|
 |
Making Statism
Unpopular |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Some Religious Pills to Swallow
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press Tribune
January 6, 1985
Last week the religion page of the Press-Tribune had five news articles that were controversial, newsworthy and especially relevant. In fact, all five could well have been on the front page. In my opinion perhaps they should have been. Here's why:
The top article by the Rev. John Sauser of Caldwell's Montana Baptist Church was headlined "People today are looking for answers." What a headline! Said he, "If you could make and market a pill that contained satisfaction and inner peace you'd have it made." Well the Rev. Sauser, it seems, has such a pill. It's called prayer. But he claims it's hard to get people to come (voluntarily) to prayer meetings.
Perhaps he should get wise. The government school zealots also have such a "pill." At least they think they do, but like the Rev. Sauser they find it "hard" to get people to take their "pill" (voluntarily) so they passed a law making their government schooling pill compulsory.
You see why I say the religious articles are fraught (though perhaps not phrased) with controversy. The Rev. Sauser, while delightfully soft-spoken and thoughtful, has a double-trouble problem in that if he were to suggest his pill, i.e., prayer, in school he'd risk being thrown in jail.
Perhaps he should consult with Idaho Superintendent of Public Instruction Jerry Evans. Evans makes the state's case for compulsory attendance by saying it's his "sworn duty." He pleads amnesty from personal blame, however, in the current Shippy family mess on compulsory attendance by saying he "did not pass the law ..." Of course, neither did he lift a finger to condemn it. Unfortunately, neither did the Rev. Sauser, at least publicly.
The second headline on the religious page was from Bread for the World, Inc., a commentary from UPI it read: "Political will (is) absent to abolish hunger." It was not quite so honest (hence its added qualification for front page use) as the Rev. Sauser's, but it was plain. It was also completely naive. Its subject of world hunger was not so silly as the current draft of the Catholic bishop's pastoral letter only in that it was shorter. A key paragraph may suffice to illustrate that religious group's "unthink":
"It's not that hunger can't be ended ... what is missing is the political will ... We have not had political leadership sufficient to the task." That hogwash is from Bread for the World, Inc.'s leader, the Rev. Arthur Simon, who says his organization "started from scratch and his vision 10 years ago." Methinks it's likely "from scratch" all right. But if the Rev. Simon ever fed anybody much I'll bet it came from someone else's scratch - not his.
In other words, gentle reader, we have indeed had the leadership. We've had it since Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson. We're just getting less and less willing to follow it, thanks in no small part to liberal do-gooders like the Rev. Simon.
The third and fourth headlines on the religious page read: "Year marked by church-state-conflicts" and "Ethics needed in public schools." The latter one, by George Plagenz, says rather than prayer in schools what's needed is a "return to the Ten Commandments."
Well, hooray for Mr. Plagenz, whoever he is, but howinheller we to get 10 religious ideas back into the schools when both the media and the public are so desperate to keep out one prayer? No, it's even too controversial to mention the word prayer, so the request was watered-down to the term "moment of silence." But that, too, has been ruled as against the law in some places. One wonders if Plagenz's admonitions against materialism ever included similar warnings against statism and begging Caesar for a little less government. But, then this would certainly disqualify his articles from use on most front pages.
And speaking of ethics needed in public schools, why not begin with improving language in the schools? Sentence structure, grammar, vocabulary and clean words? What's a clean word? Good question, but I fear a hotly controversial one. Some say too hot, at least for a politician.
Why? Ask Press-Tribune columnist Marguerite Brown who used her very considerable education and vocabulary to excoriate state Rep. Bob Forrey who agreed "ethics were needed in the public schools," hence complained about some "bad" words used in the Nampa school's recommended reading literature. In doing so Forrey was also representing some of his constituents who went to him for help. For his considerable efforts to follow our religious page's well-intentioned exhortations Brown called Forrey a "demagogue."
So much for "People looking for answers ... Political will absent ... Ethics needed in public schools ..." Schooling has become the state religion.
And so much for separation of church and "slate."
Right-To-Work - Labor vs. Labor
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
January 13, 1985
Last week the evening boob-tube carried another couple blasts on the proposed right-to-work (RTW) bill soon to come before our Legislature. The media mongers, most of whom are liberal Democrats, seem almost ready to retch at the near veto-proof majority held by this year's Republicans, hence discuss RTW with long faces and sad ones.
A classic example was Rep. Patty McDermott, a Democrat mostly "owned" by the union mentality of statism, if not by their lobbyists. She's a cool cat nevertheless, but one who in most other legislative matters does her own thing. Not the least of these is to severely intimidate many of the wobbly male politicians. These are both Democrats and Republicans who outweigh her, but fail to tip the scales at all competing in front of the media.
Still, McDermott's statement sounded like her sometime libertarian leanings have wobbled terribly. Whose leg is she trying to pull anyway? "I'm afraid of RTW," said McDermott, "because it's just another government interference with private contracts of private people." Egad!
Now then, gentle reader, I ask you what is "private" about a contractual relationship mandated by coercion forcing an employer to fire an employee after a 30-day period when and if that worker refuses to join their labor union? It's called compulsory unionism and has none of the characteristics of private contracting in any intellectually honest sense of the term. McDermott knows this full well, but plays ball just like the Republicans often do when big business wants some special privilege.
The GOPers have a far worse habit, however; namely, to let the liberals couch this historic controversy in terms of management against labor. Such a characterization is all but impossible to sell to the casual voter simply because that way casts the argument as "rich against poor." Nobody can sell that. indeed, they should not, i.e., if it were true. But it is not true. Not true, in spades.
Seen in its true light the labor union question has been bastardized almost beyond belief, by do-gooders, utopian intellectuals and socialists. But it's held securely in place by much of big business, believe it or not, simply because their mutual control of free entry into the market is almost iron-clad that way. Competition against business, even big business, can be overcome in most production enterprises, but against both big business and big labor new entrants can seldom succeed. A few do, but without strike-breakers and goon squads it's usually too tough.
OK, if not between capital and labor then, who is the labor union fight between? It's between two groups of labor. The organized labor group who is "in" and wants to stay in, versus the unorganized group who is out and wants to get in. That's the true basics of it although labor legislation as far back as the old Wagner Act has served to pave the way for a train-load of so-called modern labor law and federal regulation most of which tends to obscure the bare facts. These facts are in common support of an old law of competition dating at least as far back as Adam Smith. He called it the law of supply and demand and both big business and big labor still use politicians of both parties to keep it out. It's the world's second oldest profession.
You may remember that for some years organized labor has fought to stop several Vermont women from knitting winter apparel at home under contract to clothing manufacturers. At the moment the women are happily knitting away for convenience and profit. But no one knows how long their freedom will last.
Why did the AFL-CIO go after them? The union claimed they did it to protect the women from exploitative employers and unsafe working conditions in the distaffer's own home. The women said, "Hogwash." If they lost their home jobs they have to hire babysitters and work elsewhere. Fortunately such is not yet the case in Idaho.
But one never knows where "too much" freedom from labor unions might lead, so the GOP tends to avoid many intellectual clashes about it. Liberal Republicans, sometimes affectionately called "moderates" by the media, don't like to condemn McDermott's unionism because her socialistic pragmatisms are more intellectually honest than theirs, while the conservatives seem to fear that she might regurgitate the statist's old saw about the world being divided into the "haves" and the "have nots."
Somebody should tell them and her, publicly, that the "haves" are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the "have-nots" have not.
Business-End of the Horse
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
January 20, 1985
Everybody and his dog wants less government, yet government at all levels has grown in spite of all we "good guys" do or say to the contrary. So, perhaps somebody's pulling our leg. Let's take a look.
The labor unions are generally said to favor more government while businessmen, so the story goes, want less government and less taxes. Oh yeah? Well, certainly it "ain't so," according to a brochure put out recently by the Idaho Association of Chambers of Commerce (IACC).
The group, with headquarters this year in Twin Falls, noted that its past accomplishments list the single most significant activity as the "successful passage of a constitutional amendment" to legalize industrial revenue bonds. They term it a "financial tool," but others say it's a tax gimmick. I call it a sad day in Idaho education when the government teachers of English have done such a poor job of not having their students learn how to use: (1) a dictionary and (2) a small degree of economic common sense. Otherwise a public who could read and write well would not put up with today's frequent use of euphemisms such as "financial tools."
What do I mean? First, our well-meaning Congress raises taxes to stimulate the economy. Sure enough, it doesn't work. So they pass another law to lower taxes (industrial revenue bonds are just exactly that). This, too, won't work. All that, remember, from a treasury so full of red ink and deficit dollars that it staggers the mind. In countries all around the world even the dullest politicians are watching and wondering what the American genuises of tax-and-spend will do about the alarming and gigantic federal deficit.
Sound silly? Of course it does. That's because it is, indeed, silly if not downright treasonous. But whatever the label not all of it is in Insane City, D.C. Some of it is right here in Idaho.
Comes now the IACC brochure's section entitled "1985 Legislative Goals." The following are their matters of the highest priority for legislative action for this year: "(1) Establishment of a State Department of Commerce. (2) Funding of a State Department of Commerce (funded within the resources of the state)."
This is not a plank from the platform of the Democrat Party nor even a campaign promise of our government-loving Gov. John Evans. It's from IACC, a group generally thought to be for market alternatives rather than political alternatives. But there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, right from the so-called horse's mouth. That is just exactly where "more government" comes from - main street U.S.A. A government bureau of commerce (read, business). Arraugghh!
Oh sure, it is true that labor union lobbyists and political action committees (PACs) regularly lobby for more government. In fact, their huge funds find their way into the pockets of most of the nations' left-wingers, militant feminists, socialist intellectuals, environmental extremists of every breed and many more, although few of the dues-paying members of labor unions have any idea to whom their leaders funnel money. But for these chambers of commerce to come out publicly and ask for the government itself to form yet another one of its bureaucracies is enough to, well, to make a bureaucrat blush.
Can you believe it? These same businessmen in the IACC want even more money for Idaho government schools, too, "from primary through university level." Schools get 74 percent of the state's entire budget already, but I don't think most people believe it. This time, however, both sides want more - of everything - in order to buy more votes.
The big surprise is that America has survived so very long with as little government as we're getting. In other words, have the labor unions and now the Idaho Association of Chambers of Commerce both publicly abandoned the private sector? Yes sir, they have. How can we be certain? Because, as I said, we now have heard it right from the "horse's mouth."
Unless, of course, we're hearing from the wrong end of the horse.
Government Nanny Behind Every Bush
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
January 27, 1985
Let me give you an interesting quote: "It is the policy of these United States to discourage the parental care of children. More specifically, your government intends through its policies to eliminate the full-time mothers of small children, and to replace them with social parenting."
Now then, no politician has actually said this, nonetheless these are true statements. The 19484 platforms of both major political parties pledged to support schedules transferring more income from families which care for their own children to families which do not. It is all part of the so-called "child care debate," gathering momentum since 1962 as a kind of subtle, if public, attack on motherhood.
Nor is the attack only way back east or just in the big cities. Right here in Caldwell, the City Council has been hot on the trail of yet another new ordinance. So lacking is our glorious, all-wise and all-seeing body of little feudal lords in confidence in natural mothers and fathers to make intelligent decisions they (the Caldwell mayor and City Council) now propose "work permits" for day-care centers. If they don't like the people who set themselves out as qualified and having a good enough house to care for the children - no permit.
In the Idaho Legislature, a plethora of petty politicians presently play upon the perceived stupidity of parents and propose yet another layer of bureaucrats to supervise day-care centers. Unfortunately, the fight rages not over whether it's any of the state's damn business, but rather at what level (county or state) to supervise the babysitter business.
Even the government's very own TV gadfly interviewer, Marc Johnson, interviewed only those politicians favoring yet another layer of bureaucracy about day-care licensure. Johnson should know better (I've told him often enough) than to stack the deck this way on his popular government TV Channel 4. Asks the affable Johnson of this guests as he sets us all up for the kill: "Do you favor day-care via Socialist plan A or Socialist plan B, Mr. Politician?" And like Dr. Pavlov's dogs the Idaho legislators oblige. At great length they debate on Channel 4 over the peanut versus the sunflower seed version of more government.
All of this, of course, is of much less intensity and national importance to the issue of individual freedom, the family and the arrogance of statism-run-amuck than the Shippy family affair in Payette, Idaho.
You'll remember three fathers and three mothers there were thrown in jail for removing their 16 children from the government's compulsory schools. The mothers, by the way, were at the time all nursing small babies, proving "The state (not God) giveth and the state taketh away."
Comes now into this virtual school holocaust-in-statism First District Congressman Larry Craig with a 16-line press release on the Shippy mess dated Jan. 18, 1985. Remember now, Payette is where the Shippy's court of proper jurisdiction is. It's also the home town of U.S. Sen. James McClure. The Craig release says the Shippy affair is a "human tragedy" that has "befallen the Shippy family." Befallen my eye! It was Craig's own state government that slammed the family into jail, thus this whole mess. "Befallen" makes it all sound like an unfortunate act of nature. Like an earthquake, one supposes.
Craig continues: "As an elected official ... I am restricted from intervention. As a citizen, however, I am deeply concerned that all important aspects of this issue are not being examined ... breakup of the family ... a measure of last resort ... Such action should be taken in the best interest of the children." End of release. Egad!
This sent me to the bathroom to cry (ever see a grown man cry?) until I realized nobody would hear. Most of all, my friends Jim McClure and Steve Symms wouldn't hear.
How do I know? Hell, they can't even hear the Shippys in their own backyard. Craig did! Bless his heart for voicing even this infinitesimal amount of distress about the state against the individual.
Compulsion of Unions, Schools
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
February 3, 1985
Since the subject of right-to-work is much in the news alongside of compulsory unionism these days it is most fitting to think of it alongside of compulsory schooling. The matter of right-to-work having been almost talked to death for many years, the compulsory schooling or attendance law brings some welcome relief.
Though welcome as somewhat new, it is not without its controversy, but there's an interesting twist somehow tending to be overlooked. Right-to-work is partly perceived as an exercise in compelling (by law) a rise in workers' standard of living, i.e., their own welfare. But the schools' compulsory attendance laws on the other hand are perceived as compelling a rise (by law) in everybody's standard of education, i.e., everybody else's welfare. Not their own.
It is indeed a curious switch. Nevertheless most people's feelings are terribly intense about both their own standard of living (jobs) and their neighbors' standard of education (read, schooling), hence both groups rush to the government to get them to pass a law. Of course what is often overlooked is the huge difference between education and schooling. Still, I think it is curious that some fear a right-to-work law for their own freedom yet demand compulsory attendance laws to take away their neighbors' freedom, that is, to school their own children.
Perhaps we should make a real change. We could repeal the compulsory schooling laws and replace them with voluntary learning. But then some would ask, what would we do with the giant and growing government school bureaucracy? They could go to work for the private schools, of course.
Another curious thing in all these businesses the government runs is that they have so little competition, generally speaking. Imagine that! Just like the past office which has a monopoly on carrying first class mail, it fights like a female tiger protecting her kittens when a private entrepreneur wants to "give" them some competition. In fact, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Corp. in Denver paid a $2,000 fine for carrying its own "first class" mail in its own trucks between its own factories and plants. So it is, one supposes, not unusual to see a government monopoly such as schools and post offices fight to protect their special interest.
But the screaming that many (not all) do about not enough money for teachers' salaries is also curious. Sen. Dave Little, R-Emmett, chairman of the Joint Finance Committee, told me last week that his school district had to spend approximately $100,000 in a suit to defend a reduction in force at their school when they laid off five teachers a year or two ago. Aside from this rather irrational state of not being able to run their own affairs the school was inundated with 200 applications from teachers wanting to go to work at the "starvation" wages that had been paid those five teachers.
And speaking of Idaho's starvation teachers' wages, please note these few statistics distributed by Sen. Little. They're Research Findings On Rural Districts in Idaho, Oregon and Washington (for teachers):
"Average Beginning Salaries (1982-83) Nation, $12,492; Idaho, $12,634; Oregon, $13,821; Washington, $12,228. Average Top Salary (1982-83) Nation, $20,500; Idaho, $20,310; Washington, $24,7948. Average Current Salary (1982-83) Nation, $16,337; Idaho, $16,270; Washington, $19,730."
Let me emphasize these statistics are from rural districts in the three states. Given Little's current distribution of them, however, I am assuming that urban teachers' salaries may be somewhat higher yet comparable, but Little was unavailable and I could not confirm the urban group comparisons. Still, statistics are the tool of socialist enterprises while supply and demand are the tool of business enterprises - at least where competition is voluntary, i.e., for a free society to remain free its citizens must not be compulsory customers.
All of which brings me to Thomas Jefferson's idea of "compulsory customers" or government school's compulsory attendance laws. In Padover's famous biography of Jefferson, on page 171, the author states: "In this connection it is noteworthy that Jefferson, ever the lover of liberty, hesitated to make attendance in elementary schools compulsory. Coercion of any kind was so distasteful to him that he would not see it applied even in so vital a matter as public education." (Now Jefferson):
"It is better to tolerate the rare instances of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible asportation (wrenching away) and education of the infant against the will of the father."
May God bless Sam Shippy, his two brothers and their families - and Tom Jefferson.
Issues Distorted by Liberal Media
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
February 10, 1985
What follows is merely a little homespun attempt to show by a few examples how the news media distorts important issues on public policy. Whether or not it is done with intent to mislead, or it is accidental or from a kind of intellectual hang-up we'll leave for another day.
For openers let's just touch briefly on the much-discussed three Shippy families who were jailed, they forcibly separated from their children for removing them from the government' compulsory school system. The media's characterization and portrayal of that tragic scene was simply one of "education versus ignorance." Thus ended the public discussion. "Education" won. Never mind that that is not and never was the issue. The issue is simply: who should have power over the minor children's mind? - an awesome responsibility in a country where virtually nobody, nobody, nobody is against education. But an ever-growing number of responsible citizens do question the values of the public school indoctrination monopoly.
Gambling is another subject almost as emotional as schooling. The subject is presently labeled as "the people's right to choose." To hear the media portrayal of the state lottery it is all but the main unalienable right endowed by their Creator as set forth by the founding fathers in the Constitution. Seldom is the media prone to call it what it is, i.e., shall we have a government-run lottery as a something-for-nothing scheme to substitute for too high taxes? As in counterfeiting it'd be legal for government but illegal for individuals. Typically, "individual" choice is not newsworthy.
Now then, much could be said for decriminalizing gambling, but the media speaks only of "legalizing" it. The fact is legalized gambling is spreading. Racetrack betting is permitted in more than half the states, government-run lotteries are legal in 10 or 15 states, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. There are legal casinos in Nevada, Puerto Rico and Atlantic City, N.J. The news space given to winners of government lotteries is front page stuff and growing. Never mind that private gambling enterprises pay out a much bigger percentage to their customers and never mind that our neighboring state of Washington's lottery may have to dig into the state's general fund of taxpayer money to pay for its new but poorly managed lottery business. But that's not news either.
The question of whether each individual should have the freedom to choose to gamble doesn't seem newsworthy to the media. Collective choice, it seems, it always news. Given the way our media phrases the question on the state's running still another "freedom" (a lottery), we are almost certain to get it in the end (pun intended).
And now the day-care center operators are up for a "work permit." That's what the idea of occupational licensure is called in the Soviet Union where they have a kind of truth-in-labeling on a few subjects. This is not to say those who push for government involvement in day-care "standards" are not sincere. They are.
It is to say that special interest legislation almost always turns out to be another scheme to keep out the competition. Sure, some operators of day-care centers might be queer. Some may abuse children, too. So do some parents. Are we then to license parents for breeding purposes? Are we to protect to government for yet another layer of bureaucrats to supervise cases such as the Episcopal Church within whose ranks once raged a fight to ordain homosexual priests?
Why doesn't the media portrayal of the day-care issue include the term "social parenting"? That's what it's all about. In fact, more federal aid for non-parental care has been promised. The 1984 GOP platform took pride in increasing child-care credits (including families making $28,000 or less), and pledged to increase it further. The Democrat platform called for expanded day-care facilities paid for by the federal government or business corporations.
"Social parenting," says the family-oriented Rockford Institute, "in short, now stands virtually unopposed as official United States policy. By way of contrast, caring for and rearing one's own children in America has become a privilege for which one must pay."
They might well have added, one must pay in terms of lost individual responsibility and freedom of choice, as well as taxes - thanks in no small part to the liberal education we're getting from a mostly liberal news media reporting on whether America's glass of water is half empty or half full.
Government Won't Help Farmers
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
February 17, 1985
The former secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, now dean emeritus at Purdue University, was in town last week. He was the keynote speaker and panelist on a controversial free trade, anti-free trade symposium sponsored by the Center for the Study of Market Alternatives (CSMA), Caldwell, Nampa Chamber of Commerce, the ag-show people and the county extension service.
A lively exchange ensued articulated on both sides by well-qualified spokesmen for agriculture including a dairyman from New York whose free trade position was an unique as it was well thought out. The audience of about 650, mostly farmers, stayed all afternoon to hear the panel debate on the history and future of our government "managed" mess in agriculture.
Since those who missed the affair held in conjunction with Caldwell's annual Ag Day weekend can get a tape recording from CSMA (Box 1001, Caldwell), I want to focus some attention on another agricultural forum on a similar subject sponsored by U.S. Sens. James McClure and Steve Symms. It was held Feb. 11 at the Caldwell City Hall before a large crowd, but unlike the CSMA symposium the "free market" got short shrift.
This writer has oft-times been critical of McClure for sort of "forgetting" his home address in more or less conservative Idaho. He's been in Insane City, D.C., for many years now and living in that "zoo" is like living in a mosquito-infested swamp, i.e., it tends to get into one's blood after a time.
Like malaria, sooner or later the dieases of power takes its toll. The senior senator is essentially a good man, but let's just say sometimes the wool gets pulled over his eyes, which brings me to the point I want to make.
Nobody pulled the wool over McClure's eyes in at least one instance in the above-mentioned ag forum. To McClure's everlasting credit he pinpointed a basic, if understandable, flaw in many farmers' thinking, and he did it in a clever, communicative way.
One thoughtful sounding farmer requested the government stop wool imports from New Zealand. Since he was a wool grower such action, he said, would make the government's present wool "incentive" payments more effective.
Immediately following that testimony came a suggestion from yet another farmer wanting the government to help farmers "market" their produce in foreign countries. He explained that they could grow the stuff without any help, but marketing the stuff at a profit was very difficult, especially, one supposes, when farmers produce more of a given commodity than consumers are willing to pay for.
McClure stopped the show after the second testifier with: "I want to draw attention to the last two testimonies which are almost contradictory. One wants the government to stop imports (on wool) while his fellow farmers want government help to increase exports. It is difficult for us to structure a farm policy when you fellows don't have your stories together." McClure made an excellent point, one that seldom gets made these days: in order to be free to export we must also be free to import.
Let me hasten to add that farmers are mostly just trying to survive, just trying to stay afloat, so one cannot blame them for trying to suggest something, anything or almost anything from the government. Risk of bankruptcy for farmers is very real and increasing.
However, the media leaping at every opportunity to condemn farm subsidies while slow to mention the countless government benefits, i.e., "subsidies," to Communist countries, not to mention New York City, Lockheed, Chrysler, Penn Central, big banks, organized labor, rapid transit, etc., ad nauseum, is unfair to the farmer. At least the farmers get up at dawn, work like eager beavers and put in many hard hours for their welfare, if welfare be what it is.
However, it is not welfare for farmers. It is welfare for politicians who buy votes with it. Perhaps farmers should wake up even earlier in the morning to fight government's meddling into their affairs at all.
The government to whom they now appeal is the same government that gave us the post office monopoly, a monstrous and bankrupt Social Security plan that's mostly a chain-letter scheme, a no-win "police action" in Korea, a no-win "hamburger grinder" in Vietnam, a virtually socialized medicine scheme of skyrocketing costs, a multi-trillion (1,000 billion) dollar national debt and a deficit so huge it has the whole financial world shaking in its boots. Still farmers stand in line to ask for more meddling from that same government.
McClure should have explained that private ownership and a free market is the only scheme that can possibly work. But that's tough to do. Why? Because the same schools the government subsidy "helped" so overmuch since World War II also hate free-market capitalism.
They teach government as though it were some sort of shrine, all of which tends to explain why so many farmers stand in line to worship there.
Let the Professors Try Farming
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
February 24, 1985
The headline read: "Poor faculty morale: the impact on campus." but it did not come from the regular media.
The front page headline came from a recent issue of the Argonaut, student newspaper of the University of Idaho at Moscow. It arose from a faculty committee formed last April to survey and report attitudes of individual faculty members: 700 forms were distributed and 369 teachers replied emphasizing tension and turf.
"The survey results, entitled Report of the Blue Ribbon Committee, concluded that the morale of the U of I faculty is low ... most common factor ... was lack of money ... which ... creates tension in ... salaries ... support funds ... reduced fringe benefits, new administrative position ...", the article explained.
"It's an observation that's pretty common," said department chairman Michael Moody. "There is a tension caused by the lack of money to go around. That's the devil in all this - the inadequate funding creates tension, not only between faculty members, but between department." (Education only gets about 75 percent of Idaho's entire budget.) That blockbuster, gentle reader, came not from a teacher of comedy or pathology, but from the department of foreign languages.
The shortage of money probably won't be foreign, however, to Idaho farmer-taxpayers, many of whom are facing bankruptcy. They no longer can help pay any of the professor's salary. Others in the state's mining and lumber industry who are out of work or under part-time working conditions need money, too. One wonders about their "tensions" caused by "lack of money to go around." One wonders, further, if lack of money to "go around" ought never to occur in teachers or college professors at all as participating in the real world for which they are presumably preparing students.
But money isn't everything for the U of I professors. No sir! The blue ribbon report goes on: "In some departments, faculty feel that they have no real influence on administrative decisions." The campus paper's student reporter didn't see fit to get the administrations' view as to whether or not the faculty should actually make any administrative decisions, nor if a conflict of opinion as to tenure were to arise - who should veto whom.
Well, such question did indeed arise in 1982. It involved a popular economics professor, Dr. John Wenders. In fact, his tenured teaching of the dismal science was so very "undismal" in Arizona, where he taught prior to coming to the U of I, that the Moscow administration had to make some concessions to Wenders in order to get him to come to Idaho. An offer of early tenure consideration was one of them. (Wenders also loves to hunt Idaho's big game.)
The economics faculty tenure committee, according to the Argonaut, voted against him receiving early tenure. Apparently they were going to show former college dean, Dr. Charles McQuillen, now executive manager of the state Board of Education in Boise, that he shouldn't have just gone out of state back in 1980 without their permission, even to hire an "expert" economist.
Now, never mind that Wenders is a very popular free-market type professor. His credentials were examined and approved with enthusiasm for immediate tenure and acceptance by 11 or 12 major universities who were polled in a straw vote as a result of the controversy and never mind that two separate U of I administrative chieftains including the school's president, Richard Gibb, last year overruled the faculty's negative vote against the popular new professor.
The Argonaut reporter says: "Since then there has existed serious tension between members in the Economics Department, which has interfered with morale." Another professor said, "They (the professors) become frustrated that they have no effective voice in the affairs of the university." Voice, hell, that's just labor union mentality.
It was as clear as it was unfortunate that the author of the Argonaut piece, the managing editor by the way, favored the status quo mentality of the economics department tenure committee who voted against Wenders. (According to the Argonaut the vote was seven against, four in favor.) Yet maybe the administration didn't tell the reporter the whole story, i.e., petty jealousies, ideologies, turf, intra-department competition and all that, including just who's boss(?).
Perhaps the U of I administration, like most establishments, tended to think their school should let the managers manage and the teachers teach. But many professors today are inclined to be egalitarians who want everybody to be equal.
Of course the latter is impossible. However, it tends to explain both the professor's unpopular "tension" about money and morale, and Wenders' unpopular (with them) impact on campus.
Damn the Shippys, Full Speed Ahead
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
March 3, 1985
There is an old anti-communist story that explains how the people in European countries could tell when the government had, at last, gone too far: "It's when all those things that are not prohibited are made compulsory."
That has to be how Sam Shippy, his two brothers and their wives feel now that Rep. Robert Forrey's House Bill 109 was finally killed, bottled up in the Senate Education Committee. The New Plymouth farm families of land levelers have had their minor children forcibly taken from them, perhaps permanently, because they do not approve of the government's compulsory school system.
Members of the Senate committee said other senators urged them to "bottle up" the controversy in committee so the whole membership would not have to take a public stand on the super-emotional issue. Since such strong feelings were held on both the freedom of choice side versus the government's compulsory side, some senators were afraid of the next election.
Lest you think all of the emotion-charged debate was only on the part of church-related and religious persons just consider the following statements in a letter from Superintendent Michael Jacobsen of New Plymouth School District No. 372. It is addressed to the Senate Education Committee explaining his irritations with the admittedly religious and prosperous families of land levelers, the Shippys.
The four and one half page letter on school district stationery has a logo of a 17th century ship. No doubt it is the historic Mayflower. It is captioned "Home of the Pilgrims" about which, more later.
Writes Jacobsen, "Another term that shows up in (Forrey's) bill's statement of purpose is 'religious freedom.' Many abuses take place in the world under the guise of 'religion': There is terrorism throughout the Middle East; recently a couple in the eastern U.S. cooked their little girl in an oven because 'God told them to do it'; and a few years ago a father in Logan, Utah, stabbed his 1 1/2 year old boy to death because, 'God told him to do it.' No legitimate religion would allow people to do things that are not in the best interest of the children. Compulsory school attendance laws are essential to protect children and society." How is that gentle reader. For emotional overkill? And from a school official!
Of course, it is true that Forrey's HB 109 did try to weaken a bad law, i.e., compulsory attendance laws which throw in jail both mothers and fathers when and if they do not like the schools. But wait! The punch line of Jacobsen's offensive missile against the Shippys which favors compulsory attendance for his student "customers" came in the last paragraph.
It read: "House Bill 109 sailed through the House largely because there was much misinformation and emotionalism. I would hope that rationalism and objectivity will prevail in the Senate, and I urge you to defeat House Bill 109." How rational and objective is it to talk of killing children in the name of God and comparing that with the Shippy situation?!
Now then, leaving aside the fact that most of those who favor the superintendent's emotional position against freedom of choice in schooling are the same ones who favor freedom of choice for abortion. And leaving aside the fact that if government schools are so red hot, why must we force families to compel their loves ones to attend, Jacobsen and his well-meaning statists are also in deep water in another way this time involving religion.
The logo on the above-mentioned New Plymouth School District's letterhead clearly implied praise for the Pilgrims sailed to America. Before the settlers disembarked at Cape Cod on Nov. 11, 1620, they signed the famous "Mayflower Compact." It began with: "In the name of god Amen." A potential church-state religion problem, no doubt, in New Plymouth.
Jacobsen's letterhead logo may now need to be changed to a different ship, namely, "The Titanic" with him as captain shouting, "Damn the Shippys! Full speed ahead!"
Understanding the Message
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribunje
March 10, 1985
During the past two years this writer spent some seven weeks in Insane City, D.C., in an effort (however minimal I admit) to inject some "market alternative" ideas into at least one senator's office there. However slight were the inroads I made, I did succeed in making a few into not one, but two senatorial offices.
One of those was the office of U.S. Sen. Sam Hayakawa, a conservative from California. At that time the peppery semantics professor and lawmakers of Japanese ancestry had not fully made up his mind whether or not to seek re-election. I suggested: "Senator, I hop you will not run for office this time, but instead go back to California and head up a national effort to clean up the language. There is a semantic war on and you are almost without doubt the only man in America to whom these other lawmakers on Capitol Hill just might listen. Too many conservatives, for example, seem not to even realize that language in general and words in particular can make meaningful communication almost impossible. It is indeed an awesome tool in the war of ideas no matter whether these 'clowns' in Congress recognize it or not."
Hayakawa's eyes lit up above an unusually big winning smile as he strode over to his bookshelf and got a copy of his famous book, Language in Thought and Action, a clever and insightful book on semantics. After autographing it with a friendly message to me personally he said, "Thank you, Ralph, I just may well consider seriously your most welcome if unusual suggestion."
While I doubt that I had a lot to do with his decision, the California senator did follow my suggestion. He did not seek re-election. He formed an organization called USEnglish (one word). Its purpose is to sponsor an amendment to the Constitution entitled the "English Language Amendment," one which in my opinion is long overdue.
Here's what he says it will do: "If passed, this amendment will stop the use of the so-called 'bilingual ballot.' It will allow the instruction of English in non-English languages to accelerate the learning of English, but do away with the use of foreign languages in subject-matter instruction. It will establish English as the official language of federal, state and local government business.
"There are several things a constitutional amendment will not do. It does not discourage the use of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Arabis, or any other language for religious or ceremonial occasions. It does not discourage the use of foreign languages for domestic or community use or for the preservation of cherishes ancestral cultures. It does not affect the teaching of foreign languages to American students. Indeed, I believe American students should study more foreign languages, not fewer."
So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, at least until the intellectual thugs, political power mongers, and so forth and so forth, ad nauseum, get through promoting their own special personal power interests by distorting and thus confusing the real "power of the people."
We now enjoy a common language and thereby some commonly accepted ideas about individual freedom and individual responsibility. I do admit, though, the collectivist ideas do tend to be fanatically followed by many educators and so very many self-appointed and so-called leaders of minority groups seeking positions of power for themselves. So be watching for these doomsayers to get noisier as pursuit of the English Language Amendment progresses.
And last but not least - hats off to Sen. Steve Symms who has wisely elected to take up where Hayakawa left off in the U.S. Senate and wage his (Symms') war of ideas semantically. It'll be cheaper than the one the Pentagon is fighting and may very well do more good. In addition, Symms is the Senate's leading spokesman for making English the nation's official language.
Bad Ideas Worse than Penthouse
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
March 17, 1985
There is a fine young state senator from Twin Falls, Larrey Anderson, who, in the opinion of many, distinguished himself in this year's legislative session. He is not only a red-hot conservative, something increasingly more difficult to find in the Magic Valley city these days, but he's also a graduate of Harvard University.
You all remember Harvard. That, of course, is the route aspiring politicians take in order to get to Washington, D.C. They go to Harvard and turn left. Well, this young man turned right. Also I predict he will continue to make a name for himself both in his occupation and his political career, but he made a bad kind of misguided move in the last days of the session. He offered a resolution directing the presidents of Idaho's three universities to ban the sale of Playboy and Penthouse magazines from the campuses.
Anderson said, "The periodicals are pornographic, degrading to women and may lead readers to commit sex crimes." All of which I'm more or less sympathetic to, but there is a much more important, if different, aspect to the whole matter, rendering the peppery and bright legislators' position plumb wrong.
I said to him during the two rather brief visits I had with him on his "book banning" idea: "Gosh, Larrey, is this all you have to say about what's going on in our universities? Bad words? Yes. Bad pictures? Yes. But what about an ever so much worse condition that's been going on in those classrooms for decades? I mean bad ideas. What about bad ideas?"
My guess is that folks should ask another legislator who has most assuredly distinguished himself in the past session, Rep. Robert Forrey, R-Nampa, what he thinks now about his flap with the Nampa High School officials regarding books on their recommended and/or required reading lists. I think he'd say now he missed a golden opportunity to expose the bad ideas being promoted too often in today's schools rather than make such a fuss about bad words as he (Forrey) once did on behalf of one of his Nampa constituents.
"Many writers have noted similarities between America today and Germany, before Hitler ..." says Leonard Peikoff in one of the most spectacular books ever written on such a comparison, The Ominous Parallels.
"In an advanced, civilized country, a handful of men were able to gain for their criminal schemes the enthusiastic baking of millions of decent, educated, law-abiding citizens." Remember, Germany had great universities many centuries before our country had log cabins, Washington, D.C., or even federal aid to education.
This fascinating scholar goes on to ask, "What is the factor that made all this possible?" He meant Hitler's phenomenal popularity - especially with the intellectuals. "The Nazis could not have won the support of the German masses," Peikoff writes, "but for the systematic preaching of a complex array of theories, doctrines, opinions, notions, beliefs (i.e., ideas).
"Germany was ideologically ripe for Hitler. The intellectual groundwork had been prepared. The country's ideas a certain special category of ideas were ready. There is a science whose whose subject matter is that category of ideas."
He refers to the science of philosophy, then explains: "Today in our colleges, this science has sunk to the lowest point in its history. Its teachers have declared that it has no questions to ask, no method to follow, no answers to offer. As a result, it is disappearing - losing its identity, its intelligibility, its students, and the last vestiges of its once noble reputation.
"Philosophy is the study of the nature of existence of knowledge and of values. The branch of philosophy that studies existence is metaphysics and the branch of philosophy that applies ethics to social questions is politics which studies the nature of social systems and the proper functions of government. Politics is not the start, but the product of a philosophical system."
All of which brings me to an idea completely missed by Sen. Anderson and, unfortunately, most conservatives; namely, that selling magazines - any magazine, is not a "proper function of government," hence the only good argument about the propriety of Playboy and Penthouse. The Government should only do for the people what they cannot do for themselves. In a society based largely on private enterprise the government should no more furnish recreational reading material for sale than gourmet foods, motorbikes or lease space for a used car lot.
Anderson apparently forgot the good idea of his favorite Harvard philosophy professor, Robert Nozik, who said; "Government should not prohibit capitalist acts among consenting adults." So much for over-kill on bad words and real-kill on good ideas.
Andrus Will Likely Clean Dave's Clock
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
March 24, 1985
There are two important positions which the Idaho GOP needs to fill in the immediate future. The first, for all practical purposes, is already filled by present Lt. Gov. David Leroy who has been in hot pursuit of the office of governor since his early days in high school.
The tall, handsome and intelligent Republican politician spoke publicly to his state convention some years ago in Moscow, saying, "It is time for our party to take a page from the book of Ralph Smeed and get out of the personality-cult business and into the arena of ideas and principles." But some GOPers think that was the limit of Leroy's stomach for controversy and concepts.
Of course, politicians have been both avoiding controversy and exploiting it for centuries so we cannot fault Leroy alone, but it is also true that this writer can find few partisans who think he can defeat the affable former governor and former U.S. Secretary of Interior, Cecil Andrus, despite the latter's socialist and government-loving policies.
Leroy just might pull it off, however, if the state GOP gets its organization together statewide. He's been studying and practicing politics all his life and has a stature of delivery second, perhaps, only to the great communicator himself. President Reagan, however, to the consternation of the Republican National Committee, tends to actually say something substantive in his speeches.
This explains why the liberal media refer so often to his great speaking ability in order for them to avoid repeating his popularly constructed conservative and/or anti-government ideas. It's called, "damning with faint praise."
Seen in this light Leroy will soon have to start his campaign speaking in terms of content with something besides pearl-shaped tones. Leroy has a lot going for him if he can just overcome my recent, if friendly, jibe: "David, you can talk more and say less than almost any politician in the state."
His wife, half jokingly, scolded me, but then I explained, "Don't fret. It's called how to succeed in politics and David is very success-oriented; besides, Cecil has only more government for sale while David loves both government and private business.
Just where individual responsibility, private property and individual freedom of choice come into the Idaho scene in the contest, and just who is going to pay for it all will remain to be seen.
But one thing is for sure: if the Republicans are not able to effectively replace conservative attorney and state chairman Dennis Olson, who recently "passed on to his reward," they will be in big, big trouble. The Democrats' platform of big government, free lunch, free ride, free everything (just raise the tax penalty on the rich) is still popular with the promising politicians. Hence, a good statewide organization is absolutely necessary to get a meaningful message across to enough voters.
This bring me to the other super-important person the GOP needs to choose if they are to succeed next election. Several names have been mentioned as candidates for the almost impossible and crucial job of GOP state chairman: Lee Shellman from north Idaho, former state Sen. Jim Ellsworth of Salmon, Butch Otter and a few unknown quantities from eastern Idaho.
Otter, by the way, just might choose to run for lieutenant governor thereby injecting into Leroy's lackluster gubernatorial campaign the glow, the guts and gusto it so desperately needs.
Then there's state Sen. Phil Batt. Of all those spoken about so far he is far and away the best and most uniquely suited for the job, not only as a so-called peacemaker, but as a potentially forthright and articulate spokesman for wildly divergent persons and groups upon whom U.S. Sen. Steve Symms, Leroy and other GOPers must depend in order to succeed in 1986.
This writer has sometimes been critical of Batt; nevertheless, he's a good man. Somebody must (and will) take the job of state chairman. It is a tremendously thankless one, and furthermore, although it can be, it is not usually a very rewarding one. If there's a dime's worth of gumption for anything except "special interests" in Idaho business there should be a real campaign for Batt in this particular case.
Press-Tribune columnist and liberal Democrat, Terry Reilly, bleeds long and loud that Idaho has only one party. He's politically nuts. With liberals like state Sen. Laird Noh, R-Twin Falls, and Rep. Janet Hay, R-Nampa, who needs two parties? Batt is the only man in Idaho who could make this kind of pragmatism praiseworthy.
He sought the job some years ago. This time the job should, instead, seek him.
More Than Starvation in Ethiopia
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
March 31, 1985
When the nightly news on TV is not telling us the tragic stories of the suffering and starving natives in Ethiopia, they sometimes treat us with something else for a change. That something is currently a crusade against South Africa.
Why should these two countries' situations be of interest to Americans in general and Idahoans in particular? Well, for starters, we have food for sale and can't sell it thanks in large part to dumb government policies and programs. These can often be seen more clearly by watching our foreign policy toward our friends and enemies.
Liberals avoid anything much to do with the fact that Ethiopian blacks are ruled by a Communist government, and South African blacks are ruled by an anti-Communist government. But some comparisons are interesting.
It would seem the liberal establishment is far more outraged at apartheid government in South Africa than they are with the Communist one in Ethiopia. This may account for our media's almost total silence on comparisons between the two countries' politics.
Let me hasten to add that the drought in the Horn of Africa does indeed make matters horrendously worse, but it does not explain why the Marxist rulers adamantly withhold donated food from their own people in the north of Ethiopia where there is considerable anti-Communist sentiment. Perhaps the drought does explain why their Communist government bought some 80,000 cases of scotch whiskey to celebrate their Marxist political anniversary right in the midst of all those natives needing food so desperately.
Neither does the shortage of water explain the new statue of V.I. Lenin built at a reported cost of some $5 million. In 1983 the Ethiopians spent $22.5 million simply to host the annual meeting of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa. This included $2.5 million for Mercedes Benz limousines and $2.2 million to build and furnish a villa for Libyan dictator-tyrant Muamar Khaddafi and his entourage. A special plane was chartered to airlift - not the precious water the shortage of which the liberals blame entirely on the drought, but to haul 3,500 cases of scotch whiskey and 800 cases of champagne for the communists.
One hopes the booze was exempt from the $100 per ton duty the government charges against the food charitable countries in the West are falling over one another to ship to the starving Ethiopian natives.
In the same issue of the Presbyterian Layman magazine where I saw the above story there was another announcement: "More than $2 million to relieve hunger in Ethiopia and other African countries ... has been collected." The article ended with: "(Further) Contributions for Ethiopia should be designated 'Ethiopian Famine Relief.'" But then, many liberated churches are naive in their concern.
Still, it didn't say that any of the "relief" monies would be sent to those starving black natives in South Africa for whom the American liberals bleed so profusely. On the other hand why do American liberals complain with such vehemence and alarm about South Africa's treatment of blacks? Because those blacks are denied their civil rights. They are not allowed to vote, they are treated like second and third class citizens. No question about it, apartheid (discrimination on basis of color) is a lousy system, to put it mildly and the news media liberals are enraged, somewhat understandably, on the question.
But aside from the devastating silence of the media's reference to the gigantic problem of one-man, one-vote democracy in a culture dominated perhaps five to one by people, most of whom are only a step or two out of the loin-cloth, the liberal media steadfastly refuses to say why apartheid stays so firmly entrenched in South Africa. The reason is that organized labor's white unions do not want the competition from their black "fellows" who, in order to raise their own (blacks) standard of living, would no doubt be willing to work - for less. Apartheid keeps these blacks out of the competition with white union members.
That's one reason why Idahoans should be interested in African affairs, since they spotlight issues such as the right-to-work law which will be hotly debated in Idaho prior to it being put on the ballot next year. Thus we can note more clearly and carefully in which direction American and Idahoans are being pressured to go.
That is, we should ask these questions: (1) Since excess statism prevails in both Ethiopia and south Africa which country is the least bad? And (2) which country's underprivileged class has the least freedoms - such as the right-to-work? And shouldn't we be expanding individual freedoms of choice such as right-to-work here at home?
She's Intelligent, But Wrong
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
April 7, 1985
In last Sunday's edition of the Press-Tribune moderate columnist Marguerite Brown bemoaned what she claimed to be the "erosion ... of local decision making and control."
I would not bother to comment herein on what this otherwise intelligent, caring, concerned and former city councilwoman gadfly of Nampa wrote except that her column represents a point of view held by altogether too many well-intentioned do-gooders these days. Please let me explain.
This lovely lady has for years practiced what Richard Weaver's book made famous among a rather important audience, namely, that "Ideas have consequences." To her everlasting credit Brown has vigorously pursued her ideas along with a bevy of other similarly oriented ladies in Nampa, many of them wives of prosperous and intelligent doctors who themselves ought to know better. Certainly they ought to all know better since their livelihood comes from the private sector as opposed to the public or government sector.
This brings me to what seems to dominate Brown's every waking moment of every day and many nights, i.e., collectivist affairs and the public weal. It should be individualist affairs and the public weal.
She does make the timely note that, unfortunately, government too often winds up "higher" in the hands of the country or the state or, shades of Orwell's 1984, the federal government. But what does the lovely lady of education-worship suggest as the alternative? Local coercion. She calls it "local government."
To illustrate: why is it somehow better for the local constable to command us to pray in the schools (or not to pray) than it is for President Reagan to command us? She does not say. The thing that she makes clear is that some govern-mentality should prevail - preferably at the lower level. "Local control," she insists. She emphasizes the word "local." This writer emphasizes the other word, "control." In any conflict between the two I'll give you two guesses which one wins - always wins.
Mrs. Brown (journalism practice dictates the exclusive use of her last name, but to such an attractive statist I'll use the prefix Mrs. upon occasion) laments state Sen. Dane Watkins' stuffing in the trunk of his car some legislation he didn't like in order to keep it from coming out of committee for a vote of the pee-pull.
Bad practice perhaps, but she said nothing when a Senate committee bottled up Rep. Robert Forrey's bill to soften the government's compulsory attendance laws. The latter passed the House only a few days before with an overwhelming majority. Seems as if we protest bottling up bills only when it is "our" ox being gored.
Brown (I'm becoming a little more irritated now so I'm back to calling her by journalism's harsher term) says we might be about to lose "federal revenue sharing," thus it may "cause the Idaho Legislature to listen at last to the cities." Balderdash! Why should they? She doesn't say why. Except, perhaps, inferentially, by reference to "need." Sure cities need. State do, too. So does the federal "need." Egad! What else's new?
Brown is a lady of big, but contradictory, intellect. She reads the New York Times (the liberal's bible, by the way) as if its revealed wisdom were published from the Mount of Olives. She has lead many of Nampa school's crusades and that city's liberary crusades for decades.
She is a very literate lady, but to use the term federal "revenue sharing" as she does without at least a snide reference to bastardizing the English language is - well, a glaring oversight at best. It is rather to be labeled "deficit sharing" in honor of where moderates seem to think all sustenance floweth, i.e., government. Never mind that local government can do nothing that state or federal bureaucrats cannot do without a printing press or a gun.
Brown is really, seriously, a delightful lady, one with a sense of humor and even at times a sense of the common sense, but when it comes to suggesting private solutions as did the author of perhaps the second most influential book in history, Adam smith's Wealth of Nations, she Absent Without Leave (AWOL).
Mrs. Brown's (note she's back in my good graces somewhat) column said she was "puzzled" why we should send our money to Washington have it "laundered before returning it to New Meadows (read, local government) to fix the streets ..." In fact, she asks the question rhetorically of state Sen. Dane Watkins.
Far better she should have asked her doctor-husband who has just graduated "Entrepreneur cum laude" by investing a huge sum of his own private "revenue shared" money to revive downtown Nampa in search of a profit. Bless his heart.
It's absolutely the only place the lovely lady columnist and former local politician will find what she likes to call "honest to goodness local decision making and control."
Maybe We Get What We Deserve
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
April 14, 1985
In last week's news was a UPI wire story about President Reagan's daughter, Maureen Reagan, who publicly endorsed a registered Democrat "in today's primary election" in Los Angeles. The Republican challenger was "hopping mad" and sent a telegram of protest to President Reagan and the Republican National Committee.
My first reaction was one of an irritated, "so what?" but of no particular importance until the following came to my mind. During my first visit to then Congressman Steve Symms back in 1972 or 1973, I said to him one evening after my having spent some time in the House of Representatives visitors' gallery: "You know, Steve, I got a sinking feeling watching you fellows this afternoon. It was because I'm afraid it might be true that we just may be getting representative government after all. Those politicians are just as dumb, just as smart, just as confused and just as human as the folks back home. The real bad news is they're spending other people's money - not their own, and buying votes with it for themselves."
Could it be that the news media, wire services, authors and editors could actually be as dumb or dull-witted as they seem to think the public is? Why? Well, for openers, the UPI reporter didn't even see fit to ask Reagan's flamboyant daughter Maureen just why she endorsed the Democrat city councilwoman over and above the GOPer, but no such question was even asked! This would seem to be the most important substance in such a story. But substance is not what "news" is all about among all too many media people these days.
Or could it be the same way I saw the situation in the House of Representatives? Could it be that the media more or less accurately represents the so-called mentality and perception of the public? If this is so, then those statists of both liberal and conservative and, especially, populist persuasion may be in the main stream after all, since they advocate counting noses to determine truth and then enforcing it with a billy club. It's called "one-man, one-vote solves all."
What a tragedy that we have such a personality cult in America instead of an examination of the ideas and principles involved. These could be followed with intelligent dialogue and debate. Without these our media doesn't even have to report much of the substance of basic importance. Why?
In other words, perhaps the Maureen Reagan endorsed candidate, even though a Democrat, was the best candidate. Maybe the Republican candidate advocated clearly some very lousy policies. However, the UPI reporter's readers were deemed not interested or not of sufficient intelligence to want the why of it all. Too bad too, since there are almost as many socialists among the GOP as among the Democrats. And, forgive me, almost as many political hacks.
So why is it, gentle reader, that folks today are treated with so much foolish news reporting or what passes for reporting? My guess it just may be the same reason why I perceived the U.S. House of Representatives as did the great J. Peter Grace, chairman of the prestigious Grace Commission, i.e., "a bunch of clowns."
It may well be the sad state of philosophy as practiced in today's universities, especially its journalism and political science classes. One of America's fine non-statist philosophers explains it rather well:
"Today academic philosophy in America has disappeared ... With its practitioners divided between absurd word-chopping and wordy absurdity-worship, it has completed a full retreat: a retreat by one group from asking any significant questions, a retreat by the other from any means of answering them. The public in consequence, has retreated from formal philosophy, which it now regards as an object of contempt.
"To understand the state of a society, one must discover the extent to which a given philosophy penetrates its spirit and institutions (e.g., media, schools, business, etc.). On this basis, one can then explain a society's collapse - or if it still has a chance, forecast its future."
If America's future can indeed, be forecast by who its famous politician's daughters endorse or the few thoughtful questions the reporters ask we may, Heaven forbid, get even more of that same asinine personality cult instead of statesmanship.
So far, however, it isn't at all clear that most of the media can distinguish between the two.
Our Watchdog, the Meda
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
April 21, 1985
Inquiries come and inquiries go, but this writer has yet to hear the results of an inquiry that showed any editor, columnist, reporter or publisher who has been a more consistent and reasonable critic of the media than Ralph Smeed.
In fact, Bill Hall, editorial page editor of the Lewiston Morning Tribune used to tell me during the years his paper carried my column each Sunday: "Ralph, you ought not to be so terribly critical of the media. These guys up here think you're paranoid."
I responded, "They only say that, Bill, because it's true. And so is everybody else who knows what is going on." Well, even U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., knows it and is conducting a nationwide effort to take over CBS and fire the super-liberal anchorman, Dan Rather.
But exceptions to the liberal bias even in national newspapers do show up from time to time and perhaps it will come as a welcome if humorous surprise to non-liberals and conservatives to hear of some illustrations which do creep into visibility. Maybe they'll furnish some moral support.
For example, the left-wing Washington Post carried this daring (for them) expose on a Democrat, believe it or not, on Oct. 10, 19484:
"Last Christmas, the College of the Virgin Islands paid a $2,000 speaking fee to Sen. J. Bennett Johnston, D-La., and covered round-trip air fares for him and his wife ...
"In the continuing resolutions that provides fiscal 1985 funds for several federal agencies, Johnston persuaded the Senate to add $500,000 for the college to establish a Caribbean Cultural Center ...
"Johnston said, 'It was a dumb thing of me to put the amendment in like that. Of course, there was no quid pro quo and it hadn't occurred to me that anyone would make a connection.'"
The Washington-based CATO Institute chief, my friend to whom I'm indebted for drawing attention to these items, said he "would have asked for a lot more than $2,000 ..."
CATO's president is Ed Crane, one of the country's best libertarian think-tank chieftains. He sends along this one from the Washington Times, a newspaper almost as conservative and anti-communist as the Washington Post is liberal and pro-left. It too came in October '85:
"Rep. Thomas Corcoran, R-Ill. ... (was) nominated to the (Synthetic Fuels Corp.) board by Mr. Reagan late Wednesday ... a long-time critic of the SFC, Mr. Corcoran voted against the establishment of the corporation in 19480 ...
"Mr. Corcoran, who once called the SFC 'a turkey this country cannot afford,' said he can now support it under new congressional guidelines." Crane, a neat and perceptive sort f whistleblower, says of Corcoran's new found acceptance of SFC: "Where you stand depends on where you sit."
Next is one from the Wall Street Journal, a paper not frequently known as a corporation whistleblower, yet here it is from the Aug. 24, 1984, issue:
"The U.S. shoe industry is trying to convince Congress that growing reliance on imported footwear is 'jeopardizing the national security of the U.S.' The headline on a recent industry press release cautioned, Military Might Go Barefoot in Case of War ... 'That shortage could cripple our battle plans in Europe, the group says, where NATO is de-emphasizing tanks and armored divisions. This strategy will fail if the foot soldier is without shoes,' Footwear Industries of America president George Langstaff warns."
And last, and methinks perhaps best, of all the "good news" for today is from (I hate to admit it) the Washington Post again. Oct. 10, 19484: "In Annapolis, the Maryland Court of Appeals upheld the right of race tracks in the state to bar convicted gamblers." Egad!
So take heart, gentle reader, it's getting clearer and clearer that it is the world that's upside down - not you and me.
A Liberal Behind Every Bush
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
April 28, 1985
Last Sunday CBS-TV had 10 minutes or so on the national news about whether or not to abolish the Job Corps as proposed by President Reagan. Inasmuch as our own nearby Marsing has a Job Corps facility and since one of the two U.S. senators interviewed was Idaho's own Steve Symms, I watched with anticipation. It may have heralded next year's election campaign.
By way of brief but bigtime background: Symms was interviewed on camera in the backyard of his home in Alexandria, Va., for 15 whole minutes. Robert Pierpoint, a CBS newscaster, asked good questions of the Idaho senator and seemed quite interested and satisfied with the answers.
In fact, Symms himself was in good form, he said, with rational and thoughtful private sector alternatives to the fabulously expensive federal "job" making programs. "Of course," Symms explained to me, "one never knows how ornery the rascals will be when they do their final editing and cut-outs. But let's watch and see."
Well, we soon found out how "ornery" was the giant CBS (the company some of the more vocal conservatives have taken to calling: "Communist Broadcasting System.") Certainly the label may seem too strong, but it is surely getting clearer why Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., is so enthusiastic in his crusade to have conservatives buy controlling interest in CBS.
Pierpoint's Sunday broadcast was clearly a liberal whitewash and apology for keeping the Job Corps on the federal payroll. He showed Symms for only approximately 20 seconds. Symms was saying that the program had no doubt helped some of the corpsmen, but it was too terribly expensive. The newscaster then turned his camera to the liberal Sen. Charles Mathias, R-Md. who explained that even though the $15,000 per "student" per year cost was going up next year to $17,500 each the price was much cheaper than to house the Job Corps men "in prison." Mathias' liberal feelings are no doubt sincere, but CBS's Pierpoint was taking no chance. He gave Mathias about 300 percent more air time than he gave to Symms' counter-position.
But that is not the only difference. Symms' position was portrayed principally as merely a cost factor, i.e., a nice program but costs too much. Sort of a bah-humbug with a smile. Conservative alternatives as explained by Symms during the bulk of his 15-minute interview were cut out.
Of course no one expects CBS to use all of Symms' or Mathias' entire interview, but as the Idaho senator noted to me after the broadcast, "Gosh, if all I had was Pierpoint's Sunday morning broadcast about the Job Corps to judge by I, too, would vote to keep it. CBS gave its typical liberal slant to the broadcast."
With this kind of "reporting" one can virtually guarantee that the federal budget deficit - enormous as it is, and growing - will never be cut down to manageable size. What then? Print more money! That's what. It has been happening for centuries. It will happen again. And it can, and probably will, happen here.
Remember the Germans who had great universities long before we had even log cabins? They caved in to the welfare-state, cure-all mentality. It took a wheelbarrow full of German marks to buy a loaf of bread, remember? Also, financial chaos isn't the only result. civil chaos always follows. People then demand a strong leader - to restore order.
In Germany that leader was Adolph Hitler. He restored it too!
Now back to Symms, Mathias, Helms and the news media (CBS in this case), and the coming Idaho election. The principle race, of course, is Symms vs. Gov. John Evans for the U.S. Senate. How can super-conservative Sen. Steve Symms possibly be elected against super-liberal Gov. John Evans when so many news moguls, both state and national, hold the "CBS mentality" for political "reporting"?
This writer's best guess is that Symms cannot defeat Evan's only talent: "democratic socialism," unless and until his conservative managers come up with an aggressive and understandable offense. symms might counter and call his ideas "democratic capitalism," except that anything capitalist is hard to launch as an offense with 20-second TV snatches done by a generally hostile and liberal news media.
Eldridge Cleaver's Revolution
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
May 5, 1985
There are, I suppose, many interesting contradictions and double standards in life, but some stand out during special times. And who will gainsay that these times of crisis are not special?
One of these special situations is the matter of race, a very sensitive area, one that some persons of color tend to trade on to gain public attention and thus political power with a phony claim to "represent the poor" - as if they were more able, somehow, because of their different skin color rather than in spite of it.
Of course, there is also the qualification of "strong feelings" as such an authority. Most of us of whatever ideology, religion, political persuasion, etc., have felt the urge, if not even claimed it outright, as justification for a stand on some issue we were not able or were too embarrassed to articulate.
Well, I met just such a strong-feeling individual recently. His name is Eldridge Cleaver, former member and leader of the Black Panthers and member of various hard core Communist Party groups all over the world, but especially here in the USA.
Cleaver's speech and my visiting with him afterward was itself worth the whole effort of the trip - clear to Los Angeles and back - although I had some other important reasons for this particular sojourn.
You may remember Cleaver was an extreme leftist black revolutionary given to burning churches, denouncing capitalism and pushing other more violent criminal activities which caused him to be shot, arrested and convicted. He then escaped to Cuba into the waiting and welcoming arms of Fidel Castro, certainly, also, to avoid prison in America.
After several years in Cuba, Algeria, Soviet Russia, communist North Korea and elsewhere, studying in their major think tanks and universities he came back voluntarily to the USA - and jail. He has, since then, become a major anti-communist speaker and leader of some note.
But before this ideological metamorphosis came about, some pretty big thoughts and actions came and went involving this black zealot in search of a better life for himself and his fellow blacks.
Drawing upon these many stories Cleaver is now becoming a much sought-after speaker especially following an unusual experience during one of his speeches.
"I was arguing with these communist students, these off-campus communists, and there were people in the audience who began to speak up and take my side. I liked that, so I began to open my ears and eyes to see who these people were who were supporting me," Cleaver said.
He went on to say he was not particularly fearful, but concerned when he found out that his newly found supporters were inspired by the Rev. Sun Yung Moon, head of the Unification Church. (Cleaver, by the way, is Mormon.)
"I thought Rev. Moon was a bogeyman from all the stuff I had been hearing, and so I was very glad I took the time to sit down to listen to them and see why everybody was so scared of them. I wanted to know. I came to the conclusion that it is not because of their theology. It is because of their very sharp, piercing thrust that they have against the communists.
"I'm very happy I had the opportunity to work with them (the 'Moonies' as he affectionately calls them) ... particularly when I got to know Dr. Bo Hi Pak (Moon's number two leader and head of their worldwide anti-communist crusade), then I found myself in a schizophrenic situation because I was in contact with many other people and religions, organizations and groups, and as soon as they found out I was talking with these people they just cut me off and stopped talking to me and didn't bother to inquire into it themselves."
This writer, having had exactly that same experience, is glad to give an enthusiastic "amen" to Cleaver's observation. I have since attended two first-class conferences sponsored by their organization which, by the way, pushes none of their church's theology - just an in-depth examination of Christianity alongside communist ideology and how the latter is fast taking over the world.
I'll have more next week about this unusual and fabulously interesting man and my interest in the Unification Church-sponsored CAUSA (pronounced cow-za) International organization to oppose communism. Also I'll be commenting on Cleaver's statement:
"I took a very dim view of religion. I felt it had to be struggled against along with the other evils that I thought were contained incapitalism, and the whole free enterprise system."
So stay tuned, Presbyterians, Angela Davis is not the only black who hated discrimination - and capitalism.
Learning the Facts of Communist Life
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
May 12, 1985
Last week this writer promised more about the black, once violent revolutionary Eldridge Cleaver, and some interesting observations he made since leaving the Communist Party. After several years, he has joined forces with American anti-communists. His remarks were part of a speech made in Los Angeles recently after which I had the privilege of some personal conversation.
Cleaver explained that most everybody wants to use, expand and preserve our freedom and rights, but since leaving the communists he's found it was something like a man who picked up a stick to kill a snake. Happily, however, the snake turned out to be a stick. But then something much worse happened: The stick he picked up turned out to be a snake. Such was his experience of some years on the inside with the communists.
"We have to look at this, and I've found that a lot of people don't want to think ... when they're confronted with a problem they don't think they can cope with they tend to play ostrich and stick their heads in the (sand) ... a lot of people in America today are playing ostrich ..."
The former revolutionary said he "used to hate ministers ... hate religion ... I followed an analysis that blamed a lot of slavery on the ministry ... that Christianity was the white man's religion. I used to really believe as Karl Marx taught that religion is the opium of the masses ... that here was an analysis, a program that understood the capitalistic economic system."
"I got shot," Cleaver said, "and there was one other Panther who got shot. Three policemen got shot and one member of the party, Bobby Hutton, got killed." Since Cleaver was on parole during all this, he had to escape to avoid prison.
Cuba was the closest and Castro and Co. rolled out the red (no pun intended) carpet for him. Cuba looked great - at first.
The happiness and so-called solidarity, however, were only for the cameras and the foreign press. The real Cuba was a sham, Cleaver told us, and the common people were captive and unhappy. Somehow the American media can't seem to understand this.
A closed society (freedom to travel is a privilege reserved for only the party faithful) absolutely must restrict people's travel else they "vote with their feet." The Red's Berlin Wall for example, still stands in stark silence surrounded with mine fields and machine guns - to keep the people from so "voting" inside the communists' professed "Worker's Paradise." The wall stands "in silence" since our major media in the U.S. doesn't see it as morally newsworthy any more.
Cleaver said after he was in Cuba a few months he noticed some people just plain disappeared. He heard gun shots in the night and discovered they shot dissenters. Who said terrorism doesn't work? Of course it works. "Cuba was a very bad place," he said.
After eight months Cleaver decided to look at the full-blown communist countries. "Maybe, after a few years, the system would mature." Still having hopes for collectivism, he left for a closer look and went to live in Algeria in North Africa. During his four years there he traveled extensively throughout Africa and the Middle East, mostly behind the Iron Curtain (countries friendly to the U.S. might extradite Cleaver, a fugitive, back to America and prison). He visited Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, the Soviet Union several times, China, North Korea and Vietnam.
"In every one of these countries," said Cleaver, "I would find the situation even worse than I had seen it in Cuba. I went to the Kim II Sung University in North Korea to study the ideology, and to study how to organize a serious revolutionary movement (along) Marxist-Leninist lines." He had thought that Cuba had a young revolution that perhaps hadn't had time to consolidate and get things together. But just the opposite was found. "The longer it (communism) was in the saddle the more rotten and corrupt it was," Cleaver noted.
He had thought, remember, that communists were merely super-eager do-gooders, wanting to do good for the poor, much like CBS's Dan Rather tends to portray Castro during his "fact-finding" trips down to visit with neighboring Cuba.
"The more I studied about what the communists wanted to do to America and to the world, the more I couldn't buy it. Because when I talked about trashing it or tearing it down ... I was talking about kicking the rascals (politicians) out, basically, and rearranging some of the things that I felt were unjust here (in the U.S.)."
It's not entirely unlike today's well-meaning liberals, i.e., they support communist Nicaragua, in spite of and in light of Cuba's exporting communism.
Cleaver next week: "You know that if the blind lead the blind, then we can't make it."
Freedom Just Doesn't Happen
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
May 19, 1985
In this final of my three-part series on Eldridge Cleaver, the black former communist revolutionary and his teaming up with Rev. Sun Yung Moon's anti-communist movement CAUSA. I want to remind you of his statement: "If the blind lead the blind then we can't make it." He meant "make it" against the communists, of course. He's not sure we will.
In spite of what many well-meaning liberals or moderates would have us believe today there is a real world and Cleaver lived in it. There at the bottom of what he saw as the misery level of our racist society the black militant explained how he hated preachers: "I used to really believe as (Karl) Marx taught that religion was the opium of the masses."
He explains that there is no private property in communist countries: "They say that they're mad at the capitalists because private property is held too narrowly by X-number of capitalists. They overthrow that situation and (then) the power and the property and everything else (is) held by an even narrower set of people (the commissars)."
I cite this little item of his for two reasons: (1) Why do you suppose there is so much agreement on almost every college campus in America against capitalism? And (2) why do you suppose there is such enthusiasm in schools to put down religion or at least creationism and contrary-wise such a passion to teach evolution? Think about it! Today's papers and magazines are full of an almost frantic contest between evolution and creationism all over the nation, especially in the primary and secondary schools. Why?
Cleaver, a former atheist and communist zealot, sums it up this way: "They (communists) talk about this Big Bang theory and how there were some molecules of matter swirled around in the primeval empty void, and these molecules of matter collided with each other and sparks jumped off and went down and hit a rock, and a lizard crawled out from under that rock and there's your grandfather, right?
"We used to burn up churches and things and we used to abuse people because we thought we were abusing our own enemy. That's why this whole thing about ideology is so important. Because if you don't have your ideology you don't know who you're fighting or who you are, who your enemy is, or what way you should be going."
Well, what's all this once-a-communist, now-a-Christian stuff have to do with today's drug culture in America? What does it have to do with the flap(s) in Idaho schools and their seemingly endless contests about freedom of religion or as President Reagan calls it "freedom from religion"? What does Cleaver's experience have to do with the Sam Shippy family and their four young boys now confined in a state detention home even though they've committed no crime at all (how come you've not read about this in your family newspaper?).
And then there's two little Shippy girls, as sweet and bright-eyed youngsters as you'd ever want to meet who are confined in a foster home at the orders of an Idaho government judge. But get this! These girls from a deeply religious and devout family have been denied by that court their God-given privilege to attend their church. Egad.
Well, Idaho's entire congressional delegations said nothing even though the Shippy "holocaust" happened almost right under the doorstep of Sen. James McClure's and Congressman Larry Craig's Idaho homes. That's what it's about folks. That and the fact that U.S. Sen. Steve Symms ran several of his famous and almost imspiring campaigns based on the slogan "Freedom is the issue." One supposes that is only if and when the snob establishment sees it that way, i.e., when it's fairly safe. It's called pragmatism.
That's what it's about. Religious freedom? Not necessarily. Rather it's individual freedom vs. collectivism. Religious freedom is, of course, a big and important part. So important, in fact, that Cleaver recounted something with a twist of religious irony in it that happened after his jail term, conversion to Christianity and anti-communism:
"I started off hobnobbing at the top, going to presidential prayer breakfasts, stuff like that. And then I met these guys, (Dr. Bo Hi Pak and the CAUSA Staff). And I remember about that time Billy Graham was talking about the religious freedom that they have in the Soviet Union and it made me mad."
Now gentle reader, why don't you get angry too and call the Center for Study of Market Alternatives in Caldwell at 454-1984 for a tape of Cleaver's whole speech? Maybe you'll get mad enough to even invest some money in freedom.
Vent South Africa Anger at Soviets
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
May 26, 1985
"America's foreign policy is so pathologically irrational that many people believe something clever must be hidden in it." That, by a famous philosopher, pretty well states the case against our collectivist foreign policy of the past several decades. Samples abound, but the Berlin Wall is a beautiful illustration. The Soviets must build their brutal wall to keep in their people who want out. The U.S. may soon have to build some sort of wall, but only to keep people out, not keep them in.
Old stuff you say? Well if it's so old then why have we spent $100 to $300 billion each year for decades to protect ourselves from the Russians behind that wall? Doesn't make much sense, does it? That's so, especially, given that we're losing the propanganda war even with the facts almost entirely on our side.
What makes so many Americans such as (late of Nampa) the Rev. Nathaniel Pierce and others so gung-ho to demonstrate against United States foreign policy, but strangely not against Soviet Russia's? Since Pierce removed to the place of his childhood in Tip O'Neill's Massachusetts, other liberals of similar persuasion seem to have all but taken over the U.S. State Department and now they are demonstrating and howling for America to use coercion, if not force, against anti-communist South Africa. Not a peep against the Soviets.
All this while American taxpayers finance, yes finance, high technology, truck factories, food, etc., etc., ad nauseum, for the most barbaric butchers in world history - the Soviet Union. Make any sense? Of course not. Then why isn't this asininity the basis of the Democrats' and socialists' criticisms of America? Why? Why? Why?
Russia's and China's communist governments shoot their citizens who try to leave those countries. Yet South Africa's blacks, who are indeed discriminated against by a severely racist government, do not get shot trying to escape. In fact, many blacks from other "liberated" countries in Africa try to "escape" into South Africa because a black's standard of living is so much higher there.
One South African Indian told me when I visited there: "Ralph, you may wonder why we don't go back to India since we so vigorously protest South Africa's racist policies. Well, the reason is quite simple. Conditions are much worse for us in India. We're better off here." But that story, gentle reader, doesn't get much play in our liberal news media, in Congress, or for that matter on campus where much of the foolish dissent gets its so-called credibility.
Ideas have consequences, but just you try to get ideas of individualism and individual responsibility up to bat. Consider how we lose even on the home front: A former minor league baseball pitcher, John Fulgham, is suing for $30,000 for an injured shoulder received during a downpour of rain. Had the game been called off, he claims, he would not have slipped in the mud.
It gets worse. Xerox Corp. has been ordered to give Catherine McDermott a huge sum for back pay and mental anguish. She was nearly 100 pounds overweight when she was turned down for a job 11 years ago. State law in New York forbids discrimination against the disabled, a term the court said should be interpreted "broadly" to cover her.
According to The Intellectual Activist, an excellent free market newsletter which chronicles asinine stories like these, a male flight attendant sued United Airlines after it fired him for being 13 pounds above its maximum allowed weight. Bill Tudyman, a perfectly healthy bodybuilder, argued that since federal law forbids discrimination against "qualified handicapped" people, his being declared overweight placed him in that category. He lost, but how does such nonsense even get into court?
Well, so much for samples of America's typical and pathologically irrational foreign policy, and so much for the similarly irrational trend in our "legal" domestic policy. Okay then, what are we to make of all this? Could it be that we've come to idolize government?
Dr. Leonard Peikoff gives us a clue in his absolutely brilliant book The Ominous Parllels (between pre-Hitler Germany and today's America). Says he: "To understand the state of a society, one must discover the extent to which a given philosophy penetrates its spirit and its institutions. On this basis, one can then explain a society's collapse - or, if it still has a chance, forecast its future.
"This is what can make intelligible the fact of Hitler's rise, and the possibility of America's fall."
Socialism - a 4-Letter Word
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
June 2, 1985
Back in the latter part of the 1960s a conservative friend and I made what we thought was a valiant effort to get the Presbyterian Church, to which at that time we both belonged, out of the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the National Council of Churches (NCC).
Admittedly, most modern popular churches belonged to these organizations, but we thought the councils were mostly a bad influence, hence "our" church should get out. The reason was that these major churches had each spawned an official social action agency, almost every one of which is based on the notion that the free enterprise society had failed.
They were then committed to the proposition that our basic need is for political controls on economic life. These church-sponsored programs were and still are similar to those of the Socialist Party of which many churchmen were members at one time or another. Of course such memberships are not necessary now, since time and "education" has made the word socialism at least as socially acceptable as capitalism, perhaps even more so.
Well, my friend and I did get to first base, but not to second base. We failed to get the then preacher's attention although this was probably understandable given the leftist tendencies of almost all the theological seminaries.
What was hard to swallow was the seeming dull-wittedness on the part of the congregation. They didn't like socialism, mind you, they just looked at us as though we probably were wrong and, anyway, "the preacher was such a nice man" (which he was) and "probably knew what he was doing." (which he didn't.)
We lost, as I said, but not before we succeeded in getting quite a number of members to subscribe to the Preesbyterian Layman, a tabloid newspaper headquartered in Pennsylvania. The Layman's purpose is to work within the church to bring about a change away from what some call a kind of religious social gospel and a rather vigorous anti-capitalistic mentality.
As you might imagine, since the members who manage and publish the Layman tend also to be conservative, it was about as exciting as holding somebody's horse. Still, it wasn't all bad, of course, just not as much fun to read as most publications put out by liberals. Too bad, but too true.
Well, years passed. Angela Davis came and went, but her communist/socialist story attracted a $10,000 donation of support from the Presbyterian's main body (not the Layman). This did succeed in waking up a few members, but nothing counter-revolutionary. At least not yet. Comes now, after lo' these many years, am ost welcome new thrust of the Presbyterian Layman. While I seldom read it carefully, I have seen a few good articles in it from time to time, but nothing like the current May/June centerfold two-page "dynamite" article by the famous black economist, Dr. Walter Williams of George Mason University.
According to Williams, the Presbyterians now have an attack on capitalism that parallels the infamous and similar anti-capitalistic attack published as the Catholic bishops' "Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy." The Presbyterian letter is called "Christian Faith and Economic Justice."
Williams' rather lengthy Presbyterian critique says both church organizations' letters "... are excellent examples of increasing hostility to our form of social organization - capitalism and ... constitute an attack on the primary institution that serves to insure personal liberty - private property rights."
As I reflect back a bit maybe our efforts were not in vain, after all. Maybe, just maybe, Presbyterians hereabouts will now give some long overdue attention to someone besides the Rev. Jesse Jackson, another black who, according to Professor Williams, "Would not give me air if I were in a bottle."
The bright and unusual professor, himself a refugee of poverty, divorced parents and the black ghetto, suggests why Jackson may hate him: "Both the bishops' letter and the Presbyterian Church's article are an exercise in fantasy. Much of what is said is either untrue or can have merit only if we view the attainment of a Utopia or heaven-on-earth a real possibility. Of course no such possibility exists."
Today, almost 20 years later, liberal Presbyterians still dominate the main church, but if they insist on paying dues, however small, to the NCC and WCC, perhaps they will find a place in their well-meaning and forgiving hearts for my conservative friend (referred to above), U.S. Sen. Steve Symms. His own list of economic advisors today includes Williams, in person, a Presbyterian-approved black expert on "economic justice."
Greenleaf Offers Something Unique
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
June 9, 1985
The headline last week read "Greenleaf Academy facing closure." The Quaker Church school, teaching grades K through 12, faces huge financial problems including near-term payroll and long-term debt of $750,000.
In a surprise speech before Greenleaf Friends Academy, commencement speaker Gary Morgan asked if this year's class would be the last to graduate from the popular little private school. It normally has about 260 students and has been in existence for 77 years so the shock to the community is fairly understandable.
But what seems to escape the attention, year after year after year of so many private school leaders, is the overwhelming fact of competition from the government's "free" compulsory schools. Certainly there are many dedicated and competent teachers in the government schools, some no doubt even have religious orientation of good quality but religion per se is not a requirement. In fact, teaching religion is specifically forbidden in government schools. In Greenleaf it's mandatory.
It is here that Greenleaf Friends Academy has a strong asset that they may have been under-emphasizing, even overlooking, since an additional 100 students would add hardly at all to their expenses and one need not be a math major to multiply their $1,700 tuition times 100 added students to get $170,000 per year new income. Perhaps more than enough.
But wait! Lest you think the Quakers' troubles are over, they are not. I will take, for example, 750 friends at $1,000 each just to keep their ship afloat. It is only after that when new customers, new policies and, hopefully, new economics could be brought into play. Still it is possible, even eminently possible, if only a few important conditions in today's education could be recognized.
Here are some observations Greenleaf Academy may want to consider:
(1) Their non-government school is in direct competition with government schools for many of the same "customers."
No doubt their religious leanings will make them feel uneasy pointing out their competition's shortcomings as well as their own school's advantages, but since the government has chosen to saddle the Wuaker school's patrons with what is clearly "double-taxation" they should state this for all to see - publicly.
(2) Although both the Friends' school and the government's school(s) generally are in big financial trouble, certainly the latter cannot point blame at the former. Public tax policy is to blame for much of the Quakers' predicament. Government's "committee" of educators, however sincere, still spend tax money most of which is collected at the point of a gun while the Quakers' money is collected 100 percent voluntarily. This, too, must be said aloud and most of all publicly.
Even though "point of a gun" may sound negative it is nonetheless true, hence voluntarism and self-responsibility also should be praised and made an open and laudatory part of the Quaker school's principles and precepts - publicly. And it cannot be stated too soon, nor too loudly, if they expect to raise the money.
Education in America in general and Idaho in particular is in big trouble, partly because public school teachers and administrators who would like, or have no objections to, teaching religion and religious values have their hands tied by law. They are harassed by perhaps the most peer-group oriented profession in history, the educators who should, instead, by called schoolers. The Quakers are under no such limitations. In fact, they are not even compelled to teach the "other side" of religion, i.e., humanism and evolution - at least not yet. The Quakers simply must get this story out.
They do have something else to sell, too, at their school; namely a good basic attitude, a healthy work ethic, respect for private property, a decent regard for one's neighbor and the spiritual and moral antecedents to a God-centered freedom, responsibility and extremely limited government. There's discipline there, too, I'm told. If the student insists on misbehaving he (or she) is expelled. In government schools this is hard to do regardless of many fine teachers therein who would dearly love added discipline.
More could be said in favor of the Quakers' Greenleaf Academy, many qualities no doubt more important than I've related here, but Samuel Blumenfeld, educator and author of Is Public Education Really Necessary? and NEA, Trojan Horse in Education pretty well sums it up for me: "The simple truth that experience has taught us is that the most potent and significant expression of statism (overbearing government) is a State education system. Without it, statism is impossible. With it, the State can, and has, become everything."
Quakers to the contrary, notwithstanding. Thank heaven!
Limit Politicos, Not Imports
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
June 16, 1985
Some months ago I phoned one of the most important functionaries close to Sen. Steve Symms telling the gentleman they had better get ready for a new round of fiery demand for trade protection. The current trade imbalance with Japan, about $39 billion, is seen to be bad, even sinister, and growing. There's also a kind of hatred brewing amongst the public. In some respects it's reminiscent of pre-World War II and the old Smoot-Hawley bill.
Unfortunately, my friend dismissed my advice saying, more or less, that I worry too much and notwithstanding the fact that election time is fact that election time is fast approaching trade with Japan would probably not be an overriding campaign issue in Idaho.
Well, guess what! I was not only correct as to U.S. trade relations with Japan, we now have big trade problems with Canada. Our good neighbor to the north wants to favor the American consumers and builders with "cheap" lumber so they (we) can build cheap houses, etc. But prices of forest products have lately been low, so that many logging mills in the Northwest have laid off hundreds of workers, hence the understandable scream for government's trade protection.
Congressman Larry Craig and U.S. Sen. James McClure, both Republicans of Idaho, have leaped to the fore to follow the mentality of counting noses to determine what's right and true. Let me hasten to add that that is precisely what has been going on for centuries. "The only thing Americans learn from history," it is rightly said, "it is they don't learn anything from history."
Of course, when Idaho loggers and lumber companies are out of work it is to be expected that politicians will rush to unscrew what they screwed up to begin with. Certainly no one wants Idahoans to be out of work, but politicians cause most of the problem.
Yet why is there no market for Idaho logs and Idaho lumber at a reasonable price? No one even asks. It doesn't make sense.
Why doesn't anyone even ask? Really now, just try to remember when the government ever did anything that made sense.
Wait a minute you say. Canadian lumber is coming into the U.S. at a price that is too cheap. Why is it too cheap/ their government subsidizes their lumber industry. Maybe this is partly true. If it is I'll bet you a wooden nickel they got the idea from Uncle Sam. In any event, Craig and McClure have introduced legislation demanding a quota on these lumber and timber bargains the Canadians want to foist on American homebuilders at bargain basement or almost give-away prices.
Now then, there are two ways to bail out an industry by restricting foreign imports, (1) via a tariff or penalty on all imports of a given product and (2) via a quota. A tariff tends to let the pricing system allocate the distribution of the product even though at an artificially higher price. The quota says flatly: "You may import only what amount the politicians and/or bureaucrats say you can import - price be damned." The quota also tends to foster bribery and political chicanery of all sorts in efforts to buy allotments, quotas and all sorts of other influence peddling and log-rollinng that ingenious and innovative entrepreneurs and competitors can think of to get one of the government's "work permits."
By all odds if one must have either a tariff or a quota the tariff is the lesser of the two protectionists evils, especially to bail out our socialist timber lands. Most of them are socialist, you know.
Let me hasten to add that it is understandable for the laborers in north Idaho to demand that their politicians "do something." I guess what is not so understandable is how government edict, government coercion, government bureaucrats and government this, government that and almost everything that moves must be brought about by one or another governmental agencies. in truth all these agencies can do is to stop the market from working. As a matter of fact they cannot even do that for very long. But they never stop their meddling, for votes, or course.
One economist, Dr. Steve Hanke, of Johns Hopkins University, put it this way: "One promising thing given the most recent (trade) flap with Japan is that for once we've got all the politicians saying they want all the (trade) barriers knocked down." In other words, their rhetoric seems to be better, but their deeds are as dastardly as ever. In an age old sense it's a kind of "special interest" bail-out twist, albeit still a socialist bail-out.
Hanke, a professor of applied economics and advisor to the Joint Economics Committee of Congress adds that, "... not all the politicians seem to realize that many of the barriers (to free trade) are here at home." It is especially true given the fact that Canada is merely filling the timber market gap caused by the U.S. Forest Service's dramatic reduction, believe it or not, in the allowable timber-cut from the gigantic government forests.
How about a quota on politicians who suck and blow in the same breath?
Free Trade Fails Without Freedom
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
June 23, 1985
The $39 billion trade imbalance with Japan is creating hard feelings between the two countries' citizens without their having much interest in the "trade-offs" in the aftermath. Some are infuriating. Some are interesting, but they affect many Idahoans both directly and indirectly. Let's look at a few.
Many years ago some meatpacker friends of mine went to Japan and promoted a lively trade there for the beef hides which for years they had hardly been able to sell at home. There was virtually no government interference nor help in this trading affair between the American independent meatpackers and the Japanese leather manufacturers who wanted the hides - and at a high price.
All went well until the U.S. labor unions in "our" domestic shoe manufacturing industry got wind of what was happening. They went immediately to their batallions of lobbyists and, almost without even a fight, our politicians fell all over themselves to "give" the unions what they wanted - cheap hides. It was said to be saving U.S. workers' jobs, but it succeeded in helping to price the American shoe out of the world market and thus, of course, out of the American market. American made shoes are almost a thing of history.
About the time the hide market went up due to the above-mentioned Japanese trade demand some other friends of mine in the wheat business also went to Japan. Just as the hide promoters succeeded so did the wheat merchants one of whom, by the way, still lives in Boise. They traveled the length and breadth of Japan demonstrating to the inscrutable Orientals how flour made from Idaho wheat was better than rice. These entrepreneurs were treated like visiting princes parading their wares of bread, biscuits, cookies and pastry from the wonderful kitchens of America. It took a while but the demonstrations of private enterprise and trade paid off. Soon there was a brand new market for cheaper American wheat and flour. (Japan's 1984 subsidy to wheat growers was about $10 per hundredweight.)
What happened? Well the Japanese Diet got in the way and that is no pun. What we call Congress they call Diet. It is, or was at that time, dominated by about 70 percent Japanese farmers. Did these tillers of the soil in the land of the Rising Sun shut the door on their comrade's ability to import American wheat? No. They slammed the door shut! Thus they killed what was to have been a good deal for both the Japanese consumer and the American producers plus the thousands of other traders and service people who attend to the needs of both.
Well, there are other stories including at least one concerning the J.R. Simplot company's attempt to market potato products in Japan. What happened? You guessed it. Governments, including ours to be sure, can't trade. All they can do is muck things up for everybody, i.e., almost everybody. Exceptions abound.
For example, those who go to Washington (and Boise when the Legislature is in session) to buy favors. And don't tell me that favors (read, power) are not for sale. Indeed, that's about all government can market. I mean power. It's been going on for centuries, but the school system, another virtual monopoly run by the government, can't seem to find history teachers who know anything about it, i.e., anything but politics and politicians or generals and wars. One supposes it's easier to give the kiddies a quantifiable test such as, "When was the war of 1812?"
Well, OK, but what's all this have to do with our trade imbalance with Japan? Answer: everything! But mainly it is to say that we should get government out of trade - period. Both governments. It'd promote peace, too. In fact, one of the kindest and wisest professors I ever had and a dear friend, Dr. F.A. Harper, the economist who founded the great Institute for Humane Studies, said it so very well: "Ralph, when goods are prevented from crossing borders - soldiers will." Trade, not protectionism, fosters goodwill.
It's an interesting aside that some of the Catholic popes were fond of saying "Pray for peace," but were they to change that to "Pray for free trade," it'd do more good against war and help to beat the band to reduce our trade deficit.
OK, so what could the U.S. do for trade - besides get the hell out of the way? Well, they could begin with a couple items: (1) The Forest Service has reduced the allowable timber cut form their government timber lands about 50 percent in the last several years. No wonder Idaho loggers are out of jobs. (2) Our maritime unions together with the U.S. shipbuilders have succeeded with Congress Jones Act mandating that only U.S. ships can carry "waterborne commerce" between U.S. ports. This artificially raises the price of a big potential U.S. export to Japan - Alaskan oil.
If our workers could be put to work shipping logs from Idaho and oil from Alaska to Japan (they would love to pay cash, by the way) we'd have made a long overdue start. And we could sure use the money.
You Can Be Right, and Lose
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
June 30, 1985
Some months ago a small group of college students applied to the ruling student body entity at Boise State University (BSU) for permission to organize on campus. The little band of students is called Young Americans for Freedom (YAF).
When I called them a "little band" I was, of course, serious because they are conservative. Liberal students are the ruling majority establishment at BSU as they are on almost every campus in America.
As you may have noticed, if you read newspapers with a magnifying glass, the conservative students' request was turned down by the policy board of the Associated Students of Boise State University. The alleged reason(s) given was that YAF's charter limited membership to students under 40 years of age. One wonders if in this day and age of school-worship the liberal student board anticipates more BSU perennial students. In any event, the permit was denied, believe it or not, based on "age discrimination."
While the YAF student officers suspect a hidden agenda of other "reasons" for denial of their campus permit to exist, at least one added reason was put forth by opposing students in front of witnesses. Now get this: the YAF students were accused of "discrimination against communists." Egad!
Now then, the term discrimination has indeed sunk to a new low on Campus-USA, even to malign discriminating between good and bad, (i.e., no absolute values seems to be the main value), but this one seems really to stretch even that. And it's pretty close to home, too.
Well, the conservative BSU students hollered and squalled, even appealed to the university big shots, but to no avail, so they've engaged James C. Harris, Esq., former bright, young prosecuting attorney of Ada County who has already filed suit to get YAF their permit. Harris, by the way, was state chairman of the Idaho YAF from almost two decades ago when he, too, was a conservative student at BSU. That was back in the Barry Goldwater days.
If you find it difficult to remember that far back, you may recall the brilliant and conservative author, editor and bon vivant of the popular TV show Firing Line seen on government TV (Channel 4). it was William Buckley, along with Goldwater and some other nationally known conservatives who organized YAF and helped write the famous Sharon statement of their purpose.
OK! Now what's all this have to do with Idaho's huge and powerful BSU, it's students - liberal, socialist, conservative, mugwump and extreme? (YAF students are definitely not extreme, by the way, Erwin Schwiebert to the contrary notwithstanding. He thinks left-wing and extreme are a contradiction in terms). It has this to do with BSU,Idaho, the nation and whether or not it is realized, it has to do with - you. That is, it does if you care about the two principal terms in YAF's name. The terms are "Americans" and "freedom." The YAF club's being denied the right to form a genuinely and enthusiastically conservative group on the overwhelmingly liberal campus is a glaring double-standard.
But wait! I forgot to tell you something important about YAF. They're anti-communist. Even in spite of that they are still on scores of campuses all over America.
Just listen to the last three of YAF's Sharon statements: "That the forces of international Communism are, at present, the greatest single threat to these (our) liberties; That the United States should stress victory over, rather than co-existence with, this menace; and That American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: does it serve the just interests of the United States?"
Space limits my listing here the preceding 10 of the beautiful Sharon statements, but given their simplicity, wisdom and common sense it is strange that BSU president John Keiser is not personally leading YAF's little crusade to exist on his anti-capitalistic campus.
Some of us, however, remember Keiser's severe condemnation of two of his economics professors calling for a "conservative" free market in education. So good luck, YAFers and Harris, you may need it.
Starting to Play the Liberal Way
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
July 5, 1985
There is a fellow who follows the popular, if usually liberal, TV show 60 Minutes every Sunday night. In fact he is actually part of the 60 Minutes program each week giving vent to his vigorous gripes about some aspect of our economy such as: too many brands of soap, too many different styles of water faucets, too many weird styles of umbrellas, etc., etc., ad infinitum. Most are funny.
But to those of us who see such things as "wonderful excesses" of the marketplace affording millions of nice people everyday choices far beyond the wildest dreams of emperors, kings, princes and princesses of just a few generations back - it's good news.
While it is true as I stated that most are funny - all are negative. It is interesting that when the liberals are negative they are glorified as "expert observers" of the American culture, yet when conservatives are likewise critical of things their observations are castigated as simplistic and negative.
Let me hasten to add that there are two sides to this matter. Maybe 22 sides to it, as there are to most things, but some stand out in glaring contrast to the others. John Kenneth Galbraith, the famous author, economist and political advisor, made this devastatingly clear in his anti-capitalistic book The Affluent Society. This super-intelligent, super-liberal professor criticized American industry for manufacturing too many brands and styles of deodorant. "Two kinds of deodorant should be enough for anybody," said the left-leaning sage of big shot Democrats such as John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. But, of course the capitalist supermarket's shelves stock virtually dozens and dozens of brands.
If conservatives were even half so clever at writing and speaking, their headlines would have shouted, "Galbraith's economic socialism stinks," but they didn't say that. Partly they didn't because they can't write, i.e., most of them, and partly because they can't write, i.e., most of them, and partly because they aren't too clever and, especially, humorous.
I should hasten to add also that not so many conservative economists were (are) in positions of power and influence either. The media, the magazines and the TV have literally blacked out any reference to conservative economists and political advisors of a persuasion opposite to such as Galbraith. Of course the same applies to humorous critics opposite to Andy Rooney.
Why do I mention all this great stuff about liberals, Andy Rooney and John Galbraith? Well, two reasons. (1) There's a thread that runs through both these gentlemen's rhetoric. That thread, while admittedly humorous and well done, at least from a literary and polemic standpoint, is nonetheless anti-capitalistic or anti-market. One can hardly escape the inference that some kind of government control is surely needed to make America's "affluent society" less wasteful (read, stupid). (2) All that is beginning to change, no doubt slowly, but no doubt surely.
Comes now a new face to Caldwell in particular and the Northwest in general. He is an economist, by the way, but oriented in quite the opposite direction of the super-glib, super-lib John K. Galbraith. He is Lawrence Reed, new director of Caldwell's Center for the Study of Market Alternatives (CSMA).
Reed is a rare economist not only by being a non-liberal college professor, but by having the super-scarce ability - not unlike Galbraith - to both speak well and write well. He's a nationally known and sought after speaker and edits his own popular monthly newsletter, Anwers (to economic problems) published in Michigan.
But that's not all. Reed also has a secret weapon (also not unlike Galbraith). Though serious, he has a great sense of humor. I'll tell you more about this bright young man later, but the matter of his humor brings me back to the curmudgeon Andy Rooney.
In subsequent issues of this column, I will make frequent reference to the foibles and follies, more or less opposite to Andy's anti-market so-called social expertise. Some will be "funny ha, ha," some will be "funny peculiar," but all will suggest that non-liberals should take heart for the liberal monopoly is beginning to crack.
A Heritage Worth Rekindling
By Ralph Smith
Idaho Press-Tribune
July 15, 1985
What seems to be the matter with Caldwell? This question is on the lips of many Caldwell citizens the past few years. I don't know that there is anything exactly "wrong" with our fair city, but it is certainly not the thriving center of activity that it was a few decades ago.
When the old Lincoln School was torn down in 1945 to make room on Cleveland Boulevard for Sears then brand-new modern store, it was no accident the site was in Caldwell. I mean one of that day's Sears executives told one of the more entrepreneurial city fathers the reason they chose to build their huge new store in Caldwell, instead of the more populous nearby city of Nampa, was that the latter city had nowhere nearly so much of a "trading spirit" as did Caldwell. Sears were aggressive marketers and understandably wanted to be in the midst of other aggressive folks who, in the vernacular of those days, wanted to "do business" come hell or high water.
Whether or not Caldwell, generally speaking, has lost that aggressive spirit of traders-wanting-to-trade may have to wait for another day, but there's a lot of oddball talk recently, something to the effect that Caldwell should more properly become a bedroom community rather than, one supposes, a trading community.
Well, that sounds to me like the proverbial "cop-out." It sounds like, having tried everything else and failed, that perhaps if we merely label Caldwell a "bedroom community" people will assume we planned it that way. Instead we're only throwing in the towel on getting new businesses to locate here or getting old ones to expand and increase the ever-so-vital economic base.
In any case the idea of entrepreneurs and traders furnishing goods and services brings to mind some of the men and women in Caldwell's relevant history. Their spirit of enterprise brings to mind some qualities that Caldwellites may very well want to recall before they abandon their town's trading spirit in favor of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
At risk of leaving out (which I'm certain to do) some of the more important and late businessmen and women who once lived in Caldwell, I'd like to recall just a few of those whose hard work, zeal to trade, private entrepreneurship, perseverance and guts, desire for personal success and, perhaps many other fine incentives which nobody knew for sure. I'll mention some names in no particular order of importance as they showed up on my hastily assembled list. See if you can remember where and how they did their thing years ago helping Caldwell while in search of a buck or two for themselves and their families - it's what Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" is all about.
Pete Olesen, Carl Busse, Stanley Jensen, Bill Hay, Leo Mason, George Weitz Sr., Edwin Springer, Claire Hull, Al Garber, Ray Pasley, Joe Garber, Glen L. Evans, Press Nicholes, P.G. Batt, Doyle Symms, Mrs. "Sandy" Sandmeyer, Rom LaFond, Bernie Holden, Mrs. Margaret Leech, Clem Parberry, G.W. Montgomery, B.A. "Bud" Howard, Pat O'Connor, Dean Miller, Kenneth Stringfield, Emory Vassar, Jim Gipson Sr., Curly Lodge, Martin Warberg, Bob Brown, Bob Jensen, Tex Coles, J.G. Conley, Dan burns, Charlie Turner, Judson Boone, J.M. Carl, George Crookham Sr., A.I. Meyers, Earl Wheeler, Carl Carlson, Henry Vinson and if I may be forgiven, my own father, pal and partner, John Smeed.
There were, of course, others. Many of them! A few others, thank heaven, are still with us. Some of them gave a huge measure of their time and miscellaneous resources in the best sense of that little motto which hung for years over the door of my office: "There's no limit to the good a man can do - if he doesn't care who gets the credit." But I've listed here only those who have passed on to their reward having left us a legacy, if only we will see it, one much more important than just the business they were in or their walk of life, not to mention the jobs and employment they created and the money their trade brought to town.
A friend of mine, Lawrence Fertig, the nationally syndicated columnist (since retired) summed it up so very well: "People and business organizations in this country who have labored for generations to save and invest in improved tools and techniques of industry should get medals for promoting welfare. Unless this capital had been saved and invested we could not have the good life we lead."
So you see, gentle reader, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Some of them were right here under our noses. Some worked, lived, loved and died right here in Caldwell. Of course, not all of those I've listed above were giants, but many were. Some gave the necessary moral support to the others without which little can be accomplished - even by giants.
Caldwell sorely needs a couple of giants today. Chances are they're here, unnoticed maybe, but need our moral support. So give to that need as much as you can. It's a good cause.
Road to Success Paved with ...
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
July 21, 1985
Last week this column carried comments about the "trading spirit" that used to pretty well dominate Caldwell's attitude and some of its late citizens of bygone days who helped shape that attitude. The response which followed was so favorable let's see what we can do with some more recent illustrations.
In an effort at trying to be helpful it is easy to appear to be too critical, but then "nothing ventured, nothing gained," so please bear with me and perhaps together we can suggest something positive. Heaven knows we could use it.
I've said for years that a good farm-to-market road is as good for a city as is a factory. Of course the latter is more visible, more dramatic and hence easier to raise considerable enthusiasm, the resultant effort and funds usually necessary for successful promotion of such things.
The particular road I have in mind is almost a classic example. It is one I tried for many years, all too unsuccessfully I'm sorry to say, to promote. It was to be a first class secondary one from Emmett to Caldwell over what is known as Little Freezeout, south past the natural gas pipeline company's pumping plant and then generally in a beeline toward Caldwell.
Opinions vary, but the route options are fairly obvious and logical. At least they were back when I was actively trying to promote the road being upgraded, straightened and made into an economic and capital asset to both Emmett and our own city.
As most people the least bit familiar with our agri-business empire know, the Emmett Valley is a great place. Not only is it productive of farm produce and livestock it has also produced a happy host of ambitious, successful and friendly people who need, from time to time, additional good places to market their production.
Caldwell has well provided just such a market outlet for years to towns and trading areas all over the Northwest. In the best tradition of economic good sense Caldwell should do what Caldwell does best - serve agriculture. A good farm-to-market road is indeed a fine and necessary capital "tool" toward this goal though it is often not seen as such by merchants in many cities, Caldwell included.
Furthermore, it is not only our own, fair city's merchants and professional people's vision which often suffer, or did in the case of the less-than-ideal road to and from Emmett. The latter city's merchants, at least the more vocal ones, in a typical small town type of provincialism actually opposed the Little Freezeout road's upgrading. At least this is what the several Emmett Valley farmers told me after they made two or three trips to Caldwell, having heard of my lively interest in the road that they wanted, too.
Certainly such provincialism is not new, nor is it hard to understand. Indeed, at first blush many otherwise progressive businessmen are quick to oppose schemes that make it easier for their present customers to gain access to their competitors for purposes of trade. As a matter of fact sometimes in the short run such a road can and does work a disadvantage to some of the merchants and traders.
What too few recognize, however, is that in an effort to save the status quo other competing and farsighted merchants and promoters often "build a better mousetrap," then the former's economic ship sinks or flounders on the shoals of too shallow water - the tide of trade having gone out, maybe forever.
Let me hasten to add that the Emmett-Little Freezout-Caldwell road project is not, was not, original with me. In fact the late Leo Mason, one of Caldwell's better men of vision, said to me only a few months before he died: "Gee whiz Ralph, how I wish I'd have known of your interest in promoting that road. We could surely have used your support. Having failed mostly for lack of enough moral support we were only an inch or so short of success - when we threw in the towel and quit." There is a road today, but it's a very mediocre one.
A friendly wisecrack of Chamber of Commerce President Joe Ledgerwood's sort of touched indirectly on some of these problems facing us. The ambitious and enthusiastic tire merchant had just introduced the new Chamber executive-manager, Maureen Cegnar, at a get acquainted picnic held Tuesday evening in her honor. With his characteristic good-natured smile Ledgerwood dismissed the attractive and bright young lady with: "... so she can mingle with the crowd and socialize."
Let's hope somebody suggests that Cegnar also mingle with the crowd and - "capitalize" - on what Caldwell can do best, that is serve our farmer customers. They're great people. And we need each other - desperately.
In Defense of Al McCluskey
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
July 28, 1985
In a recent book published by Regnery Gateway entitled More, The Rediscovery of Common Sense, a very important theme is brought forth. It is that: "The great democracies are not free because they are rich. They are rich because they are free." I'm surprised that remark went so unnoticed and unappreciated.
Would you believe Jimmy Carter made that statement? More is a book crammed with surprises, but more (no pun) about that another time. Just now I want to tell of another surprise from another politician. This one is a friend of mine with whom I went to school, Al McCluskey. He happens to be mayor of our fair city of Caldwell.
Many years ago, his father, Harry, was also mayor - and a colorful one, too. His stewardship of Caldwell took place in the very early years of World War II and was perhaps the highlight of an immensely interesting era of entrepreneurship, which included getting J.R. Simplot to locate his potato processing plant in Caldwell. So hats off to Harry and his city father pals of that day.
But what's all this McCluskey stuff have to do with the book, More, The Rediscovery of Common Sense? Well, it has to do with a good side of a politician that all too often seems to escape the public's eye. We also need to remember some of the good things that propelled our city's prosperity before (repeat, before) the days of federal aid and Big Brother, i.e., to rediscover common sense.
I am motivated to tell these little stories because of a spate of undue criticism aimed at the present mayor, as if he alone were responsible for all the bad and all the good things presently taking place or not taking place in Caldwell. It is, of course, true to some extent that politicians can and do sometimes furnish leadership in a way that can give a real boost to their constituency. It's seldom as big as they would have us believe and seldom much appreciated by those of us who almost never pay a lot of attention to the problems and opportunities at city hall. But I flinched when a man said to me last week, "They ought to hang the mayor (McCluskey) up by the thumbs. All he wants to do is promote parades, publicity gimmicks and ego trips. He wrings his hands about the decay of downtown Caldwell in one breath and in the next works his head off to promote and run a sewer half-way to Nampa."
While there was an element of substance in some of the man's vehement criticisms, I suppose, there is another side to our mayor's efforts that is sometimes forgotten. Without wanting to neglect other fine citizens whose work and ideas are terribly important, I want to name a couple projects important to Caldwell about which many folks might be surprised.
McCluskey was to the best of my knowledge the first city official to become a red hot booster for building the new extension of North 21st Avenue beyond Chicago Street up toward the freeway almost to Bob Nicholes Oil Co's. now brand new Phillips 66 service station and truck stop. This road project was started under the administration of N.C. "Coley" Smith, but the mayor who followed him worked hard to cripple it, successfully delaying its completion for four years. Fortunately McCluskey came along to play an important role in finally getting this popular cross-town access route completed. A real plus for Caldwell. A real capital asset, too.
In a recent column, I said that a good farm-to-market road is as important as a factory. This is especially true for a city such as ours. Recognizing this at an early stage, it was McCluskey whose enthusiasm and salesmanship played the key role many years later in getting the bridge over Boise River located properly for an excellent farm-to-market road as an extension of West Chicago Street. It goes across the Nishitani property and logically and conveniently heads for the Notus-Parma highway to Caldwell.
If and when this road is completed, farmers will no longer have to pull their slow-moving vehicles on and off the high speed freeway in order to do business in our city. There are others, too - some good, some not so hot, but these I know are first rate, and we shouldn't take them for granted.
Possibly the most popular thing (it was clearly his project) McCluskey ever did in and for the city of Caldwell was the 19483 Centennial parade. This writer was out of the state when that spectacular event took place, but I never cease to hear people brag, even today, about the "best parade they ever saw in these parts." Maybe the old-time historical parade was fine also because it reminded us of when common sense needed no rediscovery and our being free meant "More" than being rich.
In any event it was easily one of our mayor's finest promotions. Nonetheless, it's both fortunate and unfortunate that it's likely to be the only one properly appreciated.
Playing the Monopoly Game
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
August 4, 1985
This past week's news reported Democrat Gov. John Evans' having raised $84,000 for his year's campaign against incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Steve Symms. The race would seem to be another one pitting a well-known liberal against a well-known conservative.
As the campaign approaches, the confusion as to the candidates' labels gets really quite interesting, especially for those few voters who try to find out just what each candidate will do (or not do) after the election.
Since the public, led to some degree by campaign promises, expects the politicians to do so many asinine and even contradictory things, the fancy footwork of oratory is, well, awful, but understandable. For this reason some of the less obvious and visible influences are helpful to us in helping us "guess" what a given politician is likely to do.
Most observers estimate that the Symms-Evans race will surpass even the record-breaking sum of $3.7 million spent by the late U.S. Sen. Frank Church and then Congressman Symms. Estimate as high as $6 million have surfaced for the 1986 contest. Given a million population figure for Idaho that's $6 per person and a whole lot more per voter. Whatever the figures turn out to be we cannot blame Evans or Symms. Each is mostly just following "the system."
The governor's biggest contributions by far came from organized labor's political action committees (PACs). Most of them from out of state. These have been around for decades, but somehow almost never came up for criticism from the media. In the past few years, however, others got wise (finally) and now business, professions and other single issue conservative groups of all kinds have their own PACs.
It is these latter ones which have aroused the ire of the media at long last, one supposes, due to the media's tendency to favor left-wing causes, hence almost always a Democrat (the more liberal the better). The mainsupport, for example, for super-liberal presidential candidate George McGovern came from the media. and John Anderson, who became a viable force in the presidential debate a few years ago, had virtually no support from anybody, organized or unorganized, save the national media crowd of super-lib news manglers.
While Evans' campaign report made the news Symms' report had only been just mailed. No one will be surprised if his shows mostly support from business and professional people and their PACs, since it is ever-so-rare that GOP candidates even venture inside a labor union temple.
Yet I accompanied him on one such occasion years ago when one postal union member asked from the lecture room floor: "How can I vote for you again, Steve? You support the Hatch Act which says we postal employees cannot engage in political campaigns." Symms paused a moment. The atmosphere had been charged, tense and apprehensive, especially since the union's newsletter had suggested their members "... come hear how your congressman wants to take your jobs away from you."
The gutsy conservative's pause was fortunately not very long. Said he: "I'll tell you what I'll do, my friend. You guys give up your monopoly to carry first class mail and I'll go to bat with you to repeal the Hatch Act." That broke the ice. From that point on Symms may not have converted many union members to vote for him, but the questions that followed were not hostile. In fact one member came up afterward saying: "I've got to hand it to you, Steve. Your coming here is about like Daniel coming into the lion's den. I probably won't vote for you, but I gotta say you ain't all bad either."
In a 58-page booklet of fine print the Democrat National Committee platformspells out the party's 19484 principles and goals in rather plain and forthright (for politicians anyway) terms. On page 18 of that document are only five lines under "Postal Service." I applaud them for being brief - if not entirely honest. Here's their gist:
"The private express statutes guarantee the protection and security of the mail ... are essential to the maintenance of the national postal system ..." They mean, of course, the national postal - union's - system.
Ask both Evans and Symms about government monopolies vs. private monopolies and what his position will be on each. I doubt that the left-wing media will - if you don't.
'Platforms' Have Consequences
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
August 11, 1985
If you think very many people pay very much attention to the platform of either political party, you're wrong. If you think it doesn't make any difference what either platform says about anything, then you're wrong again. So where's the beef? good question. Let me try to shed some light on it.
Way back in the 1920s and 1930s, some fellows published their "political platforms" in considerable detail and on a great many subjects. One was entitled Mein Kampf by a German politician of great talent and two others in book form by a bright fellow named Karl Marx. Everybody remembers The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital which he wrote and the ideas from which came to have a great big, if bad, influence on a whole lot of people, including many in the U.S.A.
So you see, my point is well taken - ideas do have consequences. And believe it or not the platforms of both the Democrat and Republican parties are full of ideas. Some good. Some bad. In fact, not all the bad ideas are in the Democrats' platform, but generally they are the more colorful and in my humble opinion, more ominous, especially in terms of Karl Marx's ideas.
When one puts aside most of the misleading rhetorical promises, posturing and trying to say something without getting too wild or too dull, both party platforms tell us quite a bit. It's just too bad that the usually liberal media so seldom hold today's politicians' feet to their platform fire.
Remember, ideas have consequences, so let's look at the colorful Democrats' 1984 job first. Remember, too, the platforms at least put it down in writing and only then after great fights and maneuvering by both parties big shots wanting to stack their party's decks for future "influencing."
On page 2: "In place of conflict, a Democratic Administration will pursue cooperation, backed by trade, tax and financial regulation ..." Gosh, one strains to recall even one of those three items the government has used wisely and well any time in the last 30 years.
Page 5: "Indeed, success in marketing a product may depend more on the quality and productivity of the relationship between government and business (now get this) than on the quality of the product."
Egad, maybe John Kenneth Galbraith was right. The Democrats' big chief economist and adviser to several of their presidents loved to scold the GOP and big business fat cats for just such cozy and fascist-like arrangements to give the public the shaft.
Of course, then there is Bill Agee, Bendix Corporations former president, (formerly of Boise, too, by the way) presumably a big Republican tycoon, who not too long ago called for even "more partnership arrangements between business and government." The prestigious private Council for a Competitive Economy gave Agee a big noisy raspberry on the "Roses and Raspberries" page of their newsletter for what they saw as bad news.
If the above was a switch for the usually anti-business Democrats the status quo was hastily sought after on their platforms' page 9 with the familiar big-spending tendency again on the risk: "We oppose the artificial and rigid Constitutional restraint of a balanced budget amendment." Image that! With so many of today's Democrats gnashing their TV-teeth with snarls and hisses against the ravenous federal deficit. One wonders if their big-spending, politically failing memories have been replaced with deep breathing exercises in order to suck and blow in the same breath.
All of this, and we are only to page 10 from 58 pages of their 1984 deliberations, is not (repeat, not) to suggest that Democrats are like socialist Adolph Hitler nor is it to suggest the Republicans intend to pursue policies tending toward fascism (defined as private ownership, with government control). But it is to suggest a note of worry to each, i.e., the danger really exists. Remember, Germany had great universities, artists, poets and philosophers centuries before our country had button shoes. Think bout it a little, because what follows is on page 10 of today's Democrat Party platform. (Thomas Jefferson must be turning over in his grave.)
"We will ... enhance the progressivity of our personal income tax code ..." Does that sound familiar? It's pure "soak the rich" and it usually works - on paper. And it usually works during a political campaign, unfortunately. It should sound familiar too, to those of you who have read the political platform of Karl Marx. He demanded a progressive income tax as one of the absolute and most important key facets of his communist "worker's paradise."
As a matter of fact, most of Marx's "platform" of ideas were not heard seriously for several years. But politicians talk faster now, and most left-wingers hafve learned to "fly" faster than sound while standing flat-footed on one of their platform planks of just a few years back.
Covering One's ... Platform
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
August 18, 1985
Let's see if we can find a little more ammunition for folks interested in something besides the personality-cult so deeply indulged in by much of the media. Last week we got to page 10 of the Democrat's 58-page 1984 national platform as a source for our search
On page 11: "The Reagan Administration's only prescription for inflation is recession - deliberate high unemployment ..." Now then, in this document put together by the best the Democrat Party has to offer their own members (and candidates) the quote still seems pretty far out, but let's look a little closer.
Merriam-Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, one of the most often used in the country, defines the word "inflation" on page 591 as: "An increase in the volume of money and credit ..." Unless the Democrats can prove the Republicans have a printing press all to themselves in order to print money, somebody is lying.
Well, one might suggest the GOP has instead increased the "volume of credit" for a prescription against inflation as alleged by the Democrats thus deliberately causing high unemployment. But the Democrat Party has virtually screamed their lungs raw for generations advocating easy (read, more) credit in order to push the country's prosperity up. How can they suck and blow in the same breath and get away with it?
Good question, but one that is almost never asked in a serious and persevering way by most of the news media. It's too bad,too, because the voting and non-voting public have almost no other contact with the subject that affects their very lives and families.
It is that way because by far most of the media consider themselves to be "watch-dogs" of the government and thus entitled to somewhat more freedom of speech, or license, than others. I mentionthis because if public opinion ratings of the media decline very much further there will almost certainly arrive a complete state of chaos and distrust in our land much like that in Central and South America. People want and will demand order or what they perceive as order, never mind whether it is through Democrats, Republicans, Mugwumps or the Army.
In spite of what most of the media see as a threat of military takeovers it is the public's extreme disdain for chaos that causes most military leaders to take charge. Certainly no one wants this for America, but the media must find a way to be less sensational, less cynical and less indifferent to asinine statements such as those in the Democrat platform. They simply must demand that each and every candidate vigorously denounce or endorse his own party's rhetoric especially when it's their official written policy.
As for Reagan's "deliberate" idea to "cause high unemployment" as alleged by the donkey platform, well, it cannot go unchallenged by the media much longer else nobody will show up at the polls. Reagan may be wrong. But "deliberately?" Hogwash!
Lest one think for a moment the press or media is not responsible for blowing the whistle on such foolhardy allegations, then let them stop claiming such privileges as they do in behalf of "the people's right to know." If the ballplayers in the major leagues had referees who took sides in the same manner as the media currently "referees" politics in America the ballparks and stadiums would soon be empty.
Indeed, few are those public leaders who will dare to draw such an analogy. Almost all of them blame the non-voters instead of their political colleagues. And, generally speaking, the media goes right along. In fact, many seem to prefer it that way.
On page 12 the Democrats in power over their official written and published policy had this to say under Primary and Secondary Education: "While education is the responsibility of local government, local governments already strapped for funds by this administration cannot be expected to bear alone the burden ... for quality education ..." Now who wants to inflate the volume of printed money? Egad.
One guesses the Democrat platform claims to have sent the astronomical U.S. deficit to the moon, never to return. If they really, honestly and sincerely believe that (and, indeed, they may) then their school teachers must be the same ones who taught them economics, moral philosophy and - you guessed it - journalism.
Solving Problems Requires Thought
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
August 25, 1985
What must one do to get the attention of the intelligent American public about imports and exports? The answer seems to far to be "offer them something cheaper or of better quality at the same price." Either one is a cinch to get their attention, but there's more to the story.
The trade balance or deficit between Japan and the U.S. last year climbed to an all-time high of $39 billion. This means Americans bought that many more goods from Japan than they (the Japanese) bought from us. (Never mind they must eventually spend the money right here in the U.S.)
Well, the news media seems to think that's dirty pool on the part of the Japanese because their government puts big barriers up against the Japanese consumer who would most probably like very much to buy more American products - if his politicians would allow it. I say the "news media seems to think" because they (most of them) report virtually only those who protest Japanese imports into the U.S.
This is important for several reasons, but in addition to those who quite understandably complain, there are those who would applaud being able to buy products they need and want at much cheaper prices. The problem is that most reporters seem unwilling to report both sides, meaning the one who is getting the good deal, i.e., cheaper or better products as compared with the one who is getting the bad deal, i.e., the one who can't sell his wares because they are priced too high.
Too many Americans are blaming this situation on "those danged Japanese" who refuse to buy our higher priced goods. The hostility is high and growing worse. That's bad news because the Japanese are good guys, not bad guys.
Comes now another similar, though not the same, problem closer to home. Our good friends the Canadians are selling lumber to Americans at much lower prices than they have to pay for American lumber.
The media reports are full of politicians trying to get into office by blaming other politicians most of whom are in the other party (please note). Well, who are we to believe? Nobody? One cannot merely ignore the problem what with a reported 6,000 loggers out and lumber workers out of work in north Idaho. So what to do?
First of all, there is usually a solution to every important problem. It is almost always simple, neat - and wrong. Second of all we should take care to ask the right questions first, all of them, but we seldom do. Thomas Edison, the late great inventor, said, "There's almost nothing the American public will not do to avoid the labor of thinking."
OK, then, since the Canadians are closer to home and seem to be responsible for putting our timber industry into bankruptcy by selling cheap lumber to our homebuilders and wood products consumers, let's try Edison's idea. Let's try thinking. It's hard work, so be patient and look for competitive alternatives.
We could, one supposes, go to war with Canada. We are bigger, have more people, did have more guns, maybe still do. But we like both peace and our neighbors to the north, so that's not a very good idea. We could merely not speak to them, but that is not very practical either, since our common border is awfully long and there never has been a fence or even a tiny platoon of soldiers guarding that friendly border across which thousands of citizens commute almost every day. Why, for gosh sakes, their private citizens are good guys just about the same as we are.
"Good enough," you say, but what are we going to do?" They are putting our boys, our dads, mothers, wives and friends out of work. And without work there's no jobs and no food and not much of anything else worthwhile. Countries have gone to war for less.
Well, not everybody is out of work. Too many, but not all. OK, what are those doing who are not out of work? Good question. They are trading! They are trading their goods and services for other people's goods and services, i.e., others who want to trade and those governments and bureaucrats do not get in the way - in both governments, Canada and the United States.
So maybe we could get a helpful handle on the so-called Japanese trade deficit problem if we can get a handle on the Canadian lumber problem here closer to home.
Next week we'll try to take some of Edison's advice - and think. We'll think about how Uncle Sam has taught the whole wide world about government subsidy, and how Canada's socialist government is now using that very same subsidy idea to put Americans, their good neighbors, out of work right here in north Idaho.
We'll look to see, too, if bailing out America's socialist timber industry will get us out of trouble or - in deeper.
Stay tuned.
Fight Socialism with Socialism
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
September 1, 1985
The Canadians are ruining our traditional lumber market right here in the U.S. In Idaho it is reported that, therefore, 6,000 of our citizens are out of work. Those pesky Canadians are selling lumber to American homebuilders at a price too cheap for Idaho lumber mills to make a profit. The mills, hence, are shutting down.
First, absolutely no one wants Idaho employees to be out of work. Second, the Canadians have been shipping lumber into the American market for many years, so what is new? Price! Simply, price. How come their price is so cheap and our Idaho mills' price so high? Well, aside from the difference in wages paid to their workers compared to those paid to American workers there remains (1) productivity per worker and (2) cost of timber, i.e., raw material, to each country's mills.
Since there are abundant figures available to inform most any interested and objective observer as to which country's workers are most productive and how much each country's people are paid, let's look at the price of their raw material - timber. It is said that Canada, where virtually all the timber is owned by the socialist government, "sells" their stumpage at sacrifice prices, namely, $8 or $9 per thousand board feet. That's admittedly well below the price charged by the U.S. Forest Service to American mills.
Now then, never mind that most American lumber companies extravagantly bid up the stumpage prices of government timber a few years back when they thought price-inflation was going to skyrocket the cost of everything and never mind that federal government "bailout" legislation forgave most of those companies their obligation for the too-high prices they agreed to pay, still our timber industry cannot make a go of it. Why?
Well, one problem is indeed the ghastly depression especially in north Idaho's lumber industry, but it is aggravated by yet another one from the out of state labor union bosses in Pennsylvania. They said "nothing doing" when striking Idaho miners voted overwhelmingly (58 percent) three or four years ago to go back to work for a modest cut in wages at the giant Bunker Hill mind. I mention this, my friends, so you'll know the $10 to $20 per hour compulsory union wages of north Idaho miners are now zero, thus adding substantially to the lumber industry joblessness.
There are also the environmental nuts who essentially by mouth alone have locked up most of Idaho's raw materials and job producing potential into an ever-so-vast and growing wilderness. Even at this late date they want still more lock-up. Their greed against responsible growth seemingly knows no bounds.
But back to the lumber imports from Canada made possible so cheaply in large part because their socialist government "subsidizes" their lumber industry with cheap timber. So let's consider something positive:
The United States government owns about one-third of all the land in America. That, my friends, make us one-third as classically socialist as Soviet Russia. Worst yet, America's foreign policy has taught the whole wide world of governments how to subsidize their own country's resources and businesses. Now that albatross is coming back to haunt the American dream into an American nightmare. So to those of you who have screamed at this trend of events and public policy for decades I say - "So long, cowboy. I sent your saddle home. The show is over."
But for the rest of us common-sense moderates and hangers-on who don't know when we're licked there is one idea left (pun intended). Since nearly all of America's politicians and educators have already socialized most of the timber lands let's have the government give, yes, I said give, "their" timber to the unemployed lumber mills - now. Free! Let's have our government, whose anti-trust department is so persevering, yes, even arrogant and omniscient in its effort to compel private companies to compete vigorously, get competitive itself - vigorously - with Canada's government.
Let's have our government-owned timber compete with Canada's government-owned timber and see just who can honestly create the most jobs. Politicians of both parties are fond of bragging about how many jobs their particular administration has "created." Phoney baloney, you say? Yes, but not nearly so phoney when they "create" those jobs with "their" own assets, in this case with the government's own timber. It is our socialist-fascist schemes that strangle America.
U.S. Sen. Steve Symms, almost Idaho's only outspoken advocate of private ownership as a principle of this nation's heritage, could and perhaps should propose such a bill in Congress. It should contain a sunset clause phasing out, through homesteading, the clearly socialist timber ownership over say a five-year period and into a clearly capitalist mode where it should have been all along. (Such a plan is not as nutty as it might sound, especially given that the federal government sustains an annual money hemorrhage of a billion dollars net negative cash flow from so-called publicly owned lands. Even with no capital carrying costs nor any necessity for profit, America's own socialist lands mismanagement is a disaster.)
Such a bold move would put the housing industry into orbit, give homebuilders a good price and put those jobless thousands back to work, thus phasing out our environmental lock-up extremists. It would also expose their soft underbelly for what it really is - socialism.
'Odd Couple' Debate S. Africa
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
September 8, 1985
Last Wednesday night two political theologians had a most fierce debate about South Africa. To say the least, the exchange was full of meaning - something new for TV, I'd say.
Ted Koppel, anchorman for ABC's late evening show Nightline, moderated his interview show between super-liberal Democrat the Rev. Jesse Jackson and super-conservative the Rev. Jerry Falwell. We can only assume the latter may be a Republican inasmuch as he supports GOP President Ronald Reagan on a host of issues, but has never run for public office.
The general subject debated was whether American foreign policy should more or less blackmail nearly the only African country remaining friendly to the United States. The blackmail I refer to is euphemistically called "sanctions." (A confusing term since it has two opposite meanings.)
Jackson says the U.S. should spare no cost to slam shut the trading doors with South Africa until they install one-man, one-vote among all the people in their country. Falwell, wisely I think, takes the opposite view saying that disinvestment, i.e., urging U.S.companies to close down their job-producing industries doing business in that country, is a bad idea that causes hardship mostly among the poor blacks.
The whites, of course, are outnumbered in South Africa by non-whites (blacks, Bantus, coloureds, and Indians) by about five to one. Incidentally, the U.S. and Great Britain were instrumental in forcing such a one-man, one-vote scheme on Zimbabwe, formerly called Rhodesia, a few years ago. They are now ruled by a lousy Marxist government, hence Falwell, Reagan and others claim that the same would soon happen to South Africa if they allow everybody to vote. "Everybody" includes even the black natives, many of whom still wear stacks of brass rings around their necks and loincloths to cover themselves.
Let me hasten to add that there exists some fine, intelligent and responsible non-whites in South Africa, but they are a tiny, if growing, minority who are also terrified at the prospect of a too early, too hastily imposed one-man, one-vote pure democracy.
Many observers claim that even in America the voters are horribly ill-equipped to cast intelligent votes on all but a very few complicated issues. When I visited South Africa some years ago both their media and ours steadfastly refused free discussion of such an obviously crucial, even tragic situation, but one which must be considered openly and candidly prior to an intelligent solution.
Still, the so-called debate between the two articulate and gutsy preachers was far and above the usual "dog and pony" TV shows between the two-party political hacks to which we are so often treated on Meet the Press, Face the Nation and many others. To the everlasting credit of both Falwell and Jackson, each did his level best to make both his ideological and pragmatic points.
Naturally, Jackson's liberal, statist, egalitarian and almost completely socialist point of view came through as usual. He claims America should sock it to the apartheid government of south Africa and never mind if it does indeed close up some jobs for blacks down there. Perhaps it would help the many jobless working in America, he seemed to be saying.
Falwell said no. He claimed the system of apartheid is teribly bad, but it's improving and one that the many different tribal chiefs complicate far more than the left-wing Bishop Tutu admits. The latter also wants divestiture for U.S. companies presently investing down there. Falwell says divestiture and the present U.S. policy will only drive our well-meaning friends from power and install the Marxists just as we did in Rhodesia, South Africa's neighbor to the north. The conservative Falwell blamed much of the confusion on an arrogant and stacked-deck news version unmercifully slanted by America's big media.
While I quite agree with him that America's media is indeed about 90 percent left-liberal, I must admit that ABc's Koppel is due a vote of thanks for last Wednesday night's face-off. It was between two clearly opposite political and religious leaders on a complicated and super-emotional (thanks to the media, itself) racial issue.
One of this country's major philosophers summed it up in his brilliant book Ominous Parallels so very well. Leonard Peikoff says, "As government controls and the power of political pull have soared, many Americans have come to feel ... that survival requires identification with a group, which can serve as one's refuge in an uncertain world, one's protector from the other groups, and one's lobbyist in Washington. The easiest group to form or to join is one defined by race."
But surprise, surprise! It was the chronically racist Jackson who said that blacks, too, should be allowed a color-blind idea - own property - privately. Horray for Jesse! His Marxist pals must be furious.
Nevertheless, it was only Falwell who had any criticism whatsoever for the biggest bigot in all history - our trading partner - Soviet Russia.
Forrey Does His Homework
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
September 15, 1985
In this day and age, there is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that many people often become completely frustrated at our public officeholders, the politicians. While I must confess to a measure of this myself, it may be useful to look at a case in point. But first, a little background.
We've come to expect politicians who are so hell-bent on getting elected that they merely put one of their fingers in their mouth to get it wet, then hold it up in the air to see which way the political wind is blowing. Presto! They run out to lead the mob no matter which way that mob is going and, of course, get elected. The ego trip is great and oft-times the play and benefits are substantial, also.
But all too often those of us who don't have to get elected tend to forget what "we" are asking the lawmakers to do, namely, to take courageous stands on the hot issues and at the same time keep from making so many voters angry that defeat in the next election is a lead-pipe cinch.
So how do we resolve the age-old dilemma? Well, many more or less career politicians merely smile a lot, advertise a lot, spend a lot, shake hands and talk a lot, but say very little. Certainly they say nearly nothing that is likely to make any waves. But when they get into office, they set about busily to "get things done."
What they get done (or try to) is often at odds with what the voters thought they heard or, rather, "felt" they heard. The latter accounts for what many well-intentioned voters label as "lying politicians," thus tending to encourage more and more voters to stay home on election day.
At risk of sounding trite, this is not all the fault of the politicians. What else can we expect if the voters ask, as they frequently do, for more and bigger free lunches from government and, at the same time, lower taxes? In spite of what many liberals call simplistic - a term they love to lean on when they cannot meet a well-reasoned argument - there is a great political answer to voters' requests for more government and less taxes. It's called deficit spending.
Politicians tend to buy votes (it's called pure democracy) with more government and reduce or hold down taxes by putting the cost on the cuff. The "cuff" is the deficit and we've just about piled the political bucks on it as high as the Tower of Babel, from the top of which both Democrats and Republicans try to explain it (the deficit) away.
One unusual politician who has done his darnedest to be honest and forthright with the voters is Canyon County legislator Robert Forrey, R-Nampa. I have followed his time in office much more closely than many others I've watched inthat arena and, while I vigorously disagree with him on some issues, I am pleased to say that, with precious few exceptions, he has tried his level best to grapple with the important and controversial issues of the day in a basically thoughtful, hardworking and studious way.
Forrey does his homework. And while his unusually straighforward manner is based solidly on what he sees as the Judeo-Christian ethic of our founding fathers, I will admit this tends to make him sound a bit preachy, even a mite condescending.
In fact, Forrey is just the opposite most of the time; i.e., he is a politician who (1) cares and who (2) is not so hung-up on being re-elected as to avoid any confrontation on anything as many do today.
And unless you're an expert, don't tangle him on the matter of the National Education Association (NEA), the teacher's union from whose own handbook he quotes almost daily. His is an effort to show how they are responsible for America's crisis of education in the three Rs: readin', writin' and 'rithmetic. He is one citizen who has certainly done his homework, hence the reason most (not all) of his critics resort to calling him names, if not simply hating his guts.
All of which isn't to suggest the furor surrounding the peppery and affable politician is simple. He is also a devout anti-communist. In fact, what makes Forrey such a threat to much of the media liberals whose attacks on him have not only been grossly in error, but lack even good taste and manners, is that he is also doing his anti-communist homework. That, my friends, constitutes simple fanaticism in the minds of most of his liberal critics.
In pursuit of the above, Forrey accompanied about 20 of his Republican colleagues in the Idaho Legislature to an expense-paid, first-class, anti-communist seminar out of state. for this he (and they) are scolded by other, mostly liberal, Republicans who are afraid the voters will not understand someone other than Uncle "Sap" picking up the tab.
And maybe they won't! But it won't be because Rep. Bob Forrey didn't try to warn anyone who didn't already have his (or her) mind made up - against the facts.
An Incentive Not to Work
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
September 22, 1985
It was to be on Tuesday morning that the popular TV talk show host was to have a rare and unusual guest. Charles Murray, author of Losing Ground (297 provocative pages published by Basic Books) had actually been invited by Phil Donahue to be interviewed before what is perhaps the largest television audience of its kind in the world. Hooray! Chalk up one for the good guys.
Why? Well, after the mile long parade of books written by all sort of liberals and welfare-state worshippers here comes a real success story. His book's subtitle, "American social Policy 1950-1980," reveals an analysis of 30 years of a most heart-wrenching and genuinely emotional issue - welfare. And if I may, the welfare state which is fast consuming the very marrow from the bones of the once happy, growing, super-productive "hope of the world," America.
Never in the history of the world had a country's poor been treated so well, fed and clothes so well, nor been given almost free access to upward mobility creating her real guts - a true and abundant middle class. But something weird happened on the way to Utopia, hence Murray's "provacative" pages.
"As the 1960s faded and we settled into the 1970s, the realization gradually spread that things were getting worse, not better, for blacks and poor people in this country. (Although) it was seldom put in just that way."
It wasn't "put that way," folks, because the politicians' great "war on poverty" had been a miserable failure after staggering sums of money were spent on social reform. The unskilled were to be trained, the jobless employed. Blacks were to be brought to full equality. Crime, ignorance, poverty and the rest were attacked with new legislation, court decisions, regulations and a gigantic flood of government money, the size of which is just barely indicated by the Congress's already new bill to raise the national debt limit above $2 trillion.
Let me hasten to add, certainly not all the deficit or crazy spending hysteria is the fault of the politicians and bureaucrats advocating even more welfare. (They never, ever, get enough). According to Murray, "It is not only terriby costly," he claims, "but we're losing ground." Hence this is his book's title which, by the way, is documented with unprecedented excellence.
Consider some of his provocative thoughts using his hypothetical couple - Harold and Phyllis. He shows that under welfare rules in 1960 the incentive was to marry and work. Welfare then provided too little money, compelled the couple to live separately and made it illegal to supplement welfare payments with work.
By 1970, all of these objections had been removed. Given our new, generous welfare system, he argues, "the old-fashioned solution of getting married and living off their earned income has become markedly inferior. Working a full 40-hour week in the dry-cleaning shop will pay Harold $136 (in 1984 dollars) before Social Security taxes are taken out.
"The bottom line is this: Harold can get married and work 40 hours a week in a hot, tiresome job; or he can live with Phyllis and their baby without getting married, not work, and have more income. From an economic point of view, getting married is dumb. From a non-economic point of view it involves him in a legal relationship that has no payoff for him. If he thinks he may sometime tire of Phyllis and fatherhood, the 1970 rules thus provide a further incentive for keeping the relationship off the books."
Under the 1970 rules, Murray shows, if Phyllis and Harold marry and he is unemployed, she will lose her AFDC benefits. He says that, "Harold's job is not nearly as stable as the welfare system. ... Marriage buys Phyllis nothing ... In 1970 the child provides her with the economic insurance that a husband used to represent."
The massive illegitimacy in the black community, according to Murray, may well be only a rational response to destructive incentives our social programs have created. He writes: "It makes no difference whether Harold is white or black." All of which has been made abundantly clear if not clearer by the brilliant black economists Walter Williams of George Mason University and Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institute, but they too, only infrequently make the headlines. That latter is too bad, too, especially for people who think.
Why? Because Phil Donahue openly admitted that "we" (NBC-TV) have invited a whole lot of both black and white welfare mothers to appear in the audience and shout questions at the author. Sensational yuk!
And they did, along with three female antagonists all of whom shared Donahue's stage alongside the mild-mannered Murray.
But, strangely enough, the famous Edward C. Banfield of Harvard University said the book was "scholarly and fair-minded." He even added: "If I had not promised myself never to use the phrase, I would say that it (Losing Ground) ought to be required reading for every voter."
Editorial Smears Forrey
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
September 29, 1985
The news media seldom see their own kind as worthy of criticism, and that is sad. It is sad partly because there are so many ways to view the news that some healthy criticism could go a long way to improve their "reporting" and opinion molding, both of which are too frequently an ideological mixture.
To their everlasting credit, Idaho's Lewiston Morning Tribune (LMT) deviates from this status-quo on rare occasion.
In fact, this Idaho version of liberaldom's "Pravda of the West," The Washington Post, published a snide editorial attacking the Idaho Press-Tribune's sharp criticism of Idaho Supreme Court "political" Justice Robert Huntley. The latter seems to love more government, as does LMT, while the paper you are now reading once in a while thinks we have too much already. For whatever it's worth (and it wasn't worth much), the Press-Tribune printed the North Idaho paper's editorial complaint some months ago.
But there my applause for LMT's knee-jerk liberal editorial criticism comes to a screeching halt. On September 19, the Press-Tribune reprinted another LMT editorial. This one lacked even a sense of humor, not to mention good taste and manners. Unlike most papers, LMT does upon occasion evidence some sense of humor, but if there was even any tongue-in-cheek therein, it was overpowered by such abuse of facts as to be downright dishonest. It concerned a politician that other card-carrying liberals also love to hate, Rep. Robert Forrey (R-Nampa) and his vigorous criticism of the super-powerful and super-liberal National Education Association.
As was 100 percent predictable, LMT disagrees with the conservative and outspoken Forrey. But the first line of their edit column was a lie. It clearly infers that Forrey compares "teachers of Idaho ... with Marxists," when he merely quotes from NEa's own handbook claiming the organization, not Idaho teachers, follows some, if not many, Marxist ideas.
LMT says, "Forrey has been teaching at UnificationChurch workshops that the NEA subscribes to Marxist philosophy. That's a low blow even for Forrey." Hogwash. (1) Forrey has less to do with the Unification Church than the Catholic and Episcopal churches have to do with the two giant hospitals in Boise; (2) it's with a kind of short-term "mental" health, instead of physical health, that Forrey and CAUSA International, his real host, is concerned with.By that I mean theirs is a huge anti-communist effort to fight on both the domestic and foreign fronts. Admittedly the media, generally speaking, tend to have an extreme disdain for anti-communism, hence, the LMT is in this case being super-orthodox - another term they love to hate.
While the Lewiston paper makes a slim editorial point or two, it is only with the help of the well-known half-truths and non-sequiturs commontoday in muckraker journalism. But the LMT saved their lousy worst for what the late, great scholar Ludwig Mises called the "semantic jungle," i.e., the quagmire of words so grossly shifted and twisted as to make the contest into which they are tossed a rotten, virtual jungle warfare - where, one supposes, they feel perfectly at home.
It's OK with the liberal editorial writers if Forrey "wnats to damn the NEA as liberal ...denounce some positions (as) too selfish, too militant ...unfair to conservatives and wrong, that's in bounds.
"But that loaded word Marxist, is used for the vicious reason of bearing false witness against thousands of teachers across America ... It's a smear word ..."
The false witness is against Forrey. It's "vicious" only if one's own views are at all parallel with Marx.
It most certainly is a "smear" word, please note, as LMT uses the term. Forrey, however, uses it precisely against the NEA, not the teachers. In fact, he goes out of his way to separate what he calls thousands of honest, sincere and intelligent teachers, some of whom do and some of whom do not belong to the giant labor union of teachers.
"I don't know if the NEA is Marxist or not," says Forrey, "but they subscribe (in many instances) to a Marxist philosophy." He then goes on to quote very carefully both page and paragraph from the union's own handbook. But again, no doubt with a kind of fanatic sympathy to their shared knee-jerk liberal values, the media avoid quoting this part of the Forrey rhetoric.
If it is anti-communist then, so be it, but let's not berate a conservative who is as outspoken as the LMT by not only quoting him out of context, but using the downright dirty journalism ploy of a damn lie. It is not true that Forrey compares teachers, generally, to communists. Perhaps some could be, but that isn't Forrey's point. His point and that of CAUSA (Latin for cause)
International is that communism is bad - a point that so much of America's liberal media seem loathe to even mention - and that its basically bad tenets, by whatever label they are held and however unwittingly, should be exposed and avoided.
Conservative Voice in the Wilderness
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
October 6, 1985
Human Events celebrated its 40th anniversary not long ago at or near the same address they had when I first subscribed in the late 1940s. Conservatives who think the regular media tend to give only the liberal welfare-state slant to the news today need only address a note to 422 First St. S.E., Washington, D.C. 02003, for some real good news.
The Founding Fathers began, "When in the course of human events ..." and that's where a little band of conservatives and part-time libertarians got the name for their own "declaration of independence" from what they saw way back then as a dreadful bias in the media's reporting of politics in particular and public affairs in general.
In those days these editors made no bones about trying to tell both liberal and conservative sides of their stories. They explained that one need only pick up most any newspaper or wire service story in the nation (and in later years the TV would become even worse) and get the "other" (liberal) side of the news.
So it was that the little band of editors, columnists and pundits of many colors of conservative persuasion began their crusade to "tell the other side." And tell it they have - in spades. So effectively, consistently and responsibly has this little newspaper done its work that some other leaders have purchased ads and written articles therein in an effort to communicate with President Ronald Reagan, since for many years he's been such an open and enthusiastic reader of Human Events.
Without Frank Hanighen, Henry Regnery (the famous book publisher) Gen. Robert Wood and some others, conservative politics as it exists today would be hard to imagine. The journal itself in the early days was published from Hanighen's apartment, and the free market, limited government views that it promoted were the outspoken and vigorous if small voices of news media dissent.
"Human Events has been and is the newspaper of that movement ... has spanned the history of political conservativism from the era of Hoover-Taft Old Guard Republicanism to the epoch of Reagan and Jack Kemp," says my friend M. Stanton Evans, chief of the National Journalism Center, "and more than simply 'being there,' it has actively helped to shape and direct the movement of ideas ...
"More to the point," Evans continues, "Human Events geared up its campaign to redeem the soul and straighten the backbone of the Republican Party - an enterprise that continues, in altered context, now." To which I am eager to add my own endorsement but a task I am not too sure even Human Events is up to given the number of excessively liberal Republicans with whom Reagan has too often surrounded himself in the White House.
Still, Reagan has raised the morale of conservatives far beyond what most of us had even thought possible before 1980. This alone may eventually go father than his legislative efforts, however, given the hairsbreadth majority he has had in the Senate and the overwhelming majority the liberal Democrats have in the House. Here's partly why I'm optimistic.
John Kenneth Gailbraith, the super-liberal economist explains: "The trouble with liberals is they won't read anything but that left-wing stuff. And the trouble with the conservatives is they won't ready anything - period." But Human Events has helped tremendously to push and make popular a host of "conservative" authors including but not limited to three Nobel Prize winners all of whom have been regular contributors, namely, Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek and George Stigler.
To name but a few books: William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale; AllenDrury's Advise and Consent; James Burnham's Suicide of the West; George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty; Russel Kirk's Conservative Mind; JeanKirkpatrick's Dictatorships and Double Standards; D.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man; Ludwig von Mises The Anti-capitalistic Mentality; Michael Novak's The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism; William E. Simon's A Time for Truth and just lots and lots of others. Some perhaps better than these.
There's also generals such as Douglas MacArthur, A.C. Wedemeyer, Barry Goldwater, Adm. Hyman Rickover and the list of brilliant contributors to the conservative weekly is hardly scratched.
If Gailbraith's appraisal of conservatives is eventually wrong it will be partly because of Human Events editors Tom Winter and Allan Ryskind. If they're not always "right" - they're always conservative. May they live forever.
Lang a 'Fairly Reliable' Writer
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
October 13, 1985
The Idaho Press-Tribune has a political reporter who could be a real threat. Of course, all Idaho daily papers' political reporters could be a real threat except for one main reason - they don't make a whole lot of sense.
The Press-Tribune's reporter, Sam Lang, on the other hand, does make some sense once in a while. At least I notice that when he agrees with this writer he's usually right on target, and while that's admittedly not often, the 46-year-old reporter was on target last Tuesday.
His column, which Sam tries to keep separate for his own personal views as differentiated from his political news reporting, was entitled "Symms-Evans horse race on tap." It said in essence that Symms faced a "tight race" with the Idaho governor come November 1986, and cited as evidence the fact that the former apple grower would soon have his friend, the president of the United States, here in person in Boise to help raise money for his (Symms') coming campaign.
Reading the political "tea leaves," even in his sincere attempt to separate an opinion from a report, is almost impossible even for Lang. For example, his "... clear indication that the highly conservative senator is facing a tough campaign."
Without intending to, Sam's rhetoric tends to mislead his reader. Why?
Because Symms - always - faces tough campaigns. He does this each time he gets up to bat. Why? Because he openly takes sides on controversial policy matters. He always has, ever since the first one in 1972. In fact, Symms has made it much more difficult for politicians from both parties to dodge tough issues. Moreover, many so-called moderate GOPers will say privately they wish he were less outspoken, but the people love it. Even after he's been in office all these years they call him a political "breath of fresh air."
For that same reason Lang's column is often a credit to this newspaper because he tries to be fairly reliable. It sort of reminds me of a real live used car dealer in Boise who calls his own car lot "Fairly Reliable Bob's." He does it for business and for laughs, no doubt. Sam really tries, too, I think, most of the time anyway, but I wonder sometimes if his many years as a college professor tend to distort his unusual effort to be fair to conservatives (i.e., most professors on most campuses tend to loath conservatives).
Consider this by Land on Symms: "highly conservative senator." Not bad, as labelling tends to be in most media channels, but hard as I tried I looked in vain for even a trace of a "highly liberal" John Evans. He is, you know. Or do you know? If you do not, you should look at most of his political appointments and at the bills he vetoes.
Evans is no fool, and it's "legal" for him to appoint highly liberal cronies and liberal Democrats and Republicans - but where does one look in the media to find the labels and adjectives preceding the term "liberal"?
Lang makes no attempt at all to knife Steve Symms in his column, nor do I think he intends anything of the sort, but consider if you will what we'd have if we had a political reporter who was actually intending to slash conservatives by fair means or foul.
For example, Lang's premise is that Reagan will be in Boise to help his friend Symms because he (Symms) is in political trouble. Wouldn't it also have been newsworthy to say, "Symms may be thought by Reagan to be so important that the president flew all the way out to Sagebrush, Idaho, just to help his pal whose conservative vote he (Reagan) so needs"? Considering the philosophy and sheer guts of both Symms and Reagan on most every issue, it would seem both logical and newsworthy.
So you see, Idahoans in general and Canyon County in particular are lucky to have newsman Sam Lang, both when he writes his column and for his news reports on politicians during the legislative sessions. This isn't true merely because he doesn't exactly fit the mold of the muck-raking political pundits in Idaho, but also because he's a decent and sincerely dedicated human being.
Now for the other shoe: Sam hates the truly "highly conservative" the Rev. Jerry Falwell's guts. He called him "Rev. Jerry Foulmouth" in the above-mentioned opinion column wherein Falwell defended South Africa in part. Lang used Falwell to show a side of our U.S. senator with whom Lang vehemently disagrees when Symms supports, as he does quite often, the Rev. Falwell.
Whatever one thinks of the words from the "highly conservative" Falwell's mouth, they are not "foul." Nor are those form my friend Lang's mouth - most of the time.
'Right-Wing' Chad and 'Hanoi' Jane
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
October 20, 1985
A friend of W.C. Fields once discovered the comedian diligently reading the Bible. Surprised by the uncharacteristic display of piety, the friend asked Fields what he was doing; "What do you think?" retorted Fields. "I'm looking for loopholes!"
A delightfully bright Australian I met a few years ago, the Rev. John K. Williams, said of the above encounter: "That, I suppose, is one way of reading the Bible. There are countless other ways." One supposes that is one of the main reasons news media people scream so loud in defense of freedom of expression, especially for those who are in the newspaper business. It is an understandable defensiveness they have inasmuch as they must meet deadlines and could (and do) sometimes make too hastily their judgement of what was said or meant to be said.
But the Idaho media was not about to be even half so understanding of State Rep. J.R. "Chad" Chadband, R-Idaho Falls, during a recent flap concerning one of his campaign publications containing a controversial photograph of the extreme liberal Jane Fonda.
Now then, let us admit that reporters delete, indeed must delete some of each story, news conference and or news event every day. One could not possibly report the entire proceedings of every hearing, every story of any broad significance no matter how sincere or conscientious the reporter tried to be.
Add to this the problem of political "news" which is often staged and/or stacked by expert public relations people in order to lead or mislead depending on one's point of view. A news reporter can certainly be forgiven such an occasional error or oversight. So too, perhaps, a politician. Let's look at one.
Chadband, a well-known conservative and somewhat outspoken champion of free enterprise and limited government, has announced his candidacy to oppose the liberal incumbent Congressman Richard Stallings, D-Idaho, who narrowly defeated long-time holder of Idaho's Second District seat, George Hansen. Many Republicans asserted Stallings claimed to be far less liberal in that election than he really is.
On this latter claim Chadband the challenger, who is of and running hard for the GOP nomination to compete against Stallings, is hot to trot out Stallings' liberal, even super-liberal, record in Congress. It is generally conceded that whoever gets the GOP nod in the next primary will probably win the general election. So what's the problem?
Well, Chadband stood to gain great favor with his conservative district if he could show "proof" of his prospective opponent's genuine left-liberalism. Comes now a genuine windfall profit for Chadband. He got his hands on an actual photo taken at one of Tip O'Neill's very own Democrat hearings in Washington, D.C., showing Stallings, his future opponent (he hopes) standing alongside the flaming liberal, communist sympathizer, political activist Jane Fonda.
Remember, "Hanoi Jane" Communist North Vietnam's friend and ally?
But wait! The flaming liberal Idaho press to the rescue. "The photo sued by Chadband had been doctored," said the media. The word "cropped" was used to describe the photo. This writer has seen a copy of the original photo (i.e., before it was "cropped").
Here's the alleged photo scam: Originally the photo contained six congressman, all Democrats with conservative voting indexes averaging only 9 percent (from minus 2 percent to 40 percent) alongside the left-wing Fonda and two of her super-liberal lady friends, Jessica Lange and Cissy Spacek. Of course all were smiling enthusiastically for the photographer.
What did "Chad the cad" do that so aroused the Idaho media and their Democrat pals? Chadband's forces edited out four of the original six congressmen (forgive me: also one ear and a shoulder of one congressman clearly showed the "cropping" was incomplete). The remaining photo "edited" for Chadband's scandalous accusatory purposes showed four people remaining after the photo was, as some claimed, "altered." (Remember now, Chadband claims it was merely "edited").
The final four were: Stallings and Congressman Robert Thomas, D-Georgia, standing, and seated in front of the smiling politicians were Fonda and her liberal movie actress pal Cissy Spacek. Chadband's caption under the photo read: "Hanoi Jane" Fonda (right) had Richard Stallings' ear at liberal Democrat hearing in Washington." That's Idaho's latest political controversy folks.
It may not be as my Australian preacher friend said, "... one way of reading the Bible," but it most certainly is one way of reading a photograph. And as even the media is wont to say, sometimes: "It's the truth that hurts - and not the loophole."
Teaching Agriculture Basics
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
October 27, 1985
Many things are happening in government schools today, most of them controversial. That is, of course, both good and bad. It is good if the controversy brings good results and it's bad if it brings bad results. In either case the controversy brings with it at least the threat of change and it is here that the educators can legitimately lay claim to being "conservative," i.e., against change.
In this regard, perhaps we can all understandably plead guilty to a bit of status-quoism, but since the government for all practical purposes holds monopoly power in schooling we should try to hold them accountable whenever possible. The current farm crisis provides us an interesting case in point concerning our own University of Idaho.
The Oct. 17 issue of Idaho Farmer-Stockman magazine contains an article entitled, "Farmer Has Low Profile in State's Textbooks." The first paragraph begins: "The American farmer may be in the news lately, but he's not in Idaho textbooks." That observation provides the motive behind a committee for Ag in the Classroom, a program being coordinated by (you guessed it) the Idaho Department of Agriculture.
But wait! The public relations department of the U of I to the rescue. Comes now Lou Riesenberg, academic coordinator of our U of I's Department of Agricultural and Extension Education in the above article saying agriculture has not been addressed in Idaho textbooks because "it's never been a problem before. Food has been very accessible, costs have been very low and agriculture is not a glamour industry."
Egad! One wonders if Riesenberg is suggesting the U of I teaches only "glamour" subjects. It seems as if they should only teach hygiene and medical health after sickness and the plague have taken over.
Ho hum, so much for the government school's tendency for wanting to teach only what's popular, not what simply is basic. Still, one must be largely sympatico with the professors who find it somewhat boring to teach only the "three Rs" day in and day out, week in week out, year in and year out.
All of which is not to put them down. Not at all. It is to say that "basics are beautiful," hence we should promote back to basics as personified by Chicago's fabulously successful black teacher, Marva Collins. She should be our students' No. 1 folk hero instead of the nuts and freaks who beat hell out of their amplified guitars to massive and screaming audiences on most of our campuses.
If these campuses were not able to "sell" education so very far below cost one can guess that there would be even more incentive for the government school establishments to compel attendance and try to tout government education even further as a sacred cow.
I am reminded of U.S. Sen. Steve Symms, then president of the U of I Alumni Association, in 1969 when he was fired from that office for advocating, among other sensible things, a chair of capitalism. Can't you just hear Lou Riesenberg faced with today's textbook crisis on capitalism (there is one, you know) on campus saying: "It's never been a problem before."
Well, to his credit, judging from the rest of the magazine article, it is a pretty good guess Riesenberg and a few others in the government school system have at least awakened to the farm crisis. So what are we to look forward to now?
My guess is, given the penchant for government planning at almost all our government university campuses, there will be yet another parade of plans for agriculture coming from various college departments of agriculture.
As a case in point, this writer did a series of columns a few years ago opposing farm commodity marketing orders, a classic sort of fascist scheme for limiting (yes, limiting) farmers' freedom to grow food. I phoned the Moscow (U.S.A.) university department of both agriculture and economics in search of material "against" marketing orders. Believe it or not, my friends, they (the U of I) had material which favored farm marketing orders, but not one shred of evidence against them. Ho hum, so much for the free market side at our own Moscow.
There are some wonderful people at the U of I and Lou Riesenberg may very well be one of them. He may even be a closet libertarian (though I doubt our board of regents would approve) but it isn't necessary that he or his alumni lie awake nights worrying about agriculture's problems. It is only necessary they stay awake days.Such might have saved their alumni association's ex-president Steve Symms, who didn't know his university's status-quo, back in 1969, amounted to a marketing order against capitalism.
Bigotry Within Local GOP
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
November 3, 1985
It seems as if people today believe less and less in the dictionary, that is in the meaning of words. In fact the Republican Party is a case in point. Their party platform has for years pleaded for and bragged about tolerance and religious freedom. Until now?
Well, maybe so. It just may be that the Canyon County GOP has elevated religious bigotry to a new high - of nonsense.
Perhaps the meaning of these words also has to do with anti-communism and competition. These are also two words about which the GOP platform is quite clear. The competition I refer to just now is the competition between churches. Let me explain.
Several months ago about two dozen members of the Idaho Legislature attended a meeting in Los Angeles sponsored by CAUSA International, an anti-communist organization devoted to a worldwide voluntary effort to unify all the churches and people who believe in God so they can (read, could) defeat communism.
CAUSA International emphasizes the fact that communism is not only evil but it is in fact making great gains around the world. These gains are not only by military and violent revolutionary means (Afghanistan, Cuba, Hungary, Poland and the list goes on and on), but they are succeeding in a great many intellectual areas, such as churches, universities, movies, book publishing, TV's so-called documentaries and many other arenas.
The leaders of CAUSA have made an in-depth study of just why it is that socialism, communism and communist ideas succeed. They have concluded that people generally and America in particular do not understand communism or what makes it tick. They conclude that the way to correct the onslaught of the fearsome ideology and government against which America spends $200 to $300 billion each year is to study it (communism) and get the word out.
Well, this they have done - in spades. CAUSA is headed up by the Hon. Phillip V. Sanchez, formerly ambassador to Honduras (1973) and Columbia (1976). This dedicated, respected and intelligent man is now spending nearly his full time to advance the crusade to alert the world against communism and the menace posed by its forerunner, socialism.
Not only that, but he and his friends in CAUSA are having great success especially among the churches in America. The latter is a great, if rare, accomplishment. Moreoever, it is great any time one can get different religious groups to cooperate on anything at all, hence my sad feeling at our own GOP here at home. Here's why.
The Idaho legislators who attended the Los Angeles meeting were, almost to a man and woman, sincerely and greatly impressed with the success and intelligent presentation made by CAUSA; hence they made no secret of their moral support for the seminar which took three or four days.
So why my disappointment at our GOP? Well, since the legislators return from that Los Angeles trip, several have made praise-worthy public statements about it only to be almost shouted down by some members of the Canyon County Central Committee. Why?
Well, the CAUSA crusade tends to be politically conservative, at least it is most certainly anti-communist. But many liberals in their respective religious capacities are also anti-communist and now see through the lies and empty communist Utopian promises to which they were erroneously attracted for so many years.
OK, you ask, so what's so bad about all that? Nothing is bad, except that County GOP Chairman John Favillo has been deluged from some of the moderate members of the county almost screaming against our legislators who have been applauding and participating in the CAUSA effort. The protestors are being led more or less by their attractive, intelligent, energetic and moderate GOP State Committee woman, (Mrs.) Patty Ann Lodge. She feels the party is being embarrassed.
Again, why all the fuss? Well,a substantial part of the funds that go to support CAUSA come from the Unification Church which is headed up by the Rev. Sun Yung Moon. (I say, may God bless the Moonies.) Now then, it is Mrs. Lodge's right to oppose or enthusiastically support whomsoever she likes, but don't you think it should also be the legislators right to do likewise?
Ask longtime GOPer Monte Munn of Caldwell what he thinks of CAUSA or the Moonies too, for that matter, because both he and I attended a CAUSA conference in Washington, D.C., and loved it.
Oh yes, I should add that Munn is a Presbyterian and the Hon. Phillip Sanchez who leads up CAUSA is a practicing Catholic.
We Need to Agree on What Not to Do
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
November 10, 1985
Conservatives today are fond of the word "efficient" and tend to complain of the mess politicians have made of welfare spending. Liberals, on the other hand, prefer the word "compassion" and tend to complain only of the mess politicians have made of military spending. Each seems to admit government spending is much too high, but want the cuts to come off only their opponent's budget.
It comes as little surprise then that today's political activists are getting nowhere fast in controlling the hysterical growth of our runaway federal budget. It is true that it is cluck-clucked about, but something big is certainly missing. What is it?
Well, almost everybody is blaming the politicians for being dumb, insincere, lacking compassion, bungling inefficiency, etc., etc., ad infinitum, much of which is true enough. But the something that is missing may be that we've "educated" ourselves into what a great old sage explained: "It ain't what people don't know that causes our problem. It's what they DO know that ain't so."
The arms race is but one case in point although an overly dramatic one simply because the media tends to be sympathetic to liberal causes.
While the latter has some real truth to it, the media tends to underestimate the fact that much of what is wrong today stems from an almost fanatic agreement between the conservatives and liberals. The agreement seems to be that what gets voted into law is only what a sufficient number of conservatives and liberals can agree on what the government should do. In other words they cannot agree on what the government should not do.
This results in a sort of ratchet effect that calls for another law and another law even when it is, or should be, obvious that the original law caused the problem in the first place. It is almost as though our sacred cow, government, is like those in India and having ruined the grain crop by plodding through and mashing down what they don't actually eat,
having noticed the damage caused by the sacred cows the caretakers turn in even more cows to clean up the mess.
When somebody complains the caretakers explain: "But that's what the people demand." (In America the caretakers would add: "At least those in my district demand it."
For example, it cost $375 million when Rep. Joseph Addabbo, D-New York, insisted the Air Force buy 20 A-10 anti-tank aircraft that the Air Force regards as obsolete. The planes will be built in a plant near Addabbo's New York district. He is, of course, head of the house Appropriations subcommittee on Defense, which enabled him to insist that the Navy spend $15 million on research for a radar system it (the Navy) does not want. The work will be done in - you guessed it - New York.
In the last six years, the Defense Department has proposed more than 600 closings or scale-downs that would save half a billion dollars annually. Very few have been carried out, however, because congressmen fear the adverse effects on voters back home.
While this military spending may be complained about in the media, from time to time, there is not the same or a parallel political spending outcry in the area of welfare spending. The asinine characteristics of both these "sacred cows" is legendary, but the political motivations seem to get an almost stubborn, double-standard treatment in the selectivity with which the liberal media tend to criticize them.
Using tax money for private gain is no longer thought of as dishonorable, generally speaking, let alone as grounds for expulsion from public office. "Graft," once virtually synonomous with criminal activity,l is now known as "pork-barrel politics," and sometimes even by the sanitary newspeak term of "public service."
It is now taken for granted that elected officials should use tax money to buy the votes of their constituents. And where does that "revenue sharing" money ultimately come from? The deficit, of course.
If religious bigotry is on the rise in America, and indeed it is, it is exceeded only by the worship of our own sacred cows: the conservative's "efficiency" and the liberal's "compassion". Both, of course, at no cost to themselves.
Buying Votes with Envy
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
November 17, 1985
The rather curious headline read, "Simplot's son-in-law launched lieutenant governor's campaign." The Associated Press (AP) wire service story went on: "The son-in-law of industrialist J.R. Simplot and president of Simplot International (the overseas branch of Idaho's own giant Simplot Corporation) said, 'The basic economy of the state is in serious trouble,' and the key issues facing Idaho were, 'jobs, jobs, and jobs.'" Good statement. Dumb headline.
Now then, C.L. "Butch" Otter is one of the best-known, intelligent, outspoken and colorful political activists in the state of Idaho. He is also quite possibly the single-most articulate spokesman for non-governmental or market solutions to public policy questions in the state's history. His political views, while admittedly controversial, are well known if not understood or enjoyed by most of the liberal news media. Why?
Otter, as most people know, is conservative, but not in the status quo sense of the word. He is a conservative in the sense of the word that the great Barry Goldwater was a conservative back in 1964 when he made his now-famous statement: "Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." An absolutely great quote, but one for which the 1964 media virtually crucified him at that time. Why?
Most people now two decades later are agreed that Goldwater was conservative and right while the media was liberal and left, hence they aborted the conservative leader's free-enterprise mission before it even lifted off the 1964 presidential launching pad.
Now back to Idaho. why attack a whole year in advance the bright young free enterpriser, Butch Otter? It's something one has come to expect only from a left-liberal media, i.e., tag him to a big rich industrialist father-in-law.
"Yeah, rich is bad and poor is us," they seem to be saying, "Simplot must have stolen all that money from somebody since he has so much. His son-in-law must have helped him, so maybe us voters better beware or they may get all the dough and we'll get none."
Never mind that Simplot has furnished Idaho about the most beautiful and successful war against poverty ever in the state's history and got rich in the process. Oh well, maybe the newspaper's headline writer just had a bellyache that day. Let's hope so.
In any event, let's be thankful the media has not yet headlined Marjorie Ruth Moon (probably the Democrat's major chance to beat Otter) as daughter-in-law to the man in the moon. It would be as relevant as the "Simplot son-in-law" crack.
Comes now another of the media's men, former state senator and super-liberal Democrat Terry Reilly of Nampa. He is also a candidate for his liberal party's lieutenant governor's post and, if successful, would run against Otter (if Otter is successful in the GOP primary, of course). His opinion is somehow always big news. Here is the headline in another daily paper's Nov. 14,1985, report of political asininity. I feel a bit guilty even to repeat it, but here it is: "Reilly accuses Otter of pecuniary motives." That's an exact quote.
Thus Reilly's penchant for a political post has reduced his own body's resistance to a kind of intellectual AIDS for politicians. A new low. Get this as his "news" story unfolds: "But he said Otter's interest (in being lieutenant governor) is in helping the J.R. Simplot Co. gain financially." That newspaper's quote about Reilly's statement should have read: "Billionaire needs money." Or, "Reilly needs votes." Egad!
Here is Reilly's own proof of another almost incurable politician's disease: "Politically, I don't think Butch knows where he stands." Sufferin' succotash! Otter has his faults, but his stand's clarity often embarrasses the GOP.
Notwithstanding that Otter's campaign for governor a few years ago was the most forthright, high-principled, outspoken, direct and intelligent campaign ever carried out in recent Idaho history, Reilly himself knows better. otter wanted then (presumably wants now) less government. he favors capitalism though seldom uses the term. Contrariwise, Reilly almost inevitably wants more government and naturally favors socialist ideas. He never uses the term socialist, but should - every day.
This leaves only one question unanswered: What is the motive (since he used the word on Otter) behind Reilly? He is also a tall, handsome, intelligent, ordinarily good-humored and articulate politician. Well, I think his motive is the same as the headline writer's in the above-mentioned AP story on Otter. It is simple envy. There is precedent for it, too, as it goes back centuries. It is particularly clear and relevant today, however, as outlined inthe Bible's Book of Proverbs, Chapter 27:4, which reads, "Wrath is cruel and anger is outrageous, but who is able to stand before envy?"
I say, none can stand before envy. Absolutely none! Especially none can ina socialistic political system of ideas. But any predatory politician can exploit envy, urge his followers to wallow in it and buy votes with it - especially against a successful capitalist.
Beware Barnyard Economics
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
November 24, 1985
It is said that controversial ideas go through three stages: (1) they are roundly criticized; (2) they are violently opposed; and (3) they are accepted as self-evident. The idea of free trade may be just such an idea, but it is by no means accepted as "self-evident" yet, at least by sugar beet farmers and college professors.
Of the two professions, the latter is in no way suffering economically half so severely as the former, hence an interesting letter of lively protest grew from the pen of George O. Grant recently on the subject of the sugar provision of the 19485 U.s. farm bill.
Grant is president of Idaho Sugarbeet Growers Association and lives at Rupert. He's much like most farmers, that is, he is just trying to survive and help his ailing industry to survive. Grant complained in a letter sent to the University of Idaho, the media and others that Professor John Wenders, a free-market economist at the U of I, had signed a background paper for the Economist Committee on Public Policy asking the feds to phase out altogether or at least revise downward the sugar price support program.
While I tend to support Wenders' position for the most part, I must hasten to add that Grant and his industry are in big, big trouble. Certainly, if agriculture's problems and prosperity continue to be dependent on the federal government, the latter will continue to mangle and muck up both the farmers and the many agri-business jobs so terribly dependent on the crops they produce and process. Here's why.
Governments can't farm. They can't manage, can't finance, can't harvest, can't sell, can't process, can't store. Why, they can't even dump, yes dump, farm products into a foreign nation of hungry people without making most of the people there angry at how the U.S. went about it.
So why do most farmers want the government to do even more in the area of agriculture? Good question. One perhaps that Wenders wonders about, too, albeit he did so out loud and albeit that he doesn't have a damn dime invested in it.
But the sharp, gutsy, testy and controversial pedagogue doesn't worship the government either, bless his heart, nor does he worship the government either, bless his heart, nor does he worship its jillions of bureaucrats who tend to enforce the Department of Agriculture's own rules and jillions of regulations, which is more than one can say about most college professors.
OK, so what did the sugarbeet grower president say that was so worthy of note in his letter-made-public about the out-spoken U of I economist? (Other economists also signed the statement, by the way.)
"I am flabbergasted that an employee of a land grant college that is supported in some form by state tax dollars (here we go again) would support a policy that would unquestionably eliminate an industry that is so important to the state's economy and suggest that we would be better served by producing more wheat, beans or potatoes. I would like to suggest that the Dean of Ag., the Governor and the State legislators give Mr. John T. Wenders a short course in barnyard economics - Don't Bit the Hand That Feeds You! (signed) George O. Grant, President, Idaho Sugarbeet Growers Assoc., Rt. 5, Box 69, Rupert, Idaho."
There you have it ladies and gentlemen. If you take your salary from the government, state or federal, they claim to be "feeding" you, hence in the minds of many, you otherwise "bite the hand that feeds you," i.e., if you disagree. There is precedent for such an opinion, too. One of this country's federal Supreme Court justices said, "It is hardly lack of due process for the government to regulate that which it finances."
Now then, if this writer sounds a bit given toward Wenders' position inthis important flap, it is probably true, though this column won't likely satisfy him. Still, there is a real world out there and the professors should have to deal openly with it - votes, hatreds, envy, plunder, buck passers, bigots and all the rest. But will they? People generally want free trade - for others. They want protection for themselves. Politicians want to get elected. Toward this end, they tend to promise in order to get votes. They must. They won't change.
Prices, on the other hand, tend to tell us, honestly, what to sow and what to reap; what do produce and what to consume; what to use up and what to hold dear - and when. All government can do is to say "charge it," muck it up and send us the bill.
Wenders wants to deal with the real world, sincerely and wisely, with free trade. but foreign imports get in the way. So he is having a trade symposium in December on Canadian lumber imports. I asked him to invite Sen. Steve Symms to come and help keep the economist's theories honest. He (Wenders) declined. Methinks this tends to cause a vacuum into which may well rush what Grant calls "barnyard" economics.
This Monopoly Not a Game
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
December 1, 1985
Some time ago a Caldwell businessman sent me a form letter he received from the United States Post Office at Boise. It began, "Dear Postal Customer" and requested the customer's presence at "an important meeting of the Greater Boise Customer Council. We strongly urge you to attend this important luncheon and trade show."
The meeting was to " ... feature Albert M. Kellert, Manager, Sales Management Branch, from National Headquarters in Washington, D.C. His topic is 'Postal Trends and What is in the Future.'After the luncheon, there will be a short seminar on 'How Your Mail Moves and the Best Services for Your Needs.'"
My businessman friend's cover letter to the above asked, "Why does a monopoly like the post office need a 'Sales Management Branch?'" Good question I thought - at first. Then I changed my mind. Why? Well, once the public sentiment admits the post office to be properly "doing business," that is to say as a legitimate socialist enterprise, then how can we be consistent and not compound the initial error further by denying said socialist enterprise all the options open to a competing private enterprise?
Answer? We cannot, of course. So what do we do? Those of us who give a hoot tend to wonder just when government will at last consume the entire vestiges of the private sector, since government today gobbles up about half of the productive income of its citizens in the form of one kind of taxation or another. Seldom in history have even slave-owners not granted a much larger share of their slave's production to be retained by those same servants. This was in no way out of the bosses' benevolence but rather in order to keep the slaves pacified and productive.
This little scenario, ladies and gentlemen, is neither a small potatoes issue nor is it the fault of the friendly local postmen who deliver and service our mail. Indeed, Caldwell is more than fortunate to have had the services of a far above average group, generally speaking, at our local post office. But the ever-increasingly rapid demise of the private entrepreneurial sector in almost all arenas of competition is all too obvious to even the casual observer to need statistical verification.
OK, then why does my businessman friend ask; "Why does a monopoly like the post office need a sales management branch?" He should have asked the far more pertinent question: (1) Why does the government have to carry first class mail in the first place? (2) Why do they have to have a law prohibiting private enterprise from competing with it? They shouldn't have one, but they do.
The Boise post office letter signed by Gil L. Hicks, MSC Manager/Postmaster, signed off its advertisement flyer-letter with: "There will be a trade show in conjunction with the luncheon and local vendors will display all of the latest mailing equipment available ... we urge you to attend ... We believe there will be something for everyone, so send in your reservation as early as possible. Registration material is enclosed."
Sound familiar? Sound like a private business? sure it does. I nearly is except that a government "business" has no capital, takes no risk, pays no interest, pays no dividends, pays no taxes,brooks absolutely zero competition (private carriage of 1st class mail is against the law which, by the way, is rigorously enforced). It is strictly a growing socialist enterprise, but with many if not most businessmen too dull witted even to ask why its competition is prohibited.
Nor has it just happened overnight. According to my friend Anthony Sutton, former Hoover Institute scholar and author of National Suicide and many others: "On Jan. 20, 1844, Lysander Spooner announced that the American Letter Mail Company (ALM Co.) would establish post offices and carry mail between New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston. Within months (that) company and other private companies had captured the bulk of the mail from the government post office.
"The post office was alarmed but, instead of challenging Lysander Spooner in the courts, the post office initiated naked force: It threatened the transport companies with loss of government contracts unless they ceased to haul for ALM Co. The government then harassed and arrested the private mail company agents.
"In June 1844, Supreme Court Justice Story ruled that it was an open question whether the United States had any exclusive right to establish post office and post routes. Justice Story's ruling was too late. Government harassment had forced Lysander Spooner, american Letter Mail Company and the private companies out of business."
My business friend should have asked the more basic legal question of whether the government has any constitutional right at all to a monopoly of the mails. Then he and his pals simply must help restore respect for the Constitution and free, private enterprise. otherwise, soon everything that is not prohibited will be mandatory.
If It Moves - ... Privatize it!
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
December 8, 1985
A good natured but articulate educator said to me this week: "Ok Ralph, so the state is admittedly short of money. Just where would you cut assuming you had absolute power today?"
He was serious, of course, since the subject of the committee discussion was education and there was almost universal agreement that a problem of huge proportions at least did indeed exist. He knew also that education in Idaho receives approximately three-fourths (that's 3/4 - believe it or not) of the state's entire budget and some critics say that educators seem hell-bent after the remaining one-fourth.
Let me hasten to add that I do not believe most educators who think about the matter very much actually want the other one-fourth. Most of them are as sincere as I am and as my questioner, above. It is just that they genuinely feel they are "doing the Lord's work," so to speak, and it is terribly important that children be educated.
Furthermore, they see more money as being the rather obvious if not the only solution. It is a national sort of "mentality." Just look at our federal government's handling of foreign aid, Pentagon, CIA, Post Office, HEW, agriculture, etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseum. No, ladies and gentlemen, the route out of the swamp is to drain it, not irrigate it.
And merely to criticize teachers and administrators, most of whom are sincere, is not the answer. Most of them are just trying to survive (although admittedly it would help greatly if they could recognize that the majority of their critics are also sincere) as are the beleagured farmers, miners and lumbermen, for example.
All right then, what is a proper reply to my educator friend? Well, I told him I would begin a crusade tomorrow to privatize every good and service the state of Idaho performs. Everyone. No exceptions.
Is that too radical? Perhaps. But notice I said I'd "begin a crusade." Some things may need to be done by government, such as roads, police department, fire department and national defense. However, as an interesting aside, there are some private enterprise fire departments functioning quite well, for example, in Scottsdale, Ariz., notwithstanding the fact that Caldwell's Mayor Al McCluskey headed up a study group a few years ago who toured the private Scottsdale fire district.
While his group then reported favorably on the Arizona arrangement the firemen's union in Idaho flew into near-rage at the idea. McCluskey was soundly defeated at the last election in a write-in campaign widely reported to have been inspired and led by the local fire department. Such is a frequent reaction to the privatization idea in general and privatizing unionized governmental services in paticular. (Interested parties please note that in this "land of the free" there is even a law - strictly enforced - prohibiting private carriage of first class mail.)
Limited space precludes indepth discussion of complex circumstances surrounding the privatization idea, but a growing body of information and literature does exist, much of the media to the contrary notwithstanding. One lawmaker decided to use it.
Comes now Idaho House of Representatives Speaker Tom Stivers to the rescue. In a letter to the Caldwell-based Center for the Study of Market Alternatives (CSMA) two years ago this month, he asked for a review of an expensive report on Idaho education funded by a giant lobbying organization, the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry (IACI). They represent most all of the giant corporations in Idaho.
That report, generally speaking, might just as well have been written up by the Idaho teacher's knee-jerk liberal labor union itself. It called for more tax-funded community colleges - well - in fact more tax-funded almost everything.
The CSMA report entitled, "An Analytical Critique of Higher Education in Idaho: A Plan for the Future" was critical all right - severely critical. Stivers' letter requesting said study was printed in the front of the 19 page double-spaced typewritten study. Written by nationally known author-educator expert Samuel Blumenfeld the critique was next to brilliant, but it was ignored by much of the news media.
Although fairly well covered by the TV news in two major press conferences held right outside the door of the press room area during the legislative session in the capitol building itself, one large daily newspaper virtually censored completely any mention at all of either press conference.
Stivers and Rep. Donna Scott R-Twin Falls, recently re-opened the privatization idea recommended by Blumenfeld. Whether the CSMA "report" will be reported alongside the IACI report (or covered up) remains to be seen.
Educational 'Food Stamps'
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
December 15, 1985
Education vouchers. What are they? Some say they are a kind of "food stamp" for education. The government pays for schools much as they do now, only the voucher would enable parents to send their children to whatever school they choose.
The GI Bill, which grew out of World War Ii, is a good example. Hundreds of thousands of veterans received a higher education at the college of their choice through the GI Bill and the whole exercise went rather successfully. Then why all the controversy? Well, many people now want to extend the idea into lower education to expand both choice and competition, and maybe non-government schools, too.
In a country founded on freedom of choice, it is absolutely amazing how many battles still have to be fought over that issue all under the banner of what's best for the children. but in many ways school children are not beneficiaries, but pawns - creating jobs for teachers and empires for layer upon layer of administrators and bureaucrats all the way up to the giant new Department of Education. Children are merely the raw material that keeps this huge machinery turning for the benefit of others.
But that fact aside, all sorts of halloween scarecrows are brought out of the pumpkin patch to scare people away from the idea of parental freedom of choice.
One such scarecrow is that parents don't really understand education and would make terrible choices. If one considers the many disasters in the public schools in America created by "experts" over the past 10 or 20 years, it is hard to imagine how parents could do worse. One intellectual, however, is trying to blow the whistle:
"As the cost per pupil soared the students' test scores have plummeted," says Dr. Thomas Sowell, brilliant black educator and fellow of the prestigious Hoover Institute at Stanford University. "As the number of students has gone down the number of administrators has gone up. As the 'sex education' fad spread, under the guise of reducing venereal disease and teenage pregnancy, venereal disease and teenage pregnancy have reached new heights. As rules and disciplines have been relaxed or eliminated to make children happier, teenage suicide has also reached new heights.
"The education 'experts' have failed at virtually everything they have put their hands to," explains Sowell. "Johnny not only can't read, he can't think. But he can smoke pot, and get girls pregnant - and repeat sociological excuses for his behavior. The education experts' only (real) success has been at snowing the public.
"A parent doesn't have to be an expert on the inner workings of schools to be able to choose one that produces good results for his or her children. The real problem for the education establishment is precisely that parents can judge end results."
Given freedom of choice, there can be no question who has the best incentive to see that their children get the best available education and in Sowell's mind the parents will indeed so choose - if allowed to.
The black educator goes on to explain some exceptions: "Sometimes the education bureaucrats are willing to concede that some parents can make choices. but they claim that this is not true of parents who are less educated, poor or black. (Oh boy, the latter two really infuriate Sowell having had first hand experience, himself, at being both).
"It is precisely the children of these kinds of parents who get the worst education today, from the very education experts who claim to want to protect them from parental free choices."
During a panel discussion two weeks ago on the government TV's (Channel 4) Idaho Reports, some of the pros and cons of vouchers were discussed. This writer defended the government voucher plan as the only game in town that had even a prayer of a chance toward more or less semi-private solutions and competition in today's schooling.
To one question put to me by the program's charming, competent and left-handed host. Marc Johnson, I replied: "As soon as you media hot shots decide vouchers are virtuous, then and only then will the public appetite and demand for freedom of choice become popular." On my way out from his government TV studio located on the government campus of the government's Boise State University, Johnson, the affable utopian southpaw retorted with a big grin: "Smeed, it'll be a cold day in November before I let you on this show again."
Let me hasten to emphasize he "scolded" me with a big knowing grin, not a scary one. What does scare me, however, is the grin both he and BSU President John Keiser must use when they look for non-government choices - in anything.
The New Mr. Conservative
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
December 22, 1985
On Thursday evening's TV came Gov. John Evans explaining the case - that is his case - for less government.
Not that he generally favors less government, you understand, because he usually favors more. It is only because he (i.e., you and I) is out of tax money. There's not enough to go around, what with schools today using 75 percent of the state's entire budget.
Well, it is getting clearer that the mood of the public is such that most folks have had it "up to here" with more taxes. Remember when the politicians were promising more prosperity via more taxes? Well, that didn't work, so they promised more prosperity via less taxes. That has not worked either, so now what?
Evans' budget director followed him on the TV, saying that we need more money for schools and the only "fair" way is to increase the sales tax by assessing it now to services such as, one supposes, hospital bills, doctor bills, lawyer bills, plumbing services, hair cuts, etc. Practically all those services out there which are producing income outside the present sales tax are up for grabs.
I'm reminded of that old verse "Don't tax him, don't tax me; tax that fellow behind the tree." It has been going on for centuries. But the only thing Americans seem to learn from history is that they don't learn anything from history.
So what's to do? Well, Evans is no path-breaking politician. He has a shortfall of more than $26 million so, according to law, he has ordered a 2.5 percent spending holdback in order not to run out of money. The state agencies have screamed like mashed cats as you might imagine. So have the farmers screamed. So have the loggers. So have the miners. But the latter, the taxpayers, have neither money nor morale.
As an interesting aside, the University of Idaho school paper, The Argonaut, ran a story last school year about a survey interviewing professors as to the state of their morale. Result? All was pretty good except - guess what? "Not enough money," they said. This writer write a column to ask that student newspaper to poll Idaho's unemployed farmers, loggers, miners, waitresses, mechanics and others who are taxed to pay for those subsidized college degrees. Said poll would no doubt reflect the latter's morale, too, which would be a real downer.
I sent that particular article also to the Moscow paper, The Idahonian, which upon occasion runs my column, but like the U of I student newspaper they elected to "spike" the story. Their own special interest, one supposes, is much like the "greedy capitalist pigs" in Boise who pay "court" while the lawmakers are in session, i.e., they know which side their bread is buttered on.
So what is Gov. Evans to do to cover his shorts (read, shortfall)? Remember now, Big John is a nice man, but he is running hard for U.S. Sen. Steve Symms' job come next November, so he must appear to be at least as fiscally responsible as his opponent whose record in that regard is clearly more conservative than Evans'.
Here is what Evans could recommend although there is not yet a big hue and cry for it. It's called privatization.
In fact, thanks especially to the TV interview shows in particular and the media generally, the public scarcely knows that any recommendation even exists except the one promoted and paid for by a task force from big business in Idaho. That is the one financed by the Idaho Association for Commerce and Industry (IACI) calling essentially for merely what the teacher's union wants, namely, more of everything including even an additional system of community colleges throughout the state - and a great deal more tax money of course.
At the request of House Speaker Tom Stivers, R-Twin Falls, in January 19484, there was an excellent expert analysis made which was severaly critical of the massive IACI plan for schools. In part, the analyst's cover letter said: "Most educators claim that the (Idaho) situation would be far worse if the money had not been spent. I claim that it would have been better, for what all that money did was institutionalize this poor quality of instruction and provide lots more of it. The Title I legislation addressed form only. It did nothing for substance. That, I fear, is what will happen in Idaho if the Task Force recommendations are implemented without a deeper inquiry into the causes of educational failure in the state's public schools."
There was more, much more, to the timely 20-page critique which came to be known as the Blumenfeld Report commissioned for Stivers by the Center for the Study of Market Alternatives in Caldwell. But for some strange reason, since then most of the media has steadfastly looked the other way.
If you are interested in Stivers' crusade to reduce taxes through privatization write him for a copy of the Blumenfeld Report. His address is: Speaker, House of Representatives, Statehouse, Boise, ID 83720. And don't forget to wish him luck - he'll need it.
Kennedys on the Right Track
By Ralph Smeed
Idaho Press-Tribune
December 29, 1985
It is somewhat customary for editors, columnists and other writers to sum up at the end of the year more or less what went on. In fact the Press-Tribune reprinted an old but interesting editorial from U.S. News and World Report magazine which appeared Dec. 25, 1955, authored by their founding editor, David Lawrence.
It was a Christmas message of good and considerable proportions, but somehow it fell a little short of the mark I thought. In part it asked (I paraphrase): "... when will there be peace on earth and good will toward men? ... Can it be while men malign one another and distort the truth just to win an election to public office?"
The editor should have answered: "Heck yes, they will promise anything to get elected just as long as we in the media continue to write about politics as though it were something akin to a religion and as though the politicians were some sort of messiahs with whole bags full of miracles to give away."
The 1955 U.S. News editorial went on: "Can it be while we prate of morals and idealism, and then sell our souls amid the hypocracies of the hour?
"The motivation to resist tyrannical masters at the risk of death has always been heroic, but nowadays we are asked to buy security at any price - even at the price of ideals and moral principles." Lawrence properly deplored the politics of pragmatism, but unfortunately, not interventionism.
Yet wait! Comes now some good news, but from strange quarters. And forgive me if it's not big on the front page or nightly TV news. It certainly should have been. Why? Because in the Dec. 16, 1985, issue of that same magazine appeared some spectacular and unusual news.
The headline read, "A Hat in the Ring, A Toe in the Water." The son and daughter of one of the country's most popular statists and politics worshipping high priests, the late Robert Kennedy, express intention to run for high political office.
Joseph Kennedy II, 33, intends to run for the seat to be left vacant by House Speaker Tip O'Neill. The young Kennedy apparently touts private enterprise as the solution to many social problems according to the article: "The old way of the government's taxing and spending just won't work any longer," says the new young Kennedy. What in heaven is going on here?
If that doesn't surprise you in a big way, get a load of this. The granddaughter of famous liberal Democrat, Joe Kennedy, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who has her eye on a House seat in Maryland, says in the same (1985) U.S. News article:
"Liberals must stop viewing government as the caretaker of first resort." That one's for Ripley's Believe it or Not.
This is not to suggest we expect the Kennedy's "new generation" to start another compulsory government school system just to teach Adam Smith and Milton Friedman to a young generation brought up on Keynesianism, Marxism, Kennedyism and the burgeoning welfare state.not at all. But something long overdue, ladies and gentlemen, is happening in the idea centers and it should be bigger, much bigger, news.
Meantime back to the Press-Tribune's 1955 U.S. News editorial: "Somebody there will be a real Christmas. Someday the world will rise to pay homage to the principles that will assure peace ... as it unites us all in a world of eternal love."
Beautiful words of hope. Bless the late David Lawrence's heart. But let us not hold our breath. Consider the following bit of history that most media people and most liberals, by the way, seem to overlook in their "looking back" at the year's history year after year after year.
It expresses a post World War II mentality that somehow still sticks in the minds of the politics-worshipping leaders in both the Democrat and Republican parties. It permeates most of the media including, usually, today's U.S. News and World Report. It comes from the heritage Foundation's monograph, A Brief Survey of Price and Wage Controls: (Most people don't realize that that's our government's economic policy, even today).
"An authoritative critique of the Third Reich's economic policy was given by Reichsmarshal Herman Goering (who was responsible, among other things, for economic planning) while a prisoner of war in 1946. He told the war correspondent Henry J. Taylor, that 'Your America is doing many things in the economic field which we found out caused us so much trouble. You are trying to control people's wages and prices - people's work. If you do that you must control people's lives. And no country can do that party way. I tried it and failed. nor can any country do it all the way either. I tried that too and it failed. You are no better planner than we. I should think your economists would read what happened here ...'" (in Germany).
Well, some economists do. But those don't make the headlines. At least their ideas tend not to do so until the new Kennedys last week. And now will the media's New Year resolution writers please stand up?
|
| |
|
|
The Pragmatic Side of Principle in Pursuit of Public Policy
|
|