Rolling Back the Imperial Congress; R. Reiland

The proportion of French surnames was probably not out of proportion to a random cross-section of the population in the area. Nobody seemed driven by ancestral genes to have their children study French, con trary to the tenet of the new government imposed multiculturalism that ancestry alone determines linguistic ability and pref erence. These people had made personal evalua tions of their children's and their families' unique environment, ability, and resources in such an endeavor. For example, it is understood by the non-French-speaking parents that there will be a cost for private French tutors for their children. I spend about $200 monthly for such tutors, a cost that will surely increase as my children continue French at a more advanced level. No bureaucrat could possibly know the parents' resolve and resources in such mat ters, or gauge their resolve half as well as the first-come, first-serve system does in a crude but effective way. Because their par ents are willing to bear the costs, the school's students are the children with the best opportunity to succeed in its French immersion program.

The officialbilingual, multicultural movement is no respecter of parent's wishes or children's best interests. Throughout the nation, but especially in California, children with Hispanic surnames whose families may have spoken English for generations are being herded into bilingual Spanish pro grams, supposedly to help them adjust to learning English. Just as logically (or illog ically), children with Irish surnames, such as mine, should be incarcerated in Gaelic immersion to help them better adapt to learning English, Spanish, and French. Except in the rare case of children who are literally wards of the state, the linguistic training of children should be the matter of familial and not governmental responsi bility and choice. Parents quite naturally want their children to do well in life and wish them to master the language of the society in which they live, English in the case of the United States. In any event parents all over the world wish their children to learn English, the modern lingua franca of mankind. I have noticed that French familiesthat are temporarily in New Orleans strive to have their children master English in the short time that they have in the United States.

To rephrase Clemenceau, language train ingof children is too serious a thing to be left to bureaucrats. The family knows best. D Rolling Back the Imperial Congress by Ralph R. Reiland A top priority in the new Congress was to approve legislation that requires mem bers of Congress to obey the same laws that they pass for the rest of us. No longer will Ralph R. Reiland is Associate Professor of Economics at Robert Morris College and co owner of Amel' s Restaurant in Pittsburgh. the private sector be mandated to build wheelchair ramps while the disabled are told to forget about easy access to the Imperial Congress. That's a revolutionary concept to the old guard on Capitol Hill. A few years ago, a former Senate Democratic leader stated: "It's been said here many times tonight that ROLLING BACK THE IMPERIAL CONGRESS 317 we want to treat Senators the same as everyone else, that we want to have the Senate treated the same as the private sec tor. Not a single Senator believes that. Not a single Senator wants that."

The senator was arguing that the hiring and firing decisions in a senator's office should be exempt from civil rights laws. The EEOC wouldn't be playing any quota games with victim groups in his office. Another senator put it more bluntly: "The Senate is no lumber yard." Those senators are gone now. They didn't understand that most of us value the houses we get from lumber yards more than we value the meddlesome laws and red tape we get from Congress. The senators didn't understand why the public ranks Washing ton politicians below any other occupational category, including lumber workers. At least the guys carrying plywood buy their own stamps and don't confiscate part of our paychecks by voting themselves midnight pay raises. The call to exempt the Senate from civil rights legislation wasn't unique. Congress has exempted itself from the most far reaching and important pieces of modern legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Freedom of Information Act of 1966, the Age Discrimination Act of 1967, the Occu pational Safety and Health Act of 1970, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972,Title 9 of the Higher Education Act of 1972, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Privacy Act of 1974,the Age Discrimination Act amendments of 1975, the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, and the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988.

With the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa offered an amendment that said simply that the ADA would apply to the Senate. Sam Gerdano, senior counsel to Grassley at the time, reported that he and the sena tor were besieged by Capitol Hill law makers who were worried that they might be sued for discrimination under the bill. The amendment was defeated. The Lords of the Hill who created the world's worst litigation explosion didn't want to face trial by jury. Many Washington politicians never learned that a nation dominated by an arro gant political class that creates an increas inglyintrusive government and sneers at the work of the private sector ends up with an abundance of misery (and a shortage of lumber). We've reached the point where over half of the GDP of the United States is socialized by the various levels of government through taxes, transfer payments, and regulations.

Still, there's no shortage of politicians who push for more. They ignore the key eco nomic fact that the more market-oriented, small government economies around the world outstrip their statist counterparts by virtually every measure. When the Berlin Wall was toppled, the per capita GDP in capitalist West Germany was twice that of socialist East Germany. Today, South Korea's GDP is six times that of North Korea. Taiwan's is more than twenty times that of mainland China. In 1993, for the first time, the United States had more people employed in gov ernment than manufacturing. Making rules was more important than making things. Increasingly, the government became a col lection of litigiously minded busybodies and self-righteous social engineers who prac ticed less and less restraint in their assaults against private enterprise and personal lib erty. What's springing to life now is the public backlash against the ceaseless growth of monitoring by government bureaucrats and the job-killing explosion of taxation, litiga tion, and regulation. Making politicians in Washington subject to the rules and regula tions they pass is a meaningful first step toward pullingthe nation out of its statist rut and returning to common sense.

In November's election, the public elected more businessmen and business women than lawyers to the freshman class of Congress. Let's hope they start running Washington, D.C., more like a lumber y~. D THEFREEMAN IDEASON LIBERTY John Stuart Mill's Immortal Case for Toleration by Jim Powell j ohn Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty (1859) is the most famous work about toleration in the English language. It is clear, concise, logical, and passionate. It defends tolera tion-of thought, speech, and individuali ty-as a practical means to promote happi ness for the greatest number of people. The book inspired generations of classical liberal thinkers, and today it is probably the only historic work about toleration that most people ever read. Yet from the standpoint of liberty gener ally, the philosophy behind On Liberty Utilitarianism-was a terrible failure. Mill and other Utilitarians relentlessly attacked the doctrine of natural rights, a moral basis for liberty which had provided the only known intellectual barrier to tyranny. Nat ural rights, as explained by thinkers like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, de fined what governments could not rightfully do. Neither Mill nor any other Utilitarian offered fixed principles to replace natural rights. As far as Mill was concerned, Utili tarianism became a moral plea for socialism.