The View From 1776

Germany’s Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck detested individualism, preferring collectivized control by an aristocracy.  One of his insults was to dismiss an opponent as “no more than an English shopkeeper.” In the 1880s he created the world’s first welfare system.  The purpose, he candidly acknowledged, was to enable him to herd the German people like cattle (cf. FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, and Obama’s multitude of socialistic initiatives).

Despite the German Empire’s great industrial, scientific, and educational achievements, laissez-faire individualism made, first Great Britain, then the United States, the greatest commercial and industrial powers in world history.

Tom Emerson emailed his summary of the case for allowing individuals political and economic liberty, without the suffocating embrace of Big Brother, to find new and efficient ways to improve human productivity and thereby to raise everyone’s standard of living.

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In a web discussion group, a liberal member issued an ad hominem attack on Washington Post columnist George F. Will for his recent column titled “Awash in Fossil Fuels”.  I felt compelled to write an answer, and that answer follows.  I thought your readers might enjoy reading it.
 
1.                   Let me begin with a defense of George F. Will.  Whether you agree with him or not (liberals always impugn the people they disagree with, rather than answering directly the points those people raise), George F. Will is an intellectual with a first-class mind.  His article was well-researched and purported to demonstrate that fossil fuels are not likely to be exhausted any time soon.  This argument can be buttressed by the observation that the earliest vascular land plants first appeared on our planet about half a billion years ago.  They have been thriving and evolving on our planet ever since, converting solar energy into hydrocarbons whose remains we refer to today as fossil fuels.  The idea that humans have, in a little more than a century, burned any sizable fraction of the stored energy of these prodigious life forms is, it seems to me, thoroughly ridiculous.  Humans are, in fact, now discovering new fossil fuel deposits at a rate that exceeds the rate at which we are consuming this resource, so it is not likely that fossil fuels will be depleted for at least several millennia.  When, at that far-distant time, fossil fuels are depleted, technology surely will have evolved to replace this energy and materials source with far superior sources of energy, plastics, etc.  The “scarcity argument” is a convenient liberal ruse to sell otherwise unappealing dogma to ignorant masses – not an argument to be taken seriously by serious people.

2.                   No one that I know is in favor of mankind destroying its nest, or even significantly fouling it.  That said, the same people who worship at the altar of environmentalism were, 30 years ago, warning just as vociferously of the dangers of “global cooling”.  Their arguments were not taken seriously then, and should not be now.  Their real agenda is not to “save the planet”, but to empower government to vastly increase its control over our people and redistribute wealth.

3.                   If they had been serious about clean energy, they would not have vigorously and irrationally impeded the proliferation of nuclear energy for the last 30 years.  They are now arguing that we can’t build more nuclear plants because there is no place to store the spent fuel rods – oblivious to the presence of the completed and very safe Yucca Mountain facility which they themselves have blocked from operation.

4.                   I believe that liberals fundamentally misunderstand what made America a great nation and the envy of most of the rest of the world.  The first permanent settlement of Europeans on the North American continent was Jamestown, VA (1608), followed closely by Plymouth, MA (1620).  So we and our ancestors have been here a little over four hundred years.  (I know that the Vikings and the Spanish were here earlier, but they didn’t stay, so that doesn’t count.)  In those four hundred years, America has given the world a lot of things:  The cotton gin, the steamboat, the telephone, the motion picture camera, the electric light (the last three by the same American inventor), radio (with some help from an Italian), television, nuclear power and weapons, the transistor, the microchip, the microprocessor, most of the software that runs the planet, the conquest of yellow fever, polio, measles, mumps, and dozens of other diseases, ultrasonic and magnetic resonance imaging, the movie and recorded music industries, animated cartoons, computer-generated graphics, the graphical user interface, the mouse, Ethernet, the transcontinental railroad, etc.

5.                   American contributions to science have been just as prodigious.  The building where I worked for the last 10 years on Carnegie Mellon’s main campus has been awarded seven Nobel Prizes (Herb Simon, Franco Modigliani, Merton Miller, Robert Lucas, Finn Kydland, Edward Prescott and Oliver Williamson), and that’s just one of Carnegie Mellon’s buildings!  Overall, Americans have won more Nobel prizes in science (let’s forget about Al Gore’s and Barack Obama’s peace prizes and other irrelevancies) than any other continent or region.  America’s great universities and our leadership in scientific research are envied the world over.

6.                   Americans have built a great civilization where no civilization existed in just a bit over four hundred years, but the American experiment in democracy began in 1787, and thus is less than 225 years old.  The men who assembled in Philadelphia to write the U. S. Constitution didn’t trust government very much.  Thomas Jefferson said it well:  “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.  The hand of man may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”  He also is alleged to have said, “That government governs best that governs least.”  A profound distrust of concentrated power (whether governmental, military of economic) is an enduring part of the American ethos.  The recent liberal power grab in Washington is running into that buzz saw as we speak.

7.                   Since our founders didn’t trust government very much, they filled the Constitution with blocking mechanisms.  A bi-cameral legislature, Presidential approval of laws, confirmation of Presidential appointees by the Senate, the Presidential Veto and the two-thirds vote of both houses to over-ride, an independent judiciary to oversee it all, with a Supreme Court that had no direct powers except to interpret and nullify, but was all-powerful in those functions.  The Constitution was amended ten times before ratification to add James Madison’s powerfully and succinctly written Bill of Rights, which imposed significant limits on the powers of the government.  “Congress shall make no law. . . “  The founders were also concerned about the protection of private and intellectual property.  Perhaps you didn’t know, but the first U. S. Commissioner of Patents was Thomas Jefferson.  The founders believed strongly that a citizen should be entitled to the fruits of his own intellect – an unknown concept prior to 1787.  

8.                   Winston Churchill always marveled at the power of “an aroused democracy”.  There are many examples of this, but the best probably come from the WW II era.  To illustrate, consider that, at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, the U. S. Navy operated four aircraft carriers in the Pacific Ocean (Hornet, Lexington, Yorktown and Enterprise).  Three months after Pearl Harbor, we lost the Lexington in the Battle of the Coral Sea.  Three months after that, we lost the Yorktown in the Battle of Midway.  So in June of 1942, the U. S. Navy had two aircraft carriers in the Pacific Ocean.  Fast forward two years to June of 1944 and the Battle of the Philippine Sea.  Twenty-three fully armed and equipped U. S. aircraft carriers took part in that battle alone.  That means ships, crews, armaments, airplanes, trained pilots and weapons.  And that “aroused democracy” did that while fighting a major war in Europe!  In fact, by 1943 the City of Pittsburgh was producing more steel than the Continent of Europe.  Yes, there is great power in an aroused democracy.

9.                   I will grant you that liberals always have the best of intentions.  They are always trying to make things better.  In doing so, they victimize many.  When I was growing up in rural Louisiana in the 1940s, both blacks and whites had strong, church-going families, low divorce rates, low rates of out-of-wedlock births and the crime rate was low.  Abortion was virtually unknown, and was certainly not a means of birth control.  All of that changed with LBJ’s Great Society programs.  In an effort to “help”, liberals gave people (both black and white) incentives to have children out of wedlock.  The result was several generations of welfare mothers, disintegration of the family, indigence, government dependency, soaring crime rates, etc.  All of this was predictable, but it was only ended in 1996 when, after two Presidential vetoes, a Republican Congress finally shamed Bill Clinton into living up to his campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it”.  Yes, the Great Society had noble intentions, but it harmed poor whites and poor blacks indiscriminately, almost destroying the black family. Liberals always have the best of intentions, but the results are often disastrous.

10.               In January of 2006, I spent 10 days in and around the Indian City of Bangalore, where an entrepreneurial revolution is going on.  I visited many of the companies that were leading that rebirth of Indian capitalism, including a 15-year-old company called Infosys.  Infosys had gone from zero to more than 50,000 employees in less than 15 years.  (Talk about creating jobs!)  Their ultra-modern campus in Bangalore would put Microsoft’s Redmond campus to shame!  (I have visited both.)  I asked the founder of Infosys what accounted for the company’s phenomenal success.  His answer was revealing:  “Dr. Emerson, the government got out of the way!  When we started this company 15 years ago, we had to pay three times the world price to buy a computer.  Today, we pay the world price.  The government got out of the way!”

11.               The U. S. economy will recover far more vigorously and quickly if the U. S. Government will stop trying to “help” and just get out of the way.
I could go on, but the above is probably enough of a rant.  The bottom line is that America’s great achievements have been the result of an industrious and creative people operating in a free-market system where government allowed both success and failure, protected private and intellectual property, and didn’t worry too much about the fairness of outcomes, as long as everyone had an equal chance at success.  Government should intervene to prevent concentrations of power from impeding the success of individuals, but failure is part of what Joseph Schumpeter called capitalism’s “creative destruction”.  Failure is thus essential to continued success.  We would be far better off in the long run if Chrysler, General Motors and a few more large banks had been allowed to fail in the recent crisis.  That is not to say that their depositors should have been hurt, but the “moral hazard” of bailing out shareholders, failing managements and outmoded unions should not be encouraged by government.
 
I appreciate that liberals have good intentions, but you know what they say about the road to Hell.
 
S. Thomas Emerson, Ph. D. 

The David T. and Lindsay J. Morgenthaler Chair in Entrepreneurship

Carnegie Mellon University