Looking Backward

(Written in April 2003, from the perspective of 2029)

As The Heartland Institute prepares to celebrate its 45th anniversary this year, we look back on many accomplishments as well as a few disappointments.

Back Then

Back in 1984, when The Heartland Institute was created, taxes and regulations consumed more than 50 percent of the average family’s earnings. Governments owned nearly 40 percent of the land area of the nation (excluding Alaska) and owned and operated airports, roads, parks, forests, and even the schools attended by almost 90 percent of all children.

The government owned everybody’s Social Security accounts, and government payments through Medicare and Medicaid accounted for nearly half of all health care spending. Three-quarters of a million Americans were in prisons and jails in 1984, a number that rose to a stunning 2 million in 2002.

In 1984–and indeed for the 25 years that followed–two political parties dominated the scene. Republicans promised less government and a strong defense and opposed concentrating authority in Washington DC. Democrats promised bigger government, fewer wars, and more federal authority. Third and fourth parties were nonfactors in nearly all elections.

A Changed Landscape

Things have certainly changed since then. Globalism and technology played the biggest roles. Competition for increasingly mobile capital from what were once called “developing countries” ended the era of regulation of industry by national governments, forced reductions in taxes, and prompted better protection of property rights in the U.S.

The invention of the semantic (voice-activated) Web in 2008, personal implanted computers (PICs) in 2009, and the virtual reality chair in 2014 fueled the global economic transformation. In 2019 the number of Americans using virtual reality chairs to supervise factories and laboratories in other countries exceeded for the first time total manufacturing employment in the U.S. Most of the factories and office buildings in major cities were converted to hospitals and schools, and then into apartment buildings, condominiums, and health clubs.

The exodus of most manufacturing to China, India, and Eastern Europe, plus widespread adoption of fuel cells, mini-nuclear reactors, and virtual reality chairs, led to the virtual elimination of pollution in the U.S. by 2020. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) closed its doors the next year. The Washington DC Memorial Nuclear Waste Facility ended a decades-long debate over where to store spent nuclear fuel.

Privatization–shifting the ownership and control of assets from government to the private sector–also played a major role in the transformation. Beginning in 2003, vouchers allowed parents to choose private as well as government schools for their children. When the last government school closed for lack of students, in 2018, more than 2 million teachers and administrators and $400 billion a year in spending had moved from the public sector to the private sector. Also in 2018, the country’s last publicly owned airport, the New Ronald Reagan International Airport at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, was sold to Poole, Cox & Savas LLC.

President Ed Thompson

Conferring private property status on Social Security accounts, a legacy of President Ed Thompson (2012-2016), helped boost the stock market to 36,000 in 2020. More importantly, it forced the federal government to pay for the benefits of those who had already retired, an expense made greater by the life-extending effects of nanotechnology and genetic engineering.

Having to devote 80 percent of federal nondefense spending to funding the Legacy Social Security Program led to the 28th Amendment, abolishing the IRS and federal income taxes and returning to the states responsibility for virtually everything except defense and Social Security. (Yes, Heartland helped draft the 28th Amendment. It was our proudest moment.)

Drugs were legalized in 2014, another legacy of President Thompson. As expected, crime and violence plummeted, freeing up hundreds of billions of dollars previously spent on police and prisons and allowing more than 1 million adults to return to productive work. Of course, “drug abuse” was already falling as universal training in general semantics (Null-A) led to superior integration of mind, body, and environment.

Government’s share of total income in the U.S., which peaked at 40 percent in the early 1990s, gradually fell to today’s level of about 17 percent. The switch to land value taxation from archaic sales and income taxes lifted another huge burden off the taxpaying public. We still have a ways to go, but President Jeff Flake thinks we’ll reach 12 percent by 2032.

The Political Scene

Few people today remember what it was like having only two major political parties from which to choose. Oh the lies they told! “Don’t waste your vote,” they’d tell us. As if Thomas Jefferson believed in a “two-party system”!

Defense issues pretty much disappeared from the platforms of both “major parties” by 2012 following our military victories in Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and France, and replacement of the United Nations with the World Federation. The Democrats lost major party status first, losing the black vote to the Republican Presidential ticket of Colin Powell and Clarence Thomas in 2008, and then losing their labor union support due to school privatization and relocation of the AFL-CIO to Beijing. The Republicans quickly followed their long-time foes into oblivion, however, by opposing drug legalization and the virtual reality bed.

The combination of the virtual reality chair, Null-A, and school privatization helped create a nation of self-governors. Who, back in 1984, could have imagined schools where students experienced 200 hours of conversation with a virtual Thomas Jefferson by the 7th grade? Or where living a week in a virtual Soviet gulag with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a graduation requirement? We now know these experiences turn 90 percent of high school graduates into life-long libertarians.

As the ability of politicians to use their offices to plunder the public treasury fell, so too did spending by interest groups on politics. Into the vacuum stepped the daily virtual referenda and the new political parties we now take for granted: Seniors, GenZ, Oprah, Libertarian, Rand, Null-A, and of course, Heartland and Heritage.

Still Kilometers to Go

While the condition of freedom is much better in 2029 than it was in 1984, we still have kilometers to go. Reducing taxes to 12 percent of national income is nice, but our goal remains 10 percent. There are still a few government-owned (and grossly mismanaged) parks, roads, and bridges. The Oneida Nation’s application to become the 83rd state won approval by referenda on its third attempt, but just narrowly, suggesting the public may feel the U.S. is becoming “too decentralized.” (A ridiculous notion to us, perhaps, but not to others.)

We fight extremists in the Seniors and GenZ parties over Social Security. The Seniors want benefits for those who retired before 2015 to increase in pace with average household income, while the GenZers want the Minimum Required Savings (MRS) rate reduced or eliminated entirely. Jefferson would not have approved of either change. (And shame on the Heritage Party for pandering to the Seniors!)

There is, finally, the not-so-small matter of civil liberties. It has been 28 years since Our Beloved Leader President George W. Bush launched the War on Terrorism. We have endured the indignities of total surveillance, random searches and arrests, suspension of habeas corpus, news blackouts, the mysterious disappearances of Edward Crane, Edwin Fuelner, and other prominent thinkers and political activists, and censorship of our publications.

Such restrictions on our liberties may have seemed necessary following the terrorist attacks of 2001, 2003, and 2008, but 21 many years have now passed without incident. Are those restrictions still necessary?

Heartland’s founder, The Evil Traitor Dave Padden, often warned that our advances in wealth and apparent freedom would be for naught if we surrendered to government our most precious freedoms from arbitrary authority. If you share that concern, I hope you will join us in calling on President Flake to remove the shroud of secrecy that now protects the Department of Homeland Security. rule wisely and firmly.

It has been my great privilege to have served as Heartland’s chief executive for 45 years. With your continued support (and the new heart and lungs I received on my 70th birthday last year), I hope to continue to fight for freedom law and order for another 45 years.