I’ve managed to avoid getting bitten by the millennium bug until just now. A reporter called to ask what major public policy issues I think will be fought over in the twenty-first century. In the course of thinking through my answer, I arrived at something that is more like a warning than a series of predictions, and another reason to speak out on issues that matter.
Privatization and Deregulation
Privatization, a megatrend through much of the 1980s and 1990s around the world, will continue to spread in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Large parts of welfare programs, prison systems, and the delivery of municipal services in the U.S. have already been privatized. Highways and tollroads are beginning to be privatized here and abroad, and schools are about to start down the privatization road.
There’s no stopping the rise of the for-profit K-12 education industry as a major competitor with government school systems: Wall Street and the Internet are seeing to that. Vouchers will follow, and other forms of privatization are in the wings. In two decades, all but a handful of government schools will be gone, replaced by private schools or public-private hybrids.
Deregulation is also a megatrend that will probably extend into the twenty-first century. Trucking, airlines, and telephone service were deregulated in the 1980s and 1990s, states are currently deregulating their electric utilities, and just last month Congress voted to do away with the Glass-Steagall Act, a barrier to innovation and change in banking and finance.
The public flogging of Microsoft currently taking place is either a short-term reversal of the trend toward abandoning archaic antitrust doctrines, or the final failing attempt to impose antitrust laws in the twentieth century. Either way, antitrust’s days are numbered. The Microsoft case asks whether laws based on nineteenth-century notions of technology and competition should be enforced in the twenty-first century. The unsurprising conclusion is no. Such laws ought to be excised from our nation’s legal code and join other discredited tools of socialism in the dustbin of history.
The Politics of Cynicism
Politics at the end of the 1990s was plummeting from trivia to farce. Someone said “send in the clowns” and we got a parade of them: Warren Beatty, Jesse Ventura, Donald Trump. Pity Steve Forbes, a serious candidate with a sound message, trying to connect with a public that views politics as an irrelevant game or spectacle, to be discussed only in the most cynical terms and only when more important things (football, baseball, what’s for dinner tonight, the latest sitcom) don’t come to mind.
Is this trend sustainable? As elected officials become less competent and the public withdraws its mandate from the political process, misguided government programs could simply disappear. This is what I call the “tooth decay theory of reform” after a sign I once saw in a dentist’s office that read: Ignore your teeth and they will go away. A surprising number of conservative and libertarian thinkers seem to believe this is the best or only strategy available to reduce the size and burden of government.
But cynicism, viewed as a tool for political change, does too little. Unlike our teeth, which may simply fall out of our mouths if sufficiently neglected, many government programs grow and flourish in the absence of sustained and concentrated attack. They do so because they benefit special-interest groups, and those groups show no sign of simply going away.
Cynicism also threatens to do too much. Like a fire deliberately set to rid an area of underbrush but which burns out of control, endangering crops and homes, so too does cynicism threaten those values and democratic institutions that hold, however imperfectly, governments accountable to the people.
Russia’s recent travails illustrate what can happen when government accountability is lost before its power is diminished. The current gangster state offends freedom and justice nearly as much as the previous system, and it is still an open question whether that country is on the road toward greater individual freedom or back to serfdom.
Beating the Demonizers
The first decades of the twenty-first century will decide whether the ascendency of democratic capitalism in the U.S. and around the world, described in books like Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw’s The Commanding Heights, is a lasting change or merely temporary, soon to be taxed and regulated out of existence by permanent and ever-growing state bureaucracies.
Today’s newspapers show how far we must travel: They are full of proposals for a higher minimum wage, federal “patient protection” legislation, budget-busting federal spending programs, higher taxes, more restrictions on gun ownership, huge subsidies for favored special-interest groups . . . the list goes on. The best-informed among us are also the most cynical and therefore sit out these debates–why bother to get involved when we all know politics is broken and government can’t solve problems, right?
Advocates of more government power are least likely to sit out the battle, and growing cynicism makes their job easier. The Demonizers–those alliances of anti-market advocacy groups, plaintiff’s lawyers, and opportunistic elected officials I’ve written about in the past–are having a field day. It’s like a football game where one team, convinced the game is fixed, refuses to even suit up, and the other team runs unimpeded up and down the field, scoring at will. We applaud the boycotters’ devotion to principle, but wonder at their strategic sense.
Special-Interest Groups
If our team decides to suit up and take the field, the legal profession’s privileged status will be a major issue in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Personal injury lawyers, already controversial and unpopular, are ripe for demonization by the companies and industry groups they now target. Watch for serious tort reform proposals, such as loser pays, caps on fees, tighter screening of junk science in the courtroom, and prohibitions on political activism by lawyers.
The environmental movement is also poised to take a fall. It was losing credibility throughout the 1990s as its politics grew increasingly alien to the American mainstream and its alarmist pronouncements no longer frightened a media-saturated and more sophisticated public.
To keep pace with other trends sweeping the globe, environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace must embrace a more market-based kind of environmentalism that protects people and their rights even as it protects the environment, or else they will gradually become irrelevant to the political debate. Their current approach cannot win converts without the massive and one-sided push from sympathetic media and philanthropists it has received in the past.
Seattle suggests that some part of the movement would rather follow the example of the animal rights movement and become an underground movement of weekend terrorists. That is their choice, but they deserve and should expect no mercy from either the courts of law or of public opinion when they are caught and punished for their deeds.
To Secure the Blessings of Liberty
History doesn’t just happen. It is, in Stephen Spender’s memorable words, “made by people acting on principles, not on principles regardless of the quality of the people.”
We homo sapiens are slow learners, but after two world wars and tens of millions of deaths at the hands of tyrants, utopians, and sometimes even democrats, we have found the principles of a free society. They can be summarized as individual liberty, private property, freedom of contract, and limited government.
Securing these principles against those who appeal to pre-capitalist nostalgia, and the bureaucrats and special interest groups that would benefit from the policy prescriptions that falsely promise to take us there, may prove as difficult as the act of discovery. Yet unless we succeed, government’s power will grow in the first decades of the twenty-first century, extinguishing the gains caused by privatization and deregulation at the end of the twentieth.
“The only hope of a cure” to a people’s addiction to false principles, wrote Arthur Koestler half a century ago, “rests on the gradual attrition caused by the ever-widening gulf between reality and myth, and the emergence of a new creed of equal emotional power and a better harmony with reality.”
That is our task for the twenty-first century. Thank you for help and companionship along the way.
