Making the Case for Liberty Stick; L. W. Reed

As veteran readers of The Freeman know, ideas are what matter most. Pointing fingers, naming names, and unmasking duplicitous pol iticians can never by themselves win the battle for liberty. Indeed, such tactics can be counter productive when they lull people into thinking that changing faces in government is enough to change results. Ideas must change, and if they do, the faces will take care of themselves. For some, focusing on ideas seems to be an unbearably long-term strategy. They yearn for the magic button that, when pressed, will make things better. They think everything depends on who gets into office in the next election. They want to win elections now, so they put their money and time into yard signs and bumper stickers instead of books, articles, seminars, and other educational tools. These impatient friends fail to understand that politicians rarely operate outside a box framed by public opinion which, translated, means the demands and expectations of those politicians' particular constituencies. One wealthy patron of hundreds of candidates Lawrence W Reed, economist and author, is presi dent of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free market research and educational organization head quartered in Midland, Michigan.

over the years recently expressed this frustra tion to me: "I wish I could do something so that once the people I support get elected I won't have to keep calling them to find out why they cast so many bad votes and make so many wrong decisions." I told him that the one most effective thing he could do is to invest in ideas. Give someone a book, I told him, not a bumper sticker. What better evidence do we have of the importance of education than the experience of the 104th Congress? The Republicans ousted the Democrats for control of both houses, for the first time in 40 years. Most of the freshman class elected in that tumultuous year of 1994 pledged themselves to shrinking the federal government and "turning power back to the states and to the people." But by early 1996, enthusiasm gave way to disappointment. Government had been nicked here, shaved a little there, but the "revolution" had fizzled.The more thoughtful among the revolutionaries didn't lay the blame on the president or the media; they knew they had been thwarted by the "sunshine patriots" back home-people who buy the rhetoric of less government but run in the other direction at the prospect of actually achieving the real thing. This suggests that much work remains to be done on the idea front. People must deepen their understand ing of liberty so they'll stick with it when the going gets rough.

Making the case for liberty stick, so that it isn't simplysome short-term rhetorical exercise, is a multi-faceted task. It draws support from a 790 range of intellectual disciplines-economics, politicalscience,sociology,and history,to name a few. It requires a nurturing of many personal virtues-self-reliance, enterprise, respect for others and their property, moral inspiration, and optimism about what free people can accomplish.It encourages a patient, long-term perspective over the instant gratification of short-term obsessions. To this list I add one more ingredient that is worthy of our increased attention-demystifYing government. Too many battles are lost to statists because of a misplaced and hard-to-shake faith in government itself. For all its endless failures, now more widely perceived than at any time in decades, government is still regarded as real and tangible while free-market alternatives are often thought of as nebulous and imaginary.

For example, take Social Security. Most Americans now acknowledgeits inherent flaws and impending debacle. Suggest ending Social Security and making retirement security a purely personal and market-based responsibil ityand manyof those same people wincein fear. "Who would take care of Grandma?" they ask. Of course, theywant you to answerwith a listof names and addresses; anything less will leave them in grudging acceptance of the status quo. Far too many Americans think that if government provides education, it may do so ineffectively but at least some basic level of schooling will exist. Likewise, they think that if government gets into the low-income hous ing business, the result may be scandal-ridden but at least the poor will be housed. It constantly amazes me that defenders of the free market are expected to offer certainty and perfection while government has only to make promises and express good intentions.

Many times, for instance, I've heard people say, "A free market in education is a bad idea because some child somewhere might fall through the cracks," even though in today's government schools, millions of children are falling through the cracks every day. Our task as friends of the free market is to reverse this state of affairs. We must portray the promises of government and politicized society for what they are-nebulous and imag inary. We must explain the benefits of free markets and civil society for precisely what 791 they are-real and tangible. After all, isn't the evidenceon these points overwhelming?Where do oppressed people flee when given the chance-to free countries or socialistcountries? Where do they conquer more poverty by pro ducing more goods that sustain life the longest and at the highestlevels?In whichenvironment do people attain the greatest satisfaction and self-fulfillment-an environment of depen dency and sloth, or one of self-reliance and effort? Americans should be embarrassed even to ask such questions.

The Myth ofthe Magical Bureaucracy, a recent booklet co-authored by Congressmen Pete Hoekstra, Mark Neumann, Sam Brownback, and Mark Souder, demystifiesthe federal gov ernment with a goldmine of facts and figures. For example, Americans have come to assume that since Washington became involvedin ed ucation in the mid-1960s,education has been advanced; effortsto abolish the Department of Education and its 760 separate programs have been met with stiffresistance. The facts, however, are these: Educational performance in the United States has been in steady decline since the mid-1960s. Average SAT scores have dropped 35 points since 1972. Sixty-sixpercent of 17-year-olds do not read at a proficient level. U.S. students scored worse in math than all other large countries except Spain. And 30 percent of all college freshmen must take remedial classes. For another example, consider the Ameri Corps program, which propagates the myth that "magical bureaucrats" can create a re newed volunteer spirit in America. The facts are these: AmeriCorps displaces true volun teerism by paying people with tax money to "do good." Designed just three years ago to cost taxpayers "only" $16,000 per "volun teer," it now costs between $25,797 and $31,017 per volunteer. Worse yet, only $14,000 of that money goes to the actual "volunteer," while the remaining $11,000 to $17,000goes to overhead and administration!

Making the case for liberty stick will take a lot more of this sort of compelling analysis, marketed in an articulate fashion. The Em peror has no clothes; we merely have to encourage people to take their blinders off and see reality. 0 THEFREEMAN IDEAS ON LIBERTY Free-MarketEconomics in a Phone Booth by Russell Shannon I n The Wealth of Nations, published 220 years ago, Adam Smith argued that the interests of consumers would be better served by an open system of free markets than by the regulated regime of mercantilism that pre vailed. Competition, Smith maintained, was more efficient than monopoly. Could anyone oppose Smith's policy prescription? We have before us now a simple, straight forward example of Smith's point, which also shows why some people oppose his principles. An article in the Washington Post National Weekly Edition dealing with the breaking up of AT&T, the giant telephone company that was once a monopoly protected by the federal government, includes some statistics obtained from the Federal Communications Com mission, AT&T, and the U.S. Labor Depart ment that are marvelously pertinent to Smith's thesis.