Points High and Low
It’s been a strange year for conservatives and libertarians. The high point was the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June upholding Cleveland’s pilot school voucher program, a genuine landmark in the movement for parental choice and privatization in education.
The low point was the “War on Terrorism.” We all want to make sure attacks like those of 9-11 never happen again. But many of us worry the “War on Terrorism” won’t achieve that objective, and is turning into a war on our civil liberties instead, just like the “War on Drugs” did.
We’d all feel better if the President showed some familiarity with the work of historian Robert Higgs, whose study of American history found that every time we have traded freedom for security, the threat to security eventually passed—but our loss of freedom was permanent.
The Heartland Institute focuses on domestic policy; in particular, school reform, environmental protection, and health care. In these three areas, we’ve won some and lost some over the past year.
Progress on School Reform
I already mentioned the Supreme Court ruling on school vouchers, and it is difficult to exaggerate its significance. The next few years offer a once-in-a-generation opportunity to significantly privatize K-12 schooling in the U.S. If we don’t capitalize on this opportunity, we will be left debating class size and teacher qualifications for another three decades.
President Bush talks about school choice and accountability, which is good, but “No Child Left Behind” has allowed very few parents to choose different schools for their children. What it has allowed is an unprecedented expansion of federal authority over schooling.
In his first year, Bush increased the U.S. Department of Education’s budget by nearly 50 percent. The powers of the national government enumerated in the Constitution don’t include educating our children. It wasn’t so long ago that Ronald Reagan was saying we should abolish the Department of Education. A conservative President would have done that.
Stalemate on Environment
On the environment front, President Bush killed the Kyoto Protocol, resurrected the use of cost-benefit and comparative risk analysis, and is pushing to end some Clinton-era policies, such as the ones that have allowed fires to destroy millions of acres of forests. This is all good.
But this administration seems just as tone deaf on property rights as the Clinton administration was. Privatizing the National Forests would do more to stop forest fires than doubling the budget of the National Forest Service.
The Bush administration has not stopped EPA from imposing unnecessary regulations, and it has not prevented the Army Corps of Engineers from taking private property without good cause and without compensation. For example, EPA recently decided it would require farmers who perform what is called “deep” or “rip” plowing to apply for permits under the Clean Water Act, because the dirt piled up into ridges by the plow falls back into the trench, and is therefore, technically, a pollutant. The Bush administration filed papers in support of EPA’s position.
Emissions trading seems as close to market-based solutions as the Bush administration is willing to go. Emissions trading is more efficient than command-and-control regulation, but it is no substitute for private property rights. If the emissions caps are based on junk science to begin with, there is little social value in achieving them more efficiently.
Still Losing on Health Care
In the health care arena, on the positive side, we’ve avoided a patient’s bill of rights that would have violated medical privacy and burdened us all with government paperwork, and we’ve avoided a prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients that would have bankrupted the country.
President Bush has the right idea about giving seniors more freedom to choose among private health insurance plans, including insurers offering prescription drug coverage. He’s wrong to support policies that undermine the patents of drug companies.
As Measure 23 in Oregon and the so-called Bernardin Amendment here in Illinois demonstrate, debate over health care reform continues to be dominated by the left. No proposal for price controls, central planning, greater subsidies, or increased regulation seems to be too radical to be part of the debate or appear in a political campaign ad.
All these reform proposals are simply more of the poison that is killing the system already. The Bush administration has not been telling the American people this, and it hasn’t put forward its own agenda for market-based reform.
Eternal Vigilance
My remarks have already shown how it’s easy to focus too much on short-term legislative battles and miss the big picture of the long-term war for individual freedom and limited government.
The theme of this year’s Anniversary is “eternal vigilance.” Most of us identify the words with the phrase, “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” which is usually attributed to Thomas Jefferson.
As it turns out, these words can’t be found in any of Jefferson’s writings. The original author is probably John Philpot Curran, a contemporary of Jefferson, who in 1790 wrote:
It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.
The need for eternal vigilance is why The Heartland Institute exists. The freedoms we often take for granted must be actively defended not once, but again and again against those who would take them away from us.
People like Stan Evans, Paul Craig Roberts, Gary Becker, and Howard Fuller epitomize the kind of dedication to freedom that it takes for us to win. For example, Dr. Becker, this year’s Heartland Liberty Prize winner, has spent a lifetime working to move free-market ideas from the fringe to the cutting-edge of the economics discipline, and from the classroom to public policy in the U.S. and around the world.
Becker was a pioneer, and he put his career at risk defending unpopular ideas. In an autobiographical essay written in 1992, which you can read on the Nobel Prize Web site, Dr. Becker writes:
For a long time my type of work was either ignored or strongly disliked by most of the leading economists. I was considered “way out” and perhaps not really an economist. But younger economists were more sympathetic. They may disagree with my analysis, but accept the kind of problems I studied as perfectly legitimate.
Vigilance in the pursuit of the truth is eventually rewarded, and we are very proud to add the Heartland Liberty Prize to Dr. Becker’s already-impressive list of awards and accomplishments.
Friends of freedom face a never-ending fight against those who profit from our servitude. This is the most important fight taking place in government and public affairs today. With your help, we’ll continue to fight for less government and more freedom. The stakes are very high: If we stop, the other side will win.
Thank you for your past financial support and encouragement. Thank you for your own efforts on behalf of freedom, and thank you for being with us tonight.
