Reflections  

The customer is always wrong — Here's the cover story of the Feb. 21, 2005 issue of Time magazine: "What Teachers HATE About Parents."

Can you imagine a Time headline "What Successful Restaurateurs HATE About Their Patrons"? Their only possible complaint would be that their customers don't eat out often enough. But, of course, teachers want fewer students per teacher, not more.

Nothing could demonstrate more clearly the complete absence of competition in modern education, and consequently the ability of producers of education to dismiss the concerns of consumers of education, than this Time cover. — Ross Levatter

Will declare blight for cash — The article "They're Coming for Your Land" (March) was superb! Even very small towns in rural Nevada use the designation of "blight" (which can be applied to any neighborhood, blighted or not) to qualify for government grants of various types for town improvements. Fortunately for us, in Nevada, counties with fewer than 100,000 residents cannot use eminent domain for redevelopment purposes. When our very small hometown designated the main street through town as "blighted" (nothing blighted about it) in order to get a grant, we told the town board that if they did not remove our main street property from the "blighted" area, we would sue the town for taking private property without just compensation, thereby violating the 5th Amendment. They caved after they realized we meant it, and the map of the "blighted" area has a noticeable chunk missing. Of course, this is not the sort of thing you can do to protect your property in a large or even medium-size town, which is one reason we are here and not there. — Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw

The lowest common inaugurator — Most presidential inaugural speeches are just compilations of truisms and homilies, intended to appeal to the lowest common denominator of Boobus americanus. Every once in a while there's a memorable line, however glib, like Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Or Roosevelt's "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." My candidate for the signature line in the Bush coronation ritual is: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."

It's a good thing that few people pay any attention to these things, perhaps intuitively realizing that it's mostly just superficially appealing spin. But I found the words of our self-appointed "war president" scary, ill-informed, and just plain stupid.

Contrary to the mantra of the Bushies, what has distinguished America in the past is that liberty flourished here totally independent of what happened in other lands. Things have come to a sorry state indeed if liberty can't survive in the United States without "depending" on its success in miscellaneous hellholes. Even worse is his thought that peace apparently depends on the United States expanding "freedom" by invading places he thinks need it.

An analysis of Bush's speeches will show that, other than articles, conjunctions, pronouns, and similar parts of speech, the words he uses most are "liberty" and "freedom." He should have them purged from his vocabulary, and have his mouth washed out with a bar of soap for corrupting the English language. Bush is (and I hate to say this after the disastrous Clinton) the most destructive president we've ever had for liberty and freedom, with the possible exceptions of Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR. — Doug Casey

Academic disciplines — Two current controversies might help illuminate what is meant by "academic freedom" and how it ought to be applied. Ward Churchill, former chair of the Ethnic Studies department at the University of Colorado, is under attack for things he has written outside the classroom, specifically that the victims of 9/11 were "little Eichmanns." Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a professor of economics at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, has been under administrative pressure for a year, ever since he made remarks inside a classroom about time preference for different groups during a lecture in an economics class. Hoppe claimed that, for a variety of reasons — for example, no children to worry about — homosexuals have a higher rate of time preference discount; that is, they tend to value present satisfaction of wants or desires over satisfaction in the future.

Tenure, with its attendant academic freedom, was originally intended to protect teachers not from what they did in classrooms, but from what they did outside them. But as political advocacy has become one of the academy's favorite pastimes in our postmodern age, it is now more generally invoked for problems arising within classrooms. As one who has done a fair share of college teaching, I am sensitive to the fact that, in today's often poisonous academic environment, a single slip of the tongue can cost one a job and, possibly, a great deal more. Is invoking academic freedom an all-purpose defense? Obviously not, for professors are disciplined and fired all the time for infractions of school policy, as their colleges and universities (and school districts, of course) define those policies. No teacher can claim an absolute privilege never to suffer negative consequences for saying — or writing — something that offends someone, or for classroom behavior subsequently judged to have been incorrect.

I can't claim to know precisely what limitations academic freedom ought to have, but it seems to me that these two cases are very different. Churchill's statements outside class and in his writings are a matter between him and the university. If CU wants to tolerate them, then its administrative process must bear whatever long-term consequences arise from having one of its professors spouting unpopular rhetoric.

In Hoppe's case, his claim of academic freedom in the classroom needs to be taken very seriously. I wasn't there, but by the accounts I've read, Hoppe's statement was in an academic context and not some kind of gratuitous insult aimed at homosexuals. It is also a statement that can be subjected to empirical verification or falsification. The fact that the offended student chose not to speak with Hoppe or challenge him in — or outside — class, but instead chose to run directly to the school's administration is quite telling. Even if Hoppe had been expressing an entirely personal opinion, his claim of academic freedom would still apply for several reasons: students often desire to learn their professor's opinions on subjects other than the one they are studying; and no professor can possibly teach pure facts alone, so all professors say things that are partially or wholly non-factual at some point in their lives. When they do, should they immediately be fired? Reprimanded? Retroactively fired when evidence shows they were incorrect in some past lecture? Should teachers refuse to discuss any issue that in any way might offend even one student's sensibilities? What are students' obligations when confronting professors who they claim are offending them?

I don't have the definitive answers to these questions, but unhappily, they appear to be of increasing importance. It's enough to make one consider some field other than teaching, and that's the real pity in all this. For every good teacher who is forced out, or reprimanded, several potentially fine teachers will divert their talents to pursue other endeavors with a "Who needs this kind of thing?" attitude. Tomorrow's students will be the ones who ultimately pay for poorly applied policies. I say CU should let Churchill say and write whatever he wants, and UNLV owes Professor Hoppe a very overdue, and very sincere, apology. — Robert Formaini

Lousy judges, dumb questions — I hope somebody on the New York State Matrimonial Commission said "Amen" when Judge Judy testified about "lousy judges who really have no right to rule" making "lunatic decisions." Her prescription to remedy the family courts included instituting "a substantive test" for judicial candidates.

I'd like to contribute these three questions for that test, from a litigant's point of view.

Question 1: You want your lousy judge off your case in particular and the bench in general. You chronicle your reasons. The decision on your recusal motion will be made by:
A) The supervising judge in the Courthouse;
B) The political party who offered this judge as the only candidate for the Civil Court;
C) Your lousy judge.
The correct answer is C.

Question 2: You can expect the decision to read:
A) Gee whiz! Did I make all those lunatic decisions? Motion granted;
B) The court is fair and intelligent; furthermore the court's experts agree that the roses should be painted red. Okay? Motion denied;
C) We are Egypt. We are not pleased. Motion — and all motions henceforth — denied.
The correct answer is B or C, depending on whether you read between the lines.

Question 3: Your next and last step is to appeal. By established case law, Appellate judges must show great deference to:
A) The Family Court judge, because she has the best vantage point for evaluating the credibility of the witnesses;
B) The litigant, because she has the best vantage point for evaluating the credibility of the judge;
C) Whoever went duck hunting with them.
The correct answer is A.

Until the answers to this test change, any test for judges misses the mark. As long as the inmates are running the institution the courts will remain lunatic asylums. — Lauren Shapiro

Tilting at turbines — It's amazing what a 1.8-cent tax credit and some state mandates for renewable energy can do. Suddenly, wind farms are being proposed for the hills of West Virginia, Maryland, and Vermont, the mountains of Colorado, and the waters off the shore of Cape Cod. Possibly aided by high natural gas prices, wind energy is all the rage.

Although wind power produces less than 1% of the nation's electrical energy, it has become highly visible. Indeed, that is its chief problem — wind turbines, which reach 160 feet in height and have blades 140 feet in diameter, are very visible. For environmentalists, who traditionally have supported wind as a "soft" source of energy, the idea of despoiling beautiful places is a shocker.

So environmentalists are splitting ranks. It started with Robert Kennedy, Jr., who imperiled his environmentalist credentials by opposing an offshore wind farm that might be seen from his family's compound on Cape Cod. "There are appropriate places for everything," he told the New York Times, and Cape Cod apparently isn't one of them. Green opponents are popping up around the country. Pleading to his fellow activists to let up, Bill McKibben wrote in the New York Times on Feb. 16, that "part of me doesn't want to gaze out from the summit of Peaked Mountain or the marsh at Thirteenth Lake [in New York State] and see an industrial project in the distance." But, he goes on, to stave off global warming he will have to.

I get some wry amusement from the activists' disarray. What shocks me, though, is the way that otherwise free-market venture capitalists have embraced a business propped up by government subsidies and regulation. An article I recently edited that criticized wind energy aroused outrage, much to my surprise. Although the criticisms included a few dubious technical arguments, at the core they argued that traditional fuel sources are subsidized, so wind should be too. This claim of heavy subsidies for other fuels is largely wrong — on net, government hurts them more than it helps, says a Cato study — but the idea lets would-be entrepreneurs feel better about getting on the subsidy gravy train. — Jane S. Shaw

Keepin' the faith — I recently listened to the first of three hour-long monologues presented in a 24-hour period by Harry Browne, at a meeting of the San Diego Libertarian Party. He was given cheers and a standing ovation . . . and I came away understanding why the LP is hopelessly marginalized in American political life.

What has the party accomplished during the 40 years since William Buckley campaigned for libertarian policies and values in New York? Never since has his exposure or vote-getting been matched.

The truth? America's closest thing to a third party cannot even do to George W. Bush what Ralph Nader did to Al Gore (an accomplishment that might have done our country and the world tremendous good, even without electing a candidate.) Libertarians are not only on the fringe. We are pathetic. If the LP had pulled a Nader in just one state, the salvation and gratitude of the Union might have been overwhelming. But no, men like Browne cannot even see how we let the country down.

I had been told by organizers that Mr. Browne would debate me about pragmatism vs. idealism. Finding instead a camp meeting, featuring monologue pulpit sermons, I grew frustrated listening to calls for perfect fealty to the precise liturgy of Received Faith, reiterating that failure after failure at the ballot box need never provoke significant reflection upon the message itself.

No, we must stick to a purist party line that the American people have relentlessly rejected (in one form or another) for 70 years. No tweaking. No fresh approaches to replace stale ones. No gradualist proposals for free-market alternatives that might compete with statist solutions. No concessions to an American consensus that the best-educated people in world history have generally ratified in biannual elections for three generations. No, we must continue to rant at our neighbors that their consensus is 100% idiotic. Hallelujah.

Mr. Browne preached that we must reject incrementalism and stick to "educating" the foolish, unenlightened masses, hoping that someday, like the Berlin Wall coming down, a sudden change of state will miraculously occur. This has all of the hallmarks of a religion, not a political agenda grounded in assumptions of individual sovereignty.

In a market, you would laugh at a businessman who kept blaming his failures on the customers. Or whimpering that the market is biased to favor big players. A competitor with a good product should be able to get past such obstacles.

Yes, there are elites out there who have biased much of the media, rigged electioneering laws and even hijacked some of the ballot process. But is it seemly to whine and blame such shenanigans for the LP's inability to capture more than one percent of the vote? Pathetic.

Mr. Browne seemed puzzled when I stood up to suggest that this entire approach was based upon an unpleasantly smug assumption — that the American people are fools. (Puzzled, but uninterested in discussion.)

Contempt is the food of ideologues. They crave it more than oxygen. All religious fanatics relish contempt for their infidel neighbors, who cannot see the Truth that they see. But this impulse is especially ironic, hypocritical — and, yes, contemptible — for libertarians to embrace, since their entire philosophy is supposed to be based upon the premise that our neighbors are not fools. Indeed, Americans are so vastly better educated than all other polities in history, combined, that they have produced far more libertarian-leaning minds! That alone should be cause to reject seductive contempt.

Blaming citizen-ignorance is the profoundly stupid and hypocritical premise of LP platonism and the root of all its failure. It must be called what it is. An emotional crutch and the core reason why a party based on adult-sovereignty relentlessly insults Americans instead of offering them pragmatic alternatives. The fault is not theirs, it is ours.

A few libertarians have been awakening to the cult mentality that prevents the movement from outgrowing its image as a band of tinfoil hat-wearing kooks. I was invited to harangue the LP National Convention about this in 2002 and the speech (transcribed at http://www.davidbrin.com/libertarianarticle1.html) has become an underground hit.

Elsewhere I have led a drive to recognize that the deeper problem is not just government. Other enemies also undermine individual initiative and sovereignty. For example, no one seems to have noticed what really happened on Sept. 11, 2001: ordinary citizens swiftly and resiliently acted to assume responsibility for duties that had been taken over by the professional classes (http://www.futurist.com/portal/future_trends/david_brin_empowerment.htm). This squelching of the "age of amateurs" is perpetrated at least as much by commercially-centered professions as it is by government-centered ones.

Are "government bureaucrats" the only threat to citizen autonomy, free markets and liberty? Anyone who fixates solely on the IRS and bureaucracy is no student of history. And yet, that is precisely the stance of today's libertarian liturgy, which can see no threat at all in the sort of conspiratorial aristocracies that squelched freedom in every other nation, in every other era.

There are millions of Americans who might vote Libertarian if the LP stopped yammering and hectoring people about FDR and LBJ. If libertarians cheered up and stopped ranting about dismantling consensus institutions that the American people consented to for three generations, and instead began offering incremental alternatives to those institutions. Private services might first compete with paternalistic ones, and then gradually replace them, without much protest from the American people. There are many recent examples.

You will never dismantle the IRS by shrieking at it. In contrast, the gradualist "parallel services" process by which FedEx and UPS gradually and gracefully replaced Parcel Post shows that you can use the incremental approach to make a huge difference. The people have seen that sort of thing happen. They understand it and don't fear it, the way they legitimately fear all-or-nothing fanaticism. — David Brin

© Copyright 2009, Liberty Foundation

Send editorial comments to letters@libertyunbound.com.
All letters to the editor are assumed to be for publication unless otherwise indicated.

Send web site comments to webmaster@libertyunbound.com.