Reflections  

Defending our lesbian brothers — "We need to add the category of sexual orientation because it is so critical that we say to our lesbian brothers and gay brothers and sisters that we care about you, we include you, we want to defend you," said Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore, commenting on the bill he's co-sponsoring with Ted Kennedy to expand hate crimes legislation.

I'm thinking their real goal is to make it illegal to hate politicians. Then there'll be three types of Americans: those in Congress, those that love them and re-elect them, and those in jail. The real question will be how the small number in the second group will be able to afford to continue paying for the first group, to say nothing of the massive hoard in the third group.

By the way, isn't it amusing when smarmy politicians like Gordon Smith are so devoted to kowtowing to special interests that they do so even before they understand the nature of the special interest? What else could explain him pledging to defend his "lesbian brothers"? — Ross Levatter

Terrorist switcheroo — When I was in high school, I recall being told how one of the Crusades — whose purpose ostensibly was to rid the Holy Land of "Mohammedan" infidels — had somehow ended up invading and conquering Byzantium, the capital of a large and prosperous Christian empire. I've always wanted to read Gibbon and get the straight skivvy on this, but I've never found the time.

Yet I think of it when I look at what's happened in the War on Terror. It astonishes me to see how little we've done to prevent another terrorist attack and how much we've done that, well, actually seems to undermine our ostensible purpose. Last time I flew, a uniformed policeman demanded to search my wallet. I hadn't set off a metal detector, but he thought I might have been carrying a "card knife" (whatever that is) in my wallet, or so he said. I don't know about you, but when policemen can search people on a whim, Americans are facing a new kind of terror.

Of course, the biggest switcheroo is the conquest of Iraq — oops, I mean "Operation Iraqi Freedom." Saddam Hussein's Iraq was an awful dictatorship and Hussein helped maintain his popular support by saying nasty things about the U.S. But he didn't try to do anything to us, and didn't even have the means to try, despite our government's repeated claim that he had "weapons of mass destruction" (i.e. military weapons that might actually be effective against America's nuclear arsenal). Nevertheless, we invaded Iraq, conquered it in a few weeks, deposed Hussein, and celebrated our great victory.

Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden, the perpetrator of the terrorist attack on the U.S., is a free man, more capable than ever of committing further terrorist attacks, thanks to America's invasion of Iraq increasing his popular support among Arabs. — R. W. Bradford

The fabulous Communists — On May 5, Sen. Joe McCarthy was once again in the news. The U.S. Senate unsealed transcripts of closed sessions with suspected Communists. The press coverage was predictable.

The Reuter account, by Joanne Kenen, began thus:

"Fifty years after Sen. Joseph McCarthy's scorched earth investigation into supposed Communist infiltration of America's most sensitive institutions, secret transcripts released on Monday add another layer of tarnish to his place in history. The 5,000 pages from his closed-door hearings show no smoking guns, no uncovered spies, no verification of conspiracy theories on which he built his political career."

The article went on at some length about McCarthy, with one paragraph near the bottom about the wider context:

"But McCarthyism was longer and deeper than Joe McCarthy himself. Anti-Communist probes, sometimes camouflage for attacks on labor or early civil rights activism, dated back to the 1930s and intensified in the late 1940s with the Cold War."

I quote this not because it is exceptional, but because it is typical. Outside of the conservative press, there is rarely any mention that Communists existed in the government in the 1940s, or that with what was going on in the world then, there might have been good reasons to worry about them. There is no reference to the Communists in the Roosevelt government or of Stalin being our ally; of Elizabeth Bentley, Whittaker Chambers, and Alger Hiss; of Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs and the atom bomb; or of the "girl" spy Judith Coplon. Above all, the pursuers of Hiss, Coplon, and the Rosenbergs are never credited with being right.

The Left — indeed, the mainstream, which on this issue is the same as the Left — doesn't focus on Communists in government, but upon the investigations of screenwriters, musicians, and academics. They tell the story they want to tell — and they make it the only one. — Bruce Ramsey

Brave new day care — To make a bird a good pet, you take it from the nest before it can see, and start feeding it in human hands. That will imprint onto the bird that human hands are its mother, and the bird will mature into an adult that likes to be petted.

In the same fashion, kids taken from their parents' home and put into state facilities will grow up to recognize the state as their parents. In books like 1984 and Brave New World, totalitarian governments assume all the responsibility for raising children. It is imperative to instill a love of the state into kids' minds at a very young age. The younger they can start loving the state, the better.

About 50 years ago, leftists decided that first grade was not early enough to begin imprinting children, so they instituted kindergarten. About 20 years ago, Operation Head Start was instituted as a pre-kindergarten measure. Even though studies indicate there is no benefit to a child's education from being in Head Start, the funding for the program has increased every year since its inception. Now all the talk is of state-financed day care for kids not old enough to get into Head Start.

Look in the coffeehouses of America if you want to see the end result of day care. A bunch of bitter, unemployed, vegetarian art school graduates who didn't believe their parents when they were told they would never get a job with a degree like that, waiting for a government handout. Where do you think they learned that hanging out with your friends and making pretty pictures is more important than work? — Tim Slagle

Poverty is the health of the planet — That now makes it three times that I've heard it.

The first was last year, amid all the protests against globalization and the World Bank. Some talking head was going on about what a disaster it would be for the environment if the entire world had the same living standards as the U.S. Amazing: here was a leftist openly worrying that free trade would not impoverish, but enrich the lives of everyone in the Third World. More recently, some of my fellow Libertarians and I attended a third-party gathering. I compared notes (so to speak) with a gentleman from the Green Party. He did not favor unlimited immigration to this nation. What a disaster it would be for the environment, he explained, if we had even more people living at U.S. standards. When I asked if this meant that he wanted people to remain in their poor countries so that they could remain poor, he insisted quite sincerely — hey, you should have seen his face — that he didn't want people to be poor. The third time was at a coffeehouse-type folk music venue sponsored by PeaceSmiths, a left-of-center anti-war group. The singer of "It Could Happen" warbled about all kinds of doomsday possibilities, including the Third World becoming like us, "wasting resources" — i.e., utilizing resources in an industrial economy.

To me, this is almost like the Wizard himself pulling back the curtain. The only thing I can add is a riff on Tim Slagle's suggestion (February) that Canada-loving progressives head north — namely, that these poverty-loving environmentalists should head south. — Barry Loberfeld

You can lead a statist to water... — At the annual meeting of the Association of Private Enterprise Education in Las Vegas, where there were about 200 participants, one question kept coming up everywhere: Why is it so difficult to get people to realize that individual liberty is all around far better than government regimentation? Why do people, even after all the historical, analytical, moral, and related arguments have shown that communities benefit from liberty a great deal more than from government intervention, keep putting their faith in force, not in voluntary cooperation and competition?

No one seriously doubts, at least in America, that religion is better off decoupled from government than when the state tries to force it down people's throats. There is also little question that a free press is superior to a managed one. So why is there this persistence of belief in the idea that as far as commerce, education, science, medicine, and other areas are concerned, we need government to take the initiative instead of just keeping watch that criminals don't get away with impunity, that aggression is kept out of human relations?

Speaker after speaker trotted out mounds of evidence showing that environmental, educational, artistic, and all kinds of other issues are better handled when government stays out of the picture, yet speaker after speaker concluded a presentation with the question: how is it that this plain fact isn't accepted by the public, by politicians and by academics?

We have the examples of the Soviet Union, of Nazi Germany, of Fascist Italy, of Cuba, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and even the faltering welfare states around the globe to teach the lesson that men and women who aren't treated as children by a government that is supposed to stick to protecting their basic rights do far better at solving problems — at doing the right thing, at being creative and productive — than do the subjects of dictatorial regimes.

Sure, there are some who have a vested interest in holding on to the myth that government is necessary to make all sorts of things work, but such rationalizations are transparent enough for most people to grasp. It is not these people whose lack of appreciation for the value of human liberty is mystifying. No, it is those who themselves would benefit most from liberty who seem not to grasp its immense advantage over the use of force. And that is bizarre.

One collage of reasons stands out for me as a likely explanation for this phenomenon. The gist of it is that liberty is, after all, a risky state to be in.

First, liberty involves taking responsibility for your own conduct, good or bad.

Second, it means not treating your fellows as if they were available to use to your heart's content whenever your luck has run out.

Then, also, there is the risk that free men and women will just do their own thing, good or bad, and not pay much heed to what the wiser folk would have them do, or that it will take quite a bit of effort to get them to do what the wiser folk want if government's force of arms isn't available to set them right.

Finally, and I put a lot of credence in this one, free men and women do not have to serve some mysterious lord and master no one understands very well, but for whom lots of folks like to speak. Nearly all religions fear that without a good deal of force, or the threat thereof, we will just live it up right here and now, never mind everlasting salvation. And that is to some a frightening prospect.

So, few people are comfortable giving up the hope that they can eventually turn the powers of government to their own superior use and make people virtuous, getting them to behave properly. Maybe next time, just maybe, the government can get it right — after all, it has that famous use of last resort handy, physical force (just as when, in personal relationships, one person resorts to slapping another around, claiming that, well, nothing else did the trick so quickly and efficiently)!

All this despite the fact that there is nothing at all decent about people doing the right thing because they are compelled to do it. Still, this just doesn't seem to faze many Muslim or Christian leaders, nor most of the intelligentsia — so we have wars on drugs, vice squads, economic regulations, and, in large regions of the world, even forced prayers to make us all behave well.

Perhaps only after it is grasped, finally, that all we can do in life is learn to live well, and that whatever follows, if anything, is completely out of our hands, will we also admit that freedom is better for people than any measure of tyranny, be it Draconian or petty.

Given how this idea is quite radical and relatively new, it may be, as Ayn Rand once wrote, earlier than you think. — Tibor R. Machan

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