The National Park Service bureaucrats have begun systematically making it harder for people to visit Yosemite. The most blatant and arrogant example was their forcing the filling station in Yosemite Valley to close down, making the nearest source of gasoline 20 miles away.
This filling station was not spoiling some pristine wilderness. It was located near a large built-up area, which includes a sprawling hotel complex, three restaurants, a bar and a sports shop. The filling station was closed down to make it harder for people to drive their cars into Yosemite Valley.
The National Park Service bureaucrats have their own vision of how people ought to visit Yosemite and cars are not part of that vision. For years, these bureaucrats have spread hysterical and apocalyptic stories about how cars have created practically bumper-to-bumper traffic clogging the roads in the park. At no time during the dozens of visits I have made to Yosemite, during all seasons of the year, have I ever seen anything approaching the picture painted by the park's bureaucracy and spread throughout the media.
A big flood that covered Yosemite Valley to a depth of several feet in 1997 made major repairs and rebuilding necessary afterward. This rebuilding process provided an occasion and an excuse for permanently reorganizing the park, closing down camp sites and otherwise making it more difficult for people to visit Yosemite. Then, in the last months of the Clinton administration, something called The Yosemite Valley Plan was rushed through, embodying a Sierra Club type of vision of the park, sharply restricting the visits of the great unwashed in their cars, so that Sierra Club types can enjoy Yosemite in splendid isolation.
Now the taxpayers' money is being used to propagandize all visitors to the park into accepting the Yosemite Valley Plan of the park bureaucrats. Material handed out by the guards at the entrances practically gushes over how wonderful the plan is and how much more enjoyable visits will become—for those who can visit at all, under the new restrictions.
Instead of being able to drive when and where you want, under the new plan visitors will be forced to park their cars and get on buses. You can imagine families with small children, along with elderly people, all herded together and taking the regimented tour, instead of being able to stop and go when and where their own interests and need for food or toilet facilities would lead them.
It is a bureaucrats' collectivist Utopia—and anyone else's nightmare. Yet one of the bureaucrats who helped create this scheme speaks of himself as “fulfilling a sacred public trust.” In fact, what he has done is the very definition of betraying a public trust—using the powers given to him to serve his own agenda, rather than what the public wants.
Like so many of the environmental storm troopers, this official takes it upon himself to be the adjudicator between humans and animals, if not the ombudsman for the animals in Yosemite. The Yosemite Valley Plan “will benefit Yosemite's wildlife for many years to come” he says, by such things as “restoring areas in Yosemite Valley that have a high value to wildlife.”
First of all, the entire Yosemite Valley is just a small fraction of Yosemite National Park. So even if it were all wall-to-wall pavement, which nobody wants, it would still barely make a dent in the amount of habitat available to animals. In this context, the park official's pious talk about reducing “habitat fragmentation” means little more than preventing those animals living in the valley from having to cross a path or a road now and then—something they do with no great sign of angst.
As a final insult to our intelligence, we are told that “generations of visitors to come” will benefit from policies that restrict visitors from coming. What the future-generations argument boils down to is this: Future generations of people with the same mindset as the environmental storm troopers will be able to impose their dictates on future generations of other people.
Arrogant ego indulgence is never pretty. But masking it as altruism makes it particularly ugly.
STATE STEALING
A reader in Michigan says that he has been living in retirement on $15,000 a year—about $5,000 from Social Security and about $10,000 from stocks he owns in Southern California Edison. But now that the California government has forced Southern California Edison to sell electricity for less than it paid to buy it, there are no more profits from which to pay dividends, and the value of the company's stock has plummeted.
The Michigan retiree is by no means alone. All across the country there are people who have invested their savings in public utilities that supply electricity to Californians. What California politicians have done is steal these investors' money to pay for electricity that Californians want to use but are unwilling to pay for in full. Politically, it is a clever strategy to steal from people who can't vote in California, in order to gain the favor of people who can.
Long before there was any such thing as electric utility companies, governments used their power to confiscate the wealth of some and distribute it to others whose support was more important to them. The men who wrote the Constitution of the United States were well aware of that, which is why they included property rights in the Bill of Rights. For most of the history of this country, courts would not have allowed either state or federal governments to force someone to sell anything for less than it cost, because that amounts to confiscation of property without compensation.
In more recent times, unfortunately, clever people have gotten judges to evade the clear words of the Constitution by putting property rights on a lower plane than other concerns that are more politically fashionable. Law professors and others have managed to depict property rights as a special privilege of the affluent and the wealthy, something to be sacrificed on the altar of the greater good of others.
Neither these law professors nor the courts regard freedom of the press as just a special privilege of journalists. They understand that freedom of the press is an essential part of the larger political process. But they have yet to see that property rights are an essential part of the larger economic process. Without property rights, politicians have control of the whole economy within their reach, to the economic detriment of all, quite aside from the injustices they can commit against individuals.
What has allowed California politicians to get away with thefts of billions of dollars' worth of other people's property has been their ability to demonize those they are robbing and depict themselves as rescuers of Californians who are victims of “price gouging.” The public's and the media's utter ignorance of economics has made this possible.
The medieval notion of a “fair and just price” seems to underlie the current notion that prices which rise above levels that people are used to are unreasonable and unconscionable. But rising costs of the fuel needed to generate electricity have to be paid for by somebody. Rising demands for electricity by people in other parts of the country compete with demands for that same electricity by Californians—and this reality underlies the rising prices that are condemned as “charging what the traffic will bear.”
While utility companies that supply electricity to the public are heading into bankruptcy, the companies that supply electricity to the utilities have rising profit rates. There is nothing mysterious about this. Shortages usually cause rising prices and rising profits. These rising profits then attract the investments which end the shortage. This has been happening for centuries.
Prices are not arbitrary things. They convey a reality that is not going to be changed by price controls, whether state or federal. Prices are like readings on a thermometer. When someone is suffering from a fever, you can always lower the reading by putting the thermometer in ice water. But that does not change the reality of the fever.
The enormous costs of the current political charade in California are ultimately going to be paid for by Californians in many ways for many years ahead. Businesses disrupted by power blackouts are looking for greener pastures—or rather, states that are not so green, in the sense of environmental extremism that prevents power plants from being built. Besides, who is going to invest in build
ing power plants in California, when existing power plants are being threatened with confiscation? Certainly not our Michigan retiree or others like him across the country.
LOVING ENEMIES
Of all the Biblical injunctions, the one that seems hardest to keep is loving your enemies. Yet that happens with remarkable frequency in politics.
No one is a bigger enemy to women than those who promote easy sex. Many a woman has been saddled with the burden of raising a child alone, while the man responsible has gone off and forgotten all about his responsibilities. Yet feminist “leaders” have pushed easy sex and a unisex vision of the world, when in fact the consequences for women are very different—and much worse—than for men. Yet such leaders have been followed by the very women whose lives have been blighted by their philosophy.
Blacks vote overwhelmingly for liberal Democrats and yet no group has suffered more from the way liberal Democrats among politicians and judges have let violent criminals walk the streets. Moreover, no one has done more to make it illegal for the victims of these criminals to get guns to defend themselves with than liberal Democrats. No group has lost more from the dumbing down of public schools than blacks, as liberal ideas have been put into practice in the public schools.
Apparently loving your enemies isn't nearly as hard as it seems. People have been doing it throughout history.
Nobody brought more death and destruction down on Germany than Adolf Hitler did by attacking so many countries and arousing so much of the world against his regime. By the end of World War II, many German cities were little more than vast piles of rubble, inhabited by hungry and desperate people. Yet one need only look at old newsreels of the 1930s to see the love and rapture in German crowds as they cheered their fuhrer.
At least the Germans had the excuse that they did not know in the 1930s what horrors this hate-filled demagogue would bring down on their heads in the 1940s, or what lasting disgrace would hang over Germans in general as a result of Hitler's atrocities. Even Germans whose families had lived in other countries in Europe for centuries were sent “back” to Germany by the millions, as a result of the postwar backlash against the Nazis.
On a smaller scale, we have seen charismatic cult leaders like Jim Jones in Guiana and David Koresh in Waco lead their people into lethal disasters. Jones and Koresh turned out to be the biggest enemies of their followers, though adored by them.
Dictator Juan Peron and his wife Eva were the toast of Argentina as they transformed this prosperous and vibrant country into an economic disaster area. Argentineans were as capable as anybody else of loving their enemies.
Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Lenin in Russia and Mao in China are among the many beloved leaders around the world who brought catastrophe to their respective peoples in this century. Napoleon was said to have been regarded as a demigod by the troops he led to their deaths in the vast frozen reaches of Russia.
Maybe there is something in the human psyche that makes us yearn for idols. Euphoria over rock stars and mass adulation for Princess Diana are among the milder forms of this idolatry. Even so, it is painful to contrast public responses to the deaths of Mother Theresa and Princess Di within a short time of one another.
Hating your friends is apparently just as easy as loving your enemies. Ibsen wrote a play titled An Enemy of the People about a man who revealed dangers that others wanted to sweep under the rug, and who ended up as an outcast as a result.
The smearing of honorable men has become a highly developed political art form ever since the orchestrated demonization of Judge Robert Bork during the 1987 confirmation hearings on his nomination to the Supreme Court.
Although a similar smear campaign against Judge Clarence Thomas narrowly failed to stop his elevation to the high bench, a more all-out campaign of smears has made special prosecutor Kenneth Starr a national villain for finding out the truth about people who lied. Meanwhile, Monica Lewinsky has gotten up off her knees and gone on to collect big bucks here and overseas.
Many people find it impossible to believe the polls because these polls seem to reflect so badly on the judgment of the American public. Believe them. They are part of a long tradition.
If it turns out that we have been supporting a man who jeopardized this country's military security for the sake of political campaign contributions from China, it may be catastrophic for America someday, but it will be nothing new in history.
MICROSOFT AND CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM
When a writer from the New York Times was doing a story on Microsoft a few years ago, he asked their top management about the size of their lobbying office in Washington—and learned that they had no Washington office. But Microsoft's rivals in Silicon Valley have not only been lobbying, they have been contributing big bucks to the Democrats and providing Bill Clinton with an audience of cheering executives during his visits to California.
Is the Clinton Justice Department's anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft a pay-off to those who paid political tribute and a retribution against a company that didn't? Things are seldom done that crudely or that openly in Washington. But an administration which sent dangerous technology to China, after getting illegal campaign contributions from the Chinese military, should not be assumed to be above that.
Zealots for campaign finance reform tend to see political contributions from business interests solely as bribes to get government favors. It never seems to occur to them that it could also be protection money.
Governments operating protection rackets are nothing new in history and there are gross examples around the world today. Why then is this never even considered as a possible reason for many large campaign contributions from the corporate world?
Perhaps it is nothing more than the anti-business bias of the liberal media. But whatever the reason, the campaign reform issue is shot through with hypocrisy. People who talk about the “root causes” of crime have no interest in the root causes of big bucks campaign contributions.
Whatever special political favors are gotten by this or that particular business or industry, there is no question that business as a whole is increasingly hemmed in by government regulations, mandates and pressures. In short, business as a whole has been losing its ability to mind its own business and has become increasingly a plaything for bureaucrats and politicians.
Is this what you would expect if corporate campaign contributions were just buying favors? Or is it more consistent with paying growing amounts of protection money as there have been growing numbers of government powers to be protected against?
Incidentally, Microsoft has now belatedly entered the political arena. There are even complaints that its influence is behind Congressional reluctance to appropriate the kind of money desired by the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department.
Ironically, what arouses the ire of the New York Times writer is that Microsoft did not have a Washington office before. That was “arrogance” on Microsoft's part, if you believe the voice of the liberal vision. When not bending the knee to politicians and not paying up for protection are considered to be “arrogance,” then you know that you are in the wonderland of political punditry.
Quaint as it may be deemed these days to refer to history, the tragic fact is that many nations and many eras have been corrupted, and their economic development retarded, by precisely the kind of relationship between government and business that we have been moving toward. Put differently, American prosperity and American free enterprise are both highly unusual in the world, and we should not overlook the possibility that the two are connected.
Where those who hold political power treat businesses as prey, rather than as national assets to be safeguarded, the biggest losers are the public, whose standard of living never reaches the level of prosperity made possible by existing resources and technology.
While communism is no longer the official ideology in Russia, free enterprise has yet to be established. One painful sign of this are restrictions on the shipment of food out of particular re
gions controlled by political bosses, who are just as authoritarian now as they were when they were called communists.
The net result is that getting food in the cities is a problem in a country with vast expanses of some of the richest soil on the continent of Europe. The legendary fertility of the Russian black earth region caused Hitler to plan to transport trainloads of it to Germany after he conquered the country.
Whether it is rich natural resources, which abound in Russia, or high-tech know-how in which America leads the world, politicians can muck it up—to the cheers of those who think business needs throttling by government and who fear that business money will corrupt politicians.
LYING STATISTICS
“Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled.” Did you know that? It is just as well if you did not, because it is not true.
It takes no research to prove that it is not true. If there had been just two children in America gunned down in 1950, then doubling that number every year would have meant that, by 1980, there would have been one billion American children gunned down—more than four times the total population of the United States at that time.
Yet the claim that was quoted did not come from some supermarket tabloid. It appeared in a reputable academic journal. It is one of innumerable erroneous statistical claims generated by advocates of one cause or another. Too often, those in the media who are sympathetic to these causes repeat such claims uncritically until they become “well-known facts” by sheer repetition.
During the “homelessness” crusades of the 1980s, for example, homeless advocate Mitch Snyder made up a statistic about how many millions of homeless people there were in this country and threw it out to the media, which snapped it up and broadcast it far and wide. This fictitious number was repeated so often, and was so widely accepted, that people who actually went out and counted the homeless found that it was they who were discredited when their totals differed radically from Mitch Snyder's arbitrary number.
Controversial Essays Page 9