Promises

© Laurence B. Winn

Nov 1, 1999

November is an election month. In November Y2K, if all goes well, the United States will elect a new president. Doubtless there will be speeches about the presumed survival and global proliferation of democracy in the 20th century. Historians may well hearken back to 1900, when the idea of government by and for the people was held unlikely to persist.

Frederick Jackson Turner, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, had launched his frontier theory in 1893. It was widely interpreted to imply that democracy, the product of a defunct frontier, could not survive in the new, frontierless environment. That interpretation is often cited as a problem for the theory.

Indeed, peoples' right to choose has faced challenge after challenge in the 20th century. World War I, the Great Depression, World War II or the Cold War could have ended it. It is usual to believe that freedom of the individual has triumphed. However, when recent events are viewed with a skeptical eye, it is not at all clear that American democracy has survived these challenges, particularly the last.

Consider a late product of the Cold War, National Security Defense Directive 145 (NSDD145). The brainchild of an assistant defense secretary in the Reagan Administration, NSDD145 has been used to restrict access to the medical records of the National Cancer Institute and the Veterans Administration, IRS corporate and personal taxpayer files and agricultural statistics.

In 1985, employing NSDD 145 as its authority, the U.S. National Security Agency made a detailed investigation of a computer program used to count votes in local and federal elections. The reason for the investigation was, presumably, to determine the program's vulnerability to manipulation. In order to do that, however, the investigators had to learn how to manipulate the program themselves. (Note: See also "NSA and Microsoft".)

That our right to choose might be affected by a government plot to control elections is a chilling prospect. Yet it is only one of the lesser threats to freedom imposed by enclosure, which is the absence of frontiers. The major threat is environmental.

"The Baltic Sea is dying from sewage and other pollution. Every year 25 billion tons of topsoil are lost. In places like Mexico City and Eastern Europe, millions breathe toxic air. China soon will have cut all its harvestable forests. The ozone is thinning, the globe may be warming, and more devastation lies in store," lamented a 1992 issue of Business Week in describing the new geopolitical fashion called "sustainable development". More a vision than a strategy, the concept of sustainable development calls upon the industrialized nations to consume less while directing billions in aid to developing nations in return for their promise to cut birth rates. Its fundamental premise is that the only way to avoid ecological disaster is to redistribute wealth.

Requirements for sustainable development include:

* implementation of global family planning procedures by any means;

* massive aid and debt relief from the industrialized countries to provide replacements for existing air conditioners, refrigerators, furnaces, and lighting fixtures, not to mention solar power and biotechnology to replace pesticides, herbicides and associated polluting technologies;

* falling standards of living in the industrial countries.

One is reminded of the second law of thermodynamics. No one has ever offered a proof of the second law, which is the basis of the rejection by science of the perpetual motion machine, an imaginary device which operates indefinitely without the expenditure of external energy. Science accepts the law because no exception has ever been observed. There is no model for a perpetual motion machine, just as there is no model for a "sustainable society", which may well be the same thing.

The fact that there is no rational model for a thing does not mean there is no reason for promoting it, however.

"The hidden agenda of some environmentalists is to expand the dominion of some people's political will over others," wrote The Washington Post's George F. Will in 1990. It is true that there is no more direct route to the regulation of the masses than restrictions on consumption, especially consumption of energy and transportation. Thus the slogan of some European conservatives: "The green tree has red roots."

In fact, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, penned in 1848 by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, reads like a blueprint for current U.S. policy.

Take government control of private land, including rent control and the Environmental Protection Agency's wetlands policy, as examples. So too are a "heavy progressive income tax" (quoted from the Manifesto) and the "centralization of credit in the hands of the state by means of a national bank..." like the Federal Reserve Bank. Marx's call for centralization of the means of communication and transportation is answered by government bureaucracies like the Federal Communications Commission and the Interstate Commerce Commission.

Most of what Marx had to say makes sense in the context of a zero-growth economic system. It promises what Rome promised: bread and circuses, and, like state welfare in England in Marx's day, it preserves public order.

We have just such a choice as Frederick Jackson Turner might have predicted. We can build a new frontier and have the freedom and prosperity that go with it, or we can trust the little man from the government who says he is here to help us. If you believe the little man, Karl's got a manifesto for you. It will do exactly what it was intended to do, which is not at all the same thing it promises.