What If?
http://www.populistamerica.com/what_if

July 24, 2007
by Clay Barham

What would America be like now, if the Federal Government stopped meddling in the affairs of American individuals and their enterprises? Just imagine what it would be like if we did not have cabinet level Departments of Education, Energy and Transportation? If the tried and proven Free Market still provided what we need, would we be better off? I have no doubt, from the evidence of America's history, that free people do things better and government makes things worse.

Let us speculate on some good changes. If local communities had school districts that were autonomous, as they once were, would children be better educated? Would teachers help educate children about what makes them tick, and sharpen their individual skills and talents? Once, when literacy was up and people aspired to be creative and productive on their own, it was because a school district's purpose was to educate the children of those in the community. Skill training was the preferred method of education by the parents for the children. Parents wanted their children to have the best prospects for the future, and a good education was the best preparation for it.

Influenced by meddling experts, claiming to know what was best for children, teachers abandoned skill training. Experts said children needed shaping to better adjust with their community and each other, not to excel and exceed others. Children, whose individual interests no longer mattered, lost interest in going to school. School was, to them, without purpose or value, other than a social gathering place for the young. Literacy dropped and skills downgraded solely for getting along. Schools became blackboard jungles and shooting galleries.

What about the energy crises? If no bureaucrats could put their untutored hands in the mix, would American companies find and recover oil in the Gulf of Mexico, the continental shelf, Alaska as well as the shale in Colorado? Would innovative Americans turn coal into fuel for our trucks, planes, trains and automobiles? If no government intervention were involved, would not the price be much lower?

Many will say price and pollution would increase if free people made the decisions, as they did in the beginning. Those people believe free men and women are ignorant, immoral, insensitive brutes who think of nothing but stealing what they can from each other. They ignore the fact that free men and women have not shown any such impulse, while government, representing a few elites, cause disturbances, higher prices and short supplies from self-serving ignorance every time they touch something.

Local and regional government bureaucrats, out of stupidity and lack of vision, have designed up to fifty different gasoline formulas in the past twenty years or so, all of them supposedly to do the same thing. None of them lived up to their public image. The one thing they all did was to raise pump prices to the consumer. In California, one imposed ingredient actually poisoned the environment, and when everyone knew it, it took a long time to remove it.

How would transportation be improved? Planes, trains, trucks and automobiles are the created, designed, manufactured and distributed products of free people. Government never ordered or created the internal combustion engine or the steam engine. The continued development of their uses came from free people, not bureaucrats. America grew rapidly from the use of the creations of Americans, free of government intervention. Year by year, each improvement in design and performance rose out of the desires of free American consumers, not because bureaucrats wanted them. When government began to meddle, disrupting and distorting the market, things began to deteriorate.

In every area where government meddles, things get worse. The one Government agency that comes closest to getting things right, during a conflict, is the military. The military, however, is not safe from the interference of politicians and bureaucrats. Our 20th century wars may have been won with less loss of life and treasure, if just military men ran it. That does not imply they are free from bureaucratic stupidity, but are stupid in better ways than Washington bureaucrats are. The current war in the Middle East is a case in point, where politically correct behavior established by the bureaucrats, and their ever-supportive media, trumps sound military judgment.

The 2008 vote is nearing. Americans will choose between more meddling bureaucrats, those who claim to know more than free men and women do, about how our lives should be lived. Will it be more of the same? Will Hollywood actors, rock and rap singers, slick politicians and internationalists have more to say about education, energy and transportation in America than the industries serving consuming Americans in those fields? Probably yes. Will we sink deeper into the mud and look more to the dictators for managing our lives? Looks like it from here.

Clay Barham [send him email] has been a candidate for the California legislature and a stand-in talk show host for ABC. He was educated in physical and behavioral sciences, with a Ph.D. in sociology. He is the author of five books, with his latest being Foundations of Modern American Conservatism and Liberalism: The Roots of Freedom and Tyranny. Visit his website at http://www.claysamerica.com.