[585] in libertarians
Re: Anyone save the full WSJ Article??
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Duncan Frissell)
Wed Jan 25 16:30:05 1995
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 1995 16:25:10 -0500
To: Vernon Imrich <vimrich@MIT.EDU>, libertarians@MIT.EDU
From: frissell@panix.com (Duncan Frissell)
The Wall Street Journal
January 19, 1995, pp. A1, A4.
Less Is More
Libertarian Impulses Show Growing Appeal Among the
Disaffected
When the Government Fails, Many Voters Are Asking:
Who Needs It, Anyway?
Mixed Blessing to the GOP
By Gerald F. Seib
Washington - It just might be that Bill Frezza, not Newt
Gingrich, best illustrates why the American political
system is quaking.
Mr. Frezza, a onetime McGovern Democrat, today is a
libertarian. This Philadelphia-area computer consultant
doesn't just want to cut government: He questions the very
need for most of it. He figures that in a world in which
computer wizards are close to creating their own private,
encrypted digital cash system for making transactions
without any government involvement, the need for
centralized authority is shriveling. "Government isn't
simply irrelevant," he says, "it's totally irrelevant."
Mr. Frezza, who actually classifies his thinking as
"post-libertarian," may be an extreme example, but his
feelings help illustrate Ihe powerful public passions
driving the revolution in the new GOP-controlled Congress.
Though many voters probably don't even realize it, much of
the angry sentiment coursing through their veins today
isn't traditionally Republican or even conservative. It's
libertarian.
Down With Government
Libertarians question the need for a government role in
virtually every area of their lives, personal as well as
economic. A traditional conservative might want to comb
through the government from top down to weed out certain
programs and beef up others, like those designed to enhance
"family values." But a libertarian works from the bottom
up, challenging everything the government does and finding
little worth doing.
Because of their growing disdain for government, more and
more Americans appear to be drifting -- often unwittingly
-- toward a libertarian philosophy. That seems particularly
true among baby boomers returning to the "do your own
thing" ethos of their youth and among young people involved
in the intensely independent computer industry. Indeed,
when the Gallup polling organization last year asked
questions about government's role that were designed to
distill Americans' political philosophies, it categorized
22% of the public as "libertarian."
The drift, therefore, is substantlal but hardly universal,
and it isn't organized. The actual Libertarian Party
remains a tiny political organization. And there are lots
of problems inherent in this drift. Many people,
Republicans particularly, who are drawn to libertarian
economics may have a hard time swallowing the same kind of
hands-off government approach to abortion and school
prayer.
Link to Conservatives
Still, the thinking of many Americans is changing. "There
is a libertarian revolution going on, in the sense of a
greater movement away from government power at all levels,
than at certainly any time in my life," says Clint Bolick,
a prominent Washington attorney who often works with
conservatives but considers himself a libertarian.
Shifting sentiments made Republicans' basic antigovernment
message so successful in the November elections and, before
that, energized the 1992 explosion of Ross Perot voters.
His people tended to be conservative on fiscal matters,
hands-off on social issues and utterly disdainful of
government.
The desire to keep pace with such public sentiment is
fueling a drive by many of the 73 freshman Republicans in
the House of Representatives to mow down government
programs. "There would be a good number of people out there
who would be ahead of us" in chopping down government, says
Rep. Sam Brownback, a Republican freshman from Kansas.
He sits in his new office, worrying not that ambitious
young House Republicans may scare people by moving too fast
in attacking government, but, rather, fretting that the
novice lawmakers can't find enough fully cooked plans for
dismantling agencies.
Government and the Individual
The problem for Republicans is that pure libertarian
thinkers would recoil at efforts by some in the party to
pass a school-prayer amendment or to restrict gay rights,
just as surely as they might blanch at liberal Democrats'
efforts to raise taxes to pay for welfare.
A true libertarian would do away with laws banning
marijuana and hard drugs, too -- an idea that could set off
a food fight at any Republican gathering. Many libertarians
would like to see Social Security become voluntary.
Libertarians see little need for foreign entanglements, so
they see ways to pare defense spending.
Some of these ideas are too rich for the blood of even
antigovernment Republicans, not to mention
middle-of-the-roaders. "I do not for a moment pretend or
believe that what is taking place in the Republican Party
has any semblance of libertarianism," asserts Gordon Black,
a politically independent pollster who considers himself a
"free-market civil libertarian.
But some conservative Republicans are starting to move away
from wanting to see government action on social questions
and toward neutral government social policy. The Christian
Coalition, for instance, is playing down, for the time
being, its advocacy of a constitutional amendment allowing
school prayer and focusing instead on pushing laissez-faire
economics and tax cuts. It is placing more emphasis on
issues such as "school choice," in which the government
steps aside and allows parents to divert their tax dollars
to private schools.
Some Americans, no doubt, are drifting toward libertarian
thinking because of careful analysis. "People are starting
to at least consider the idea that many of their problems
come when they start thinking of the government as their
own agent of change, or their major agent of change," says
Gregg Gaylord, an Indiana physician and Jimmy Carter voter
who now regards himself as a libertarian.
But since many Americans don't spend all that much time
analyzing their political beliefs, it is likely that much
of today's antigovernment sentiment arises from what people
see as the government's trial and error: Voters feel
government has tried to solve problems but has been
inefficient or ineffective in doing so. "It's not
doctrinaire," says J.D. Hayworth, a freshman GOP lawmaker
from Arizona, as he analyzes his constituents' views. "It's
inherently practical."
What Good Government?
Many analysts, in fact, think it was President Clinton's
ill-fated health-care reform proposals, widely supported at
first but gradually abandoned by many voters, that sparked
a rethinking of government's role. "People were saying, 'We
don't want you to run our health care. And come to think of
it, we don't want you to run much of anything else for us,
either,' " says Edward Crane, president of the Cato
Institute, Washington's bastion of libertarian thought.
Similarly, the demise of an overarching national-security
threat from Moscow has inspired many Americans to
reconsider the need for a big government to protect them.
Whatever the cause, the signs of a drift toward
libertarianism are everywhere. When freshman Republicans
attended an orientation session sponsored by the
conservative Heritage Foundation, for instance, some of
them immediately began complaining about a Heritage
analyst's proposal to phase out farm subsidies over a
period of five years. The new lawmakers didn't at all think
the idea too radical. Some figured it didn't go far enough,
and thus proposed a cold-turkey approach: Why not cut out
the subsidies immediately?
When members of the new House Appropriations Committee
began to look for billions of dollars in spending cuts this
month, they called in an analyst from the Cato Institute
for advice. And the tiny Libertarian Party, though widely
viewed as a minor political force has experienced an 11%
jump in both contributors (to 20,000) and enrolled members
(to 11,000) in the past year. The party still suffers from
an oddball image. But Perry Willis, national director of
the party, says that "the more intellectual component of
our society is thinking its way toward this. There's
probably another, larger segment of American society that's
stumbling its way."
Mr. Willis says the libertarian concept has particular
appeal to people in the computer industry. "We have more
members in one computer company in Seattle than in some
whole counties, and that company is Microsoft," he says.
Indeed, when Mr. Frezza, the Philadelphia computer
consultant, last month launched a computer network of like-
minded thinkers called DigitaLiberty, he was so overwhelmed
with responses, especially from college students, that he
had to temporarily shut down the group's electronic
mailbox.
One member of DigitaLiberty is Bruce Fancher, a 23-year-old
who in the late 1980s earned brief notoriety as a hacker
who broke into computer systems, though he was never
charged with a crime. He is president of a computer
communications company called Phantom Access Technologies
Inc. "Being involved in computers or the Internet, you
inevitably move toward being a libertarian," he says. "It
is basically possible to keep all of your secrets from
prying eyes, particularly the prying eyes of the federal
government."
Mr. Fancher also is intrigued by anonymous digital cash, a
plan for creating electronic "cash" by stringing together
bits of information that can be exchanged in place of paper
currency, and electronically encrypted so the transaction
can't be monitored by the government. That would include
the government's tax collectors, who would be powerless to
exact a toll on this barter in electronic play money.
Computers Off the Books
The social consequences of such ideas are enormous,
particularly to the tax system. If the electronically
empowered were able to amass income beyond the reach of the
Internal Revenue Service, for instance the burden of
financing government functions that even libertarians
consider essential -- national defense, the courts and
foreign policy -- would fall inordinately on those who
don't have the same technological sophistication.
On a more practical level, Mr. Brownback, the new
congressman from Kansas, worries how voters will react if
federai agencies designed to protect public safety are
eliminated and some hideous disaster occurs. And asked
whether farmers are really ready to give up government
subsidies, Rep. Brownback, himself a member of a farm
family, replies that "a number of people are there," but
others aren't.
Indeed, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows how
American thinking is drifting, but it also illustrates that
the public still is queasy about some cuts. Nearly half of
all adults surveyed -- especially those in the South,
Republicans and white men -- say that most government
regulations are unnecessary and harm the economy. Some
government agencies are widely regarded as unnecessary,
too, but not those guarding health and safety.
That the public wants change seems clear from the results
of last fall's elections. But exactly what sort of change
has yet to be spelled out. "In general, it seems like
people have lost faith in government as the solution to
problems in general, be they social problems or economic
problems," says Jeffrey Singer, a 43-year-old general
surgeon from Phoenix who considers himself a libertarian.
He thinks people are now more disposed to do-it-yourself
problem solving.
A sign of the times: The Libertarian Party is about to
double its national staff and move out of its current,
modest headquarters on Capitol Hill. The Libertarians' new
home: the Watergate office complex, the scene of the crime
that brought down Richard Nixon.
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