|
Go Forth and Multiply:
Flourish with Freedom!
By Floy Lilley
Too few of us have
been able even to conceive of the evil of our destroyers. Too many of
us in our third generation comforts have given our oppressors every
benefit of the doubt. We have thought, "Certainly they - in their
cries of social justice, equality and common welfare- mean
well. Certainly they simply do not understand that their commonism
succeeds only in extinguishing the breath of purpose, creativity and
dignity that self-ownership and pride of stewardship
achieves. Certainly these would-be-rulers can see that Nature's
glorious diversity created the very inequalities of the human
skill-set that foster the fruitful divisions of all labor. Certainly
these pretenders-to-thrones are men, also, who hold sacred a love of
life as we do."
What were we thinking?
The collectivists' coercive assaults reveal that they, in fact, do
not cherish human life at all. Nature's Rule is Mutate, Migrate,
Adapt, or Die. Humans are part of Nature, are we not? Central Planners
prevent us from mutating, from migrating, and from adapting. Their
policies lead to our collective death. Is the mandate of man's life
"coerce and kill?" Or is the human mandate "Go forth and multiply?"
We know the answer. Humans have been commanded to "Go forth and
multiply" in the universe. Exactly how are we to do that?
Frederic Bastiat, that great 19th Century thinker whose slender
book The Law, gave us the phrase, and the understanding of "legalized
plunder," knew just how essential economic and political freedom is to
humans being able to go forth and multiply. Bastiat wrote:
"God has given to men all that is necessary for them to accomplish
their destinies. He has provided a social form as well as a human
form. And these social organs of persons are so constituted that they
will develop themselves harmoniously in the clean air of liberty. Away,
then, with quacks and organizers! Away with the whims of governmental
administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their
tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free
credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions,
their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations! And now
that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many
systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have
begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty: for liberty is an
acknowledgment of faith in God and His works."
Bastiat's wisdom was voiced in 1848. In our own generation and in
our own country, Murray Rothbard of the Ludwig von Mises Institute
propounded and expanded upon Bastiat's libertarian values:
"All socialism is immoral - a system of institutional aggression
carried out by the state against free human action. All coercion
against the actor prevents him from developing what is his most
essential, natural, and typical characteristic - the innate capacity
to create new ends and means and to act in order to obtain them. To
the extent that state coercion prevents entrepreneurial human action,
the human being's creative capacity will be restricted, and neither the
information nor the knowledge necessary to coordinate society will
emerge. That is why socialism and central planning goes against human
nature and is intellectually bankrupt, since it is impossible for the
governing body to generate the information it requires to coordinate
society through commands."
As if the country claimed both Bastiat and Rothbard as their own
sons, New Zealand has been trying liberty. New Zealand has peeled away
stifling layers of government to permit freedom to breathe and
flourish. Rolling Back Government: Lessons from New Zealand,
by Maurice P. McTigue, former New Zealand Cabinet Minister, is a
blueprint for going forth and multiplying. McTigue's educational
lecture is reprinted, in parts, by permission from Imprimus, the
national speech digest of Hillsdale
College.
New Zealand Spending Reforms
The impressive list of spending reforms that New Zealand has
accomplished includes: Created purchase contracts with senior
executives of government agencies that clearly delineated what was
expected in return for the money; Chose the heads of government
agencies on the basis of a worldwide search, and those selected
received term contracts - five years with a possible extension of
another three years; Made non-performance the only ground for removal,
so new administrations did not simply throw them out; Purchased policy
advice from each agency about how to reduce hunger and homelessness;
Made it clear that what is important is not how many people are on
welfare, but how many get off welfare and into independent
living.
The reform government asked each agency those two vital questions:
What are you doing? And what should you be doing? Then it told each
agency to eliminate what it should not be doing. Reforms reduced the
number of government employees with the department of transportation
from 5,600 to 53. The number of parasitic employees with the forest
service was slashed to 17 from 17,000. McTigue, himself, used to be the
Minister of Works. He ended up being the only employee when the
process was applied to its 28,000 employees. As McTigue says, most of
what that department did was construction and engineering, and there
were plenty of people who could do that, without government
involvement.
Did New Zealand's new flexing of freedom's muscle kill all those
jobs? No. Government just stopped taxing producers to transfer to
those employees. The need for those jobs still existed, and private
companies happily employed those skills. Freedom allowed those
workers to earn three times as much, and be 60 percent more
productive.
Reform freed up the things government was doing that had no reason
for being done by government. New Zealand's wave of freedom sold off
telecommunications, airlines, irrigation schemes, computing services,
government printing offices, insurance companies, banks, securities,
mortgages, railways, bus services, hotels, shipping lines,
agricultural advisory services, and more. Productivity rose; costs
dropped.
The government roll-back determined that other agencies should be
run as profit-making and tax-paying enterprises by government. Reforms
made the air traffic control system into a stand-alone company, gave
it instructions that it had to make an acceptable rate of return and
pay taxes, and told it that it could not get any investment capital
from its owner (the government). The accountability reformers did the
same thing with about 35 agencies - agencies which had cost producers
about one billion dollars per year, now, instead, produced about one
billion dollars per year in revenue and taxes.
The institution of high levels of transparency and significant
consequences for bad decisions had the following results: the size of
government was reduced by 66% measured by the number of employees; the
government's share of GDP dropped to 27 from 44 percent; surpluses
were produced; the surpluses were used to pay off debt; the debt
dropped to 17 from 63 percent of GDP; the remainder of the surplus
each year was used for tax relief; the income tax rate was reduced by
half, and incidental taxes were eliminated.
New Zealand Subsidies, Education and Competitiveness
McTigue writes:
"We need to recognize that the main problem with subsidies is that
they make people dependent; and when you make people dependent, they
lose their innovation and their creativity, and become even more
dependent. Reform took all government support away from the New
Zealand sheep farmers. The process changed the farmers' position from
a receipt of about 44 percent of its income from government, to zero
subsidies. In 1984, lambs' market was $12.50 per carcass. By 1989,
producing a different product, processing it in a different way, and
selling it in different markets delivered $30. By 1991, the product was
worth $42; by 1994, it was worth $74; and by 1999, it was worth
$115. Rolling back government let the New Zealand sheep industry go to
the marketplace to find people who would pay higher prices for its
product. Such reform delivered a loss of only three-quarters of one
percent of the farming enterprises - and those were people who should
not have been in farming. Instead of a turn to corporate farming,
family farming expanded. Freedom demonstrated that if you give people
no choice but to be creative and innovative, they will find
solutions."
Thinking differently about government, New Zealand eliminated all
the Boards of Education in New Zealand. Every single school came under
the control of a board of trustees elected by parents of the children
at that school, and by nobody else. The new accountability gave the
schools a block of money based on the number of students that went to
them, with no strings attached. All schools were converted to this
system on the same day. Privately-owned schools were funded the same
way. All of a sudden, teachers realized that if they lost their
students, they would lose their funding; and if they lost their
funding, they would lose their jobs. New Zealand moved from being 15
percent below its international peers to 15 percent above.
Freedom knows that the challenge of competitiveness is
worldwide. Capital and labor can move so freely and rapidly from place
to place that the only way to stop business from leaving is to make
sure that your business climate is better than anybody
else's.
New Zealand Taxation and Regulation
New Zealand's reform government decided that social services and
changing behaviors do not have any place in a rational system of tax
collection. So they selected only two methods for gathering revenue -
a lowered tax on income, and a flat tax on consumption. All other forms
of taxation were eliminated, period.
Deregulators rewrote the statutes on which all regulations were
based. All environmental laws, tax codes, farm acts, occupational
safety and health acts - the whole lot, every single one. Laws that
were 25 inches thick were reduced to mere hundreds of pages. New
statutes repealed all of the old. The goal was only the best possible
environment for industry to thrive.
New Zealand's Vision Imported to America
The Honorable Maurice P. McTigue has been willing to share New
Zealand's positive story with our own Congress and he reports that
some great things are happening along these lines in the United States
today. I did not know it, but back in 1993, the United States Congress
passed a law called the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA),
to take effect in 1999. Responses are just now beginning to be
weighed. GPRA orders government departments to identify in a strategic
plan what it is that they intend to achieve, and to report each year
what they actually did achieve. The fresh emphasis is on
"quantifiable" and "outcome-related" results. The Forest Service draft
2000 Revision failed to create a plan that encompassed outcome-related
goals and objectives, and almost no goals were quantifiable. Our
Forest Service appears to have chosen the wrong outcomes and goals to
quantify. Two years ago, President Bush brought to the table a
President's Management Agenda, which sifts through these reports and
responds. It is happening. Freedom's promise is there, in these
mechanisms, if used properly.
Be Optimistic; Be Inspired
Be optimistic for people and the planet. Be optimistic for the same
reasons that Murray Rothbard always was. Markets work, and governments
do not. Why Capitalism is Inevitable, by Joseph Stromberg and Jeffrey
Tucker of the Mises Institute recently argued:
"Left and right can define terms however much they want, and they
can rant and rave from the point of view of their own ideological
convictions, but what must achieve victory, in the end, is the
remarkable influence of millions and billions of mutually-beneficial
exchanges putting relentless pressure on the designs of central
planners to thwart their will. To be optimistic about the prospects
for capitalism requires only that we understand Mises's argument
concerning the inability of socialist means to produce rational
outcomes, and to be hopeful about the triumph of choice over
coercion."
In conclusion, be inspired. Be as inspired as the protagonist John
Galt in Ayn Rand's classic work of libertarianism, Atlas
Shrugged. Galt urged:
"In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to
those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you
alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the
cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do
not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright
posture, an intransigent mind, and a step that travels unlimited
roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in
the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet,
the not-at-all."
Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for
the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your
road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won,
it exists, it is real, it is possible, and it's yours. But to win it
requires your total dedication, and a total break with the world of
your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who
exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your
person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of
that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the
radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is
the Morality of Life, and that yours is the battle for any achievement,
any value, any grandeur, any goodness, and any joy that has existed on
this earth.
Floy Lilley is an attorney with Shroads & Lilley,
P.L., Amelia Island, Florida, and is Vice-chair of Sovereignty
International.
|
|
