When you get to work this morning, sitting down at your desk to a burnt cup of office coffee and your morning email, I ask you to contemplate that fixture of working life: the QWERTY keyboard.
Have you ever wondered how the keyboard got the way it did? I have. I've experimented recently with different key arrangements on my own board, a trivial thing to do in Microsoft Windows. As a chronic tendinitis sufferer, I have an incentive to try less fatigue-inducing alternatives to QWERTY, even if my words-per-minute get handicapped in the process. One promising arrangement I found is called “Dvorák”. It purports to be laid out on strictly ergonomic principles, placing the most frequently used keys in the most prominent positions. Despite this I am finding little relief so far. Typing, no matter how I slice it, just plain hurts.
Investigating further, I found to my surprise that controversy has swirled for years among economists over whether Dvorák or QWERTY are superior, and how QWERTY gained its market dominance. The lowly keyboard, it turns out, more than just an overlooked symbol of life in our networked world, is Exhibit A in the case against free-market capitalism.
The typewriter was invented in 1868 and, so the story goes, the now-familiar QWERTY keyboard was selected precisely because it prevented fast typing, which jammed the keys. Though it may have been the right design for the time, QWERTY critics say, we've all been suffering its inefficiencies since, and a mass conversion to Dvorák should be undertaken forthwith by the computer industry. More tellingly, these critics say that government is needed to force that conversion on us.
This isn't a conspiracy theory. Mainstream economists like the liberal-left Paul Krugman discuss the so-called “Economics of QWERTY”. This is the familiar story of BETA vs. VHS, Mac vs. PC, and Hybrid vs. SUV. To Krugman, the undeserved market success of technologies like the QWERTY keyboard is due not to superiority or low cost, but to early “lock-in”. These technologies simply beat their competitors to the punch, and market inertia keeps them dominant - and keeps all of us dim-witted consumers from switching en masse, even though we all know individually we'd be better off doing so.
This is all garbage, of course. Products dominate a market if – and only as long as – they serve consumers' needs. The QWERTY keyboard remains dominant because, as I discovered first-hand, Dvorák is no better. If it were, consumers would clamor for the new keyboards, and savvy entrepreneurs would provide them.
The true lesson to be learned here is that anti-capitalists always underestimate the intelligence and autonomy of individual consumers and entrepreneurs acting without help or guidance from Big Brother government. To them, we are all helpless in the face of a cruel and capricious free market that rewards not innovation, but timing and luck. They couldn't be more wrong. I prove it every day I sit down at my computer to type.
The bad news about the Big Dig keeps getting worse. While most of the news media are accurately reporting the horrific figures - nearly 700 leaks in the main tunnel, bungling contractors bailed out over 3,200 times, and 500% in cost overruns - public outrage usually doesn't sustain itself for very long. People have gotten used to the Big Fat Obnoxious Dig. They shrug their shoulders and blithely move on with their daily doings, offering at most a toss-off comment like "Those pesky bureaucrats!"
Though we have little reason to be thankful so far for this boondogle of a public works project, we are thankful for one thing - that the feds are paying for most of it.
Ever since the project's inception in 1985, the funding ratio has been pegged at around 80% federal to 20% state tax dollars. That makes the it the most obscene pork barrel fleecing of the other 49 states in the history of public works. For this we can thank Reagan-era Cabinet Secretaries George Schultz and Casper Weinberger, both former Bechtel executives, who might have helped steer federal funding to Massachusetts, and consequently to their friends at Bechtel. Such rotten connections should be enough to induce an accute case of deja vu in anyone who's heard juxtaposed the words 'Haliburton' and 'Dick Cheney'.
With the most recent revelations of corruption and ineptitude, talk has begun in Washington of finally shutting off the Federal spigot. At that point, for Massachusetts taxpayers, the panic will set in. And for good reason - when its someone else's money you're spending, who cares how badly its spent?
This prompts a larger question: can publicly funded projects of any kind avoid corruption, inefficiency, and rape of the taxpayer? The Big Dig is routinely labeled "The largest and most mismanaged public project" in US history, as though these two aspects are coincidental. The facts speak loudly that most initial estimates for government projects are lowballed, later spiralling out of control, and funds are always allocated not to contractors who are the most innovative market entrepreneurs, but to the most persistent political entrepreneurs - that is, those with the greasiest lobbyists. So, the larger the project, the larger the corruption. As economist Lew Rockwell, President of the libertarian Ludwig von Mises Institute, puts it - "When the slop's in the trough, we can't be surprised when the pigs come out to eat."
What we now hear from politicians is righteous indignation and steely determination. We can conquer the corruption, save the project, protect the taxpayer form further abuse, make the scoundrels at Bechtel pay.
This is absurd, and no one should believe it. Trying to root out government patronage and corruption is like playing whack-a-mole - whack it down here and it pops up there. Human nature, supremely adaptable and greedy to the core, always finds a way to be corrupted.
But greed can also be a definite good. In fact, self-interest in the free market has been the engine of social progress for two hundred years. The key to any successful project is private, not public, ownership. So in the future, we should look to privately financed and managed highway systems.
Its hard to imagine what a privately owned and managed Big Dig would look like only because government has long held a monopoly on civil construction. Whatever the funding mechanism would be for such an arrangement - tolls, an auto-use tax - is unimportant. Human ingenuity would invent a solution to that. But what can't be invented is a government that knows how to spend The People's money better than The People themselves.
Democrats, Be Born Again
Last week James Carville, the colorful Democratic Party strategist and architect of the 1992 Clinton campaign - aka the "Ragin’ Cajun" - offered the way to salvation for disheartened members of his party: "We've got to be born again." His challenge gave voice to many Democrats disgusted at their anemic showing in this year's election. Rather than wallowing in denial, wringing their hands, or blaming defeat on an ignorant public, Carville says Democrats need to pare down their message, stop pandering to fringe left-wing groups, and diffuse radioactive wedge issues like gay marriage and abortion.
This approach would not be new for Democrats. Carville's own management of Clinton's campaigns emphasized a moderate position on cultural issues coupled with fiscal restraint and a rolling back of spending on many federal programs. What resulted was an unshackling of the American economy and a boom unseen since the 1920s. What worked once may certainly work again, though I for one would like to see the ideals of the Democratic Party lived up to even more fully than this. And so I say:
Liberals, be born again Libertarians.
Blog discussions are raging on the web advocating just this sort of revival of the Democratic Party of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Back in the early days of the Republic, being a liberal really meant something - it meant standing for individual rights, freedom from tyranny - from either a king or your own fellow citizens - and a truly free capitalist market, not one where unholy alliances between industry and government predominate. A liberal was against big government and high taxes but for the Bill of Rights, against war and a large military but for citizen militias and gun rights. In short, liberals believed America was and should remain a true meritocracy.
As we all know, something funny happened to the Democrats on the way to the 2004 general election. For one thing, early southern Democrats' addiction to slave labor undermined their putative commitment to rights and made their cries against increasing federal power ring hollow. After emerging from their Civil War defeat and the long political winter following it, and rather than resolving their contradictions and replanting their libertarian roots, they simply embraced all the big-government ideals of their Republican opponents, and then some.
So here we are. Somewhere along the way the platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties got reversed. Republicans are the supposed party of small government and economic liberty, while the Democrats stand for high taxes, redistribution of wealth, and special favors for minority groups. But we all know the truth - Republicans are crooks, in bed with big business and committed to war and moral legislation. And worse, they know it. On the other hand, most Democrats are truly well-intentioned if misguided folks who have simply lost their way lo these many years.
So I too call on Democrats to wake up and be born again. Wealth redistribution is working against you and for the Republicans - nearly fifteen cents out of every "Blue" state tax dollar goes to the "Red" states. So cut taxes sharply, cut spending even more, and balance the budget. Let states make up the difference as they are able. Pull the rug out from under gay-bashing bigots by getting government out of the marriage business for good. Shun environmentalists and realize that our single biggest polluter is the unnacountable federal government and its enabler the EPA. Bring our troops home, disentangle us from foreign alliances, and hang a giant 'Open for Business' sign at our ports. Free trade and a truly competitive economy will be here to stay, which is the best thing that could ever to happen to any poor man.
Such reforms would certainly be bitter pills to swallow for many Democrat-aligned groups - labor unions, trial lawyers, socialists, and other parasites. But if Democrats wish to rise from the ashes, they must have the courage to repudiate their own special interests and work for a return to true liberty, economic as well as civil. An army of image consultants won't save you, Democrats - what you need is the plain truth and the courage to act on it.
Yasser Arafat is dead. One more Islamofascist bites the dust. Call it one small step forward for mankind. But is it? To Arabs he was an icon, a righteous victim and defiant guerilla warrior wrapped into one man who for decades acted as titular head of a stateless people, the Palestinians. Recent corruption was wearing the shine off of his reputation, but despite this and his tacit support for the increasingly brutal Palestinian terrorists, he remained the most viable partner for peace with Israel - the best choice of a bad lot.
Why should Americans care about Palestine vs. Israel, and the Middle East in general? Until recenty that would've been a good question. Meddling in their affairs only got us burned in the past. Our unstinting support of Israel earned us little in terms of strategic advantage, while only breeding resentment from Arabs. But today, it should be obvious why the Palestinian-Israeli conflict matters: our part in it was a key motivator for the 9-11 attacks, touching off an open-ended 'War on Terrorism' that promises to mire us in ideological and armed conflict for a generation.
"So was 9-11 our fault?" you ask indignantly. However harmful our policy might have been toward the Arabs what could possibly have justified a crime like 9-11? I hate talking down to adults, but with so many Americans having succumbed to George W. Bush's childish view of the world as 'goodies' vs. 'baddies', I'm afraid its necessary: stop being a knee-jerker.
Pundit Pat Buchanan has long been a critic of the Bush Administration's empirialistic foreign policy. He's no knee-jerk Republican, but a common-sense conservative who's vision of a non-interventionist America is looking better all the time. When Bush says "You're with us or against us", Buchanan says "If you're not against us we'd like you to be with us". When Bush says "We must stay the course in Iraq", Buchanan quotes Kenny Rogers: "You have to know when to hold 'em, Know when to fold 'em". When Bush says of muslim extremists "They hate freedom", Buchanan asks "Do they hate us for who we are, or for what we do?"
Indeed, the Arabs love us for who we are. American culture reigns supreme and is emulated in the progressive Arab cities of Damascus and Amman. What they hate is our favoritism of Israel. And why should we take sides at all? There will always be interest groups with influence in government - pro-Palestinians no less than pro-Israelis - who want us to favor one side or another and to intervene on their behalf. But our government should keep hands off any foreign affairs that don't directly affect Americans' security. We must stop giving Arab extremists reason to use America as a scapegoat for their own misery, when their true opressors are their own corrupt rulers. Though I doubt Bush will take my - and Pat Buchanan's - advice, let's at least hope that Arafat's death won't propel us further down a dead-end road.
Winston Churchill once said "Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains." I turned 30 September 6th, and this year's election marks my political middle age: I've had a heart this long, it was now time to discover that I also have a brain.
What I am talking about here is not a conversion of party allegiance from Democratic to Republican, but from a mindset that views government as the solution to most problems to one that views it as the root cause of most problems. Though the Republican party has - ever since Ronald Reagan sucessfully ressurected the political ghost of arch-conservative Barry Goldwater - made itself out as the defender of traditional limits on government power, they deserve this reputation only when compared to the avowed socialists in the Democratic party. History teaches us that the first true American liberals came from Lincoln's Republican party of the 1850s, and that the Democratic party, after nearly being destroyed by the civil war, simply leap-frogged past them in their embrace of big government and high taxes, and their hostility to free market capitalism.
So how did I and my newly discovered brains vote this presidential election? We voted Libertarian. As expected, Michael Badnarik barely registered in polls, but at least this time the Libertarians saw fit to run a credible candidate who knew how to wear a suit and deliver a concise stump speech - skills their past candidates totally lacked. I'll refrain here from a defense of my decision to vote third-party, as most people with whom I talk try to bully me into doing. I'm not the only true conservative to be disgusted with the Republican (let alone the Democratic) offerings this year. Some bit the bullet and voted for Bush anyway, still others like me voted Libertarian or just stayed home.
Consider the record turnout of young voters this year. Given Churchill's dictum, it was natural to expect twenty-somethings to support the liberal candidate. They are inexperienced, psychologically under-developed, and ignorant of the economic struggles they are to face later in life as mothers and fathers, husbands and wives. Demographically they are waiting longer and longer to leave their parents' nest, retarding their ability to exist independent of some paternal authority. Consequently they wind up transfering many of their hopes for protection and susbsistence to the government. And waiting for them with open arms is that pack of perenially immature, tooth-fairy-believing, free-lunch-offering Peter Pans - the Democrats.
Even if young people do anticipate the struggles of 30-something adulthood, they are likely to still be under the impression that economic hardship is mostly the result of too little government support, not too much taxation and regulation. Just wait until they turn 30 and start earning a decent income - like me, if they've got any brains at all they'll have a quick conversion.
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