Last month’s April Fool’s edition of my monthly Heartlander essay, written as if it were the year 2029, generated many much-appreciated calls and letters, but most fell in the “what did you mean by that?” category. I didn’t think the intellectual movements and trends I mentioned were too esoteric for so enlightened an audience … I’m hardly in a class with Dennis Miller … but I may have miscalculated.
What’s In a Title?
The title of the essay was borrowed from Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward from 2000 to 1887, a novel published in 1888. The book’s protagonist falls into a trance in 1887 and isn’t awakened until 2000, when the world has become a socialist utopia. The book was a best-seller and is generally credited with making socialism attractive to an American audience enamored with technology and progress.
(Tom Peyser wrote an excellent commentary on Looking Backward in the August/September 2000 issue of Reason. You can find it online at http://www.reason.com.)
Virtual Reality Chairs
The Internet and other information technologies are driving the cost of sending and receiving data down to near zero, while continued advances in computer processing speeds (Moore’s Law) move ever-more sophisticated programs from mainframe computers to laptops, personal digital assistants, and even telephones.
Video conferencing is now cheap enough that I expect Heartland’s offices to be equipped with cameras, projectors, microphones, and speakers inside a year, allowing real-time audio, video, and data exchange with think tanks and other key audiences across the country and around the world.
The next stage is virtual reality rooms–holographic rather than video images of other people and other places projected to our conference room, and eventually to our homes. It will be a short step from there to the virtual reality chair.
A virtual reality chair would have tremendous impacts on education and industry. Why not imagine (as I did in the April Heartlander) students sitting across from a virtual Thomas Jefferson for an hour every day and learning about America’s founding and the principles of classical liberalism? Or witnessing the cruelty of totalitarianism in a Soviet Gulag?
And wouldn’t virtual reality chairs make it possible for American workers to supervise assembly lines and other business activities in China and other countries, thereby creating millions of new jobs in the U.S. even as most of our manufacturing industries continue to migrate to lower-cost business climates?
General Semantics and Null-A
On a slightly more fanciful note, I predicted widespread training in general semantics (null-A) would help create a nation of self-governors. General semantics is an intellectual movement started by Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950) integrating the then-new findings in neuroscience, psychology, and physics into a philosophy of living. An important part of the movement’s epistemology was multiordinal or non-Aristotelean (“null-A”) logic.
The connection between general semantics and libertarianism remains a promising if largely unexplored path. Science fiction writer A.E. van Vogt published a series of novels in the 1940s that sketched out the kind of world we would live in if the general population received training in general semantics–e.g., learning to distinguish abstractions from reality and emotional from deliberate responses to events. The worlds invented by van Vogt are libertarian utopias.
(The van Vogt novels are titled The World of Null-A and The Players of Null-A. Second Amendment advocates should also check out van Vogt’s Weapon Shops of Isher. For more information on general semantics, go to http://www.general-semantics.org.)
Politics
Consumer choice is constantly expanding in almost every arena, leading to demands for more choice in politics as well. The main forces sustaining the two-party system today are ballot access laws that unfairly burden third parties and massive financial support from interest groups who find it less expensive to buy (or rent) politicians from two parties than from many.
If the size and cost of government were to shrink–perhaps due to a combination of global competition from less heavily taxed and regulated countries and a renaissance of the habits of self-governance at home–then interest groups would have less incentive to invest in the current parties. The Internet is already lowering the cost of creating new political parties and operating effective campaigns.
The rest is just filling in the blanks. Ed Thompson, the 2002 Libertarian Party candidate for governor in Wisconsin who got 10 percent of the vote in his first run for statewide office (he earlier had been elected mayor of tiny Tomah), could be the charismatic anti-politician who becomes the first third-party President. Jeff Flake, the libertarian who once ran the Barry Goldwater Institute in Arizona and who is now a Republican congressman, could win the Presidency in a five-way race in 2028.
Land Value Taxation
The most radical type of tax reform generally discussed today is replacing income taxes with a national sales tax, but am I the only one who suspects a 23 percent (or higher) sales tax would be difficult to collect at the point of sale? The alternative I mentioned last month is land value taxation, the “single tax” proposed by Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, and most famously, Henry George (1839-1897).
George observed that we own our own bodies, and this gives us the right to own the fruit of our labor. Taxing the fruit of our labor is therefore no different from involuntary servitude, and should be prohibited in a free society. The natural world, however, is a gift by God to mankind, and can be taxed without offending any human rights. So George proposed replacing all other taxes with a tax on the value of land.
Most economists would agree that taxing land value (or rent) causes less economic distortion than taxing income or sales, and privacy advocates ought to be among its strongest advocates. “Georgists” are prepared to answer objections and doubts based on workability and fairness, but critics seldom take them seriously enough to engage in debate. Georgism, like General Semantics, is a quirky but promising path too seldom traveled by freedom lovers.
(For more information on Georgism, go to http://www.henrygeorge.org.)
War on Terrorism
I ended the April Fool’s Heartlander essay with a protest against civil rights violations under the 27-year-old War on Terrorism, only to have the Department of Homeland Security censor my criticism.
In case you wondered, the prominent intellectual leaders who had disappeared, and whose names were blacked out by the censors, were Cato’s Ed Crane and Heritage’s Ed Feulner. My advice to President Flake was to “remove the veil of secrecy that shrouds the activities of the Department of Homeland Security.” The censor’s addition of “the evil traitor” in front of Heartland founder Dave Padden’s name is a nod toward the treatment of Leo Trotsky by Stalin in the Soviet Union, and of course the pig Snowball in George Orwell’s anti-utopian satire, Animal Farm.
While the War on Terrorism has major domestic consequences, it cannot be debated seriously without a wide and deep knowledge of foreign policy. I lack such expertise and so only rarely comment on this topic. Thankfully, Heartland’s donors can get insight and punditry on this topic from better-qualified sources such as the Cato Institute, Reason magazine, and The Heritage Foundation.
I hope this answers any questions you might have had about last month’s Heartlander. May you live long and prosper!
