 Just to set the tone. Some years back, I read most of the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, including his three-volume exposé of the Soviet labor camp system, the Gulag Archipelago. But there's one passage from his work from a little lone novel of his, Cancer Ward, that always stuck in my mind. And thinking of what to use as my text this morning, I thought of that one. Mm-hmm, okay. It's a three-page passage. I'm going to read that first and then go on to my theme about the Sovietization of America. In this three-page passage that I always found memorable, nurse in a hospital, some unnamed state hospital in Kazakhstan, meets an old man who is a patient and we take it up from there. An idle conversation from two people who have not met before. Where do you get all those French books? He asked. There's a foreign language library in town, she said. But why always French? The crow's feet around her eyes and her lips revealed her age and the extent of her suffering. They don't hurt you so much, she said. Her voice was never loud and she enunciated each word softly. Was it because of your husband or because of yourself? She answered at once as straightforwardly as if he were asking her about tonight's duty. It was the whole family and as for who was punished because of whom, I have no idea. Are you all together now, he asked? No, my daughter's in exile. After the war we moved here and they arrested my husband for the second time. They took him to the camps. And now you're alone? I have a little boy, he's eight. Which camp? Taishet station. Again, Oleg nodded. I know, he said, that'll be Camp Lake. He might be up there by the Lena River but the postal address is Taishet. You've never been there, have you? She asked, unable to restrain her hope? No, I've only heard about it. Everybody bumps into everybody else. His name's Duzarski, she pursued. You didn't meet him, you never met him anywhere? She was still hoping. No, he hadn't met him. You can't meet everybody. He's allowed two letters a year, she said. He nodded. It was the old story. Last year there was only one letter in May. I've heard nothing since then. It doesn't mean anything, he said. Everybody's allowed two letters a year. At Spassik camp, when a prisoner was checking the stoves during the summer he found a couple of hundred unposted letters in the censor's office stove. They just forgot to burn them. You mean your son was born in exile? He resumed. She nodded. And now you have to bring him up on your own salary and nobody will give you a skilled job and they hold your record against you everywhere and you live in some hovel? These were framed as questions but there was no element of curiosity in the questions. It was all so clear, clear enough to make you sick. Elisaveta's small hands worn out from the everlasting washing and the floor claws and the boiling water and covered in bruises and cuts were now resting on the little book, soft covered and printed in small, graceful format on foreign paper. The edges a bit ragged from being cut so many years ago. If only living in a hovel was my only problem, she said. The trouble is my boy's growing up. He's clever. He asks about everything. And how should I bring him up? Should I burden him with the whole truth? The truth's enough to sink a grown man, isn't it? It's enough to break your ribs. Or should I hide the truth and bring him to terms with life? Is that the right way? What would his father say? And would I succeed? After all, the boy's got eyes of his own. He can see. Burden him with the truth, said Oleg confidently. He spoke as though he had brought up children himself and had never made a slip. She propped up her head, cupping her temples in her hands, which were tucked under her headscarf. She looked at him in alarm. It's so difficult bringing up a son without his father, she said. A boy constantly needs someone to lean on. Where to go? And where's he to get this? I'm always saying the wrong thing. And that's why I read these old French novels, but only during the night duty. I have no idea whether these Frenchmen were keeping silent about more important things or whether the same kind of cruel life as ours was going on outside the world of their books. I have no knowledge of the world, and so I read in peace. Like a drug? He said. Like a blessing, she said, turning her head. It was like a nun's in that white headscarf. I know of no books closer to our life that wouldn't irritate me. Some of them take their readers for fools. Others tell no lies. Our writers take great pride in that achievement. They conduct a deep research into what country lane a great poet traveled along the year, 1800 or something, and what lady he was referring to on page so-and-so. It may not have been an easy task getting all that out, but it was safe. Oh, yes, it was safe. They chose the easy pain, and they ignored all those who were alive and suffering today. In her youth, she might have been called Lily. There could have been no hint then of the spectacle marks on the bridge of her nose. As a girl, she had made eyes and laughed and giggled. There had been lilac and lace in her life and the poetry of the symbolists. And no gypsy had ever foretold that she would end her life as a cleaning woman somewhere in Asia. Those literary tragedies are just laughable compared with the ones we live through, she said. Aida was allowed to join her husband in the tomb to a loved one in the tomb and die with him. But we aren't even allowed to know what's happening to them, even if I went to Camp Lake. Don't go, she said. He said, it don't do any good. Children write essays of the school about the unhappy, tragic, doomed life of Anna Karenina. Was Anna really unhappy? She chose passion and she paid for her passion. That's happiness. She was a free, proud human being. But what if during peacetime a lot of great coats and picket caps burst into the house where you were born and ordered the whole family to leave the house and town in 24 hours with only what your hands can carry? You open your doors, you call in the passers by from the streets and ask them to buy things from you or throw you a few pennies to buy bread with and with a ribbon in her hair your daughter sits down at the piano for the last time to play Mozart. But she bursts into tears and runs away. So why should I read Anna Karenina again? Maybe it's enough, what I've experienced. Where can people read about us? Us, only in a hundred years? They deported all members of the nobility from Leningrad. There was a hundred thousand of them, but we didn't pay much attention. The kind of wretched little ex-nobles were they, the ones who remained, old people and children. We knew this, we looked on, we did nothing. You see, we weren't the victims. You bought their pianos, I suppose, Oleg said. We may even have bought their pianos. Yes, of course we did. He could see now that this woman was not yet fifty. Yet anyone walking past her would have said she was an old woman, a lock of smooth old woman's hair, uncurlable, hung down from under her white head scarf. But when you were deported, what was it for? What was the charge? Why bother to think of a charge? Socially harmful, socially dangerous element, S-D-E. Special decrees just marked by letters of the alphabet. So it was easy, no trial necessary. And what about your husband? Who was he? Nobody, I guess. He was a flute player in the Leningrad Philharmonic. He liked to talk when he had a few drinks. We knew one family with grown up children, a son and a daughter, both Komsomol Communist Youth Party members. Suddenly the whole family was put down for deportation. The children rushed to the Komsomol district office. Protect us, they said. Certainly we protect you, they were told. Just write on this piece of paper. As from today's date, I ask not to be considered the son, the daughter of such and such parents. I renounce them as socially harmful elements and I promise in the future to have nothing whatever to do with them and to maintain no communication with them. Oleg slumped forward. His bony shoulders stuck out and he hung his head. Thousands of people signed letters just like that, he said. Yes, but this brother and sister said, we'll think about it, and they went home and threw their Komsomol cards into the stove and started to pack their things for exile. She sat silent in the twilight, but he could hear her murmur several times, a line from Pushkin, not all of me shall die, not all of me shall die. That's the end of the passage. The prolonged agony that was the history of the Soviet Union didn't, of course, stop with the dissolution of the USSR. The recent history of many countries in the world still involves political assassinations, executions, torture, mutilation. Most of Western Europe and North America has been spared these gruesome developments, but there are others no less insidious that have been occurring. I will concentrate on the United States because this is the area in which I'm the least ignorant. But these are not as dramatic and horrifying as what I've just described, but they are as I'll try to show no less dangerous for all that. I'll give examples of these developments from very different areas of our national life and see what we can put together with them. They at first, at the beginning, may seem a little bit vanilla-flavored after what I've just described, but bit by bit, I think their cumulative impact can be quite overwhelming. I'll describe a few of them in what time I have and then draw a few conclusions at the end. Now, here's a vanilla-flavored start, but I have to start with this. I was in a dentist's waiting room some time ago when a woman came in furious. She had forgotten to pull the emergency brake on her car when she parked, and the car had rolled into the back of the car in front of her, causing damage. Somebody's going to pay for this, she kept saying, and her whole effort was directed toward determining who was going to do the paying. This in a nutshell has become the unuttered motto of many Americans. It's not my fault. I am not responsible. Let somebody else pay for it. And this has been going on, just a minute or so on a couple of things. If you take a look at Warren Olson's book, The Litigation Explosion, you get thousands of examples, but just one or two because I want to save time. A woman was incorrectly told that she had won the jackpot in the California Lottery, though she hadn't. Just for a split second, she entered the winning slot and the jury decided that $3 million was about sufficient to pay for this momentary discomfort. One woman claimed that she had lost her psychic powers after a CAT scan. She sued the hospital for $2 million. The Washington, D.C. court awarded $5 million in punitive damages against Korean airlines for letting its airliner be shot down by a Soviet fighter jet plane in 1983. Recently, two teenagers, I don't know why this got to me particularly, in a car rental agency in Los Angeles, they sued the agency for charging higher rates for teenagers than to adults because of their safety record. They won. Now the rental agencies are required to rent to all ages at the same price. An employer now faces a lawsuit from victims if he lets a suspected, but not proven drug abuser stay in a safety-related position and he faces a lawsuit from the worker if he doesn't let him stay. Or this one. A clinic counselor fears an invasion of privacy lawsuit if he tells a client's wife that her husband has AIDS. But he faces a lawsuit for failure to warn if he does not do so. I mean, in most other countries, if you lose the suit, you pay the court expenses, but in the United States you don't do that, so there's virtually no risk that the lawyer takes it on consignment. But now to some of the laws themselves. I want to give a little bit on the laws and then go on to regulatory agencies and then draw conclusions from that. The last two issues of the Atlantic Monthly contain a two-part article by Eric Schlosser on the war on drugs. In this case, only one drug. Mirawana. Not only are people arrested, their property is forfeited. With that fact, it happens all over the place. Forfeiture of property for suspected drug possession. Even if the suspicion is false and the government keeps the property even if the person is innocent of the offense. In some states, it's illegal to be in a room where the marijuana is being smoked even if you don't smoke any. Or if someone uses it on your property even without your knowledge. Two cases. Just to dramatize what this situation is. At 38, this is a quotation from the Atlantic Monthly article, September 1994. Mark Young was arrested in his Indianapolis home for the sale of marijuana grown on a nearby farm. He never before had been charged with any crime. He only introduced two people to each other, the possible seller and a possible buyer. There were no confiscated drugs, no physical evidence to link him to the crime. He was convicted on the testimony of those who were cooperating with the government. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. He was promised a lighter sentence if he would turn in the names of those who cooperated with him, but he refused. I didn't have anybody to give them, he said. They only wanted a name and the only name I could give them was that of a fishing buddy and that guy has nothing. He couldn't even buy half an ounce. Another revealed names. When you're talking the kind of time that they're passing out, he said, you expect anybody to do what they can to defend themselves. But me, I wouldn't do it any other way. Though he's now in Leavenworth for the rest of his life with no possibility of parole. One other. Jim Montgomery, a paraplegic from the Waste Down in Oklahoma, used marijuana to relieve muscular spasms. He was arrested when sheriffs found two ounces of pot on the porch. The charge was possession of marijuana with intent to distribute by possession of paraphernalia. The sentence, life in prison plus 16 years. Drug offenses are prosecuted by both the state and federal governments and with the war on drugs there are mandatory minimum sentences which most states don't even have for murderers. Quick quotation from the Atlantic article and then I'll go to another topic. In the 1980s, the annual federal spending for jailing drug offenders rose over 1,300%. The inmate population has been transformed by these minimum mandatory sentences. In 1970, 16% of all federal prisoners were drug offenders today at 62%. Many of them are first offenders with no previous arrest imprisoned for low-level drug violations. Over half had no prior criminal record the judges found worth sentencing, but they had no choice. The law required the 10-year minimum sentence. State correctional facilities are now being overwhelmed by drug offenders. The prison system in 40 states is operating under court order to reduce overcrowding. Violent criminals are being released early to provide cell space for nonviolent drug offenders whose mandatory sentences does not permit parole. There are 200,000 drug offenders imprisoned in America today, the same as the total number of people in all crimes 20 years ago. Since the war on drugs began in 1982, the nation's prison population has more than doubled. The U.S. now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world and no society has ever imprisoned so many of its citizens as of crime control. Question. Does anybody really think that these legislators are interested in morality? When they confiscate the drugs, who do you suppose gets them? Many of the enforcement officers save them for their own use. No, they're not interested particularly in getting people off drugs. That's a smokescreen. They know that more than half the violent crimes in America could be stopped tomorrow morning if people didn't rob and mug others to get them. The name of the game, of course, is power. To arrest, to confiscate, on any pretext. After all, what is conspiracy to possess marijuana? When are you supposed to be guilty of a conspiracy for that? What are the criteria? I don't know of any. What is the law when somebody in your house smokes a joint when you are not even physically present and you go to jail for it? No, the aim is, surely, to institute a reign of terror so that anybody can be arrested or bankrupted on any pretext at the whim of any agent. As de Tocqueville predicted in 1836, he wrote, the nation, that means America, will become a nation of timid and terrified sheep with a government as the shepherd. That's the aim. That's the intended outcome. Okay, that's just one area. I want to take three or four areas and then draw some conclusions from those. Here's one. The environment. When Bush became president, not only did he initiate the war on drugs, he did something probably even worse. He issued the order that, quote, all existing wetlands no matter how small should be preserved, unquote. And then followed a new definition of the word wetlands. The manual was written in secret behind closed doors. And now a land that is dry 350 days of the year until wetland, including most of Nevada. We're now, which they called the Great Wetlands State. The EPA claims that wetland authority extends to every patch of land in the United States. They imposed a huge penalty for placing excavated dirt in a pond. EPA claims jurisdiction over interest state wetlands and regulatory birds might use it as a place to feed or nest as a stopover on the way to the Gulf. This is called the glancing geese test. Geese might glance down and consider stopping at a water hole. And the geese were on a flight that may cross state lines and so instantly that becomes interstate commerce. Even one tenth of an acre may fall under federal's jurisdiction because of passing birds. It's sometimes called the reasonable bird test. The EPA sent people to prison for filling in a quarter acre of wetlands while at the same time the Department of Agriculture gave North Dakota farmers permission to drain 7,000 acres of swamp land to expand their crop acreage. There is an environmental problem for instance in Florida the deterioration of the Everglades and the main reason why sugar is still produced in Florida is its federal price support since strict import quotas and sugar production is the main reason why the Everglades are being poisoned. But it's easier for politicians to send in federal agencies in vendettas against landowners than to end the gravy train for campaign contributors who were continuing sugar subsidies. The EPA is to the farmer today what the Gestapo was in Nazi Germany. They can get you for anything anytime on their own definition of some offense. Any person whose car is found in a junkyard can be required to pay the total cost of cleaning the whole junkyard which may include hundreds of cars even if it happened 30 years ago. If the EPA agent says to a farmer that mud puddle over there in your backyard is here by dubbed a wetland the farmer cannot use it for his own purposes though he still pays taxes on it and so on. The EPA has issued almost 20,000 pages of regulations in the Federal Register complying with these cost businesses about 30 billion a year and meanwhile it's impossible to figure out what they mean. You can't find out what one paragraph means you have to relate that paragraph to another paragraph 100 pages earlier and then a footnote on a 9 year old Federal Register preemble and the real fund begins to publish internal interpretations or guidance and sometimes these new interpretations appear in letters from headquarters but the EPA doesn't make any effort to publicize these interpretations. Of course not everybody gets prosecuted but they're all under the gun. How does an agent decide whether to prosecute somebody for an environmental violation? I read recently an enforcement official in Los Angeles but here's how he explained how he did it. When something just makes you tingle it's a misdemeanor. When the little hairs on the back of your neck stand up it's a felony and so on. There are plenty of more cases of this kind. Some of them are discussed at length in James Bulbard's book Lost Rights which is really the blockbuster book of 1994 an expose of some of these things who I've relied on that one other angle. The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment was followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it requires that employers have shown no intent to discriminate on grounds of race but the word discrimination is used by the EEOC Equal Employment Opportunity Commission much more widely than Congress ever authorized. It created tests that would allow it to convict almost any employer that EEOC officials felt didn't have enough of racial balance. For example, the Duke Power Company had a policy of not promoting employees unless they were high school graduates or could pass a written test. A group of workers sued the company claiming discrimination against the black race. The Supreme Court ruled against the power company saying practices neutral on their face and even in intent cannot be maintained if they operate to freeze the status quo of prior discrimination. Quote, the power company they had a special program to pay the costs for undereducated employees to give them a high school training but the court found that this was irrelevant. The EEOC used this decision to attack practices of recruitment, hiring, testing promotion and seniority. The company is presumed guilty of discrimination if its employees represent less than 80% of the racial groups in the area. The EEOC to determine exactly what the area is. The rules for pursuing and imposing equality are so complex that people affected don't really understand them and the guidelines are not designed to enable employers to make a good faith effort to comply and so lawsuits abound. One example, a lamp company in Chicago was sued in 1991 for not hiring enough black employees but it was in a Hispanic district. Almost all the employees were Spanish. The city of Chicago was unable to provide safety for the plant which had been broken into time after time but it had enough resources to punish the company for hiring too many of the wrong kinds of minorities. The government went through records of job applicants. It called people up and said, are you white, Hispanic, or black? Did you know you may have been discriminated against and you may have money coming to you? Many people didn't even know about the case but of course they presented their names for collection. The company finally settled with the EEOC paying 8,000 a year indefinitely into a settlement fund and the manager said, my whole life was fighting this thing. I couldn't do it anymore. My family and I couldn't function. We agreed to it because we just wanted to be left alone but we had no troubles within our company until Big Brother came in and this goes on case after case. The cumulative impact of the cases is tremendous but I can only give a few before turning on to the next topic. Hiring has an affirmative action override. Equal opportunity went from requiring the best person to be given the job to a demand the jobs be distributed to equally to minimally qualified applicants or those who could be made qualified at the expense of the company. See the weasel word here is the word qualifiable as opposed to qualified. And any test is considered unfair no matter how job related when racial groups differ in their score averages. So the company is punished for not hiring those who seem to be less intelligent or capable than others and so we get to race norming that is the government fixes the results of tests, advances some lowers others without telling the employer to be that that has been done. So he never knows what the real test score was. So that's one of the current government prerogatives to deceive and to tell a potential employer that person is qualified or unqualified and then simply lie about it. One final example of this because it comes near to sort of thing I've been doing. In 1989 the Michigan legislature withheld half of the Detroit symphony's subsidy because it didn't have enough black musicians. The state senator said he had no excuse for not doing this. Music is music he said I learned that in school music has been one of the major contributions of African-Americans and the New York Times commented on the critical shortage of black musicians, classical musicians. It was difficult for some orchestras to find any to even audition because blacks make up less than 1% of the 4,000 classical musicians playing in the nation's symphony for more than a decade, most orchestra managers have used blind auditioning. Applicants perform behind a screen to prevent racial discrimination and favoritism. But the use of the screen really makes affirmative action unnecessary and impossible and the New Republic remarked in an editorial what Michigan legislators seem to have in mind are auditions that are not blind but deaf taking place without a screen but with earplugs. And so the orchestra caved in. They made one black man William Terry, its first black president they sought to hire James DePriest who is black as their music director away from his job as music director as the Oregon Symphony and DePriest refused the offer. He said it's impossible for me to go to Detroit because of the atmosphere there. People mean well but you fight for years to make it irrelevant and then they're making race the whole issue. And so it goes with the EEOC having carte blanche to do just about what it wants. When some of us started this whole libertarian party thing in 1972 we professed as our aim to reduce the trend toward big government but we didn't know it would go so far. I thought it was bad enough being audited by the IRS thoroughly for three consecutive years after the presidency run but of course that's nothing compared with some of the things that are going on now. A couple of other areas and then I'll try to wind it up. Once upon a time New York was a habitable city. Relations between tenant and landlord were on the whole pleasant and if a tenant was dissatisfied he could usually get another apartment without too much trouble. And now the scene in recent years the city decided that rents were too high, imposed rent controls, the severest in the nation. No landlord could make a reasonable profit of the rent he was permitted to charge. Many of those sold their buildings for a song, losing their whole life savings. Others tried to hold on. Tenants destroyed the furniture and plumbing knowing they didn't have to pay rent until it was replaced. Another convenient city regulation says that rents to fire will be the first on a list of controlled rents when something opens up. Coincidentally there were a lot of fires in buildings that no insurer would ensure knowing what would probably happen. Many landlords simply abandoned their buildings. They couldn't break even and couldn't sell them. These burned out hulks are inhabited by street thugs and petty gangsters and that's why the South Bronx looks like Berlin in 1945. It was all done officially to stem the landlord's greed. But most of the landlords are small timers who had put everything they earned into the buildings they bought. What they had in common, most of them came from overseas according to William Tucker, the author of the Excluded Americans. For them they had faith in free enterprise. Buying a building was the fulfillment of their dreams. At last we're in a free country, they said. One landlord had tried to evict the tenants who hadn't paid for two years. The plumbing and heating systems had long since been plundered. The court sided with the tenants. He'd have to restore service before taking action for nonpayment of rent. And by this time he had spent months sleeping on a friend's couch and borrowed 5,000 to have the plumbing reinstalled. The tenant went out again. And he installed it again and started sleeping in the kitchen to protect the pipes. And the tenants waited until he left during the day and then plundered them once again. Then he shut down the heat, turned off the electricity, tried to starve them out. The tenants retaliated by building cooking fires and stealing electricity from neighboring buildings. Every time he went to housing court, the court ruled that he still wasn't providing enough services. And so on. Well, it kept on when he did finally, why did he persist? I, that is the author of the book William Tucker's The Excluded Americans, asked. He said, my mother and father had spent their lives working for this. Their lives were wrapped up in this. As it stands now the building isn't worth 50,000. Fixed up it would be worth a half a million. I could fill it with good tenants in five minutes. People who could pay rent on time and never give trouble. The city government doesn't want that. They say they want safe housing. But the first thing they want is to destroy all small owners so that they can take the buildings for themselves. One landlord was a woman who was a Chinese immigrant. One of her tenants was a drug addict on welfare, hadn't paid rent for years, lived with two large dogs. When she asked for the rent he slashed her tires. When she went to court he threatened to kill her. She filed a complaint in criminal court for attempted murder and the criminal court judge says this is not a criminal case. It's a housing case. And he sent it back to the housing court. The housing court judge reviewed the case and decided to overturn the eviction and the tenant got to keep the apartment. The fire bombing charges were dropped. He's still in the building. In 1989 she said she was going back to China. The government there has offered me the chance to take back my family's old hotel. She said, I think I'll do it. In China when they want to take your property they just kill you and get it over with. Here they torture you first. One landlord said when the Nazis invaded Vienna in 1938 we at least had a sense of injustice. We knew we were right and they were wrong. But being a landlord in New York you're not even allowed a sense of injustice. Everywhere you go you're surrounded by people who hate you and tell you it's your fault. There are stores in Manhattan displaying a set of fashionable sweatshirts which read, live cheap, marry your shrink and screw your landlord. How does the city get all these vacant buildings? As the author of the book says they are literally torn from the landlord's bleeding hands. The housing authority teaches people how to get these buildings away from their owners. They are in the business because it's an easy way to steal money. The aim of the whole program is the destruction of all private ownership of buildings in New York City. And what's the result? Row after row of beautifully designed apartment buildings on upper Broadway with courtyards and fountains that were built to last a thousand years have become slums. The sturdy and efficient structures that were up and down West 120th where I used to hang out when I was a graduate student at Columbia University and they stand with their windows boarded up by sheet metal and cinder blocks and signs saying property of the city of New York, managed by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Reminders, all reminders of the destruction of a once viable metropolis fond memories of a city that has been lost to sovietization. One other area because it's so much less known and yet so important namely the mining industry. I'm near the end of my examples. A few years ago Mitsubishi Corporation of Japan decided to build a new copper smelter in Texas City. Japanese officials were assured by the state and federal officials that all the required permits could be issued in 12 months. The application was submitted in 1989. Then came three years of conflict among environmental groups, permitting agencies, company management, air and water discharge permits more than 30 permits in all and the Army Corps of Engineers promised a decision within 60 days and waited 21 months. Finally, exhausted by this attrition, Mitsubishi decided to cancel the whole project in America. The new chairman of the Texas Water Commission said that when his permit came up for review in four years he would demand zero discharge of wastewater, technically impossible. The air discharge permit from the Texas Air Control Board would take a year. Building the plant would take two years and less than a year after that the company would be facing the zero discharge law. So Mitsubishi abandoned the project in 1992. They decided to build an identical copper smelter in Japan where the required permits were obtained in 14 days and the plant was built in 17 months. And so ended a great opportunity for the U.S. to acquire a minimum pollution energy efficient modern copper smelter which would have been strategically located on the Gulf of Mexico. And people wonder why Japan is in the head of the United States. A friend of mine from South Africa came to find economic freedom in America and became head of the company. But he found only an increasingly complex set of strangling regulations. Most of them trivial, pointless, debilitating, and to get past them and stay out of jail a person has to do twice the work he'd ordinarily do. Let me mention just one which he told me about that I hadn't heard about and I later looked it up. Whenever your company buys an electric motor you are now required to buy the quote most efficient one. 96% efficiency is now mandated. The earlier requirement was 94%. So what's the difference when I ask the catch is that it must be a 96% efficient when operating at full speed. The 96% efficient motor is more efficient at full speed but it has less starting torque. In fact a conveyor belt could never get started with the newly required motor. But since the 94% efficient motor is now illegal users have to go from a 96% efficient motor of 100 horsepower to one of 200 horsepower just to get the motor started. The new law doesn't save energy it requires industry to waste energy. It does its little bit to make the United States non-competitive. It's assisting in the gradual process of deindustrializing America. Is this just a little detail that the regulators were ignorant of? Was it something they just overlooked? But they had called in experts. Did they ignore them? Or do they do these things in order to frustrate American enterprise? Surely they know that Japan is way ahead of us because it doesn't impose these thousands of regulations. Are they then doing it on purpose to get even with the capitalists? Even though they themselves may go down to bankruptcy with them I don't know. I was talking the other day with an old time friend who was a psychiatric counselor and a patient came to her and asked her to certify that she the patient was disabled. Why so that she could get an income from the state under the workman's compensation law? I won't do it my friend said you are no more disabled than I am. The patient was in a rage. I'll get another doctor to sign. A week later the patient came back. I got another doctor to sign. I think you'd better watch the tires of your car from now on. My friend went to her supervising physician. He had signed up the patient. Get onto it he told her. We all do it. How do you suppose we make our living these days? When there is talk about government waste on TV programs which has become recently fashionable why don't they discuss really big issues like this one? The corruption is so massive it's a kind of cancer that eats up the whole system. It puts honest people on a treadmill consuming the fruits of their labor and one step forward, two steps back sapping their energy sapping their industry. Several years ago the Postal Service was directed by the Department of Defense to develop an electronic card system which would connect each individual with the Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Treasury, the IRS, the FBI, the FDA and the banking system and said they would put these cards into our pockets in about two months after the administration occasioned. Without the card you would not be able to own property receive government benefits, get medical attention or conduct bank or credit card transactions and the location of each card holder could be tracked worldwide by using IC chip and barcode. This may not work in the end because of ways to defeat it but anyway this is just in the future and it may not happen but it's a scary thought let me mention on that point some presidential executive orders presidential executive orders go back to Roosevelt to enable the president to declare a state of emergency or martial law or the suspension of constitutional rights such as enable the president to intern with the whole groups of Japanese right after Pearl Harbor. President Carter signed an executive order delegating the power of the country to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Now on June 3, 1994 Clinton signed a new executive order transferring the control of this agency to the National Security Council. Now some of these just summarized previous orders but a couple of them are new. I didn't read about them in the headlines but anyway here's a couple of them. Executive order 10995 that's only for presidentially declared national emergencies. All communications media seized by the federal government. Seizure of all electrical power fuels including gasoline and minerals seizure of all food resources farms and farm equipment seizure of all forms of transportation including cars seizure of civilians for work under federal supervision federal takeover of health education and welfare and there's the new one that just developed a couple of months ago housing and finance authority to shift population from one locality to the other. Now these developments aren't publicized and most people aren't aware of them and one doesn't know that they'll ever come into operation but there they are in the federal register. There's more stuff even scarier but since it's not yet sufficiently verified I just pass this on. Deploy and all this of course not just to put you in a state of abject terror having to beg the government for favors but it's also to make you dependent on government. Most middle class of parent Americans now have so much taken from them in taxes and social security that they can't make that investment they want to, they can't start that small business it seems promising, they can't hire workers for a business that never comes to exist. The result of that is they won't be able to pay the high medical bills or sustain ourselves in retirement so we'll be forced to rely on the good graces of government for our survival. And then when social security collapses we'll still be more dependent on government when they call out the troops to quash the rebellion when people see how they've been fleeced. The government diverts the blame of course you know this old story by pointing to the incomes of the rich and trying to arouse our envy of people who will be hurt most by Clintonomics are those working hard to provide products, services and employment for others in the hope of making a profit. The rates already make building some capital very difficult in Clinton it's becoming practically impossible no wonder that people like Barbara Streisand are enthusiastic about Clinton's brave new world. They already have more than they ever need and if the strugglers and strivers of the country are taxed to death well it's no skin off their back Harry Brown wrote this our recent LP presidential candidate for 96 Harry Brown said in a recent newsletter quote, the American economy has been strong enough to survive many wounds inflicted by politicians and regulators but this next stabbing could be fatal because the economy is already bleeding the death blow comes because the president lives in a world where there are no economic consequences he believes he can get away with the confiscation because he's always been able to explain away anything and the press has never held him responsible why should he worry about consequences journalists have criticized his $200 haircut, his waffling, his poor management his foot dragging but the one thing they don't criticize is his policies they accept it face value and repeat faithfully his every assumption about the economy about the free ride of the rich about interest rates falling because of his proposals about $4 in spending cuts for every dollar of tax increases and about the perfidy of the last 10 years 12 years the press has given legitimacy to the inconsistencies the lies, the absurdities if the press were really against him if they questioned half of his sloganeering assumptions his approval rating would be zero despite the support of the press even now his program has almost no public support that's the end of the quotation from Harry Brown the Clinton health program seems to be dead for the moment but I'm going to mention one thing about it of all the things about it that scared me the most because it was a straw in the wind was a question to Hillary from a listener will I be able to choose my own doctor and she said yes although according to the program it wasn't true it wasn't the lie however that really bothered me it was the fact that such a question could be asked without discomfort or alarm what do you mean choose my own doctor why shouldn't I be able to choose my own doctor what would such a question even have meant to America's founding fathers wouldn't it be self-evident that this is a matter of our own choice how could such a question be raised and the fact that it could be asked showed me how far down the road we have gone and yet most people seem to be able to ask it without a tremor of fear or dread that kind of thing has to be responded with a joke here's one a story is told about a man who appealed to a genie in his frustration to grant him three wishes oh I'm old and tired said the genie I'll just grant you one wish alright said the man I want to be in bed with three sexy and exciting women at the same time and presto he found himself in bed with Helena Bobbet, Tanya Harding and Hillary Clinton a few minutes later he found himself without a penis his knee was throbbing and he had no healthcare coverage but Clinton has done us one favor his presidency is so ridden with scandals personal and political so fed up with the saying one thing to one group and another to another that they can't even stand to see him on TV anymore unfortunately it's not always big government that people are fed up with they have seen prime time live they know all about the waste and inefficiencies but at the same time they're uncomfortable they don't want to do without the goodies that they've been promised government by government and of course which they've paid into for a long time so meanwhile there's a variety of hard hitting radio talk shows that expose media bias so well that millions of people no longer trust the media as a source of information and people don't have it all together yet however a morality of rebellion and fierce independence is slowly developing in America it's rising from the ashes of Lyndon Johnson's great society which spent two trillion dollars of our money and not brought any alleviation of the poverty it was supposed to abolish this new morality is very dangerous to the reigning liberal establishment in fact it's not really a new one at all it's a resurrection of the morality of Thomas Payne and Thomas Jefferson too long buried under the welfare warfare state it is the morality of self-reliance and individual rights and independence from the state though many people haven't yet sorted it out and identified it for what it is some people even feel guilty about wanting to make governments smaller for fear that if they do there will be a lot of people unemployed and in want and the mood is one of some soul searching and as I reflect on this my thoughts go back to a remarkable passage in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Thin in which Huck engages in intense soul searching about whether to turn in his friend Jim who was an escaped slave so I'll read that one page and then I'm almost through here's what Huckleberry Thin says to himself this is self-remination it had never come home to me before but this thing was that this is what I was doing now it did and it stayed with me and it scorched me more and more I tried to make out to myself that I weren't to blame because I didn't run Jim off from his rightful owner but it weren't no use my conscience up and says every time he was running for his freedom and you could have paddled the shore and you could have reported him and that was so I couldn't get around that no way that's where it pinched my conscience says to me what had poor Miss Watson done to you that you could see her slave go off right under her eyes and never say one single word what did that poor old woman do to you that you could treat her so mean why she tried to learn you your books good to you every way she knowed how that's what she done and I got to feeling so miserable I wished I was dead I fidgeted up and down the raft and every time Jim danced around and says there's Cairo it went through me like a shot and I thought if it was Cairo I would die of miserableness I was full of trouble and I didn't know what to do and at last I had an idea I said I'm going to write the letter and then see if I can pray why it was astonishing the way I felt light as a feather straight off my troubles all gone so I got a piece of paper and pencil glad and excited and I sat down and I wrote dear Miss Watson your runaway slave Jim is down here two miles from Pikesville and Mr. Phelps has got him and he'll give him up for the reward if you send for him, hug Finn and I felt good and I was washed clean of sin for the first time in my life and I know what I could pray now but I didn't do it straight off I laid the paper down and I sat there thinking thinking how good it was when all this happened so and how near I came to being lost and going to hell and I went on thinking I got to thinking over our trip down the river and I see Jim before me all the time and in the day and in the night time sometimes moonlight sometimes storms and we was floating along talking and singing and laughing and somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him but only the other kind I'd see him standing by taking my watch instead of his instead of calling me so I could go on sleeping and I saw how glad he was when I came back out of the fog and when I came in out of the swamp and he would always do everything he could think of for me and how good he was and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small box aboard and he was so grateful and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world and the only one he's got now and then I happened to look around and I saw that paper it was a close place I took it up and I held it in my hand I was a trembling because I'd got to decide forever now between two things and I noted I studied a minute and sort of held my breath and then I says to myself all right then I'll go to hell and I tore it up it was awful thoughts and awful words but they was said and I let them stay said and I never thought no more about reforming I shoved the whole thing out of my head and I said I would take up wickedness again which was in my line anyway being brung up to it and the other wasn't and for a starter I'd go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again and if I could think up anything worse I would do that too because as long as I was in it and in it for good I might as well go the whole hog end of the quotation I think as I read this I keep thinking that it's time for us to steal ourselves out of slavery again and while we're at it let's be in it for good and go the whole hog by nature we are free and independent peoples so we can resist the teeth the enslavers unremitting desire to impoverish us, regulate us frustrate our productive efforts resist the laws that only mean more control over all our decisions this ambivalence which Huckleberry Finn felt and which many Americans feel and I think to some degree overseas as well the ambivalence doesn't last forever it has a way of working itself out one way or the other it could lead to more tyranny or it could lead to freedom the outcome of course isn't a foregone conclusion but what will happen will depend on what we do I think we would do well to keep in mind a closing reflection of the late United States Supreme Court Justice William Douglas he wrote, quote as nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression in both instances there is a twilight where everything remains seemingly unchanged and it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of changes in the air, however slight lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness what we face in this world is the menace of an oncoming darkness and the darkness is the same whether it is in a hovel in Kazakhstan or a prison camp along the Lena River a dictatorship imposed by presidential decree and so I want to leave with you the challenge of this line by the French philosopher Voltaire civilization said Voltaire is the swish of silk stockings going up the stairs and the clattering of hobnail boots coming down thank you very much before the Harry Brown quote you mentioned Harry Brown's name in 1996 when I was a month ago when I was at the Liberty conference in Seattle he declared himself to be presidential candidate for the Libertarian party in 1996 and he's already going around the country campaigning he's seeking the nomination yes, the actual official nomination does not occur until late this time around, June of 96 but I suspect it's a foregone conclusion who will be the candidate you might hear you better well that one doesn't exist this one's dead this one's dead but this one's live I have a way of killing a microphone good luck working? yes I wondered, in your philosophy classes at USC do you find that the ideas of Liberty are less acceptable now among your students than they were say 20 years ago when you were presidential candidate? well I'm no longer at USC because I didn't like my political beliefs well I retired from USC I'm teaching an occasional course at UCLA I taught in the aesthetics and I'm giving philosophy of law this term and I'm giving political philosophy next term so I'm doing that I'm finishing my book on ethics and doing a whole assortment of other things but USC had the option and at the first moment that they legally could they said well he's a far right fanatic whatever that meant to them what about your students is there a change in their attitude? well it's been a couple of years now since I was there these students at UCLA are very friendly but it may be also a picked audience I mean those who already know about me come to the classes so it's very difficult to give any estimate at USC it's about the same as it always was most students are sort of indifferent to this there are a few people there's always a small fraction of dedicated Iran followers and some came to USC on the strength of the fact that I was there just the year before I was let out and then there were there's the usual mass of the comparatively indifferent or who just want to follow the classical definition of a lecture that which transfers from the notes of the teacher to the notes of the student without having passed through the minds of either one what they call cognitive dissidents that is that people see the evidence that does not conform to the psychological framework that they're holding and so they deny the evidence I'm wondering if what you're that's correct and how we can sort of overcome this image of negativity and still break through the context it's certainly customary to say oh that can't be true it can't be I never heard this anywhere else I never heard it on the media I didn't read it in the newspapers you're making it up well it's very difficult to fight that sometimes you can show them evidence and you can bring them around but most people don't wait around that long they just go back and watch the television news and reinforces more what they thought before so I don't have any recipes for fighting that I found in teaching courses that you can't you can't do much in a single lecture I've often been asked to give a lecture at this place or that place on libertarianism or some aspect of it I finally gave up doing that because you can't really make much of a dent what I require to make a real dent and change a student's life forever is a whole course a semester or a year when you get something straight the first day and then follow it up with getting something straight the second day and then discuss and finally carry that through a whole term or a whole year until the whole foundations of the student's mind have been someone altered the system of presuppositions is different but as long as you they keep on going with the same presuppositions nothing really ever changes a few slogans they may have some unfashionable opinions to report but then it's a high recidivism they go back you have to change their mental structure and this takes time all things worthwhile cost and this sort of thing can't be done in a single day or a single lecture or a single month yes in your book which I read about 20 years ago made what I thought at that time was a prophetic statement about Eastern Europe where I'm from originally one of the freedom fighters from Hungary and things of course have changed since you wrote the book have you been keeping an eye on the developments there and what is your latest prophecy about Eastern Europe being a philosopher I don't have to make prophecies about empirical events I'm just sort of Johnny come lately I'm no specialist in this area I remember I did say right after the collapse of the Soviet Union I said everybody's emphasizing the political democracy there the important thing however is going to be the economic and I remember saying there are at least two things that they have to get in place before a free economy is going to work over there one of them is a strict system of property rights which they don't even have yet and the second is enforceable contracts apparently neither of those is really very firm so the mafia is taken over that country and everybody's going to blame the free economy for this they're going to say well you see free enterprise doesn't work so long ago I mean four or five years ago many of us said wait a little bit you got to get these things in place first and then it can really take off I remember hearing a lecture by von Mises many years ago in New York just a few years before his death in which he said that his books would become known and popular in Eastern Europe before they ever would be in America and apparently that has come to pass any more questions I'm sorry we must draw to a conclusion we're well over an hour with Dr. Hospers I know that you all want to talk to him I'm sure he'll be available to speak to privately but we must get on thank you very much Dr. Hospers