibility" (Boise). From a north Idaho daily, however, came this front page headline "Private higher education gets boost from Caldwell group."
It was followed inside by an even more friendly editorial.
How was the Press-Tribune's news coverage? I'd have to say their political reporter leaned over backward in his attempt to be fair and balanced in his understandably brief accounts.
But one of the television interview shows to be shown today uncovered an interesting phenomenon. The author-educator, Blumenfeld, was in town last week as a guest of CSMA to visit with legislators and give some lectures on the definition of "quality education" (which the IACI report avoided like the plague and thus bore the brunt of Blumenfeld's criticism) and private education alternatives.
Blumenfeld's TV interview included the chief architect of the IACI task force report and one of the executive officers of Boise Cascade Corporation, John Clute. During the television interview the host asked Clute (whose own children are in private schools) whether he thought the idea of private, especially higher education which is sometimes referred to as state "divestiture" is a rather "kooky" or "far-out" idea.
Clute's reply, though partly in jest, was revealing. It went something like: "Oh, no, I think there are probably one or two others around the state who do, but surely not very many."
Well, gentle reader, just recently two Boise State University economic professors said just that - believe it or not. They said that the government's monopoly on education should be abandoned and opened up to competition.
What happened? Why, the roof about caved in on the BSU professors. They nearly got fired. That's what happened.
Clute had a point, but it's a very small wonder, considering that the tycoons of free enterprise seem hell-bent on suggesting more and more ways to dump endless sums of tax money into the competition of free enterprise schools.
Hart's Ideas Without Substance
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
March 18, 1984
Hello neighbor, I've some good news and some bad news. First the good: the old party hack presidential candidate for the Democratic Party's 1984 nomination for president has some tough competition.
The bad news is the competition, and it may indeed be tough, is from the neo-liberal senator from Colorado, Gary Hart. Not that it's particularly appropriate to use the word "honest" about a political commentary on presidential campaigns of either party, but I'll honestly confess to some personal preference for the John F. Kennedy look-alike winner, Hart.
Hart seems to be riding the crests of two waves: (1) he does look and act like JFK and he trades and leans on this real hard (all the while denying it, of course) and (2) the wave is almost a tide of anti-labor union sentiment all across the nation. It's a wave, if not a tide, that's obvious to all but the most myopic politicians who aspire for office.
Labor union support is the traditional sewed-up field of Democratic politicians, thanks to typical GOP candidates in general and the Republican National Committee (RNC) in particular. Both are too dull or too dishonest to tell the voters the so-called labor fight is not management versus labor, but rather between two groups of labor, i.e., the "ins" who want to stay in and the "outs" who want to get in. Both groups are nicely orchestrated by the AFL-CIO and the politicians who live to see the workers' dues paid regularly and spent largely for whichever political hack will promise the most.
Which brings me to my preference, so far, for Hart. During the main Democratic TV debate Mondale was way out front and promising the moon. Said Hart: "Gosh, Fritz, you just can't promise everything to everybody just to get elected." I thought for a fleeting moment that perhaps the liberals had at long last dug up a realistic candidate. I still smile with satisfaction when I recall Hart severely scolding former Vice President Mondale whose tenure in office under President Jimmy Carter no doubt showed him: (1) a myriad of new ways to pay off political campaign promises, once elected, and (2) equally convenient ways to get out from under such promises by blaming others.
I admit, before I'm hanged by some honest liberals, that President Reagan does it, too, at the urgings of the RNC and others. Too bad he lacks the guts of Harry Truman who took on the whole damn bunch in Congress. Reagan could, too, if he would, but I'm told his moderate wife squawks and appeals to presidential aides, Baker and Deaver, whose liberal pragmatism is usually successful in dulling much of RR's righteous indignation.
But Hart's indignation has, so far anyway, been covered up by his neo-liberal campaign rhetoric which is painfully trite. Just how trite is revealed in his book of a year or two ago, A New Democracy: A Democratic Vision for the 1980s and Beyond. His "neo-liberal" label means little except to describe a group of centroid politicians and intellectuals, e.g., such as our own government-adoring columnist, Erwin Schwiebert, who have made a fetish out of rejecting political labels. Even so, they're useful.
In any event, Hart has at least written a book for us - and it is real scary. Here's a sample of his book's plan for "Amerika" (my spelling). It's his perception of "national priorities." They run, not on direct force, mind you, but rather by a system of incentives and rewards for "correct" behavior. (Remember Soviet Andropov's psychiatric hospitals for "correction" purposes.)
Hart's book outlines how he'd control inflation with a "tax incomes policy," or TIP. Here's from the book: "Guidelines (read, controls) would be established for both prices and wages. There would be a single wage standard for the economy and a set of price standards for each major sector of the economy ..."
Now get this: "Thus firms would be free to raise prices or wages above the guidelines." Hart says, "but would pay a tax penalty for doing so." So you see, gentle reader, the more politicians change - the more they remain the same. Hart's smile, especially his mimic of the JFK version, is mostly all that matters to the public and thus, one supposes, to the Democrats.
Why such asininity? Well, partly it's because American business would rather have college professors do their reading and writing for them than to do it themselves.
And in such as Hart's book, they surefire have - in spades.
The No-Good, Rotten Media
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
May 6, 1984
The world is in one helluva state of affairs. Even weird. The Israelis invade Lebanon; the U.S. shoos the Jews out, moves in themselves with combat Marines for "ceremonial" duty. The Congress approves President Reagan's move, but blames him immediately when the fanatic Arab religionists there bomb the barracks killing 262 Marines.
The Russians invade Afghanistan using poison gas and the media tends to call it yellow rain. The Arabs are ready to close the Persian Gulf and shut off the flow of criminally high-priced oil to the U.S., but almost nothing on the national TV interview with the Arab nationals about "obscene" profits. Africa is aflame with Khadafy invading its neighboring country, Chad, and Castro's troops shooting up Angola.
Still the press and the liberal church groups strangely complain far more about South Africa's discrimination against her blacks even though none seem to want to escape. The Communists slaughter millions of their own dissenters and shoot those who try to leave. All the while the media liberals say, "Well, we can't just ignore a billion Chinese people." Why not? We ignore Central America. Provided they are socialist enough, of course.
We've got three nice liberal guys here at home running for president on the Democrat ticket, but they are at each other's throats fighting about who can promise the most in order to buy votes. And so, where does Reagan the peace-maker go? China! Is it weird? Indeed!
One supposes he just couldn't bear to hear Democrat presidential candidate, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a black who talks about little else, call Reagan's Jewish friends - "hymies." This made the Jews furious and they demanded Jackson apologize. But Jesse is in the liberal media's caressing and protective bosom, hence his "apology" did little harm. A few did say Jesse was a little naughty. Some pointed out that Jackson's staunchest ally and pal, Louis Farrakhan, a black Muslim, shouted a death threat to a black reporter and otherwise railed against white "devils."
But little clamor from the press for Jesse Jackson to apologize or repudiate his pal. Oh yes, some small talk of it, but Jesse stood by his pal Farrakhan. Still does.
Where is all this leading? Well, oddly enough, one place it must have led was to the media demanding that Ronald Reagan denounce and repudiate the Ku Klux Klan. Some clansman is said to have publicly praised Reagan for something. Of course, the KKK is not Reagan's to repudiate, but, not to worry, the president's oval office wimps to the rescue. They got rights on the media's chief concern. The first thing he did upon leaving China was - you guessed it, RR declared the KKKs were baddies, real bad. And that passes for news!
Why didn't Reagan ask the media why they didn't let Secretary of Interior James Watt off half so easily when he used the word "cripple" in describing one of his board's personnel? Why didn't the president ask the media, publicly, to compare the harm former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz did while telling an ethnic joke, in private, by the way?
Well, you know why. There's a double standard operating amongst the mostly liberal media, especially against conservatives and favoring liberals. The more liberal (read, left) it seems, the more favorable.
Poor President Reagan. He couldn't even escape the media double standard in the "worker's paradise," the largest concentration camp in the world - Red China. Having agreed beforehand to broadcast his speech in its entirety on Chinese TV, they did not. They cut out, censored if you like, America's "great communicator's" speech. What'd they take out? Why, that part about God. And, are you ready for this? - our system of free enterprise. And last of all - democracy in the U.S. So the ordinary Chinese "peepull" didn't get to hear Reagan's real punch lines after all.
One major anchorman on TV scolded: "Reagan had no business lecturing the Chinese." Egad! One guesses the United States TV commentator wanted to reserve the term "lecture" for his own exclusive use.
Still in all, while Reagan is seen by some conservatives to be selling them down the red-bloody China river, he did manage one media coup that you may not have heard. Upon being asked by an American newsman what he thought about the Red Chinese cutting out important chunks of his speech, the conservative president replied:
"Well, not much. You fellows do it to me, at home, all the time."
Which Democrat Will GOP Select?
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
May 13, 1984
One of the most bitter complaints of many liberals, especially those tending to want to solve our problems with more government, is what they call "labeling." It's become so bad one can hardly detect in which party some political candidates claim to be campaigning.
A little noticed contest in one of Canyon County's most important legislative races is a case in point. It concerns the one between Caldwell businessman Kent Marmon and Nampa's Janet Hay, former chairman of Idaho's Board of Regents and Board of Education. They will vie for the Republican nomination for the House of Representatives' seat in District 11.
Marmon is a former conservative Democrat turned Republican and a GOP party worker. Hay is, well, a kind of former Democrat-thinker, at least, turned Republican. This, of course, might be somewhat unfair, depending on whether one puts much faith in political party labels. I don't.
Labels are merely words. We need only, if desperately, to make them meaningful.
Former Democratic Gov. Cecil Andrus told Hay she should run as a Democrat. Of course, she knows she couldn't get elected in Canyon County as a Democrat.
In any event, here's what strikes me as a labeling kind of contradiction. Hay is the former "high priestess" of government schools in Idaho and, to her everlasting credit, she has at least one consuming concern - education. The bad news is that in Hay's mind the only way to deliver that education, for the vast public, is through government. She seems to think non-government schools, both nonprofit and proprietary, just can't do the job cheaply enough, apparently, because they must pass along to their customers the cost of doing business.
Well, so does the government have to pass along its costs. Right? Wrong! The federal government has a printing press.
But the state government which, according to the constitution is responsible for public schooling, has no printing press. The liberals, from whom all non-profit education "blessings" seem to flow, know this. so, they go to the federal government and get the grants to make up the difference. This difference, by the way, is skyrocketing. So much for printing press responsibility and the people's freedom to choose.
I phoned Marmon to ask what he saw as the problem and solution to our school's apparent dilemma and he replied: "No competition. We should investigate tax credits and vouchers for parents who want to send their kids to private schools of their own choice."
Well, that lacks a bit of answering all of the problems facing both Hay and Marmon as competitors. But still the suspicion lingers - if only we had reasonably accurate labels we could use them to guide us in search of both funds and philosophy. Thus we might find "quality" in education. Like beauty, quality is in the eye of the beholder, you know.
As to party labels, if one sees the differences between the parties as important, we might want to insist that each candidate tell us what the "label" of their party means and why they chose it. I mean really why, and why the Democrats are bad. Then hold their feet to the fire according to those principles. (It had better be on that basis, otherwise Hay's a cinch to win. Because of course, she's so much prettier than Marmon.)
As for other politics-loving, label-hating Republicans, I will leave them with a good wrap-up label of their first love, government. It's not exactly a short label, but it will do until we find a shorter one for all these well-meaning liberals. Like Hay, they tend to see government schools over non-government schools as sort of an egalitarian free lunch. Here's my wrap-up label:
The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have no special talent for the business of government, they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principle device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of 10 that promise is worth nothing. The 10th time it is made good by looting A to satisfy B.
In other words, government is a broker in pillage and every election is sort of an advance auction sale in stolen goods. So let's see who, Hay or Marmon, will bid the highest price, with our money, for our vote - come primary election day.
It Only Encourages Them
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
May 20, 1984
Day after tomorrow is election day. Primary election day. That's the day preceding which the candidates are supposed to tell people just what they stand for - and why. They don't of course, but they're supposed to.
While that may not be 100 percent true in each and every case - it is certainly the general rule. It is thought to be that way due to candidates who want to deceive the voters in order to get elected, but it is more often the voters who are really to blame. In fact, they ask candidates too many questions like, "When did you stop beating your wife?"
An honest candidate is put to a big disadvantage by such no-win questions, so I dug up the platform that a sincere candidate friend of mine used successfully on the toughest question he'd ever faced - whiskey drinking. You voters may find it helpful Tuesday to unfrock an honest candidate who is really sincere, but also might be pulling your leg. I think it's very illuminating.
Here it is:
"I had not intended to discuss this most controversial subject at this particular time. However, I want you to know ... I take a firm stand on every issue, regardless of how I feel about whiskey. And brother, this is where I stand on this burning question.
"If you mean the Devil's Brew, the Poison Scourge, the Bloody Monster, the Defiler of the Innocent, that liquid that dethrones reason, creates poverty, yea! literally takes bread out of the mouths of babes -
"If you mean that evil concoction that topples religious man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous and gracious living down into the bottomless pit of despair and degradation, shame, helplessness and hopelessness, then, sir I am against this Brew of Satan with all my power. Whiskey drinking must go.
"However, if you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine and ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in the heart and laughter on the lips, and a warm glow of contentment and well-being into the eyes -
"If you mean the Christmas cheer, if you mean the toddy that puts a spring in the old man's step on a frosty morning, if you mean the drink that enables a man to magnify his joy and happiness and forget his debts and life's other tragedies, heartbreaks and sorrows -
"If you mean by whiskey, sir, that drink, the sale of which pours into the treasury untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for little crippled children, our blind, our pitifully aged and sick and infirm -
"And to build schools, hospitals and highways, then brothers, I'm for it!
"This, sir is my stand. I will not retract one word nor will I compromise. You asked for my stand on this issue. There it is."
If the above doesn't tell you how to see through the "fog," then take my advice: "Don't vote. It only encourages them, anyway."
Lord, Grant Us the Grace
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
May 27, 1984
The primary election, has passed, but there's more to come. Before long the politicians will be campaigning for the "finals" in November. More often than not - for more government.
Believe it or not there is also "more to come" for less government, albeit not in the form of another election. The good news, so to speak, is in what is called the Grace Commission, or formally, the "President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control (PPSSCC)," J. Peter Grace, chairman. A public hearing is to be held on it in Boise this week by U.S. Sen. Steve Symms.
Lest you think (ho hum) this is just another attempt to make the U.S. welfare state efficient, as did some critics of the old (Herbert) Hoover Commission way back in the days of Presidents Truman and Eisenhower, consider this:
"The size of the underground economy," said Grace in his letter to President Reagan, "is understandable when one considers that the average family income taxes have increased from $9 in 1948 to $2,218 in 1983, or by 246 times. This is runaway taxation at its worst.
"Further, there is not much more that can be extracted from high income brackets. If the government took 100 percent of all taxable income beyond the $75,000 tax bracket not already taxed, it would get only $17 billion, and this confiscation, which would destroy productive enterprise, would ONLY (emphasis added) be sufficient to run the government for seven days."
Get that? "Seven days!" And still the one-man, one-vote mentality demands more. It's vigorously pushed by our colleges and the media. It's aggravated no-end by businessmen who push buy-now-pay-later schemes, phony bail-out loans and subsidies. They demand more government, yet less taxes.
Well, the venerable Peter Grace, whose blunt and forthright manner reminds many Idahoans of his friend and fellow industrialist, Jack Simplot, seems to think this team of private sector business and professional men will make a difference.
For example, he says that "... the 2,578 cost-cutting revenue-enhancing recommendations (by the Grace Commission) can be achieved without raising taxes, without weakening America's needed defense build-up and without harming necessary social welfare programs.
"The current economic trends," says this dynamic, enterprising and super-concerned business tycoon, "are simply too serious to delay action any longer.
"In total these (PPSSCC) reports substantiate three-year ongoing savings of $424.4 billion, plus cash accelerations of $66 billion."
Interestingly enough, however, Sen. Symms who will chair the PPSSCC related hearing in Boise next Wednesday, expressed some friendly but searching observations to Grace and his team on the first of this month in regard to businessmen being qualified to advise government.
Said Symms, "But history has shown that businessmen are not ... The reason is quite simple. Most businessmen believe that public bureaucrats will use private sector management techniques, if told to do so. Most businessmen believe that the public sector can imitate private enterprise, if only the right people were instructing the bureaucrats as to techniques.
"But this is not possible precisely because the public sector is not privately owned." How devastatingly correct! How rarely deplored!
The public sector, whether a bureau, an agency, a quasi-public authority, a public enterprise or an entire socialist country, cannot perform at the standards of freely competitive enterprise. The late Ludwig von Mises, leader of the Austrian School of Economics, proved this statement in his 1936 book, Socialism. We now know that this is true by reviewing the thousands upon thousands of pages of the findings of the Grace Commission's 36 Task Forces. All this at no cost to the government, but at a cost to the private sector of $75 million. It turned out to be an investigation infinitely more important than Watergate.
In his statement (May 1) to the Grace Commission, Symms closed with a particularly perceptive inquiry: "My question to you gentlemen is: if business is so desirable, why take such a tortuous route? Why not scrap government ownership and turn the public functions over to private enterprise?"
Symms, who is a member of the Joint-Economic Committee (JEC), is bringing Dr. Steven H. Hanke to Boise for the Wednesday hearing. Hanke is presently into a JED study to do just that, i.e., privatize the public sector. Hanke is a brilliant economist from Johns-Hopkins University and senior advisor to the JEC. He was formerly with the Heritage Foundation and is currently a fellow of the Manhatten Institute, a most prestigious New York think tank.
With a bit of luck he may even revive the apple-growing senator's original 1972 slogan: "Let's take a bite out of government." But, so far, Symms' old apple-of-liberty logo has almost become "forbidden fruit."
Teaching the Wrong Lesson
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
June 3, 1984
I should like to make a critical observation on something Press-Tribune columnist Marguerite Brown said in her last week's column headlined, "Combating voter apathy." It's done all across the nation, mostly by liberals, but all too frequently by conservatives as well.
First, let me say that Marguerite is friendly, intelligent, kind, thoughtful, sincere and more. I'm glad to note about my friend that in many instances, yea, most instances, she's fun and tries to be fairly open-minded - except perhaps, when discussing less government.
Last week she was back at it again promoting statism in the schools. Oh she's sincere as ever, as no doubt are Nampa teachers Mrs. Eddie Rosenbaum and Ray Moore, who Brown mentioned. Their job description no doubt calls for "teaching government." I know something of these excellent teachers and I have no quarrel whatsoever with them here. It is with Brown that I wish to take issue. She's tending to over-glorify government. That's different from having respect for it.
Brown says many good things, of course, but today's tendency is too much government - not too little. As noted in the Bible it is not so that "Money is the root of all evil." Rather the Bible notation is that "the LOVE (emphasis added) of money is the root of all evil." My suggestion is that her exultations about the Nampa school's government course tends to foster a kind of "love of government is the root of all good." Nothing, not a peep nor an applause out of her for a healthy skepticism about government, bureaucracy, or today's tendency to plunge onward into statism itself.
For example, says Brown, "Interest created by the government class has prompted a number of graduates to work in congressional or local campaigns later on." Egad! Educate more politicians? No apology, no reservations. In fact she suggests "those who follow the Nampa City Council" (on which she sat for years as a super-activist member usually, but not always, for more government) proceedings are bound to be "several jumps ahead of some voting adults."
Why? Why is this so? And if it is so, then why should some lobbyists in Nampa, Boise or in Washington, D.C., be "jumps ahead" of anybody who is merely minding his or her own business? Ordinary folks have neither the time nor the money to lobby, to travel there to work the cloakrooms of the influence peddlers and the purveyors of plunder and privilege.
Brown seems to have forgotten Lord Acton's famous dictum "Power corrupts ..." yet she trudges right on suggesting non-voters don't know what they're missing when at the polls they can "actually feel in command of the situation..."
A little boost that comes from voting, she says, "gives one a shot of adrenalin" in casting the actual vote "telling yourself that you are in charge." Yeah, telling others that you have as much to say in directing other people's lives and the property they own as they do themselves. In fact it is often said that it is coming to be as fashionable to vote-for-a-living as it is to work-for-a-living.
" ... but still there was ... elation when you felt you held the power," Brown says. She has a point. That's what government is - power. Organized force. As George Washington said, "Like fire, a faithful servant or fearful master?"
Brown ended her column last week with an appreciation of Nampa High School's "contribution to increasing the number of voters in years to come." She's suggesting, of course, that somehow the government's compulsory school system will (or could) better our children by schooling them in politics. A nice, sincere thought. But, I think, one that's far wide of the mark. The process tends to convert social power into state power.
I liked the way the editors of Harper's magazine put it a few years ago when they seemed to think we'd already gone too far in the direction of the schooling Brown usually suggests.
"Entrepreneurs have left the frontier and now dwell in tent camps on the edge of government. A tycoon is someone like Joseph Califano (U.S. Secretary of HEW under President Jimmy Carter), who knows how to corner a market of federal funds. The rest toil to shape legislation that shows the necessity of purchasing 100 new jet fighters or maintaining a (dying) domestic industry like shoes or sugar.
"Fortunes are made," said the magazine editors, "by correctly anticipating a government regulation."
On second thought maybe that's all Brown wants, i.e., for the students to be "jumps ahead" and anticipate the government's next book of regulations - before those who work for a living wake up.
IRS - a Four-Letter Word
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
June 10, 1984
Woodrow Wilson: "The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government power, not the exercise of it."
George Hansen's case (and 5500 other decent citizen's) (see below) tends to bear this out. He's written 3 books for you. If you read even one, you'll know why he's in hot water with the Big Brother that George Orwell wrote about in his famous book, 1984.
At the top of the front page of this newspaper last week, clear across the page, appeared this headline: "5,500 insulting taxpayers fined by IRS." Hats off to the newspaper. Here's why.
The report was datelined Washington and was a wire story of United Press International. The story said in part, "(IRS) ... prosecutors in field offices may have gone too far by applying a 2-year-old law to people who scrawled insults and protests on their tax forms."
Many people are wondering if America is witnessing the "tip of an iceberg" - a police state, or at least a police state mentality.
For example, the UPI story's third paragraph read: "Donna Todd of Billings, Mont., wrote on her tax form that she was paying the $35 she owed on less than $3,000 in earnings only because she had to, according to the Atlanta Constitution (newspaper) which followed her case.
"Signed involuntarily under penalty of statutory punishment," her note said. (No four-letter words, mind you, just a protest.)
The wire service story went on: "The IRS not only fined her $500 but also seized the $140.06 in her bank account and filed a lien against her house, the newspaper said."
Well, gosh. What can one say without risking some sort of retaliation from the IRS? According to Rep. George Hansen in his book scolding the IRS, To Harass Our People, (page 4): "The people of this country are afraid: they are frightened by the runaway arm of government ..."
Curiously enough the Press-Tribune was the only daily paper in this area to carry the IRS "harassment" story of the 5,500 taxpayers at all, not to mention headline it on the front page. One wonders - how come?
Perhaps Hansen's second book, published a year or two later, How the IRS Seizes Your Dollars and How to Fight Back offers some answers as well as a suggestion as to why he's continually in so much hot water with the federal bureaucrats. Here's what he says on page 70 of said book: "According to Saturday Review of May 1980, Bernard Fensterwald, chief council of Sen. Long's committee, was also audited and harassed by the IRS. Fensterwald stated, 'Senators and congressmen (who are) not scared of looking into the IRS have to be crazy, because the IRS will just ruin your career.'"
As anyone knows who follows southern politics at all, the Long family has been a real big power in Democrat circles in Louisiana and Washington, D.C., for more than a generation. Whether one agrees with them or not they have enjoyed lots of political power but not so much as the IRS. And it's not new, either. It has been going on for centuries. The great English historian and 19th century member of Parliament, Lord Acton, summed it up this way: "Power tends to corrupt, (and) absolute power corrupts absolutely." But Americans, for some strange reason, seem to learn very little from history - except that they learn very little from history. And here we go again. But why?
Perhaps it's partly due to the ever so human quality of envy. Many folks, believe it or not, seem to think of the government as "us." Hence, when the IRS is seen to be "after" somebody the tendency is to think that (we) the government as merely redistributing a little wealth from the wealthy.
But according to the UPI story the bulk of the protesting taxpayers who were each fined $500 were little people in terms of wealth. These are the people for whom the great Reader's Digest has conducted a crusade against the IRS for decades. Not big people, but little people, amongst whom the establishment must maintain sufficient "fear and trembling" lest there arise a resistance.
At risk of seeming solicitous, it is at least a breath of fresh air for a newspaper to put the IRS arrogance into a front page headline so as to maybe get somebody's attention - before it's too late.
This has to be what nationally syndicated columnist Jack Anderson meant in his front page endorsement of the Idaho congressman's 1981 book attacking the IRS: "In this book Congressman George Hansen documents in a serious way how they have been misbehaving. EVERY TAXPAYER MUST READ IT" (his emphasis).
It also might tell us something about why the flamboyantly courageous politician, sometimes to his own detriment especially among moderate Republicans, only wins his elections by such a small margin.
And for those few Democrats who may remember Thomas Jefferson, his endorsement of both Hansen and the tax protesters appeared over a century ago: "What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned, from time to time, that its people preserve (safeguard) the spirit of resistance."
Minimum Wage Hurts Youths
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
June 17, 1984
Hey folks, school's out and, of course, many are the teenagers who are happy that the government's compulsory school system has "given" them some time off.
Time was when the summer vacation was to enable the children to help on the family farms and other work connected thereto. Thus started, the tradition continues today even though only a few teenagers work on farms. This being the case, what are teenagers to do? Work at minimum wage jobs? What else?
I used quotation marks around the word "given" (above) because what the government giveth the government can taketh away. And taketh away it has - in spades. Teenage jobs have been virtually destroyed by the government's effort to do good via the minimum wage laws. The minimum wage law is one of black teenagers' single worst enemies, according to two black economists.
Drs. Walter Williams of George Mason University and Thomas Sowell of UCLA and the Hoover Institute are absolutely convinced that were it not for the politicians who profit from a special kind of demagoguery this wage-and-price-control mentality would have long since disappeared. Even left-leaning Keynesian economists have about decided they've mistakenly priced young people, especially blacks, out of the job market. (Teenage unemployment stood at 19.4 percent in April. Black teenagers were jobless at 44.8 percent.)
When President Reagan recently proposed a $2.50 (rather than $3.35) summer minimum wage for teenagers, the usual argument against it came on strong, such as taking jobs from adult breadwinners. But a new argument entered the debate recently. It centered, wouldn't you guess, on "high tech."
The new breed of old-left planners claims that a job that pays $2.50 an hour sweeping the local store will not teach youngsters the skills that will prepare them for a "high tech" future. Even though many of these people realize that kids who are kept from sweeping floors may be swept up by drugs instead, they believe a more important goal is to save teenagers from being trained for "dead end" jobs. Better that they spend summer in government sponsored computer camps, we are told.
Most obviously, the response is just who is going to pay for the government camps? But even that proper question aside, and even if they printed yet more paper money to pay the bill, there is recent academic research clearly showing that these "dead end" jobs offer valuable skills and work discipline that computer training cannot teach. For example, how to cope with and work with others, how to control impulses and respond to authority.
Getting drunk, chasing girls, getting on drugs and getting girls pregnant employ only a small fraction of the American work force. But they occupy an increasingly larger fraction of teenage unemployed, many of whom would appreciate income they themselves could earn and which they themselves would control. This is how most healthy young people, if allowed to, find themselves an identity of their own, and on their own.
Other researchers argue that nearly all jobs open to youth are "dead-end" in that they do not offer a clear career path. However, these jobs are "alive" in that they provide disciplined work experience, labor market information and skills that are not only important in the next job but throughout life. They also learn the responsible use of money before (repeat, before) marriage and get a taste of working with adults and the real working world.
So much for the ever-present and ever-so-busy do-gooders tending to solve teenage unemployment, as always, at government expense - and control. Comes now my good friend, Professor Walter Williams, the black economist I mentioned. He's written a new book, The State Against Blacks, which not only shows better ways than bureaucracy to help black teenagers and adults, but demonstrates how government is exactly to blame for most of their misery. It's literary dynamite - so don't miss it.
More good news: Walter's book has been made into a one-hour TV show and will be broadcast on the government's very own KAID-TV, Ch. 4, (bless their liberal hearts) on Monday night July 2, at 10.
If you know of a teacher who would appreciate hearing a brilliant black and brutally-outspoken economist whose words are for the betterment of mankind, rather than to gain political office, then alert that teacher because:
Williams is at least as educational and much more entertaining than the Rev. Jesse Jackson. His ideas, however, are more honestly - revolutionary.
GOP Needs Shot of Courage
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
June 24, 1984
The Gem State has another hot potato. Should Idaho lawmakers raise the drinking age to 21 years, or abandon it altogether? Big problem.
Political parties seem forever almost totally devoted to "burying" just such problems so as not to embarrass any, repeat any, of their heroes. That is to say, get the heroes elected and to heck with tough questions, especially ones of morality, conscience and individual responsibility. Politics, I am told, is thought to be a sort of collectivist responsibility anyway. A sort of Pandora's box.
Next week the Republican's state convention meets in Sun Valley, ostensibly to debate just such matters as this. Longtime State Chairman Dennis Olson has appointed ex-Lt. Gov. and longtime politico from Canyon County, Phil Batt, to head up the party's committee on resolutions.
If anything makes sense in politics (forgive me) they should be expanding and articulating difficult and/or freedom issues the party will have to deal with in the coming election campaign. But most GOP chairmen of these committees in past years ask, suggest, or oft-times even demand that "controversial issues be avoided this year ... etc., etc., ad nauseum. It's sad, but GOP "leaders" too often offer public pablum, rather than courageous leadership for liberty.
A case in point for sincere GOPers to consider at Sun Valley is the drinking age problem. Only recently President Reagan came out publicly for raising the legal drinking age to 21 years. Indeed, said he, "We should deny federal highway monies to any state that refuses to do what we tell 'em on this burning issue." Well, what else is new? The feds want to do that on every other issue, so why now on booze?
Notwithstanding their abysmal failure to legislate drinking during Prohibition in the 1930s, and not to mention their tendency to muck up everything else they touch and legislate, including, even, waging war and balancing the budget, Reagan seems to have almost as much faith in government solutions as do the liberals. Heaven knows (and so do I) that he has a tough job. But gosh, he's the guy who campaigned for less government. Remember? He's the guy who cited all those from Adam Smith to Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman whose advice was to LIMIT government. Reagan shouted this from the housetops. Without denigrating this great and good man whose sincere and wise "resolutions" in his campaign may have withered a bit, let's suggest for the Idaho GOP something positive to consider at Sun Valley:
We are told that 18 to 20 year-olds account for 25 percent of all alcohol-related traffic accidents. (Incidentally, 21 to 24 year-olds account for another 25 percent.) Truly an appalling and sad statistic, nevertheless. But why reduce our accidents by only 25 percent? Why not 50 percent or 75 percent? Why deny the right to drink only to those under 21? When they are only 18 they're mature enough to elect politicians. Aren't they?
One study, published by the Blaney Institute of Madison, Wis., found that Wisconsin, which has a drinking age of 18 had considerably lower alcohol-related fatalities per capita than its neighboring states of Illinois and Michigan where the drinking age is 21.
Nor is such a tendency to put down the government's pass-a-law, pass-a-law mentality confined to America's own shores. Many countries have a long history of no drinking age at all. Italy, for example, is one. Opponents argue that Italy has greater alcohol consumption per capita than the U.S. However, they fail to note that the rate of alcoholism (i.e., excessive, compulsive use) in America is eight times greater than Italy's.
Reagan is sincerely concerned, however, and rightly so. So are Idahoans. So are both Republicans and Democrats, but a powerful case can be made for an even worse condition in the U.S.A. - lawlessness in general. More legislation is not the way to have people respect the law, nor will it make the law respectable. In regard to booze in Italy it is cultural mores that control the drinking. That's not something mere government laws respect, much less duplicate.
Indeed, there was a wholesale disregard for our laws against drinking during Prohibition because people considered drinking to be a personal right. Individuals, that is, felt that drinking is not a privilege granted by government, but rather a right of individual decision.
As the GOP committees meet in Sun Valley next week let's hope they avoid the Democrat's over-weaning pass-a-law, pass-a-law mentality. But let's not fear controversy unless we want to rubber-stamp matters of conscience, morality, individual responsibility, and - you guessed it - less government.
Clouding the Inflation Issue
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
July 1, 1984
One wonders if the Idaho State Republican Party will have had some fun in its state convention this week at Sun Valley, or will it have been dull and uninteresting, as GOPers often are? Perhaps there is a little life left yet in the old girl, or, if you prefer, the old boy, but it's hard to predict. For example:
This writer offered to wager one of the more venturesome resolutions committee delegates to the convention $100 that he could not get the following resolution enacted by a majority vote: "Whereas capitalism is good and socialism is bad, therefore be it resolved that the Republican Party urge its representatives to re-affirm and articulate this simple statement at every opportunity."
Guess what? He gave out a hearty laugh - but refused to bet. Why? Well, one reason is that the idea is seldom discussed in schools by knowledgeable teachers who understand and believe in it. Another reason is that perhaps the oldest advice in politics says, "Do not, repeat, do not try to get elected and at the same time try to educate the prospective voters. You'll merely confuse them and they'll tend to distrust you."
Unfortunately there's a lot of truth in the statement, but if we're to have an informed electorate what else are we to do? People are confused when one of the most popular presidents we've ever had is called bad names by Rep. Tip O'Neill, one of the most powerful figures in the Congress. And confusion is a demagogue's stock-in-trade, one the media tends to aggravate rather than clear up.
Here's a case in point and, although the media is not overly bright, one that they could help correct. It concerns the second most catastrophic problem facing Americans today. Runaway inflation.
Almost every statement from Washington on the subject regards inflation as one of two things. (1) Inflation is either an "act of God," a disease, or a national disaster for which no one can be blamed - certainly not the federal government; or (2) inflation is caused by labor unions, or big business, or greedy hospitals and doctors or the oil-rich Arabs.
Never does the federal government get prodded persistently by the media to admit that its actions are the cause of inflation and, further, that it is a deliberate, premeditated policy of the federal government.
One supposes it cannot admit this because politicians love to pose as fighters against inflation - against big business and its "obscene profits": against the price-gouging Arabs and the racketeering labor unions. In fact, President Carter is reported to have said, "The government itself cannot stop inflation ... but it will be largely determined by the actions of the private sector of the economy." That's, of course, simply not true. Let me explain.
Forgive me if I mention, again, the importance of definitions, but if one uses the dictionary to define inflation, (i.e., an increase in the supply of money and credit) it is not an economic problem at all. That's what most politicians would have you believe. Inflation is, rather, a political problem. By the government's increasing the supply of money and credit there are more Federal Reserve Notes in circulation. The rising cost of living is caused by the rising number of federal reserve notes the government has printed in order to reward its pals and help them get elected. It's an old ploy.
It's been around for generations.
Then why don't we learn? Well, one reason is that newsmen and women sort of love the ego-trip of politics and hate the dismal discipline of economics. Also they, too, have a sort of vested interest in obscurity. Why? Well, if they made it clear to the public, then who would need the media-mogul's instant political analysis? Furthermore, it doesn't take a whole lot of brains and writing ability for the media to report on politicians who tend to not "say" anything anyway, but what they've not been "saying" for lo' these many years.
All of which reminds me of a couple stories that sort of wrap it up, albeit kind of superficially, for those unpretentious (and there are some) Republicans who will be "representing" in Sun Valley. The first concerns some helpful definitions: "Liberals get together to figure ways to win. Conservatives get together to prove themselves right."
(Then, if God be with us, who can be against us?)
And the latest word going around Washington, D.C. (the American "Mecca) is a bit of good news that they're noticing about Tip O'Neill: "There but for the grace of God - goes God."
That's true, of course, except for the growing number of those whose "religion" is the federal bureaucracy.
GOP Actually Did Something
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
July 8, 1984
As a result of the Idaho State Republican Convention meeting in Sun Valley last week I have good news and bad news. The good news is they passed a meaningful resolution that actually made sense and cost no one. It was clear, short and untypical.
It said: "WHEREAS, Capitalism is good and Socialism is bad; THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Republican Party and candidates operating under the Republican name embrace and support this general concept." Fortunately the resolution passed. The bad news it that the delegates' voice vote by which the resolution was approved gave out also a strong minority "no" vote. About one-third of those voting.
In other words, one supposes that about 33 percent of the voting delegates of the Idaho GOP, a group usually claiming to be less socialist than the Democrats, actually think socialism is best. In all fairness to the delegates there was no debate on the resolution, merely the voice vote. But it was AFTER the subcommittee chairperson whose group had "buried" the resolution was called upon by affable resolutions chairman, Phil Batt, to explain how they happened to "bury" it. She claimed her group assumed that nearly unanimous delegate agreement would prevail, hence its "reassertion would not be necessary." Probably the subcommittee chairperson was sincere but, of course, wrong. Still, one wonders, why? We must, indeed, ask why.
Whether or not one perceives the capitalism versus socialism flap as a crisis, the news media failed to comment on it. Both the wire services (UPI and AP) failed to even mention it in their stories covering the rather dull resolutions from the Sun Valley meeting. In fairness to the double-left-handed and more perceptive (i.e., than most members of the Boise liberal media) political affairs commentator Marc Johnson of the government's television station, KAID-TV (Ch. 4) did mention the resolution on his Idaho Reports program if with raised eyebrow and knowing grin. Still, Johnson did make some attempt to be intellectually honest.
The Idaho media covering the GOP convention missed, or blacked out if you like, a brief and rather spirited contest for the post of national committeewoman. Incumbent Janet Miller, said by some to represent a more or less moderate-to-liberal "group-think" centered in Twin Falls, won handily over card-carrying, conservative and articulate member of the Legislature, Donna Scott, from that same general area. The latter's campaign was obviously conceived late with no literature and neither candidate was afforded an opportunity even to give a speech to the assembled delegates. (Typically elitist. Tut tut.)
But the media's mightiest moment of all was their missing or, as one must now wonder - totally blacking out one of the convention's most newsworthy, controversial and hotly-debated resolutions. This writer cannot even imagine why their silence, since it's so obviously worthy of note. Here's what it said though not a word, mind you, in the entire Boise media, including Marc Johnson. (about whom more next week).
"WHEREAS the Republican Party has always supported individual's freedom of speech; and
"WHEREAS two Boise State University economics professors were severely reprimanded by (their) University president (Dr. John Keiser) for no other defense other than exercising their freedom of speech and academic freedom; and
"WHEREAS the Boise State University president's action cannot help but have a 'chilling effect' on the academic freedom and freedom of speech of all professors and teachers in the future;
"THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED by the Republican Party of Idaho that they notify the Board of Education and all University presidents that his action cannot be condoned."
The resolution concerned BSU economists Allen Dalton and Donald Billings, both of Boise, each of whom received a cranky letter of reprimand from Keiser criticizing their publicly calling for an end to the government's virtual monopoly in education (read, schooling) and advocating opening up those schools to competition. The professors' press conference press release explained they were not speaking for BSU, but only for themselves and their organization formed in Boise for that purpose entitled, "Choice in Education." Appropriately enough, Billings announced his candidacy on the eve of Independence Day for the United States Senate from Idaho on the Libertarian Party ticket. The seat is now held by U.S. Sen. Jim McClure, R-Idaho.
Now then, the press all knew the Billings-Dalton story and about Keiser's extraordinary press conference condemning the teachers. But this hardly explains the media's absolutely thundering silence about the GOP's unusual resolutions, especially the one condemning BSU's president.
Unless, of course, the Boise media and wire services think the people's-right-to-know applies only when that media approves of it.
Media Has Us in Its Grip
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
July 15, 1984
Last week I told you about how the recent Republican State Central Committee meeting in Sun Valley actually did something meaningful. Believe it or not, they did.
One important resolution, while it did not get voted on, did get read with gusto to the resolutions committee, thanks in part to its chairman, Phil Batt. Its reading brought forth great enthusiastic laughter and applause from the rather large committee. The members of the press and TV covering the committee appeared to laugh as loudly as anybody. But the reporter-columnist from a large daily Idaho newspaper, whose dislike for most conservatives is exceeded only by that papers' loathing for persecuted George Hansen, managed to float merely a mousy grin.
Whether the committee used humor to avoid a formal recorded vote against the media or mistakenly thought it was presented only in jest, I don't know. In any event, here's what the resolution said:
"WHEREAS the Republican Party is for the most part treated in an unprofessional and adversarial way by the left-leaning media establishment; and
"WHEREAS the media establishment is seldom as critical of other members of the media (they, too, are often really newsworthy, but almost never treated as such) as it is of everyone else.
"THEREFORE be it resolved by the Idaho Republican Party that we recognize the mostly biased and unprofessional reporting by the news media, and urge Republicans to take every opportunity to let the general public know this, at least until such time as the media views its fellow members as critically as they (now) view Republicans."
Now then, I ask you, ain't that sumpthin'? Of course it is! Jest or no jest, Batt had the good sense and good humor to read the whole resolution to the entire gathering in the big assembly hall at Sun Valley. It received a rousing round of applause no doubt more enthusiastic than any spontaneous clapping during the two-day convention. It was great.
Why? Well, to the extent there is a little consistent and rational difference between Democrats and Republicans, it usually orbits around conservative versus liberal issues and candidates. The liberal GOPers tend easily to have the smoothest relations with both print and electronic members of the media, since their philosophy or if you like, pragmatism, is most nearly akin to the liberal media's.
All of which is not to say there are not good buys on both sides, yea, even, a few in the media - but damn few. (Still, it's hard to be humble when you're perfect in so many ways. Believe me, I know the feeling.)
The members of the media do indeed often hold a political life or death sway over just how a party, a candidate or even an idea is perceived, i.e., understood or misunderstood by the public. And believe you me the media know this - in spades. Many are quite up front about it, too, thus accounting for a frequent, arrogant and haughty manner by the "fourth estate" in their not infrequent willingness to remind their adversaries not to get into a urinating contest with a skunk, because, "we buy ink by the barrel." Hence, they usually win.
There were, of course, some delightful exceptions - thank heaven. (Though few come from there. Or, I'll wager, end up there, either. Ho, ho, ho.) One is Jim Fisher, a mischievous liberal from a north Idaho paper whose published rating of Idaho lawmakers, if somewhat vicious, ranges all the way from the "most windy" to the "most lousy" to the "most effective." His super-biased opinion, of course, causes many red faces and hot tempers, but he enjoyed the GOP media critics.
Another is that double-barrelled liberal who is sincere in his government-worshipping, Marc Johnson. He's director for government affairs for KAID-TV's Channel 4. Nevertheless, though Channel 4 is owned 100 percent by the government, one can - sometimes - see a twinkling of praise for the private sector on his show. Further, Johnson, often the brunt of all the foam and fury of this writer's anti-socialist barbs, at least has a sense of humor. It was thus he declined my invitation at Sun Valley to view a rare PBS-TV program tape critical of extremist Rep. John Seiberling, D-Ohio, the politician who wants to lock up even two or three million acres more of Idaho into the wilderness abyss.
My ever-so-liberal friend, Marc, explained why he couldn't view it the next week: "Thanks, Ralph, but I can't. I'm going to Russia right away. I'm going with Dave Leroy (lieutenant governor) on a U.S.S.R. tour." My response was: "But Marc, what can those socialists possibly teach you that you don't already know?"
"Touche! You rascal," said he, roaring with laughter. (But he's still got that barrel of ink.)
Convention Observations
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
July 22, 1984
The Democrats have had their national convention. The "personality-cult" choices for the political parade are all cast, at least until next Nov. 6. Additionally, it's too early to make a very intelligent assessment, but it's not too early to make a few random observations. In no particular order of importance, here they are.
Walter Mondale's choice of Geraldine Ferraro was just great. A friend suggested I should write a column showing how much more qualified Vice President George Bush is than Mrs. Ferraro. It is, of course, true, but my guess is that almost nobody cares - who matters.
After all she's very attractive if not, even, pretty. We sell cars based on sex appeal the same as we do cigarettes and books. Just look at the book and magazine covers all over the nearest newsstand. Our whole society revolves around sex; some people are for it, some against it. But virtually all are aware of and probably guided by its comforting, overpowering and ever-present presence. So why not sell politics with sex?
And anyway, poor Fritz had a charisma by-pass after the surgery performed on him by political "witch doctor" Gary Hart in the New Hampshire primary. Ferraro's appointment by Mondale will, almost contrariwise, be the real "organ transplant" his lackluster campaign has needed.
Of course, there are quite a number of militant feminists out there who wouldn't have voted for Ronald Reagan on a bet, anyway, so Mondale can't win votes that he already had. Furthermore, there's a large group of women who will not vote for a woman vice president on a bet, either. But these were probably in the bag for Reagan all along.
The difference in Mondale's favor, however, will likely show up because the tendency is that the feminists, women-libbers and just nice, plain eager-beaver ladies who want a bigger place in the limelight, will work. They're apt to work lots harder to push their heroine, Ferraro, than the more conservative females are to push their handsome hero, Reagan. Still, while the Democrat leaders at San Francisco have tried valiantly to co-opt Reagan's great success with his conservative word - family, they are in for a tough go to out-sell the Reagan father image. The bad news, for Reagan, is that the more or less militant or political-type women tend to be more articulate. At least they do where debate confrontations are concerned. Of course, women are said to make up their minds, i.e., vote, based more on emotion and sentiment than reason and rhetoric. Not that men are smarter, mind you, just more predictable.
But the two highlights of the Democrat convention were far and away New York's Gov. Mario Cuomo, who declined the original offer to be a vice presidential contender, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, charismatic black contender for president, and leader of what some hoped would be the Democrat's "donkey serenade." But it wasn't. It was a big success.
With a near-apology (principally to the Jews, one supposes, for his anti-Semitic remarks), Jackson voiced somewhat conciliatory tones. He followed a Democrat "togetherheid" in the coming campaign and spoke against Reagan's alleged, sort of U.S. "apartheid" against everybody, i.e., the poor, the hungry, the cold and especially, the blacks.
After what many saw as the most racist type political campaign in recent history, Jackson, indeed, had his triumphal day in court. And like him or not, one has to say there is a certain forthrightness in Jackson's aggressive style of promises-for-votes. Gov. Cuomo's promises and anti-Reagan invectives were similarly huge and overblown, but delivered in high style. The knee-jerk liberal media-TV anchormen nearly went "ape" in their lavish and lofty praise of both men. Such media treatment, of course, isn't exactly any surprise to conservatives.
Meantime, in case the GOP thinks the left-wing Democrat's "odd-couple" team will be an easy mark and discernibly different, let me suggest a warning: Judging from Reagan's recent "Big Brotherism," i.e., forcing the states to hike the drinking age to 21 years against both responsible and irresponsible teenagers, we can expect federal compulsory seat belts to be next.
In which case, the Republican's compulsory seat belts, under Reagan-Bush, would be made in the free market, while our compulsory seat belts under Mondale-Ferraro's administration would be made under the union label.
Egad! That's a difference???
Out-Promising the Opponent
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
July 29, 1984
Here's one final observation about the recent Democrat National Convention, before it's forgotten. I mean the content of both speeches has simply enchanted virtually all the media big shots, especially the TV "tooth-fairy" types. I refer, of course, to the Rev. Jesse Jackson's and New York Gov. Mario Cuomo's oratory.
According to said news tycoons the two Democrats are destined for future high office in their party if not, even, future presidential timber. Why? Well, because of their ability to give a speech with so much emotion, few people will pay attention to its content, or, the lack of it.
Aside from the pragmatic problems, there is (or should be) the moral one. The time-worn idea of spend-and-give-to-the-poor requires an assertion by political leaders that they have moral authority. Unless they can sell this they cannot justify taking from one to give to another. It's an old, old scheme going back centuries into the history of politics, and it has destroyed many a country.
As was so clearly stated in an unusually thoughtful Wall Street Journal editorial recently, "Most people will accept this (redistribution of the wealth) so long as the taxes are within reason and the programs visibly help the poor, but, to many of us, this no longer seems to be the case."
Indeed, if one wonders what is happening to the great middle class in America - this is precisely why it's disappearing. That "the middle class is the backbone of America" is a time honored and true statement. Why? Because that's where the money is. If the government tax-grabbers grabbed the entire income of those making more than $100,000 per year, it would not pay for 30 days of today's government.
The middle class, by the way, is missing in all those foreign countries that cannot repay the U.S. bank's enormous, asinine loans, so look out, suckers, here we go again: "the fool's burnt finger wobbles right back to the fire" - mostly to pay for aspiring politician's promises-for-votes, and the do-gooders' passion for one-world government.
But you just wait and see. When the political resistance develops, liberal Democrats will come back with ever more strident claims of "higher morality." In this sense Democrats Cuomo, Jackson, Mondale and now Ferraro, assault, not only Ronald Reagan's policies, but his character, and claim that those who disagree lack any feeling of compassion for others. A case in point was vice presidential candidate Ferraro's recent claim (for which she later apologized) that Reagan was a "lousy Christian," or words to that effect. You'll see more of this as the campaign heats up. Again, wait and see.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if our political campaigns were based on something like: "Which of the candidates can best embarrass the Soviet Union for building the Berlin Wall? Which has the best chances of getting the Russian government to tear it down?" That'd be a deed, not a promise nor a piece-of-a-paper-treaty requiring "verification." It would not even require a musket, much less an MX missile. We need an offense of ideas and common sense, not oratory.
What's all this have to do with the recent spell-binding speeches of Democrats Cuomo and Jackson promising us the world? Well, they remind me of something another spell-binding political leader once said:
"We shall banish want, we shall banish fear, the essence of our movement is human welfare, our movement is the revolution of the common man. Rooted in a fuller life for every citizen from childhood to old age, our party means a new day of abundance at home and a better world order abroad."
That is not from the platform of the Democrat's Party, that's from Adolph Hitler and he did it. He abolished poverty! There was no unemployment, there were no vagabonds, there was almost no juvenile delinquency. Kids were put in uniform, thinking they had a good cause. They were busy doing something. They were not out hot-rodding or smoking pot. Germany had women's maternity benefits, free medical care and the highest standards of living in Europe. What was wrong? They lost their freedoms, and then they lost the benefits. And we're being coaxed to go in the same direction.
Likewise, let me hasten to add, not always are we being coaxed only by liberal Democrats to "sell out" our votes. Soon the GOP will convene in Dallas. And guess what they'll offer for our vote!
I'll Miss Nathaniel Pierce
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
August 5, 1984
Newspaper columnists get a lot of advice and sometimes even a suggestion that makes sense. This writer received some, in fact, just the other day. It said, "I enjoy reading your column, Ralph, but you should stop giving Nat Pierce so much attention. It tends to give him credibility and you know he's a bad influence."
Most readers of this editorial page know the person referred to is Father Nathaniel Pierce, Episcopal preacher of Nampa's Grace Church and for four years a columnist for the Press-Tribune. To say that Nat is a liberal columnist is to understate the case. He gives the word liberal a new dimension - for our moderately conservative area, anyway. And to say the peppery preacher is usually controversial is, perhaps, an even bigger understatement. So much for the labels, most of which are bad, i.e., in point of his being politically illiterate, anyway.
But to suggest that Pierce, himself, is bad, or that this writer hasn't learned something beneficial from him is quite another matter. For I have indeed profited, if in a sort of oblique but very real sense, from his unorthodox way of looking at the world.
I mention all this because Pierce and his absolutely charming and super-tolerant (she'd have to be) wife, Audry, are leaving next month to steward a church in Brookline, Mass. So, "you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore," nor, soon, will we have Nat. To which, I hasten to add, I'm sorry. I, for one, will miss him.
Oh, sure. I know the risk of even the faintest praise of an adversary (and Pierce is indeed my adversary - often). It is to risk loss of understanding, loss of followers, loss of praise and loss of support from those who would prefer to eliminate the opposition rather than respond to it. Fortunately the clergyman-columnist's arguments are usually easily countered by articulate individualists willing to do the good fight on the battlefield of ideas - but not always. Sometimes his complaints make sense.
Or they seem to make sense, in which case they need refuting even worse because error, it seems, is always with us. And Pierce's errors, if indeed they be frequent errors, are usually collectivist in their nature - but not always. Somehow, if often in a weird and, in my opinion, sort of intellectually perverted sense, his stance(s) take on a kind of individualism that makes us think, perhaps reason, more than we would otherwise.
Men of passion frequently have this effect. At least they do if their ideas and antics are seen by the establishment in reason rather than mere reaction. And it"s sad to say that conservatives too typically wait for the Left to act and only then do "we" (forgive me) react. In any event, even Pierce"s fiercest critics will grant he at least has passion. ( Oh, that the Lord should grant those of us who so often contest this preacher"s passion have even half his commitment to our "great" ideas as he has to his usually asinine ones.)
We may be indebted to Friedrich Hegel one of the great collectivists of modern history for an insight to Pierce"s passion. Said he, "passions, private aims and the satisfaction of selfish desires, are ... most effective springs of actions. Their power lies in the fact that they respect none of the limitations which justice and morality would impose ... and that their natural impulses have a more direct influence over man than the artificial and tedious discipline that tends to order and self-restrain, law and morality." Good intentions, yet totalitarian.
But aside from Pierce's passion for egalitarian values and aside from his, I think sincere, passion for freedom of expression his silence is contrarywise thunderous for the freedom of J. R. Simplot. The latter cannot "tell his side" against the labor union organizer's side. (Egad, it's against the law.) Or, more nearly at home, for example , for Bill Balding, owner-manager of Caldwell's Model Cash Grocery to do likewise in talking to his meat-cutters' union employees even as his shop is being picketed.
Perhaps we should show Nat the error of his ways, i.e., the one-sidedness of his anti-military protest marches, by citing another flaming liberal, Ernest Hemingway, who told us: "The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the SECOND (my emphasis) is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permament ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists." Now, lookout!
Because what is there, gentle reader, if not political opportunism, in Father Pierce's ploy to take the sales tax off food for the rich, for the middle class and the poor without a corresponding reduction in government spending (read, statism)?
But where have we been, my fellow reactionaries, in articulating to this caring and misguided man-of-the-cloth the army of answers already written in the "Invisible Hand" of the great Adam Smith?
Come on Fellas, Issue Is Wages
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
August 12, 1984
Not so long ago I entered a locally owned and operated grocery store in downtown Caldwell. It's called Model Marker and if my memory serves was one of the first stores in Caldwell to furnish their own privately owned off-street parking low. Community-minded, first class.
Model Market is located approximately on the same spot that Alvey Stewart's huge old livery barn stood during the time I was a young school boy getting in the way of the horses and their owners trading and exchanging their wares. It was one of the more important centers of trade in downtown Caldwell, but by no means the only one. Today it's a grocery market and, to be sure, still not the only one.
Much mote could be said about its history and nostalgic memories, not the least of which was 25 or 30 years ago (about 1955) when Caesar Balding replaced the old horse barn with a brand new grocery store. (His son manages it now.) But I want to take note of another, different "landmark," of sorts, taking place on that same old historic spot downtown.
Model Market is being picketed (a strike) by some members of the Meatcutters Union Local 368-A. If one assumes that everyone is doing their own thing, as the saying goes-voluntarily, such is their right or privilege. Oh yes, perhaps one could debate the owner's and non-union workers' right (or not) to harass the labor union headquarters, but I'm not sure it'd help.
My question is rather: Should the pickets who asked me not to trade with Balding and his non-union employees be doing this? And if the parties to the dispute cannot agree, then "where's the (real) beef?" And how should potential customers and others look at it - and why?
The union's printed flyer handed to me as I entered the marker said, "Wages are not the issue." The issues they claimed were: "holidays, vacations, reduction of wages, pensions and security, dental and vision insurance, sick leave pay, rest periods and seniority." The last line read, "Please help us to keep what we have. Don;t shop Modes Market." (Last sentence was heavily emphasized.)
Now then, without wanting to seem scolding to the union or the pickets it would appear appropriate to ask: If their complaints are"not wages" and thus "not the issue" what in the would are they? Certainly those items are not "expenses" It would appear, then, that there is a play on words.
In any event, the items mentioned cost the employer a significant sum of money. Perhaps the proprietor should pay more wages, perhaps offer the employees a share of the profits (or losses?), but to say "wages are not the issue" is to obscure the contest between the non-union employees willing to work - for less, and the union workers who insist on working - for more.
The union, by the way, merely collects dues and the employer merely collects the cost of the goods sold and deducts an agreed upon amount (wages) from the money customers pay. He passes most of it along to the employees. Whatever's left either goes to pay off the bank's mortgage, the various fixed costs of doing business and, if there's a remainder, a profit, he puts it in his pocket.
The union and especially the employees most certainly cannot be faulted for wanting "more" wages. That would seem to go without saying, but one wonders. the. what's the reason for their statement: "
Wages are not the issue." Well, of course wages are the issue. And properly so. If the honest "issue" is seen this way, then the next question remains: How do employees and their bosses decide how to allocate the too often small balance remaining? The sharp shopping housewives will leave immediately for the competing grocery stores when those stores' prices appear to be a few pennies cheaper. Hence both workers and owners have a mutual problem in keeping customers coming back. It's called job security.
One wonders how long the union and the employees think people will keep coming back downtown to shop, since it's not exactly booming there now, you know. And with the pickets trying to intimidate customers and inviting them to "shop elsewhere," they probably will.
Either a Conspiracy or We're Just Dumb
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
August 19, 1984
Have you ever wondered just who installed the communist Sandinistas into Nicaragua in the first place? Many remember the liberals complaining bitterly and for years that Somoza was a right-wing dictator and should be kicked out. Now we're worse off than ever.
The United States played the major role in that coup and the West Point educated military dictator had his country's American aid cut off. It was given instead to the communist Sandinistas who were subsequently elevated to power after the typical political promises of free elections and political "free lunches," which, of course, never came to pass.
The American big media and the foreign policy liberals were dancing in the streets. Somoza was gone. Dictatorship was gone.
Repression was gone, or soon would be. Right? Wrong! The dictatorship of the proletariat has replaced the dictatorship of Somoza. In otherwords, we've helped replace a right-wing (anti-communist) dictatorship with a left-wing (pro-communist) one.
Too simple? Well think about it a little. The W. S. has been shipping aid to the rebels in Nicaragua for many months now. Why? One wonders why we helped replace anti-communist leaders with pro-communist ones. We've done it for decades. Why?
Remember the U. S. foreign policy liberals who coaxed Chiang to merely allow a few communist Chinese on his "board of directors"? For freedom's sake. Soon the Red camel who shoved his political nose under the tent was wearing it. And Chiang eventually was pushed off into Taiwan where his stewardship (right-wing dictatorship) produced the miracle of the Orient, a high standard of living. Though some freedoms were admittedly supressed, the Chinese little-guy had not known this much freedom in centuries. Wholesale slaughter was now only for Mao's Red China.
Then why does Red "whitewash" continue from U.S. leadership and so much of the media? And why, again and again and again, all over the world? Can't we do anything right? No wonder so many believe a conspiracy theory of one sort or another rules out country and corrupts our politicians. What other explanation makes any sense?
Just one more example is Zimbabwe, once called Rhodesia. Both the U.S. and England's governmentss "conspired," if openly, to break the back of the "white minority" rule in Ian Smith's plucky little country. Unfortunately, they succeeded. Never mind the fact that none of their blacks there were trying to leave as thousands of whites and yellows wee (and still are) trying desperately to escape from the communist "worker's paradise" in Russia and China. Never mind the fact that then Rhodesia provided almost all the free world's chromium and other minerals upon which, according to Sen. Steve Symms, the U.S. is even mote dependent than Middle East oil. Why such asininity?
Never mind, too, the fact that the U.S. government refused even a visa to Rhodesia leader Smith (while communist "leaders" literally parade through the U.S., even today) to visit the University of Virginia and deliver a lecture at that school's invitation. Never mind, also, that "right-winger" Smith's government had almost no political prisoners such as dose Cuba, China, the U.S.S.R. and other countries. E en President Reagan seems willing literally to beg these same countries to come play Olympic games with us, if not to do the same at the negotiating table. We'll even finance them while we're arming ourselves.
Well, the new ruler of Rhodesia now calls "his" country Zimbabwe and the liberal's hero and ex-freedom fighter, Robert Mugabe, is a left-wing dictator. (Remember, the big media reserves their hottest venom for the "other-wing" dictators. I.e., the right-wingers or anti-communist ones). In any event, he is systematically killing and terrorizing all who oppose him. The people, black and white, are now far worse off, politically and economically, than they ever were under British colonial rule or Ian Smith. Why did we help the communists?
One fact, almost overlooked today, is that freedom like democracy is now used to mean so many different things that it's become almost meaningless. And that is a development which, more than any military dictatorship of oppressive new law, threatens the very existence of the remaining more-or-less free countries of the West including Nicaragua, El Salvador and, most assuredly, Mexico itself which is headed for communism.
There's a semantic war on, and we're losing that, too. So stay tuned, gentle reader, next week I'll try to answer why. And how U.S. Sen. Steve Symms and his right-wing pals might be overlooking what real freedom is all about - group freedom versus individual freedom.
Ship Them Ideas Instead of Guns
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
August 26, 1984
One reason conservatives fall in selling their ideas may well be their lack of an offense, that is to say, an offense of ides. The U.S. dilema in Central America is a case in point and, in part, a war of words to which they are almost blind.
American forces in Nicaragua were instrumental in kicking out right-wing dictator Somoza and installing the left-wing dictators called Sandinistas. Now the U.S. is aiding the rebels in an effort to oust those communist Sandinistas whom "we" helped to put in.
What is all this if not a game of musical chairs? All in the name of freedom - and confusion, not to mention the blood and guts and destruction. Why? Could it actually be an intellectual war?
Well, a couple of decades ago a Russian - born American philosopher coined the idea of "anti-concept,": newly-created concepts whose purpose was to destroy some old concepts. Some of these are invented to make us forget what real freedom is all about, that is, to confuse group freedom with individual freedom.
For example, when the guerrillas in Rhodesia fought to expel their colonial rulers, it was not freedom for individuals they were seeking, but freedom of one group from domination by another group, i.e., by native Africans instead of British settlers. It is perfectly consistent with the most brutal oppression of the individual citizen and continues to be all over Africa.
Freedom as "affirmative action" is closely related. This anti-concept claims that a person is not free if he or she is discriminated against in any context for any reason. If a private club does not wish to admit women or blacks, we must pass a law and compel them in order to guarantee their "freedom." If a bigoted landlord does not want to rent apartments to gays, then a city ordinance is needed to compel him to do so.
But notice the one group of people who are presumed to have no rights: the people against whom we passed the law. Concern for their freedom - to choose their own associates or to control their own property is conspicious by its absence.
Another freedom is called, "To be like me." This anti-concept is all-too-often favored by authoritarian conservatives. These people sincerely believe in freedom, but they also believe that no one should be allowed to do anything of which they disapprove. This way, they can preach absolute freedom of the market place, in one breath, and in the next demand laws to prohibit free market practices which they find distasteful, such as prostitution or the sale of marijuana.
Freedom of religion, to them, means the freedom to practice their religion and/or to say their prayers in government schools. Personal freedom means having short hair, wearing a tie, holding a conventional job, having conventional sexual desires and conventional opinions. These people too often decide that those who depart from these norms are obviously undeserving of the freedom which America lavishes upon them and ought to be promptly plopped into hail.
But there is only one kind of freedom worthy of the label. That's the freedom of any individual to live as he (or she) wishes as long as he does not interfere with the same freedom of others. Fundamentally, it is only the individual who experiences joy and suffering, not society. It is the individual, not the group, who has hopes and dreams that can be frustrated by a tyrannical society.
It is the individual, not the group, who must try to make the best of his limited time in life. And it is the individual, not the group, who is enslaved by these anti-concepts of freedom.
It's a tragedy that the U.S. State Department, U.S. Sen. Steve Symms, R-Idaho, and his well-meaning right-wing pals cannot seem to see that the U.S.S.R. has already "sold" this type of anti-concept to too many people in Central America. Further, the time is long overdue for the U.S. to export, instead of guns, a huge offense of ideas all around the world, i.e., ideas for individual freedom - not group freedom.
Still, the suspicion lingers that the only idea that will ever be exported from Washington, D.C., is - you guessed it - more government.
Taking the Love Out of Labor
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
September 2, 1984
Tomorrow is Labor Day, properly one of the designated days to fly four country's flag and tell the neighbors and passersby that you're proud of something.
It's an honorable holiday, one that was originated back in the late 1800s as an idea that all labor, both of the hand and the mind, is to be respected and valued. Unfortunately, the idea that all Americans who work, produce and deserve to be honored in their labor is often grabbed by a narrow group of union leaders as though it were their idea and thus their holiday.
These people claim Labor Day to be the celebration of the American labor union, which may, or may not, be the same as "individual persons" who labor. While it is true that a labor union, the Knights of Labor, started the holiday back in 1882, it is also true that less than 20 percent of the work force now belongs to organized labor and that percentage seems to get smaller each year. One of the major reasons for the drastic loss of these jabs is that demands from employees (or their unions) for higher and higher wages and onerous work rules make it difficult for them and their employers to compete in the open market.
This, of course, accounts for much of the union's opposition to free trade or their support for tariffs or import quota restrictions on products made in foreign countries. Likewise many businesses, unable to compete otherwise, join the union's politically powerful lobby against cheaper imports. One wonders just how these people think America can forever restrict her citizens from buying imports and at the same time export money, food and merchandise all over the world. All this to keep the hungry nations or so-called less developed countries, from starving or bankruptcy. It doesn't work, But then, such is the queer sense of Washington AC/DC, in spending other people's money.
So the pressure has mounted the past several years to unionize the civil service. They have little to compete with, since there's an endless supply of government regulation and a seeming endless supply of printing-press paper money with which to pay for their demands. The latter accounts for a great part of today's explosion in government expenditures. For example, what do you think is the starting wage for postal employees? Ten dollars per hour - to start.
Samuel Gompers, said by many to be the father of organized labor, was asked what was the ultimate goal of his union. His answer: "More." A good honest answer. But his successors too often fail to quote another of the fiery Gomper's statements: "The greatest enemy of the working man is a company which is not profitable." Those were the days, however, when private ownership of the means of production was taken for granted and none of the huge incomes of the labor union movement went to finance socialist and left-wing people, ideas and causes as is the case today.
Fortunately, one of the most important and happy trends the American worker can now witness (when, as, and if the media reports the phenomena in a positive way) is the growing tendency for government services to be privatized, that is, taken out of the hands of government agencies and turned over or sold to private entrepreneurs, who almost inevitably manage the business more cheaply and efficiently. This last is a real plus for employees who think jobs and security cannot be paid for, forever, with printed paper money.
In fact, neither foods nor services can be paid for with money. The great Albert Jay Nock may have made the greatest Labor Day statement of all time. Said he: " Money does not pay for anything, never has, never will. It is an economic axiom as old as the hills that goods and services can be paid for only with goods and services; but (some decades ago) this axiom vanished from everyone's reckoning, and has never reappeared. No one has seemed the least aware that everything which is paid for must be paid for out of production, for there is no other source of payment."
Unless, of course, the National Education Association (NEA), the powerful teacher's union, were to come out endorsing prayer in the schools. That would prove Nock was mistaken and that there is, indeed, "another source" - prayer.
Reading Between the Signs
By Raph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
September 9, 1984
A funny thing happened on the way to the office the other day. Some politician's yard signs are out - already. They don't SAY anything, of course, but they're out there big as life. Still, they may carry a more important message by what they do not, repeat, do not, say.
The signs I refer to are those of incumbent state Sen. Terry Reilly and aspiring candidate for state House of Representatives, Willie Sullivan. Both men are liberal members of the Democrat Party, but no matter how hard one looks at their yard signs - it's not there. Oh yes the sign is there, but no mention, not even in the small print, as to these gentlemen's party affiliation.
As I said, of course, they're
democrats. One wonders if they're ashamed of that fact. Well, not really, they just want to get elected. And in Canyon County it's tough to get elected because this county's majority prejudice is Republican. Could it be that these men are appealing to prejudice, for Heaven's sake/ Why certainly they are. It's done all the time in politics.
Then why all the appeals. especially by Democrats who are not ashamed of their party (perhaps a slight shade of virtue here somewhere) begging, cajolling, pleading against prejudice. One guesses it's like graft and corruption, i.e., "I'm against it, unless I'm in on it."
Well, one might be forgiven for some jest, gentle reader, except there is more than a grain of truth inmost jests. And there is, indeed, in this one. What is the jest, then? Well, before I suggest what it is, let me first say that Reilly's opponent is Jerry Thorne, co-owner and manager of a well-known and well-established printing firm in Nampa.
Thorne is a conservative Republican, I think it is fair to say. It is also fair to say, son is Sullivan's competitor for state representative, Elizabeth "Liz" Allan. The latter is a long-time educator, but dramatically different from the usual persuasion. Allan is headmaster of a private Christian Day school in Boise. She's different (and popular) among her customers for other reasons, but her private, free-to-choose school compared to Sullivan's government compulsory school serve wonderfully to set these two nice people apart, dramatically. All this - aside from her being a Republican.
Further, and before I suggest the "truth" or the "jest" in all this political chicanery, let me hasten to add that not all the political sophistry and intellectual "dishonesty" is a ploy of the Democrats. Many GOPers do it, too. (I must use quotes around the word dishonesty, above, because it is such a common practice that the common-law rule of precedent tends to make it "legal." The latter is not to be confused with legitimate, however, even though the majority party's institutional label is also played down by its members).
The jest, or if you prefer, the truth, in all this was outlined remarkably well many years ago by the great Ralph Waldo Emerson when he said: " But our institutions, though in coincidence with the spirit of the age, have not any exemption from the practical defects which have discredited other forms (if statism). Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well.
"What satire (ridicule) on government can equal the severity of censure conveyed in the word politic, which now for ages had signified cunning, intimating that the State is a trick?"
So, you see, my more perceptive reader, the "jest" in all this political monkey business of yard signs, billboards, radio and TV spots, brochures and virtually all the rest of their propaganda is but for one purpose-name-familiarity. And that only!
It's a bald-faced admission that the one=man=one=vote idea does not rest on the brains or wisdom of the average voter, or "the little guy," to whom (for example) Sullivan's unabashed collectivist-type petition is made. Rather it's a thinly disguised appeal to that little guy's foolishness or, worse yet, to his envy.
Still the suspicion lingers, that it's a jest for the same reason the Republican's typical last ditch plea for votes is often an unstated - "me too."
Tweetle-Dum, Tweetle-Dee
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
September 16, 1984
Last week's column questioned two Democrat candidates whose yard signs were conspicuous in that they neglected, no doubt intentionally, to declare the name of the party to which they belong.
While I think that is a dirty shame, it is an understandable one. In fact I was admonished in a serious, but ever so friendly way by a district judge who, while admitting my column had a point, suggested what he thought was an equally bad counter-point. He said that frequently in Canyon County some candidates merely announced their candidacy on the Republican ticket and were, therefore, practically assured of election with no contest.
It is true that even GOPers must compete in the primary, so the judge's point is only partially true. Still, the point that is buried over and over again seems, to be just why there is a trend away from party identification. If there is no real difference between the parties, then why have a primary contest at all?
One rather dull observation made frequently over the years is that "everybody" ought to have the privilege of voting in whichever primary election he or she wanted to. But if one looks at it carefully, then why keep the label of a two-party system and abandon the substance? If Boise High School fans are to be allowed to vote for (or against) the quarterback of Caldwell High you can guess how the proverbial "cross over" vote would be mangled by Boiseans.
That is, the idea of two teams contesting for clearly identifiable goalposts would be a farce. Moreover, party accountability would be even more of a farce than now.
If one looks at the absolutely astronomical sums of money that are spent on elections today, well, then it's no farce. The real silent, an arrogant kind of gluttony, is that the politicians have how passed a law financing much of their big expensive races directly out of government's (read, taxpayers') money.
Still, the hut issues are left buried in much of the rhetoric of political buffoonery and so-called advertising put out by candidates and their campaign advisors. The latter, almost by definition, call themselves pragmatists.
And not without some justification, either. Politicians are frequently compared to dishonest used-car salesmen who, typically, are said to "say anything, do anything just to make a sale." Aside from the fact most used-car salesmen are as honest as the next businessman or school teacher or laboring man, most politicians are about as honest (or dishonest) as the voters demand. Indeed, most every important politician I've known, both Democratic and Republican, is quick to admit that if they told it like it really is they'd surely be destroyed in the next election.
Is that what out system and our country have come to? If so, most politicians, again from both parties, are prone to tell us that they cannot get control of deficit spending because of special interests pressures and the general population of voters who think "to hell with fiscal responsibility, everybody else is getting government handouts, I want more, too." Hence, to act responsible many politicians say "we" must have the proposed constitutional amendment to balance the budget forcing "us" to be responsible in "out" spending - of your money.
Well, then why does Democrat Mondale publicly want to RAISE taxes to be fiscally "responsible," while Republican Reagan publicly wants to LOWER taxes to be fiscally "responsible"?
I'll tell you why. It's the same reason the Democrat's yard signs do not take sides honestly. And it's the same reason the GOP signs say less and less each year (if that's possible).
The reason is that it's much easier to sell "name-familiarity" to dull-witted voters than it is for them to interpret the voting records. Each party's politicians have already told us whether or not there's "a dime's worth of difference" as to which party, for example, has the most reckless big spenders. hence caused our huge deficit in the first place.
Methinks it will not take an unusually thoughtful and perceptive district judge to hand down a virtuous verdict come November. Unless, of course, he's been bought off with tax money like too many of us - in past political campaigns.
Freedom Belongs To Us All
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
September 23, 1984
Sometime aggo I attended an unusual two-day seminar for business executives on "How to Defend the Market." The speaker was Dr. John Wenders, a free market economist from the University of Idaho, who specializes in the communications industry.
He makes probably more money consulting on the outside than he receives as a regular salary from his teaching, but the point is that this is a real bonus for his students, since it brings "news" fresh from the marketplace directly into the classroom via a popular, practicing professor and an unusually bright one.
Aside from the fact that it's rare, indeed, to see a professor of anything these days lecturing to encourage businessmen to stand up for the free enterprise system, Wenders' adult students had another treat during a luncheon discussion at out table. It followed a statement by an executive of the J.R. Simplot Company wherein he mentioned that their company (and all others, too) was not allowed to tell their side of the story during a union organization dispute at one of their plants.
I suggested to the little discussion group at our table that that sounded like a restriction on his company's freedom of speech. Further, I thought that it was perfectly outrageous to have a negotiation, sometimes called a bargaining session, with only one party allowed to tell their side of the argument. Believe it or not, however, it's the law all over America. So much for freedom of speech.
But the point of the story has a delightful twist. One of the "students" sitting at out luncheon table was an important executive from a large Idaho newspaper. I exclaimed (for his benefit), "Well, no doubt this gentlemen's newspaper came galloping to the rescue and defended your company's freedom of expression, didn't they?"
Well, as a matter of fact, they did not defend the company's freedoms or rights. In fact, the press or electronic media seldom ever defends the capitalist side of labor disputes. One wonders why.
It is interesting to note that these same media people are so very intolerant when others want to even consider anti-free speech arguments. Contrary wise, they almost lean over backward in their zeal to see to it that anti-free market proponents have every chance to give their side.
Now don't get me wrong, I am not arguing against the logic that supports free speech. On the contrary, I am arguing that all of the arguments offered in support of free speech are at the same time arguments in support of free markets and extremely limited government. However, for some strange reason the news media (with few exceptions) has a double-standard when it comes to other people's freedoms - particularly when those other people are conservative and/or capitalist entrepreneurs.
All this media business was brought to my mind again, recently, when I read about the large body of media reporters, commentators, etc., attending Democratic vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro's press conference disclosing her husband's finances. After the understandably reluctant disclosure the whole media grouping of reporters - applauded. That is, all of them except one from the Wall Street Journal. He rose to ask only one embarrassing question of the liberal lady Democrat.
Except for his question she was about to get off scott-free. Before she had to reply, however, the reporters booed their maverick colleague.
So much for liberal and likeable Ferraro who is nevertheless very popular and still in the running for vice president. The press label for her defalcation, please note is "omissions," while Idaho's conservative, anti-communist Congressman George Hansen's far less serious disclosure errors are labeled "falsifications." Remember?
Unfortunately (for Hansen) Professor Wenders' remarkable and timely seminar, "How to Defend the Market," did not tell us how to defend freedom's "truth-in-labeling."
Free Markets, Not Bailouts
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
September 30, 1984
One wonders why those who protest President Reagan's so-called "bloated" budget for the Pentagon almost never complain about this country's insane scramble to solve the world's problems by bludgeoning them with bucks-taxpayer's bucks.
It's passing strange, too, that all these politicians who vote to "invest" your, (repeat, your) money into these foreign countries absolutely refuse to invest their own money there. It's sometimes called (U.S.) government "bail-out" policy.
Depending on whether one is on the paying or receiving end of such a policy it works, too. Much of it works because of ideological reasons, not just for profit.
Early on, Uncle Sam bailed out Penn Central, then New York City, Lockheed, Chrysler and lately the Continental Illinois Bank. Whether the government gets "repaid" is not my point. The more important point, believe it or not, is that economic calculation itself is simply not possible outside the market economy. A market economy, in order to function, must have a free market and private ownership of the means of production. (At least the Marxists know this. It's just too bad that most American opinion makers and businessmen do not).
Now keep your shirt on. You may ask: "Just who gives a damn about all that theoretical junk? I have a business to run, bills to pay, a family to raise, etc., etc., I don't have time to consider all that stuff." Okay friend, if that's all you have time for, then for goodness sake - don't vote. If you can't cast a well-informed vote, then go run your own affairs and don't ask the bureaucrats to run them for you.
Remember now, the politicians don't "do" anything. they just pass laws (more almost daily) and hope the bureaucrats do it, i.e., carry out the laws along capitalist lines. These are set forth by the Constitution and out more or less libertarian founding fathers. But somehow, from somewhere there has come to pass a socialist (as opposed to capitalist) line of theory hence a socialist) line of theory hence a socialist line of practice.
For example, several relatively well-off and potentially rich Latin American countries want Uncle Sam to bail them out from under their multi-billion dollars of public debt. (Public my foot. It's your money, i.e., if out government bail-out policy is extended to bad American bank loans to foreign countries). This morally indefensible and wasteful act is presently being aided and abetted by out own intellectuals whose Marxist-like visions are still hard at work trying to discredit out once free, private and capitalist financial institutions by redistributing the bank's wealth.
If this seems contradictory, well, it probably is. And why not? Having been assured by liberal government visionaries that everybody else is being bailed out, why wouldn't they, too, ask to be bailed out? However, there is only one possible end to this line of reasoning-nationalization of banks. Then, nationalization of private ownership. In fact, the latter is proceeding at an alarming rate, already, thanks to such socialist-leaning policy makers as former Idaho Governor an U.S. Secretary of Interior, Cecil Andrus, an utterly charming and successful politician among whose personal friends even this writer counts himself.
For at least 50 years, governments throughout Latin America have pursued disastrous economic policies more or less encouraged, so far as I can see, by yet another "government," the Catholic Church. These policies have scared off private foreign investors, strangled commerce, fostered inefficiency through tariffs and trade regulations, locked up valuable mineral and land resources, and wasted money on armaments, ill=conceived government projects and bloated bureaucracies of soldiers and civilians alike. Nationalism, clear and collectivist!
The fact is that the governments of these countries could get the revenues to pay off these debts only if they abandon their mistaken economic nationalism and embrace the ideas and institutions of free international markets and private ownership. That would mean drastically reducing government's economic activities and opening up all recources to the private management of individual citizens.
Specifically, these governments should sell to private investors the countless nationalized industrial and service enterprises that they themselves cannot manage and that currently cost them millions of dollars in subsidies. These privatized resources would then most assuredly generate more income and, just as importantly, more freedom.
But let's also watch out own U.S. Senators, James McClure and Steve Symms, both of whom last week had a chance to demonstrate leadership in the above. Each voted on a law to bail out the government-dominated lumber industry- and voted wrong. Each will soon vote on de-nationalizing the similarly socialized housing industry. Let us pray.
Citizens, Let There Be Grace
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
October 7, 1984
Who the hell is J. Peter Grace? And why should anyone in Treasure Valley care just who he is, anyway?
He's chairman of W.R. Grace & Co., which was founded down in Peru more than a century ago.
His Grace Steamship Line has grown from a modest Latin American company into a diversified, worldwide and giant enterprise operating 240 plants, 245 offices, 430 sales units, 95 warehouses, 655 retail outlets (even one in Caldwell) and 610 restaurants in 47 states and Puerto Rico and 42 foreign countries.
He's a life-long Democrat.
He's even richer than Sen. Ted Kennedy and Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, both multi-millionaires.
He's author of the book, Burning Money, sub-titled "The Waste of Your Tax Dollars," published by the MacMillan publishing company of New York.
He's the subject of a recent cover story on the front of the U.S. News and World Report magazine entitled (Washington, D.C.), "A City Without Guts."
That's just a little bit of - who the hell J. Peter Grace is.
He is also coming to Caldwell, believe it or not, so stay tuned.
He's also remembers Feb. 16, 1982, when his lunch in the Manhattan headquarters of his W.R. Grace Co. which he has served for 38 years, was interrupted. It was an urgent phone call from the president of the United States.
Ronald Reagan was seeking a favor (big businessmen are the ones usually said to be seeking the favors). Reagan wanted Grace, a Democrat, to head a commission to study waste and inefficiency in government. The job, as Reagan cheerfully described it, would be backbreaking, time-consuming and well-nigh impossible. Without hesitation Grace accepted it. They peppery tycoon raised the money from private sources, too, about $75 million, to finance the huge study (23,000 pages) exposing government fraud, waste and inefficiency.
Many people who know the two big business magnates say that Grace's guts and unusually forthright manner are remarkably similar to Idaho's own capitalistic industrialist, J.R. Simplot, a one-time resident of Caldwell and now of Boise. The two met some years ago when the Grace Company tried, unsuccessfully, to purchase Simplot's fertilizer empire. The Idahoan will introduce Grace who will be giving a lecture at Jewett Auditorium at the College of Idaho the evening of Thursday, Oct. 11. Grace's speech is sponsored by - bless their hearts - the Center for the Study of Market Alternatives (CSMA), a Caldwell free market organization having no affiliation with the College of Idaho.
The controversial Grace will be speaking about his book, The War on Waste or more technically entitled: The President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, which claims to show how $424 billion can be saved by government over the next three years.
The irascible Mr. Grace, however, is not the proverbial "Man Called Peter" of biblical times. At least not in the opinion of fellow Democrat Rep. William Ford of Michigan, the loudest one to holler. The latter squalled that letting corporate volunteers study Environmental Protection Agency records was like putting foxes into the chicken coop. (In fact, the EPA had control over the commission's access).
But what really bent politician Ford's nose out of shape was the Grace Commission's report on the excesses of Civil Service. Rep. Ford, you see, chairs the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee. What was Grace's response to Ford? Simply: "When you stick a pig, it screams."
And bloodcurdling screams are still echoing up and down the Washington, D.C., halls of what Grace calls "The City with No Guts ..."
But then, for a bargain #3 ticket ($1 for students) area citizens can go hear him in person at Jewett Auditorium in Caldwell next Thursday evening. Call CSMA for information about Grace, the "reactionary-extremist" big business tycoon whose 18th century-type ideas go all the way back to when two plus two equaled four - not 22. Seldom is Caldwell treated to such an august and colorful personality.
Oh yes, there's even one for the big-spending do-gooders in the city of Caldwell, i.e., if they choose. Grace's personal jet, a Boeing 727, is too big to land at Caldwell's new airport. Since he has to land at Boise and be driven to Caldwell by car, perhaps Grace could be persuaded to support an efficient government grant to enlarge our airport runway.
On second thought, let's hope that even Grace does not favor making government airports that efficient.
No Substitute for Principles
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
October 14, 1984
Recently I wrote in this column chiding local Democrat politicians because they seemed too ashamed to "cloud" themselves with their party's label. This concerned the Democrats'' yard signs, especially liberal Willie Sullivan's and incumbent liberal state senator, Terry Reilly's. Both are nice guys but both would make the late Norman Thomas, who for decades headed up the Socialist Party ticket for president, look like what Erwin Schweibert calls a right-wing extremist.
Since that column appeared there have been several more references to the "invisible man" party status of theirs and other Democrats'. For example, they seem unwilling to discuss the principle(s) underlying their support for the Democrats' liberal Mondale/Ferraro ticket.
But a slightly more important "invisible man" status of candidate Willie Sullivan has since come to mind. He has not only the enthusiastic endorsement of the Idaho Education Association (IEA), the state's most powerful labor union, but he was president of that militant teacher association a few years ago when they marched out onto the streets and into the Idaho Legislature to demand more pay.
I mention this little scenario again for two reasons: (1) Party affiliation should encourage candidates to debate principles instead of personalities and (2) Sullivan, generally speaking, represents a clear choice of today's liberal mentality of anti-private ownership, anything hoes so long as it's more money for government schooling. Oh yes, he is also a school teacher himself. It's a noble profession, too, especially if and when it's not a part of a giant labor union.
Running on the Republican Party ticket for the same seat as Sullivan is Elizabeth "Liz" Allen, a more or less conservative candidate. She's also a teacher. She's headmaster of a non-government Christian school in Boise. Folks in Caldwell will remember her as director of Christian education for the Presbyterian Church. She was easily one of the most popular educators that that church had ever employed. She's pro-education, too, both public and private.
While it is not my intention to suggest that Allen is the superior candidte because she puts the Republican label on her literature ( so does government-school zealot Janet Hay, also a Republican), it is to say that Allan goes to great lengths to get her party to stand clear and tall for something. This makes he controversial while working and campaigning had for the things she believes in - on principle. Some of this because he's a Republican, some in spite of it. That is to say, given the many in her party that so often try to get elected by promising the voters even more than the Democrats promise, (i.e., as if that were possible).
Again, I mention the Allan-Sullivan race because the choices are so dramatic and the labels are so obscure. As far as I know Sullivan, too, is an honorable person. But "honor" in a political race, yes, even in many actual votes cast by lawmakers while they are in session, is difficult to pin down. Still, we should try. The only way a little guy can have even a hope of success is to debate and argue the principle(s) involved, then hold his candidate's feet to the fire - publicly Otherwise, gentle reader, you and I don't have a prayer either.
This confusion is made even worse by the sincere, liberal, government-loving columnist, Erwin Schweibert, an ex-debate teacher and an ex-politician who urges people to "debate the issues" - instead of the principles. It is giving our U.S. politicians and the United Nations, and the National Education Association and the National Council of Churches, all of which he loves to support, a type of a blank check with which to buy votes.
All this while they pour the free market, private ownership, limited government ideal of Thomas Jefferson down the drain. Individual responsibility doesn't have a prayer, in or out of school, with the one-man, one-vote panacea on every issue promoted by his "invisible man" liberals masquerading as "moderates."
Much of what they have to offer is a type of name-calling. If you disagree on principle, you are an "extremist." If you vote for more government on every issue, almost always at someone else's expense - you are a "moderate." It's fun to note that no liberal, by the way, is every labeled "extreme" by them, but this year the party labels just may be starting to have a tiny bit more significance, thanks to the conservative Allan and liberal Sullivan race.
Sad to say, party labels tell us very little, but they do tell us something. Next time around ask your candidate why he (or she) did not publicly utilize his party's label.
Or, better yet, ask why he did utilize it - and then watch him squirm.
Mondale Won the Debate
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
October 21, 1984
It is only with great trepidation that, for once, I agree with the liberal national news media. President Reagan clearly lost the debate with liberal Democrat challenger Walter Mondale.
It should be noted, however, that the so-called moderates with whom Reagan has surrounded himself in the Oval Office had him so "over-coached," in the opinion of Sen. Steve Symms, that his own genuine conservative mandate from the 1980 election was virtually obliterated. Since conservative presidential advisor Ed Meese has been gone from the White House the liberal pragmatists, Baker, Deaver (et. al.), have had full sway in their "advisory" role. To them, Reaganites must ascribe much of the responsibility for Reagan's poor performance in the Sunday debate.
Vice President George Bush restored some GOP credibility in his later debate with Democrat challenger Geraldine Ferraro, the peppery congresswoman with six years experience in the ^govern-mentality^. I must confess, however, to a bit of enjoyment in merely listening to her resisting the media's characterization of her otherwise orthodox liberal positions on controversial issues. Except for her blind adherence to simply the word "negotiate" (the word itself) as if it were not supremely simplistic, I'd be tempted to think her spunky style was a breath of fresh air. But I'm afraid it is not.
Too bad, too, because another Democrat, J. Peter Grace, in a recent speech in Caldwell, gave us a huge breath of anti-government worship fresh air. But then the Mondale/Ferraro team seem devastatingly committed to more and more government meddling in our lives.
Perhaps the supreme disappointment of the month, however, was columnist Patrick Buchanan's disclosure of Idaho Sen. James McClure's "cajoling his colleagues into a voice vote on a tiny amendment ... to forgive the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts of all $33 million in back interest owed the American people and forgive, in advance, the next 33 years in interest on a $20 million loan made for a parking lot (for the Center) years ago."
Aside from McClure's questioning whether the Kennedy Center should ever have been built in the first place, his "defense" was weak. Nationally syndicated columnist Buchanan calls it "business as usual at the grand bazaar on Capitol Hill.' Both McClure and his charming wife, Louse, are known to have become great personal friends of Vice President George Bush and his wife who are well known big boosters of the highbrow "artsy" crowd in Insane City, D.C. My guess is that this friendship had more to do with McClure's support "forgiving" the Kennedy Center's financial obligation than his trying to "buy" votes to become GOP majority leader.
The latter position is up for grabs since Sen. Howard Baker, R-Tenn. is resigning that position to run for president in 1988 and McClure has since been in hot pursuit of the GOP leadership position. Forgive me, but it's just too damn bad that McClure had to further sully his record even to appear to "tax the poor to support rich people's taste in art," something the elite has been doing for centuries.
It's too bad, too, for example, that McClure hardly raised his voice to support a different kind of funding from already appropriated Bureau of Land Management (BLM) funds for a good cause. An academic study, thus financed, of the beneficial role of private landowners in preserving wildlife could have supported the idea of private property activity - but it failed merely for lack of enthusiastic support. No wonder "we" lose, since we finance socialism and tax capitalism.
But Congressman George Hansen's debate Thursday night, which, by the way, he clearly won, restored part of the current wobbling GOP dialogue. Asked during the debate why he had not passed "more laws" since he's been in Congress, Hansen replied to the effect that we had too many laws already.
Hansen apparently would rather be known as the politician who fights more laws and more taxes. But that doesn't do much for his social status with the highbrows, the moderates and most of the media.
Taking on the Establishment
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
October 28, 1984
One hears criticism these days of both liberals and conservatives, not to mention Democrats and Republicans, but one charge leveled at conservatives is that "they don't read anything." Well, one reason the allegation bears a bit of weight is that liberals tend to own or control the publishing media, thus few books are written to which conservatives can relate, enjoy, or oft-times, even get to hear about.
Comes now a brand new exception to this "book-gap." A massive missile guided right square into the militant fortress of the liberal National Education Association (NEA). Entitled, N.E.A. Trojan Horse in American Education by Samuel Blumenfeld, it is undoubtedly the most devastating critique of American public education ever written
If you have often wondered why, after billions of dollars for more and more education, students seem to be learning less and less, you will love Brumenfeld's book and his explanations.
Two press conferences were held simultaneously when the book was announced recently, one in Boise (where the publisher lives) and one in Washington, D.C. But the Eastern liberal news media, as usual, were conspicuous by their absence. One perceptive columnist in Baltimore, Robert Goldsborough, had this to say:
"Book reviewers for the New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal may know who murdered literacy in America, but they don't want you to know.
"Those newspapers, considered by many to be the pillars of the print media, refused to send a reviewer to meet author and educator Samuel Blumenfeld when his seventh book, N.E.A. Trojan Horse ... was being introduced at a Washington, D.C., press conference on Sept. 26." Even educational moderate U.S. Sen. Steve Symms, R-Idaho, has endorsed the book. Says he: "Every so often a book is written that can change the thinking of a nation. This book is one of them."
Columnist Goldsborough praises the book for tracing "... the history of public school education and the quest for power (by) the National Education Association (the NEA is a sort of rich godfather to the Idaho Education Association). It traces the consequences to American education when control of Harvard University was wrested from the Calvinists. And even though this is a thoroughly documented saga of the demise of literacy in America, it reads more like a spy-thriller than a scholarly treatise."
Observers of the role and skyrocketing rise of statism in America are familiar with the old saying that, "The successful route to Washington, D.C., has for years been to go to Harvard and turn left." If one judges from most of that school's famous graduates in public service, "left" is a one-way-only road from Harvard.
Unfortunately, this was also the case in most of America's common universities many of whom, even today, try to emulate that left-leaning school. Result? Most of them, too, lean hard in a collectivist direction, although we are beginning to witness some slight change. For example, since 1974 there have been three Nobel prize winning economists to whom the word libertarian, yes, even free market capitalism, are good words.
Author Blumenfeld, whose superb 1984 critique seriously castigating the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry's (IACI) Report On Higher Education In Idaho was completely boycotted in the news pages of a large Idaho daily paper, may risk a similar chance of having news of his book "spiked" given its emphasis on individualism and such quotes as :
"It was John Dewey who first formulated the notion that high literacy is an obstacle to socialism. To Dewey, the greatest enemy of socialism was the private consciousness that seeks knowledge in order to exercise its own individual judgment and authority."
It's too bad that Sir Winston Churchill's adage was not around for Dewey to hear, way back then. Said Churchill: "Socialism is a history of failure, a philosophy of ignoance, the gospel of greed; its only virtue is the equal sharing of misery."
And last, but not least, if conservatives and open-minded, sincere liberals (there are some) need any additional endorsements of this superior free market writer's new book, there are also two excellent educators, both famous and both black, who have high praise for Blumenfeld's chilling expose of the NEA. One is the great Marva Collins of Westside Preparatory School in Chicago. The other is Dr. Walter Williams, author, columnist, TV celebrity and brilliant professor of economics at George Mason University.
Here's William's view: "The highly publicized report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education said we are a nation at risk-risk from illiteracy. Mr. Blumenfeld's timely book points out the real risk is educational tyranny."
Read the book now, conservatives, this one's for you-and the liberals.
Libertarian for a Change
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
November 4, 1984
During a recent breakfast meeting in Dallas, there were assembled 15 or 20 business tycoons (mostly small oil) and a few free market academicians to confer with the undersecretary of Energy.
One of the more vocal of the rather soft-spoken group, an oil entrepreneur of obvious brains and energy with and enthusiastic, uncommon common-sense awareness to public policy affairs, exclaimed: "Mr. Secretary, can't you get those people in our Washington office to see what's needed? We need to drill more holes, drill more holes-if we want more energy, what we've got to do is -drill more holes."
The oil man was suggesting with gusto and enthusiasm, that Washington was making things both complicated and worse. If not always worse, at least too often, and far too complicated. Since I was a guest at the meeting, I waited until afterward to go over and shake his hand as genuinely as I could for his forthrightness and candor, the latter not being something big businessmen are too prone to do around important politicians or powerful bureaucrats. I thought it at least worthy of special praise.
The conversation which ensued soon brought forth the fact that the oil man was a friend and admirer of my friend, U.S. Sen. James McClure, R-Idaho. Since McClure opposed President Reagan's campaign promise to abolish the Department of Energy, I asked the oil magnate if he thought we needed such a department. This obviously friendly, frank and firebreathing, card-carrying free enterpriser paused and thought a moment, then said, "Well, I guess since energy is so terribly, terribly important; it's absolutely the life blood of an industrial nation - you know - I suppose we do need a Department of Energy."
With great care and respect for his obviously intense feelings, I said, " Mr. (I used his name, of course,) do you suppose, that is =, have you ever considered, that perhaps for that very reason-energy is, indeed, so terribly important- we just maybe cannot afford to turn it over to government? It screws up so consistently. Perhaps we really should leave it up to the free market and let prices, instead of bureaucrats, allocate energy resources."
Well, believe it or not, the tycoon hesitated a moment, smiled,and showing a quizzical yet sincere expression, looked me in the eye with: "Well, I suppose, when you put it that way, you may be right."
Whether I convinced him or not isn't my point. My point is that will out mutual friend McClure (we were great friends way back in the Idaho for Goldwater days when he voted for the Liberty Amendment to slash big government) be half so thoughtful to promote basic solutions? Will he use his huge (by Idaho standards, anyway) war chest to offer some free market, private ownership and limited government leadership? Since McClure will win in a runaway victory come Nov. 6, he could well afford the small risk it would entail to publicly decry the system of spoils and plunder we've all come to expect from Big Brother in Washington and his seemingly bottomless pork barrel.
So last week I stopped in to McClure's Boise office on my way back from Texas to give my oil tycoon story to McClure's aides who were busily preparing for last Thursday's "public" TV debate with Democrat challenger, Pete Busch, and Libertarian Party challenger, Dr. Donald Billings. The latter is a bright, capitalist, free market professor of economics at Boise state university, a school, by the way, not exactly famous for loving capitalism.
One of McClure's aides (all are more or less good friends of mine) demanded I say whether I'll be voting for my friend McClure or my friend Billings?I replied, " If I cannot get Billings to pay any more attention to me than McClure has, I may not even go vote." Laughs followed and the aide said, "You go find somebody else besides you and Billings who hold those weird views and maybe we'll listen to you." Not laughs, but guffaws followed. Yet there's truth in the jest, i.e., raw power, is all that's heeded by McClure aides. Not ideas.
So I responded thus: " All that a minority grouper has going for him is the truth of principle. If you deny him this, as you are suggesting, he has only one avenue remaining- assassination. Political assassination, perhaps, but sooner or later you're asking for it."
And since Democrat Busch simply has nothing at all to offer except warmed-over socialism we may have to look only to Billings for a change of big government's status quo.
So here's how one nationally syndicated columnist sums up the party of Billings, the plucky, capitalistic and idealistic professor-turned-politician who's trying to market principle:
"For the over-taxed, over-regulated, over-burdened and under-powered millions of the American middle class, Libertarians are the only people worth voting for."
Pope Jerry 1 - Alive and Well, Y'all
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
November 18, 1984
During the recent political campaign the news media, as spokesmen for the majority of liberals in America, were screaming against the conservatism of a relatively new twist.
One of the leaders of the new movement is the Rev. Jerry Falwell of the Liberty Baptist Church in Virginia with whom the media's almost traumatic concern was: "Will the Rev. Falwell name the next justice to the Supreme Court?"
Well now, considering the frequency with which that question was asked on almost every major TV network, that is quite a compliment for Falwell. The emotion and zeal with which the question was pursued was a dead giveaway. "Wouldn't that be a violation of the separation of church and state?" they asked. Over and over they thus planted their liberal concern in the minds of the voters. So far so good.
What the major network liberals leave out, however, is often more significant than what they include. The part they omitted was where was their concern about church and state when the Rev. Jesse Jackson ran a campaign for president of the United States?
Can't you just imagine the headlines on the liberal New York Times, the Washington Post and gasping of TV network anchor-persons if Falwell had attempted such a campaign for president? Why, they'd have been leaping from the upper windows of their huge skyscraper offices all over the country.
And what of the Rev. Martin Luther King, whose crusade for legislation was perhaps the largest "invasion" of church into state in modern history? Where was the liberal media's super-concern then for the dangerous dabbling of religious demons into the arena of statism? Answer? Behind big media's double standard, that's where. Their concern was - and it still is - a giant double standard.
Let me hasten to add that in the case of King this writer happens to believe that his concern may very well have been sincere and well-intentioned, but the repeal of bad legislation such as the myriad of oppressive state laws which had been used to keep blacks down, was not his major thrust. It was, instead, more and more federal government laws compelling enforcement of the modern version of egalitarianism, i.e., of compulsory equality. This is what the fundamentalists see as a kind of "newspeak" for Marxism. It accounts for much of the Big Brother criticism of Falwell and his followers. However, such a viewpoint will not satisfy the so-called moderates, but it should aid in understanding many of their critics.
On a similar note the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) will join several other plaintiffs in a Pennsylvania court challenging U.S. government recognition of the Catholics' Holy See. They claim it violates the constitutional separation of church and state.
The suit will challenge the action by Congress, last November, when they lifted the 116-year-old ban on having a U.S. ambassador to the Vatican. One was appointed, by the way, by that paragon of virtue for a "strict constructionist" interpretation of the Constitution, President Ronald Reagan.
I hasten to add, where is the big media liberal's gushing concern about separation of church and state vis-a-vis of official ambassador to the pope? Well, I'll tell you. Anything that is likely to result in more government (read, liberalism, big brotherism, welfare statism, anti-capitalism, etc.) the media just loves. Consequently, we won't find much criticism from them.
If all this seems to be a strange posture for the Presbyterians who join the Evangelicals, Baptists, and others in challenging official political recognition for the pope and the Catholics - it is. But then, nobody likes competition, even the preachers. Just as big business and big labor, they flock to Washington to stop it. Interestingly enough, the liberal National Council of Churches decided not to join the court challenge. One supposes they fear it might result in less government.
But, my favorite "non-politician" is still Jerry Falwell whose rhetoric, generally speaking, is for less government. Yet, an uneasy suspicion lingers: Will the pro-statist liberals and pro-statist conservatives now compromise and appoint an official ambassador to the Liberty Baptist Church and their "Holy See," Jerry?
They Belong to the Shippys
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
November 25, 1984
Some months ago I traded for a token coin made of brass. It was the size of a quarter and had nothing but a United States shield embossed on one side under the small word "freedom." The other side had only three words written large in capital letters, "NO CASH VALUE."
The stranger from whom I obtained the "coin" was sitting across a banquet table from me when he showed it to a mutual friend sitting nearby. I noticed the words on it and said, "Hey, friend, what will you take for the token?" He responded, "Oh, it isn't worth anything," whereupon I said, "Well, it's worth something to me. I'll give you a quarter for it." He exclaimed, "Sold!" and quickly grabbed my quarter before I might change my mind.
Well, I think I practically stole the token coin. Why? Because it so beautifully and aptly states a huge problem in America today - that is, our freedom really seems to have "no cash value." We've become so statist and materialistic, so non-market and thereby so hung up on numbers, statistics, charts, graphs and data of all sorts of information of numerical form that the computer is sold to us as a gimmick of high technology made by the geniuses of Silicon Valley which will do our thinking for us. And we buy it. Then we blame the schools when the kids can't read, write and reason.
But what do the schools say in response? "We need more money so we can buy the expensive computers which you parents want us to buy for your kids." And so it goes.
Oh, yes, then there is the critically important average daily attendance (ADA) scores upon which the government school's giant bureaucracy depends for the "meager" sums of money they do get.
Comes now, Sam Shippy of New Plymouth, his two brothers, their wives and their families. Their total of 16 children were taken out of school last week. The parents were not satisfied with the government school, so they removed their children. They wanted to school them at home. The fathers and mothers were promptly thrown in jail. Indeed, gentle reader, the six Mr. and Mrs. Shippys are locked up in an Idaho jail today. Believe it or not.
They tried to "vote" out of the system with their feet as did the Jews in Soviet Russia.
Vote? "Sure," say the Soviet and Red Chinese governments, "we let our people vote. We just don't let them leave the system. If we did, then our scheme of one-man, one-vote democratic rule wouldn't work. Would it? The proletariat sometimes doesn't know what's good for them." In the Soviet Union and Red China there's no cash value for freedom, either.
Just ask the people in Hong Kong which way the shots come from that are fired at Red Chinese who try to "vote with their feet" out of the system and swim away from the great People's Republic of China's system across to Great Britain's crowded but free city of Hong Kong.
What's all this about? "In God We Trust - but it's in the government's compulsory school system that we worship." That's what it's about.
Ask the Shippy families in the Payette County jail if God gave the 16 children to them (the Shippys) or did He give the children to The State? Ask them, too, if America's coin of freedom really has "ANY CASH VALUE" now?
Shippys Are Out Problem
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
December 2, 1984
Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of the Shippy families being thrown into the Payette County jail for removing their own children from the government school is that it's not just their problem. It's yours and mine.
Remember that Shippy, his two brothers from New Plymouth, and their wives are in jail for removing their total of 16 children from the government's compulsory school system. This act, by the way, results in a loss to the school system of approximately $30,000 since the Average Daily Attendance (ADA) figures, upon which government aid is based, are thereby diminished.
Now then, never mind that each of the three Shippy wives were actually nursing a baby when they were thrown in jail, neither the judge nor the district superintendent of schools claimed loss of the government funds was their major concern. No, it was rather the state's loss of control over the children's lives. In other words, it is the state's interest in the children versus the religious parents' interest in their own offspring.
"It's the law," said Jerry Evans, state superintendent of public instruction, and he's accurate (not to be confused with being right) about the Shippy case. The czar of public instruction knows full well that the public doesn't always "instruct" very well, particularly when they just want to be left alone, hence they need a little force from time to time.
To be fair about it Evans and his troops, the police, are not all bad all the time. In fact, he used to be a pretty good superintendent in Caldwell. But any bureaucrat's zeal for excellence is, first, the control of his customers. The second, is control of his customers. The third, you guessed it, control. In addition to being an otherwise pretty nice guy, however, he is a bureaucrat.
He's a good one, too. For example, a few years ago Evans was asked by federal authorities how many students were enrolled in non-government schools in Idaho. He didn't know. Since he had no means of commanding these statistics from the private entities and given that not all these schools seemed willing to submit their figures voluntarily, Evans promptly went to the Idaho Legislature asking for a law demanding he receive the private numbers for the feds' benefit.
Fortunately, the Idaho lawmakers had the good sense to deny the feds and Evans another "compulsory duty."
But this is how a police state begins, gentle reader. It is seldom imposed by a hostile foreign power, and rarely do the people vote for more government except when they don't realize it. Remember the Germans! After a runaway, chaotic and printed-money inflation, they voted for 90 percent of Adolph Hitler's power - voluntarily, in free elections. Suddenly it was too late.
All of which is not to say Evans is to be compared to a totalitarian bad guy. In fact, I consider him a good friend. But "Power corrupts," as Lord Acton said, "and absolute power corrupts absolutely." In this regard Evans and his political Department of Education are too typical, hence we now witness their arrogance of power.
It's the more dangerous because he even fought his GOP representatives at their state convention this year when they passed a stinging rebuke in the form of a resolution publicly castigating Boise State University President John Keiser. The latter had bitterly denounced two of "his" dissident economics professors. They publicly advocated repeal of the government school monopoly and called for a free market in education, thus infuriating Keiser who really must abhor competition.
Worst of all, Evans, who publicly supports the Shippy families being put in jail, and Keiser, who covets his monopoly, cannot see that freedom is not a Utopian pipe dream, hence they tend to resist teaching it.
They do this even though the free market is the most realistic alternative to economic and social problems. It works because it conforms to and recognizes the way people are; namely, self-seeking individuals with the creativity to devise new and, if left reasonably free, better ways to get what they desire by non-coercive and peaceful means.
Furthermore, it can be demonstrated that there is a practical as well as a theoretical case for liberty. It is not a matter of blind faith or religious conversion. More importantly, however, the merit and the worth of being free to choose must not be put down and condemned by "priestly" educators. As it is now, our education system has become a sort of cult, if not actually a state religion.
In this weird, if well-meaning, sort of paradox we have not separated church and state - we've homogenized them. The Shippys, to the contrary, notwithstanding.
China's Shift to Capitalism
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
December 9, 1984
It is not often that this columnist is able to report something that makes any sense coming from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) but here is a rare exception.
Exception? Yes. Well, two exceptions: (1) It's really from the IMF/International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and (2) it's really about "creeping capitalism" in Red China, not exactly something often promoted by the IMF nor, even, by U.S. foreign policy.
According to that organ's November 1984 survey, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Red China has adopted a program designed to bring about a sweeping reform of the country's economic structure over the proverbial five-year period.
Heretofore applied from time to time in China to the rural economy, the concept is being broadened to "industrial enterprises and the economies of urban centers."
The Communist reform plans include: "(1) greater autonomy for enterprises, (2) a more flexible planning system, (3) a rationalization of the price system (a scheme some observers say is being phased out in America; it's sometimes referred to as the free market), (4) the encouragement of competition, (5) greater material incentives for workers, and (6) an expansion of foreign participation in the Chinese economy."
But before you exclaim: "Captalism running amuck?" as economics Professor Don Billings of Boise State University likes to jest, the IMF story explaining the text of the Central Committee's decision said, "the superiority of the socialist system (in Red China) has yet to be brought into full play ... (because of) a rigid economic structure that cannot meet the needs of the growing forces of production."
As a result the Red Committee maintained, "no clear distinction has been drawn between the functions of Government and those of enterprise ... the state has exercised excessive and rigid control over enterprises (and) no adequate importance has been given to commodity production, the law of value, and the regulatory role of the market." (Egad, sounds like Steve Symms in 1972).
After some 75 years since Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto and the slaughter of countless millions of ordinary Chinese citizens by Mao Tse Tung and others, the present regime of "modern" Communists is beginning to get the message of Adam Smith. Or so it may seem. Some say it is just because President Reagan is giving the Communist Chinese a $20 billion nuclear industry as a gift of sorts. Or, don't you believe that either? (Believe it or not, it was actually reported in the Daily News Digest).
Some people thrill at what they view as a great "merging" of East and West, i.e., socialism where people are starving, and capitalism where 90 percent of the people waste more food than the people of Eastern (socialist) countries get to eat.
Why? Freedom, private ownership and extremely limited government. That's why. But in what direction do we hear our politicians suggesting WE move? "Toward an industrial policy," they say, "and it cannot be too soon." You know what industrial policy is? That's an American or European version of exactly what the Red Chinese are trying to move away from - and save face at the same time.
The Communist Committee condemned "absolute" egalitarianism (something American political liberals and academics tend to worship) in the distribution of income and insisted that an enterprise should have the power to "plan its own production, supply, and marketing; to keep and budget its own funds; to do its own hiring and firing; to set wages and recruit and deploy its own work force ... and (be) responsible for its own profit and loss."
What's all this add up to? Who knows for sure? But why should we be in such a hurry to adopt the Red Chinese contribution to the East-West "merger"? Isn't their portion merely recognizing the carrot and stick idea? Well, they seem to want to adopt our capitalist mode of production, i.e., the "carrot" of ownership and incentive, but we seem almost hell bent to take on their "stick" of compulsory indoctrination - sometimes called education. Here's how it's working:
We have, above, a brief of the "carrot" from the IMF/International Bank Survey. For the "stick," we have our own brief here at home in the Shippy family case: Three fine religious couples were thrown in the Payette County jail (believe it or not) for wanting to be responsible to educate their own enterprise - their children.
Dee Pickett - Free Enterprise Champ
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
December 16, 1984
It was my intent to write a richly deserved critique of the Catholic bishop's pastoral letter on collectivism, socialism, and envy (my title, not theirs, since that is what my cursory reading of their famous letter has so far clearly evidenced) but a great event last Sunday forces me to delay the above in favor of some good news of just the opposite - individualism. Let me explain the connection.
One of Caldwell's finest young athletes just won an event of Olympic gold medal class. Dee Pickett, 29, won the world championship all-around rodeo cowboy award for 19484. The event took place at the National Finals Rodeo (NFR) in Oklahoma City.
Pickett won the title in a hotly contested race over many other top cowboys who competed nip and tuck all week long. The race was not finally decided until the last few minutes of the NFR "games" at the rodeo coliseum.
Another first class Caldwell cowboy, Mike Beers, together with Pickett, won the team-roping championship. A main event by itself.
And Idaho's place in the rodeo sun rose even higher with a real boost from the talented, attractive and capable Neenie Blake, Miss Rodeo Caldwell, who won first runner-up in the Miss Rodeo America pageant in the same historic (for Caldwell) event.
Much more could be said about these great young Caldwellites, but perhaps most of it is that they are such fine examples for other young people all over the U.S. as well as Idaho, to look up to. Furthermore, the $122,618 prize money which Pickett won almost singlehandedly (he and Beers paired up, of course, to win the $57,556 each gets for the team-roping "gold medal") is indeed a big deal in itself. But it is the perseverance, constant training, self-discipline and self-reliance that professional cowboy contesting says about individualism that tends to be overlooked by today's spectator public and the probably wel-meaning Catholic bishops.
So many sports today are too highly organized. All sorts of booster clubs, alumni associations and downright direct subsidies from colleges and universities themselves are paid to other athletes. They keep the crowds coming to the stadiums and giant hippodromes by subsidized academic bugle-blowing. Not rodeo cowboys. They pay cash for the privilege to compete. If there's no win there's no pay. Not a dime.
Talk about free enterprise, gentle reader, these cowboys give it anew dimension. How's that? Well, in addition to transporting themselves to approximately 100 professional rodeos all over the country, they must haul their highly trained and maintained horses as well. This is not to mention hotel bills, motel bills and constant training and endless practicing that Beers, Pickett and their participating pals pay for playing in the professional athletic "game" called rodeo - they pay their own hard cash to contend for distinction, quality, virtue and reward.
At an average of $100 entry fee for each event (they enter two events in each rodeo) at those 100 arenas Pickett and Beers have easily $40,000 invested in their right just to compete in their chosen profession.
While the glory of winning and the good sportsmanship and good fellowship among their colleagues-in-competition is indeed some added reward above the prize money, only Pickett gets inducted into the prestigious National Cowboy Hall of Fame. His pal, Mike, gets merely his own prize money and the rather obvious (by the look on his face) super-joy and relish at his comrade's additional front-row success. Pickett, however, will tell you he thinks he's lucky to have such a fine partner as Beers for a good friend as well as for winning money.
But the bottom line of all the prize money, fame and recognition (none of which in this writer's opinion is anywhere nearly enough, especially when compared to the football, baseball and TV entertainers' elephantine salaries) is the honor these absolutely first class young people reflect on a once great tradition in America. I mean entrepreneurship and competition in the best sense of that term. And all in a fair field with no favors.
And last but not least: Not only do these fine young people confer credit on their state of Idaho and the city of Caldwell, it was all "free." That is to say, none of these government entities had to invest a damn dime to subsidize their smashing success.
Who said, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch?" For government, anyhow.
Color This Gift Russian Red
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
December 23, 1984
It is the Yuletide season, so Merry Christmas to you all. But it is not necessarily the season to be jolly. At least not for Mark Seldenberg of Arlington, Va.
Seldenberg owns 93,000 acres on Wrangel Island off the shore of Alaska. He is vehemently protesting the U.S. State Department's apparent intention to formally give up U.S. sovereignty over five strategic islands in the area.
There are tens of thousands of square miles of oil-rich seabed in the Bering Sea along with the five islands that have been owned by the U.S. and administered by Alaska. They are about to be given, believe it or not, to Soviet Russia.
One wonders if the Reagan administration has put on the red and white Santa Claus suit of prior liberal administrations and is about to deliver to the Russian government yet another "Christmas gift."
While I was working back in Insane City, D.C., for a few weeks last year I had a contact with a most interesting, unusual and clever young man who seems to know a great deal about this potential, if asinine, proposed giveaway to Russia. He's Carl Olsen who heads up an organization called Stockholders for World Freedom, Box 7273, Alexandria, Va. 22307. They promote the idea that corporate stockholders can help fight anti-capitalist forces and can support human freedoms around the world. It's done by discussing and voting on these issues at their annual corporate meetings.
Says Olsen, "It is a shock to discover that the U.S. State Department's delegation that went to Moscow (last summer) to negotiate this oil-rich seabed boundary failed to include any representatives from the Interior, Energy, or Defense departments who could speak up for the strategic petroleum interests of America and for the acutely adverse consequences for American workers and stockholders."
At issue is an area in the Bering Sea known as the Navarin Basin. It includes five islands that were discovered after the 1867 treaty with the Soviets, but have been claimed by the U.S. and administered by Alaska. According to one well-known Washington observer, Howard Phillips, State Department officials have already agreed, during secret negotiations with the Soviets, to abandon U.S. claims to the islands.
Mr. Seldenberg, who has no intention whatsoever of abandoning his own claim to property on Wrangel Island, warned in a telegram to the State Department's delegation to Moscow that they may be found personally guilty of violating various civil rights of the rightful owners of the disputed property and condoning forceful invasion of the islands by the Soviets.
Lest you think nothing but snow and ice are at stake in the boundary "negotiations" get this: "The Navarin Basin," according to Olsen, "has 1.9 billion barrels of oil reserves, the Barrow Arch has 1.3 billion barrels, the Aleutian Basin almost half a billion (to name but a few). In addition, the negotiations would surrender to the Soviets five strategically-placed Alaskan Arctic Islands: Wrangel, Herald, Bennett, Henrietta and Jeanette.
"Seldenberg also pointed out the State Department's failure in the past to press the valid claims against the Soviets by American victims of Soviet invastions. Such claims that the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission of the Department of Justice has granted included one in favor of the Lomen Brothers whose settlement on Wrangel Island was invaded and expropriated by the Soviet forces (Claim No. SOV-40944, decision No. SOV-3155) ... This abject failure of the State Department now to fight for the best interests of American petroleum reserves, American jobs, and American investments involving hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of American stockholders presents a tragic reversal of American diplomacy and must not be allowed to proceed.
"We talk about (and send U.S. Marines) defending the oil flow from the Persian Gulf. Why don't we talk about defending the oil from our own state of Alaska?"
Maybe the White House "moderates" with whom "Santa Claus" Reagan has surrounded himself think Alaska's perpetual Christmas-like snow means he must send the Russians perpetual Christmas-like gifts.
Bah humbug!
The Honorable Sen. Mc Pig
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
December 30, 1984
It was, I think, the great Will Rogers who said: "It's not what people don't know what causes the problem. It is what they do know that ain't so." And so it is with so many lousy ideas proposed as solutions to solve political problems. Many simply won't work.
Examples abound, but here's a good one: "If only the president had the power of a line item veto." This one is easier to refute than most, but the proper response is to simple one would think that even the simple-minded news media would ask upon occasion. How is it that an "item" not at all necessary (or germane) to a particular bill gets in there in the first place? Good question!
Well, it gets in by using what is called a "non-germane amendment." A powerful committee member, especially a committee chairman, can get an amendment saying almost anything attached to a particular bill by virtue of a horse-trade in his committee. It never gets even an appearance much less a vote before the entire membership of the House or Senate except in very rare cases.
This writer frequently badgered Congressman Jim McClure, R-Idaho, to attack this intellectually dishonest practice by senators years ago when McClure was in the House. The latter body had a rule prohibiting such devious behavior, but the Senate did not. I protested long and loud to my friend that he should blow the whistle on the Senate for such a blatant, rotten and dishonest practice. The ordinary citizens were being grossly deceived by their political representatives in Congress and non-germane amendments were obviously (to me) at the root of a great deal of mischief, much of it malicious mischief.
But friend Jim was "on his way up" as they say in the establishment and rocking the boat is not always the best way.
At least Jim steadfastly refused to be a "whistle blower" all those years, choosing instead to be one of the "good ole boys." Now, of course, he's not only one of the boys himself, but he's a member of that "most exclusive club in America," the United States Senate. A member of many important committees, McClure adds prestige to the whole cancerous and crumbling process by refusing to expose the unwholesome practice to the public. It's called power, and I readily admit that that's the way one gets it. To get along you go along.
But back to the line item veto. The president is said to need it to carve out an amendment that has no business whatsoever (i.e., non-germane to the parent bill) in straightforward legislation. If said parent bill is a popular one very few members have the guts to oppose its passage merely because of a sub-rose scheme most voters don't understand anyway.
As an interesting aside, J. Peter Grace, chairman of the prestigious commission that bears his name, calls Washington, D.C., "A city without guts." Hence Congress can pass all sorts of "pork" bills and, yes, even an occasional "good" amendment - but still by subterfuge.
All of which is not to say that my friend McClure is the only one caught up in the tide. "Everybody's doing it," they say, and they are more or less accurate. Gluttony via subterfuge is, indeed, the order of the day in Insane City, D.C. To be sure, it has become institutional, a part of the system.
Most every large corporation and labor union in the world has an office there, if not a suite of offices or a whole multi-storied building to house their full-time lobbyists. The latter are usually called, "Vice President and Chief of Governmental Affairs." The world "affairs" tells something about Washington, but it isn't the secretaries the lobbyists sleep with who cause the problem. It's the politicians. And they do "it" in broad daylight. Small wonder, too, when one realizes the trainloads of "government" money, power and plunder the politicians award to the lucky bidders.
I do not single out McClure personally as responsible for all the crap in Washington. I do single out McClure, however, for his unwillingness to blow the whistle on the whole stinking congressional establishment made up, unfortunately, of both political parties.
Some insight could be gained in a new book entitled Port Barrel, by Fitzgerald and Lipson. The authors are two former members of President Reagan's "Grace Commission" who actually did blow the whistle on government waste - to save some $424 billion over three years.
Pork Barrel, which is subtitled: "The Unexpurgated Grace Commission Story of Congressional Profligacy," says, "Two members of Congress were mentioned most frequently in our agency survey as perpetrators of the parochial imperative (pork barrel ethic) - Rep. Jamie L. Whitten of Mississippi and Sen. James McClure of Idaho."
Paradoxically, their book failed to predict the infamous (and conservative?) McClure would go on to win one of the biggest election victories in Idaho history last month.
Happy New Year, J. Peter Grace.
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The Pragmatic Side of Principle in Pursuit of Public Policy
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