Sometime last month I thought that I was dreaming my fondest dream.
The chief executive of the United States, the head of the world's biggest government,
the holder of the keys to the political kingdom, the modern Caesar who will someday ascend to the clouds after his death like his predecessors,
the Fuhrer of what his staff calls the world's indispensable nation,
The prophet and sultan of the world's model social democratic state,
this man denied on national television not once but three times that he had had sex with a 21-year-old intern in the Oval Office.
This is a turning point in American history, not because of the details of the case, but because of what it represents.
The beginning of the end of the moral mythology surrounding government power.
There's been a lot of wailing and moaning about the disgrace to the presidency that this represents.
And there's no question that it is a humiliation to the president and a deadly blow to government itself,
which depends so crucially on pumping up public respect to the institutions of power.
What I don't understand, of course, is why the decline of respect for Clinton's unconstitutional
power should be something to regret.
For anyone who longs for liberty, this is the moment of a lifetime, that the legitimacy
of power would come under severe strain as a prelude to the crack-up of the central state
itself.
In the eternal struggle between liberty and power between the freedom of individuals and
and Families and the Arrogant Demands of the Central State, Power is Slipping and Liberty
is at last making strides as it has been steadily and systematically for the last several years.
The humiliation visited upon the White House is but one of many signs that the Central
State is coming unglued and that a new era is dawning. The distance between Liberty and
and the present omnipotent state is no straight shot, of course, and the trends of the moment
could reverse themselves, especially if the intellectual vanguard of the free society does
not follow through. But the moment is truly upon us. The Cold War is over and the presidency
as an institution is in deep trouble. Socialist intellectuals are grasping at straws and today's
We're in the midst of a technological boom that benefits the cause of liberty in more
ways than even we know.
Meanwhile, the state is losing prestige day by day and therefore losing its confidence
that it is really in charge.
Consider that since the news about Clinton's escapades were first made public over the
internet, he's held no press conference, made no public appearance without using a
in a Foreign Leader or a Dramatic News Event as a Shield.
Even during the attempted run-up to war, he could not go before a phonied up town hall
meeting and confront the American people with his rationale.
He had to send three freakish minions who might well have been from another planet into
the heartland where they were chewed up by average people demanding to know what was
really behind this drive for war.
The result was a great debacle.
Here are the top dogs of the executive branch being pounded in ways not seen since the height
of the Vietnam War. When Albright, Cohen and Berger are in Washington, they have roses
thrown at their feet. Not in Ohio, however. Not anywhere in the real America. The event
reflected what the White House calls poor planning. And what does that mean? The setting
is supposed to be intimidating, where everyone who can ask a question is being glared at
at by Everyone Else. The audience is supposed to be hand-picked, so they feel it's a privilege
to attend and thus do nothing to rock the boat. The public is not supposed to be invited
on a first-come, first-served basis. But by sheer incompetence brought on by Lewinskyite
distraction, the administration stumbled so badly that its consequences were felt by the
entire foreign policy establishment, including the State Department, the misnamed Defense
Department, the CIA and the National Security Agency.
In the post-war period, these agencies have attempted to foster a public impression that
they're engaged in a deeply complex science of geopolitics, requiring high-level training
and education.
But in Ohio, they were exposed not only as mere mortals, but as incompetent fronts for
a power grab, lecturing average questioners on how little they knew about foreign policy.
The government hacks were of course furious they were being questioned at all, much less
denounced by hundreds of scraggly protesters.
This level of resistance didn't come about in the 1960s until after the draft was in
full swing and the body bags started arriving.
And the protests were marred then by the perception that being anti-Vietnam war was implicitly
a socialist act because it meant being sympathetic to the communists.
But all this is ancient history now.
Fighting the likes of Cohen, Berger and Albright is not disloyalty, it is a patriotic duty.
This level of resistance, both political and intellectual, seriously hinders the ability
of government to function. They no longer issue the blank cheque they were granted during
the Cold War. Their war games, henceforth, will have to be conducted under a new level
of public scrutiny.
The negotiated peace facilitated by Kofi Annan actually has a secret history.
It was fear.
Fear of the public, fear that this war looked too suspicious to average people, especially
in light of the sexual allegations against the president.
This will probably go down in history as the wag the dog syndrome.
In the movie, the president is caught molesting a young girl visiting the White House, and
the president's spinmeisters conjure up a make-believe war in Albania as a means of
with Public Distraction.
In the movie version, the trick works.
The masses sing and sway to music composed by hired guns and participate in all the public
war rituals concocted by the president's political advisors.
In the real life version, the masses had a different response.
Of course, public opinion polls showed overwhelming support for bombing Iraq, and it was upon
this weak read that the administration, more driven by polling data than any in American
and History based its military campaign.
But polls ain't what they used to be.
People are not likely to answer pollsters in ways that reflect core beliefs.
They're likely to say what they think they should say because in these politically correct
times they don't want to be called upon to justify an unconventional view to a pollster.
Experts on polling, for example, now discount the meaning of any polls taken on racial topics.
To have these polls challenged and discredited is to destroy the Clinton administration's
political crystal ball. If you can't trust polls and whether to go to war, for goodness
sake, what can you trust? Certainly not the Defense Department. It turns out that for
two weeks prior to the Anon meeting, the entire Pentagon and all branches of the armed services
underwent an unprecedented and deep penetration by teenage computer hackers playing all sorts
of Games, especially with their personnel files and payroll records.
These kids, and there may have been only a dozen or so, wreaked havoc on the Pentagon
and its confidence in its war-making powers.
At the time Madeleine Albright decided to endorse negotiations, she was aware that this
was happening.
What the Clinton administration forgot is that the democratic politics means majority
rule only in theory.
In reality, the agitated minority drives the process forward.
In other areas like racial politics, the administration seems to understand this.
But in areas like gun control, homeschooling, land rights, taxes and warfare, it is just
now getting the message.
Smart people with courage can make a huge difference in the course of human affairs.
They did this time and they will again.
But the administration resents the heck out of it.
They have a hard time believing that they are being so battered by what they understand
as a minority of anti-government agitators.
This is ultimately what was behind Hillary's attack on the supposed right-wing conspiracy.
But at least her formulation helped everyone understand how the administration defines
a right-wing conspirator, namely anyone who questions the idea that the executive department
ought to have total power over the country and over the world.
For at least a month, the pundits have been mulling over the question of how it is that
Clinton's approval rating could be approaching 70% even after the devastating revelations
about his private life. The most conventional explanation is that the economy is in relatively
good shape. What that means is that for the first time in some 25 years, the financial
condition of the American family isn't systematically and noticeably getting worse every single
When people are asked whether the President is doing a good job, the first question that
comes to mind these days is, well, what is his job?
He's no longer protecting us from an evil empire overseas, battling the rise of totalitarianism
in Europe, presuming to dig us out of a Great Depression, or trying to win some far-flung
world war.
Maybe the best the government can do for us these days is entertain us, and on that score
Or I have to say the Clinton administration gets very high marks.
We also cannot discount the people's intense and general hatred for the media and specifically
the resentment that people feel towards the newspapers and the TV networks for having
trumpeted details of a case that most of us would not like to have discussed publicly.
But there is a deeper reason why the special counsel Ken Starr is garnering very low ratings
and the President, High Ones.
Clinton is first of all nothing if not an impressive political figure, and like Ronald
Reagan before him, he has a way of seeming to separate himself from the government he
heads. He is rarely seen with congressional leaders, he's not particularly partisan,
he runs his own show, runs it his way, he's so shifty ideologically that his inconsistency
can be easily confused with independence, and no one in American public life is better
at Avoiding Blame than Bill Clinton.
So it may not be inconsistent that people can report trusting government less now than
at any time in post-war history and at the same time have a passive positive feelings
for Clinton.
But there's another crucial point that must be addressed and that is the persona of Kenneth
Starr, the consummate G-Man using wiretaps, the subpoena power and all manner of legal
trickery to get people to tell federal prosecutors details about a person's private life that
But the government would have no business knowing if the case involved a private citizen.
Now, of course, it's perfectly proper for the government to have an investigative arm
that does nothing but investigate the government.
And when a person becomes president and rules over the American people, it is proper that
you surrender all rights to privacy.
But ironically, it is not Clinton but Starr whose power and behavior to the average American
seems most consistent with what we know about the way government actually does business.
What institution in America subpoenas a mother to turn in her own daughter about lies the
daughter might have told to a prosecutor?
Only the government.
And it is the American people's instinctive sense of the rights of the individual against
Leviathan that caused the G-man to sink in popularity relative to the president.
In this case then, Clinton is personally benefiting from the anti-government sentiment he so often
Now it is his minions who decry the abuse of power, quote Lord Acton about the corruptions of power, and attack the supposed abuses of the Constitution by a federal prosecutor.
And in this public relations war, the administration is winning.
But it is not a long-term victory. What STAR is doing to the administration, spying on
its employees, forcing them to testify against themselves and their pals, demanding their
private correspondence and records of private conversations, is precisely what the central
government does to the rest of America every single day. If STAR represents the abuse of
of Power, What Does the Leviathan State Headed by Clinton Represent?
In this crossfire between two government officials and the state is doing much to undermine itself.
Its lies, its internal contradictions, its abuses of power are whittling away at its
moral authority.
For example, Clinton tells us that Saddam Hussein can't be trusted to tell the truth.
Clinton says we must pay attention to Saddam Hussein's deeds, not his words.
But does anyone really believe that Clinton can be trusted to tell the truth?
Can anyone trust Clinton's words?
Does anyone really have the stomach to pay close attention to Clinton's deeds?
Now, Hussein is a typical head of state whose antics are all too familiar.
But we too, it's familiar to us because we too live under a despotism.
These are governments bound not by law but by the will of man exactly the opposite of
what the framers intended. Clinton and his advisors were sick of fooling with the leader
of Iraq so they decided to carpet bomb the country for four days. What stopped this was
ultimately the fear of a public relations disaster. The truth is that there is very
little of which the US government can accuse Hussain that its own apparatus of power has
is also not committed.
Gassing its own citizens with chemicals, so Janet Reno did in Waco, Texas when her FBI
pumped CS gas into a religious community and then burned the place to the ground.
Oppressing ethnic minorities, well, the US government goes the sane one better and oppresses
its ethnic majority by redistributing its wealth and violating its freedom of association.
Threatening its neighbors, US government doesn't restrict itself to its neighbors, its troops
will travel halfway around the world to threaten. Ask the people of Northern Italy what they
think about the hot-dogging U.S. fighter pilots whose antics led to 20 deaths on the ski slopes
a couple of weeks ago. Ask the residents of Okinawa, Japan, who endure a non-stop crime
wave and all-night jet engine noise imposed by U.S. troops. In virtually every country
on the planet last week, there were demonstrations against the U.S. drive for war with Iraq.
When Inon and Hussein struck a deal for peace, the entire world cheered, leaving only a handful
of sneering warmongers like Trent Lott to gnash their teeth.
But these are difficult days of the White House.
If you want to see a preview of this administration's mark on history, I can't highly recommend
enough Ambrose Evans Pritchard's remarkable book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, published
this year by Regnery.
It's been attacked wildly in the liberal and the neoconservative press, and there's
a reason for that.
There probably has not been a more compellingly written exposé of the criminal state in the
history of political literature, and to think that this is only the first of many dozens
of books that will be pouring out over the next four or five years, many of them inside
our accounts of the deceit, crookery, duplicity and murder that lie at the heart of the state.
Like the Evans-Pritchard books, these will not be philosophical tomes, but detailed exposés.
And if you remember about how much damage David Stockman's book on the Reagan budget
fraud did to that administration, we can only imagine how deadly the library of Clinton books
will be for the reputation of the government.
Among the most notable ironies in this administration is that the White House, the most pro-feminist
statist in U.S. history, is being done in by laws promoted by feminist status themselves.
Intimidated by this lobby, Congress and the federal courts imposed sexual harassment laws
Laws that made every company with more than 15 employees legally liable if anyone could
claim to be put upon in the workplace. This resulted in a huge increase in the ability
of litigants to loot companies. But sexual harassment law is only one facet of a massive
legal edifice that unjustly intrudes into the workplace, with the EEOC attempting to
manage every aspect of the employment contract. For 35 years, these laws have accumulated
to the point that race and sex quotas have become deeply institutionalized in American
economic life, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in losses a year and repealing
the freedom of association that Americans used to take for granted.
There are few aspects of Leviathan that fly so aggressively in the face of fairness and
justice as race and sex quotas, which are implied in the very existence of civil rights
law. That's why the left, in light of the huge public backlash, has put on such a full
And what does that defense come down to? They note disparities in income and position continue
to exist in education and employment. And they argued that these disparities are prima
facie evidence of malicious discrimination. But this is a wildly implausible theory. What
this evidence of disparities actually reveals is that the distribution of talents and choice
People's choice of occupation are not evenly distributed across demographic groups in society.
To note that is not to say that anyone should be pigeon-holed in a predetermined place.
But so long as people's choice of occupation is determined by free will, what business
of government is it to override these choices and try to centrally plan some bureaucrats'
idea of the ideal society and the ideal mixed society?
Under the theory of affirmative action, that ideal should have been achieved long ago.
But like socialism itself, the utopian vision is an elusive one.
The clock has been ticking on the quota machine for some time.
A case now for absolute freedom of association is being made more and more openly.
I think it's only a matter of time before the civil rights central planners lose their
will to power, and as with socialism itself, are swept away.
You can see the future by looking at the status of employment contracts in the high-tech industries.
These industries are staffed by workforces overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male.
Notice that there has been nary a word about the supposed unfairness of this fact breathed
by the race and sex racketeers that use their extortion tactics in other economic sectors.
They rightly assume the case would be difficult to make. The sector is so enormously competitive
would make no sense for Oracle or Microsoft to maliciously discriminate against a minority
if by so doing they would sacrifice profits or pass over some new important software development.
At the same time, it violates everyone's sense of fairness that incompetence should
be forced on companies struggling to take advantage of every innovation.
But this is not the only area in which the software and computer industries are discrediting
the old rationales for state power.
The growth of internet commerce is one of the most exciting developments of our age. Not
even the futurists who forecast the information age understood how the commercial impulse
would transform this medium into a powerful vehicle for the reinvigoration of capitalism
itself. These days, everything from CDs to sneakers to books to wine to used cars is
available over the world wide web. It's remarkable to think that this extraordinary
Every medium has developed as a viable commercial center in little more than 36 months.
With the advent of the web, we have the privilege of seeing an entire economy spring up before
our eyes and teach us permanent lessons about the nature of social cooperation under freedom.
No one person coordinates the web.
It's a vast network of millions upon millions of producers, consumers and suppliers cooperating
in mutually beneficial exchange.
And these cooperative behaviors are counterbalanced by healthy competition for consumer loyalties.
It's true that only the fittest survive, but who is fit and who is not is determined
by a minute-to-minute plebiscite conducted by the consuming public with the results changing
all the time.
What we see developing on the web is no different from the way free markets have always worked.
But it's been so long since we've been permitted to observe the power of unregulated markets
that we almost forget just how glorious the site is.
Gore, Clinton and the other status types
like to tout the glories of the internet
and what they call the information superhighway.
An analogy, of course, to a government project
right at the superhighway.
And Dare suggests that it needs taxpayer subsidies
to become a genuine social benefit.
In truth, the medium has become their worst nightmare
when they have tried to stifle at every opportunity
with their proposals to tax
and Put Listening Bugs in Everyone's Computer.
Yet the Internet is breaking up the monopoly, for example, of the mainstream newspapers
and the network news broadcasters.
We often hear about how the news cycle has gone from being three or four days to being
only hours.
We hear how breaking stories have become dull and dusty after only an hour or two.
This is due not to some general degradation of the news culture as the mainstream media
apologists would have it. It's a consequence of the cold bracing winds of competition that
the mainstream media are facing for the first time in many years. Think of this. Matt Brudge
is a college dropout with no prior experience in journalism, no money, no startup capital,
no contacts, no old boy networks to call on, no membership in the Council on Foreign Relations
or the National Press Club. Yet armed with a laptop computer and a one-room apartment
and in Hollywood, he's broken almost every major news story in politics in the last 24
months, easily beating the records of the Washington Post and the New York Times with
their thousands and thousands of employees.
The major reason for web success has less to do with technology as such, but rather its
nature as an unregulated commercial center.
No licenses, no labor unions, no government protected monopolists, no barriers to entry,
and no price controls. For these reasons the forces of power are constantly trying to make
inroads on this medium of freedom. Thank goodness for the remnant of states' rights that still
exist in our system because it is due in part to the lack of a coordinated tax policy that
the medium has received such a boost. Just a few days ago the National Governors' Association
called for all states to tax internet commerce. Fortunately for us in Alabama our government
has already, our governor has already seceded from this organization on grounds of its general
uselessness.
But unless I'm very wrong about the present state of opinion in this country, especially
among users of the web, this proposal is going nowhere.
Any governor who has endorsed it is going to face a fantastic amount of opposition and
political reprisal.
There was a time, and it was not too long ago, when political dissidents were nowhere
near as numerous as they are today. But with the growing dissolution of official political
culture, the agents of the federal police state are simply unable to manage the ebb
and flow of opinion. That is why when they choose to go after particular people, they
want to make sure they represent what they perceive to be the scariest element in American
and Public Life. I speak, of course, of the Radical Right. I suppose if there were not
a group called the Aryan Nation, the Federal Police would have to invent it. For all I
know, they did. Just the other day, two fellows in Las Vegas were arrested by the FBI, their
car shrink-wrapped, their apartment ransacked, held in jail, news media blared headlines
Radical right-wingers plan anthrax attack on New York subway.
I'll confess to having known some right-wingers in my day.
Never once have I heard of anyone fantasizing about gassing and mass murdering tens of thousands
of people on the subway.
In the annals of the American right, I can't remember mass murder exactly being high on
the political agenda.
The right wing is not the equivalent of the government.
Just on the face of it, the whole thing was suspicious.
Well, within hours, of course, it turned out that the New York City subway bit was some
sort of, quote, miscommunication.
These guys hadn't exactly said where they planned their anthrax attack, but plan one
they had.
Hours later, another correction came out.
It turns out they weren't planning an attack so much as they were planning to test an antidote
to anthrax.
There, so later it turned out they didn't have live anthrax at all but a tiny amount
of dead germs they were using to test out a new anti-anthrax gizmo that they had purchased.
And whom had they purchased it from?
Who had pushed it on them?
Who had marketed it to them?
A guy and the employee of the FBI.
So the FBI story quickly collapsed into a handful of dust.
Charges were dropped and the story of Las Vegas' right-wing anthrax subway murderers
vanished from the newspapers has proved to be yet another PR disaster for the FBI along
with the litany of others from Waco to Ruby Ridge to Richard Jewell. Federal police, Americans
are coming to see, are not defenders of the public interest so much as political enforcers
attempting to criminalize a certain brand of politics. Now as we know there are dozens
of questions that the government does not like us to ask, much less actively seek answers
For starters, why are federal taxes, as a percentage of GDP, higher than at any point
in American history, even though government has less to do now than any time in the century?
As no world war, no depression, welfare is a proven failure, why must taxes remain so
high?
In Congress, the past 12 months have been spent debating the merits of the flat tax
and the national sales tax as alternatives to the present system.
A number of very good people are involved in this debate but let me add an element of caution.
No tax reform is worth the slightest exertion of energy if the end result is not lower taxes
for the American people.
And by lower taxes, I mean that less is taken from the national income and turned over to
the government to waste and do damage with.
Incredibly, however, all discussions of tax reform have so far presupposed that capital
hill excuse for doing nothing, revenue neutrality. That is the idea that the government's income
must never, ever be cut. Now, if neither the national sales tax nor the flat tax proposes
to actually lower taxes, what's the point of all this discussion? Our scholar Mark Thornton
Ronald Reagan revealed the secret last year in the free market.
There's nothing like a promise to rip up the present code and replace it with a different
one to cause the political contributions to pour in, from large corporations and indeed
from everyone who is affected by any change in the code.
No tax reform since Ronald Reagan's first term has succeeded in lowering the tax take,
and even that was short lived.
Why should we expect another tax reform to do any better?
In fact, the Republican leadership reports that their focus groups reveal a surprising
disinterest among the American people on the idea of tax reform.
The reason is clear, people don't trust Washington to tell them the truth.
Time and time again, they promise tax reform and give us revenue neutrality or higher taxes.
The best solution to the tax dilemma is right before our eyes.
Lower them. Lower the rates. Lower the take. Lower the revenue. Lower them by 1%. Lower
them by 99%. It's not the pace that is as important as the direction of change.
Another major issue that has the public deeply confused is the workings of the monetary system.
When Alan Greenspan testified on Capitol Hill last week, he was greeted by Hossan as appropriate
to a witch doctor of a primitive tribe.
As head of the central bank, he holds a mysterious power over society.
And as bamboozler in chief, he is able to intimidate practically every lawmaker this
side of Ron Paul into thinking that he's master of the universe, brilliantly managing interest
rates and money flows to the betterment of mankind.
But is he?
Of course, far from it.
Although Hales is the greatest Fed governor ever, in some ways, he's the worst.
Never before has a Fed governor been so free with the power to bail out failing financial
systems, not only at home, but abroad.
Under his rule, the Fed has not only become the lender of last resort to the American
banking system, but also to Mexico, to the U.S. stock market, and now to the entire Asian
region and eventually to the whole world.
In the last 3 years, the system faced a $50 billion bailout of Mexico, a $57 billion bailout
of South Korea, $43 billion in Indonesia, $18 billion in Thailand, total of $118 billion,
probably rising to at least double that.
By delaying the day of reckoning with bailouts, Greenspan builds the international mountain
of dollars and debt, making the inevitable collapse all the more devastating.
One step at a time, Greenspan has chosen to back the interests of the New York banks
that hold the bonds of Asian and Mexican governments, as well as the financial houses who have a
huge stake in emerging markets, and he's backed these interests over a rational economic policy.
At the time of the Mexican bailout, we argued that this was a disastrous precedent for world
finance. If Mexico gets a bailout, then no government with links to the U.S. financial
System would be allowed to fail.
And sure enough, only a few years later, Asian economies have failed as a consequence of
their own ill-conceived monetary policies.
Sure enough, Greenspan has stood side by side with the Clinton Administration in arguing
that the bailout of these economies is in the U.S. self-interest.
The Administration released the Exchange Stabilization Fund as a first round and then approved an
Congress will soon be considering a bill to refund the IMF. In a normal time, the vote
would not be controversial. But this year, faced with a massive constituent backlash,
the Congress is prepared for a cataclysmic battle that will set the stage for future
The choice is this. Will we continue down the path to further centralization of monetary power, making the IMF the de facto world lender of last resort? That way lies a monetary debacle of global proportions. It is a prescription for a level of financial recklessness and hyperinflation that no Fed Governor, no matter how smart, will be able to prevent. The other path is towards pulling out of these financial commitments.
and allowing failing economies to fail on their way to the restoration of a sound financial system.
The truth is that the present monetary order is unviable over the long term, as much as the U.S. might have benefited from it in recent years.
Subtly and without any announcement that the world has made a transition from the failed system of affloating exchange rates
to the failed system of relatively fixed exchange rates to the full-blown world paper dollar
standard we now find ourselves on.
To those of you who have wondered whatever happened to price inflation, the advent of
this new system provides your answer.
If you look at the growth of the US-based money, you'll find that monetary inflation
has been no more restrictive than it was in the late 60s and early 70s.
From the end of 1990 to the end of 1996, the Fed used its open market operations to increase
the monetary base, which is currency plus bank reserves, by 55 percent.
Currency itself increased 60 percent.
He averages 9.5 percent a year compared with 8.5 percent in the early 70s and 10 percent
in the late 70s.
The difference between then and now is that the U.S. suddenly faces a seemingly unlimited
demand for dollars.
These dollars stored in the form of U.S. debt held overseas are then used as base money
upon which governments like Korea and Indonesia can inflate their own currencies.
The primary monetary objective of Greenspan and the Clinton Administration is to keep
those dollars overseas.
So long as they are, they believe, Federal Reserve inflation can be exported far from
our shores, prices can be held in check from the forces of the boom-bust cycle kept at
bay.
This is precisely why the administration is so anxious for a bailout of Asian economies.
If they are put in the position of selling dollar-denominated assets, it could set off,
they believe, a dollar repatriation that could wreak havoc on the U.S. stock market, on interest
rates and on the price level.
The happy days of today would be replaced by the inflationary recession of yesterday.
How long can the administration keep this from happening?
That depends in part on how compliant Congress is in funding perpetual bailouts of foreign
regimes.
There is one huge political indicator that this compliance is not at all assured.
I'm speaking about what may be the most politically significant development in international
economics in decades, the failure of the fast-track legislation.
As with GATT a few years ago, the entire establishment predicted the end of the world economy as
as we know it, if fast track failed, but glory be, it was defeated.
For years, average businessmen bought the claims of the executive state that it was
all that stood between world economic order and cataclysm. But Clinton has been robbed
of the ability now to negotiate trade deals, and businessmen have resorted to doing what
they should have been doing all along, namely negotiating deals themselves.
The U.S. political elite has been attempting to construct a world government for the better
part of this century, but progress towards this goal has been seriously hampered. The
failure of Fast-Track in particular bodes ill for the future of this project. It appears
that the U.S. political elite has forgotten the crucial insight of Hume, Mises and Rothbard,
that the accumulation, expansion and centralization of power ultimately depends on the consent
of the Governed. If the people withdraw their consent, the tiny minority running roughshod
over the majority will quickly lose its authority, thus legitimacy, and thus power. If this is
true on the domestic level, it is even more true on the international level. This is why
the US political elites are so anxious to have the UN serve as a fig leaf. It's why
Why the U.S. dares not go to war overseas without the consent of our so-called allies.
Consent is necessary for the successful exercise of power. But at perhaps the most bullish
sign for liberty on the international front, the would-be world government can no longer
garner the necessary level of consent. At the same time, here at home, we've seen
a marked decline in the amount of anti-capitalist invective. Even socialist ideologues are having
The movements to empower so-called stakeholders, save endangered species, save Social Security, stop terrorism, help the children, achieve racial reconciliation, and all the rest are covers for power grabs.
But rarely do you hear the leaders of these movements overtly attacking capitalism.
The key to all our efforts must be to emphasize how these and all the other interventions
are hindrances to economic production and violations of human liberty.
How can the case be made?
In these times of rampant suspicion of government, times when a political promise is worth less
than an Indonesian rupiah, in such times as these there is nothing government could do
This reality has generated an unprecedented hostility between the government and the people,
surely the most significant political development since the end of the Cold War.
In fact, this attitude has been steadily growing for the last quarter century, but in the last
In the last few years we have seen a development in our political culture that truly signals the beginning of the end of power.
For the first time in my lifetime, and I dare say for the first time in this century, the government has begun to fear the people.
In Jefferson's vision of government, the people are self-governing and thus have nothing to fear.
When government fears the people and people fear the government, it's proof that something has gone very wrong.
The government has formed a force independent of society to Jefferson. It is at this point,
he argued, that it is time for a revolution. Mises agreed with this view but improved it.
He argued that as soon as the people find themselves oppressed by a state, they should
be granted the right to slip away from its rule, not by overthrowing the old government
but by seceding from its control. In practice, of course, this is precisely what the American
and Revolutionaries Did.
What Jefferson never imagined was that the American government could ever become as big
and as monstrous as it is today and not face the threat of revolt.
The means by which it was done was also unimaginable to Jefferson.
The nuclear threat, total war, mass democracy, government management of the economy, the
welfare state.
But Mises did imagine such a thing because he lived through it.
He saw the world engulfed by the evil of socialism and communism, and his own native land taken
over by a nationalistic variety of collectivism. Unlike us today, he saw no light at the end
of the tunnel. He saw only destruction everywhere he looked. Yet he opposed it at every step,
nonetheless.
Indeed, if you look at the great intellectuals who constructed that beautiful edifice called
of the Austrian School of Economics.
You can see that they all faced huge obstacles.
Carl Menger, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk
saw the classical liberal order of the 19th century
collapse before their eyes.
Mises, Repke and Hayek saw their homelands
engulfed in national socialism.
In the United States, Frank Feder and Henry Haslett
watched as the New Deal and the World War
smashed what was left of American liberty.
And Murray Rothbard began his teaching career
as the great society erected the redistributionist state on top of everything else.
But these men upheld truth and hope as versus the ups and downs of the events of the day.
In the long run, we will win this battle thanks to their heroic efforts.
At the Mises Institute, everything we do centers on making the ideas of liberty come alive
for Today's Students in Today's Times, not just to provide intellectual simulation, although
that certainly is there. Our goal is to see that the liberty we all love prevails against
the conspiracy of power. Our primary work is with students, the much-derided Generation
X, so-called for its members' lack of moral direction and purpose. But there's another
side to the story. We've been working with students for more than 15 years and never
have so many been so smart, so intellectually hungry, so morally committed, so many fine
young men and women come to our side seeking fresh approaches to social and economic issues.
The university campus these days is usually constrained by PC taboos. We of course face
no such restrictions on what we teach, on what our students read, on what our students
Learn.
And I'm pleased to announce that our graduates are now finding that they are sought out for
their familiarity with and commitment to Austrian ideas and classical liberalism.
They and their progress are a continuing source of inspiration to all of us.
Let me mention a few other things that we have cooked up.
In October, we're holding the first full-scale revisionist conference on the presidency itself,
Applying the lessons we've learned under Clinton to many prior inhabitants of that office.
You know those lists in which the academics rate the best and the worst presidents?
We're producing a list too, I'll give you a hint.
The last shall be first, and the first shall be last.
But even before that historic conference, we have the wonderful Mises University, which
cream of the crop students from around the country and the world come to study with the
best Austrian faculty.
And there's the Austrian Scholars Conference, founded as a direct hit on the Socialist Scholars Conference.
Yes, there is such a thing, and it attracts about 2,000 people every year.
We're not that big yet, but we have high hopes.
We have two exciting book projects.
The first is Fifteen Great Austrian Economists, in which our scholars tell the stories of the men and the ideas that built the Austrian School over the past 500 years.
We expect it to be a permanent part of the core Freedom Library.
And then we have Murray Rothbard's magnificent treatise, The Ethics of Liberty,
appearing in cooperation with the Center for Libertarian Studies and New York University Press.
First came out in 1982, but in a tiny printing and was neglected, very unjustly neglected.
We feel sure that this revised edition with a brilliant introduction
will be seen as the strongest possible case for the purely free society ever made.
In addition, this is the first year of the quarterly journal of Austrian Economics published
in cooperation with Transaction Press of Rutgers University.
And of course, our widely influential publications like The Free Market, The Mises Review, Austrian
Economics Newsletter, all make the precise difference in the world of ideas that we intend
them to.
Also this year, the Institute is finishing a permanent home for Liberty that will house
the Rothbard Collection for visiting scholars from around the world.
We have plenty of space to hold our seminars in political economy and much, much more.
We have a two-volume Mises biography in process, first ever.
We're producing a scholars edition of Human Action, the original 1949 edition considered
to be the best and most definitive edition for reasons the editors will explain in their
introduction.
While other books are in progress on money, fed, welfare state, transaction publishers
will soon be releasing our path-breaking defense of the right of secession.
All this is in addition to our flourishing op-ed program, our films on economics, our
scholarships for graduate students, our distribution of Austrian books and research materials throughout
the world.
We do it all with no connections in high places.
James Mann won't soon be speaking from this podium, but we have something far more valuable.
We have your support, and we have the memory and the spirit of Mises and Rothbard, which
are always in our minds and in our hearts.
We constantly remember that they fought with all their might at times when liberty seemed
a much more remote prospect than it does today.
Don't we have the responsibility to complete their work, to see to it that they didn't
Human makes such huge sacrifices in vain to make their dream a reality, and indeed we
do feel we have that responsibility.
But there is an even greater reason to fight on behalf of freedom.
It is because freedom is what is best for our families, for ourselves, for future generations,
because it is right, because it is true, because it is the key to saving civilization itself.
Like you, we care intensely about the future.
We understand that the real course of history is determined more by intellectual forces than
any other. For all of us here this weekend working for the defeat of power and its replacement
by liberty, sweet liberty from the tyrannous governments and monstrous ideologies of this
bloody century offers its own rewards. But no reward will be so great as that we will
enjoy on the precious day and perhaps the not too distant future when we can say that
that we have won.