Reason Magazine - Staff

Paradise Lost

john@ethanallen.org (John McClaughry) — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 10:45:00 EST

Look Homeward, America, by Bill Kauffman, Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 185 pages, $25

At the turn of the 20th century, one of the most popular writers in America dwelled in a small village in upstate New York. After two decades of wandering about Europe and America, Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) had settled in East Aurora, 18 miles southeast of Buffalo. Along the way he had built and sold a soap company, making a tidy profit he used to finance his literary ventures.

Hubbard wanted to be a well-known writer. The editors at the leading publishing houses of the day did not encourage that ambition. So Hubbard followed the advice of an ancient local rustic, Uncle Billy Bushnell: "Stay at home and do your work well enough, and the world will come to you."

Hubbard launched a printing plant, manned by youngsters from the village, to turn out his magazine The Philistine, devoted to expressing his political, philosophical, and religious views. He went on to print, bind, and sell his essays. Many of them, written to introduce readers to notables such as Washington, Voltaire, Marcus Aurelius, and Jane Austen, appeared in a 14-volume set titled Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great. His most celebrated essay—still read today, though not often enough—was "A Message to Garcia," the inspiring tale of a resourceful and courageous U.S. Army courier who made his way to the camp of a Cuban rebel leader just before the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Hubbard became known far and wide as "The Sage of Aurora."

In many respects—not including the creation of a 300-employee publishing house—Bill Kauffman of tiny Elba, New York, has become today's Elbert Hubbard. But unlike Hubbard, whose essays glorified the lives and works of famous people, Kauffman's literary journey seeks out "the America of holy fools and backyard radicals, the America whose eccentric voice is seldom heard anymore…the [voice of] third parties, of Greenbackers and Libertarians and village atheists and the 'conservative Christian anarchist' party whose founder and only member was Henry Adams."

Kauffman's earlier books mined interesting veins of localism and hostility to modernity. America First! celebrated America's forgotten isolationist activists, from Hamlin Garland to Alice Roosevelt, plus other assorted individualists, including Edward Abbey, Gore Vidal, Sinclair Lewis, and this writer, included because he considered me, not altogether inaccurately, the last lonely true-believing Jeffersonian. His Dispatches From the Muckdog Gazette celebrated the lives of the common people of Kauffman's Genesee County, home of the minor league Batavia Muckdogs baseball team.

His newest book, Look Homeward, America, will interest anyone who suspects there might be more to America than is found in the average installment of the network news. It's a series of often sparkling profiles of Americans, both near-famous and obscure—similar to Hubbard's Little Journeys, but selected and viewed through Kauffman's unique prism of localism, authenticity, tradition, and human scale.

Like Hubbard, Kauffman has had a long and interesting journey back to his self-imposed exile in Elba. He began a career of itinerant wordsmithing with two and a half unsatisfying years as a staff member for Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) in the 1980s. (Kauffman relates his disappointment with his old boss in a profile in this book, lamenting the senator's failure to live up to his own best instincts and possibilities.) Kauffman then worked from 1985 to 1988 at Reason, serving part of that time as the magazine's first Washington editor. At Reason he interviewed such eccentric Americans as the Black Panther turned Reaganite Eldridge Cleaver, a pre–Supreme Court Clarence Thomas, and Charlton Heston; he contributed reports on topics ranging from cowpunk to Kerouac, from anti-war capitalists to Delaware's former Republican governor Pete du Pont, who sought his party's presidential nomination in 1988.

In the 1990s Kauffman, who is now 47, returned to his native Genesee County after writing Every Man a King (1989), a novel clearly inspired by his own wanderings. He bought an old house in Elba (32 miles northeast of Hubbard's East Aurora) and began his own one-man literary enterprise. Besides writing books, he contributes articles to a range of publications, from the left-leaning British newspaper The Independent to the libertarian monthly Liberty. For several years he did editorial work for the conservative magazine The American Enterprise.

It's difficult to find a place for Kauffman in today's political taxonomy. He started out as a populist liberal. As that youthful infatuation waned, he became a libertarian, attracted by that creed's unrelenting hostility to the curse of statism. In his own telling, he became increasingly uncomfortable with the Randian side of libertarianism and what he saw as the movement's infatuation with economic calculus to the near-exclusion of humanistic values such as community, charity, faith, and honor. He then slid into the "peace-and-love left wing of paleoconservatism," of which he may well be the only identifiable member.

The more Kauffman read and experienced, the more he developed an affinity for various schools of thought, not all of them mutually consistent: Jeffersonian agrarian distributist, Catholic Worker pacifist, traditional Old Right conservative, transcendentalist, decentralist, anarchist. His anarchism, he stresses, is not that of "a sallow garret-rat translating Proudhon by pirated kilowatt, nor a militiaman catechized by the Classic Comics version of The Turner Diaries." Rather, he writes, "I am the love child of Henry Thoreau and Dorothy Day, conceived among the asters and goldenrod of an Upstate New York autumn." Thoreau doesn't play a major role in Look Homeward, America, but Day, a largely forgotten social activist who died in 1980, is one of its stars.

From this intellectual odyssey Kauffman has accumulated a long list of dislikes, some of them intense. A sampler: wars, empires, television, consolidated schools, homeland security, the metric system, interstate highways, collectivism, day care centers, Wal-Mart, wage labor, gun control, urban renewal, trade agreements, the PATRIOT Act, National Review, Ayn Rand, Henry Kissinger, Nelson Rockefeller, and Hillary Clinton. Among his least-favorite initials are FDR, JFK, LBJ, NYC, IRS, and CNN. What this seemingly diverse list has in common, to Kauffman, is that each entry is destructive of the values he holds dear: the richness, faith, and compassion of a small community, built upon a network of self-reliant but mutually supportive families, rooted in a sense of place, cherishing the memories and traditions of generations past.

The figures who march across the pages of Look Homeward, America include the Iowa regionalist painter Grant Wood (American Gothic), the Ohio copperhead congressman Clement Vallandigham, the socialists Eugene V. Debs and Mother Jones, the contemporary rural Maine novelist and militia maven Carolyn Chute, the former New York congressmen Augustus Frank Jr. and Barber Conable, the late Rep. H.R. Gross (R-Iowa) and current Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), and the Goldwater speechwriter turned Black Panther and anti-war enthusiast Karl Hess. Kauffman reveres this cast of characters because each, in his own way, said no to war, to empire, to global commerce, to giant enterprise, and to centralized governments gobbling up taxes, distributing benefits, and propagating dependency, all contrary to the spirit of the Old Republic.

That semi-mythic era of the happy, contented rural village—its land-owning swains and lasses farming and blacksmithing and barn raising, quilting and square dancing and parenting, worshiping and burying and remembering, oblivious to the greed, passions, and nation-state criminality washing over the rest of the planet—has, on the whole, receded far beyond recovery. But in thousands of Elbas and Auroras, Kauffman believes, principled localists can still create a facsimile. Or could, if somehow the intrusive forces of bigness, modernity, homogenization, and imperialism could be kept at bay beyond the village limits.

Kauffman leads off his parade of exemplars with Dorothy Day, the guiding spirit of the Catholic Worker movement. An ultra-sincere follower of the Christian gospels, Day ardently believed in a widespread distribution of "true" private property ownership, in which the property is under the personal control of its moral and responsible owner, as the essential ingredient of a just society. To this distributism Day added pacifism and anarchism. Her slogan was "To Christ—To the Land," representing a vision in which community-oriented independent landowners would honor the teachings of the church and build little societies free of exploitation, wage slavery, tenement housing, plutocracy, pride, communism, and for that matter "progress."

If Dorothy Day is Kauffman's heroine, Wendell Berry is his hero. One of America's most distinguished men of letters, Berry lives on his ancestral farm in Port Royal, Kentucky, immersed in its traditions and continuity of generations. As a patriot of his native land—that would be greater Port Royal and probably all or most of Kentucky—Berry brilliantly inveighs against the evils of war and empire.

Berry ascribes those ills to our loss of firm roots in the villages and neighborhoods of America. As Kauffman puts it, "As romantic as prairie schooners and the Hesperian exodus to the fruited plain may be, the real honor resides with those who stayed put. [They were] the real heroes of the settling of America." Of course, if millions of early immigrants had stayed put in Yorkshire, Galway, Ulster, Silesia, Saxony, Tuscany, Lebanon, Wallachia, Oaxaca, Luzon, Shantung, and other such places, today's America would be only a thinly populated Native American battleground, unmarred by Caucasians and casinos.

The book's other chapters celebrate the lives and idiosyncrasies of a wide range of people not often celebrated. The least obscure of this bunch is President Millard Fillmore, of whom very little has ever been approvingly said other than Queen Victoria's observation that he was the handsomest man she had ever met. Kauffman tries hard to make his fellow upstate New Yorker (Fillmore originated in East Aurora, long before Hubbard's time) look good. He was, Kauffman reports, a "fine if not outstanding president," mainly because as a "Peace Whig" he opposed the Mexican War, the proposed annexation of Cuba, and the fire-eaters on both sides who eventually produced the bloody convulsion of the Civil War.

This tribute is persuasive only to those who, like Kauffman, view nay-saying and pacifism as controlling virtues. Fillmore's signing of the Fugitive Slave Act, his preference for deporting slaves to Africa over abolition, and his 1856 presidential candidacy on the secretive anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic Know-Nothing ticket hardly make a glittering legacy. So long as Fillmore pretty much said no to everything, he qualified as a Kauffman notable if not a hero. Once he found something to say yes to—intolerant nativism—he pretty much fell out of the pantheon.

Kauffman's localist-traditionalist ethos would have received the hearty assent of Elbert Hubbard's East Aurora villagers, and their Elba neighbors, in 1900. Well, perhaps in 1825, before railroads, the telegraph, and the electric grid worked their insidious effects.

Two salient facts intrude upon this blissful picture. First, very few of America's 300 million inhabitants have any intention of living like their or anybody's forebears in an upstate New York village with all the blessings of 1900 (let alone 1825) technology. Not even Bill Kauffman, with his fondness for home-squeezed apple cider, sandlot baseball, Christmas caroling, and dandelion wine, is willing to give up his word processor and Internet access, his publisher in far-off Delaware, and (presumably) his access to modern medical and dental care.

Attractive as such a life may seem to many—and I write this in a log house on a northeastern Vermont mountainside—none of us can flee from the second and more menacing fact that in a cave in Pakistan, a coffeehouse in Cairo, a mosque in Riyadh, and a bunker beneath Tehran, well-armed and inventive villains really, really want to kill the peaceful people of Elba, New York, and wherever else we Americans dwell. They want to do so because their reading of their holy book commands them to purify their faith by extirpating the infidels, and in so doing reaffirm their divine right to rule the world. This is not a problem that Kauffman chooses to address.

As one who has long fought against the temptation, I can despondently concede that we Americans of 2006 cannot afford to retreat into a nostalgic tranquility. We are in a global struggle we would rather not have to contest but which now makes American withdrawal from the world a matter of possibly mortal consequence.

Still, facing that challenge need not command all our waking hours. Some of them thus can be enjoyably spent reading Bill Kauffman's lively, literate, and thought-provoking ramble through the woodland paths and flower-strewn dales of the Old Republic, honoring its heroes and heroines, celebrating their commitment to place and community, and inspiring us to think bravely about recovering its best features in a time of soul-crushing bigness, cultural degradation, and mortal challenge from implacable enemies.

Contributing Editor John McClaughry (john@ethanallen.org) has for the last 40 years served as moderator of the town meeting of Kirby, Vermont (pop. 500).

Mustering the Little Platoons

john@ethanallen.org (John McClaughry) — Sun, 01 Dec 2002 00:00:00 EST

Going Bezirke

john@ethanallen.org (John McClaughry) — Sun, 01 Apr 2001 00:00:00 EST

Selling Opportunity

john@ethanallen.org (John McClaughry) — Mon, 01 Mar 1999 00:00:00 EST

Private Idahoes

john@ethanallen.org (John McClaughry) — Tue, 01 Aug 1995 00:00:00 EDT

Public Goods and Private Communities, by Fred Foldvary, Fairfax, VA: The Locke Institute, 212 pages, $47.96

Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government, by Evan McKenzie, New Haven: Yale University Press, 197 pages, $30.00

Neighborhood Politics: Residential Community Associations in American Governance , by Robert Jay Dilger, New York: New York University Press, 162 pages, $40.00

In the dark misty years after the collapse of Roman Britain, Germanic tribes migrated west to the island now known as England. They brought with them a mixed public-private system of land tenure and civic administration called voluntary feudalism. In this system, the proprietary landlord owned the land and organized the defense of the settlement. The freemen owned their farms and homes on a leasehold basis, paying the proprietor in produce, labor, and military service. In the ninth century, this system gave way to predatory political states, ending with the Norman Conquest and autocratic rule.

But the operative principle of voluntary feudalism survives and flourishes in various forms today, most commonly as residential community associations (RCAs). As of 1990, there were 130,000 RCAs operating in the United States, with over 30 million residents. The Community Associations Institute projects that more than 50 percent of all housing for sale in the nation's 50 largest urban areas--and nearly all new residential development in California, Florida, Texas, New York, and suburban Washington, D.C.--is organized in RCAs. By the year 2000, the number of associations is expected to climb to 225,000. If the new ones average the same number of residents as the old ones, over 50 million people, almost one- fifth of the U.S. population, will live in an RCA of one sort or another.

The rise of the RCA can be attributed to a large number of reasons, some of them springing from natural human preferences, and some of them the result of government action. The origin of the modern RCA can be dated to 1743, when the descendants of the Earl of Leicester tried to preserve a fenced-in private park in Leicester Square, London, by requiring those who bought or leased property around the park to pay a tax for its upkeep.

The prototype RCA in the United States appeared in 1831, at Gramercy Park in Manhattan. But a more fully developed example was Louisburg Square on Boston's elite Beacon Hill. In 1844, the landowners formed a Committee of Proprietors to preserve the common park area. Throughout the next 100 years, use and occupancy restrictions on residential deeds, an important feature of RCAs, steadily grew in popularity, often as a technique of preventing a feared reduction in property values from an influx of "Negroes, Irish, Mongolians," and other non-WASP racial and ethnic groups. The use of deed restrictions for such nefarious purposes was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1948.

In 1902, the Englishman Ebenezer Howard published Garden Cities of Tomorrow, which provided the model for the self-contained suburban community of gardens, fresh air, winding streets, and happy neighbors. The man who made it happen in the United States was J Nichols, the first of the great "community builders." His Country Club District development in Kansas City, begun in 1905, became the template for the modern homeowners association. By 1964, when the Country Club District was essentially completed, the development contained 6,000 acres, 12,000 homes, 11 shopping centers, 50,000 people, and 29 homeowners associations organized into a giant RCA federation.

Unlike earlier small-scale builders, who wanted nothing to do with government, Nichols perceived that government could make a large-scale community development into a very profitable venture. This required planning--not only planning by the developer, but planning by the local government for streets, water, sewers, schools, parks, and police and fire protection. It is somewhat ironic that modern land-use planning and controls came not from assorted socialists and utopians, but from hard-nosed business people whose eyes were glued to the main chance and who probably voted gladly for McKinley.

From a legal standpoint, there are three types of RCA. The most common (61 percent) is the condominium association. These are most commonly multi-family, multi-story buildings where the residents own their individual apartments plus an undivided interest in the common areas (lobby, elevators, hallways, pool, garage, etc.). These common areas are managed, but not owned, by a condominium association made up of and controlled by the individual unit owners.

The homeowners association form of RCA (35 percent) is typically found in suburban developments of detached single family homes or townhouses. The homeowners own their own dwelling unit and its yard and garage and their association, unlike a condo association, owns the common property, including streets, parks, golf courses, and retail centers.

The third form of RCA, the cooperative (4 percent), has never really caught on in the United States. In the coop, usually but not always an apartment building, residents own no property individually. They own only a long-term, renewable leasehold in their apartment, plus a divisible interest in a tenant-managed corporation that owns all the common areas. The main drawback of the coop is that each cooperator is liable for all of the mortgage. If there are vacant units or if a cooperator defaults, the residents must pay their share of the corporation's liabilities.

Not included in these statistics are around 50 community land trusts (CLTs). A CLT is a democratically run RCA which owns and makes rules for dwelling on the land in conformity to a charter. Individuals can own and bequeath renewable 99-year leaseholds, and can sell the improvements made upon the land. Typically, the CLT retains a first option to buy the improvements at inflation-adjusted cost, less depreciation, so that upon sale the trust captures the increase in value due to community services or general appreciation.

The modern RCA performs four basic functions. Through a board of directors elected by the homeowners, it maintains the common areas. Like a government, it provides, either directly or through contracting, property-related services such as trash collection, snowplowing, and security patrols. It collects assessments from homeowners to pay its costs. And it enforces the covenants, conditions, and restrictions (CC&Rs) which protect the community and its property values against anti-social acts (any act which might diminish resale values). An unspoken fifth function is to organize political action efforts to get the municipal government to respond to the RCA's interests, making the RCA into a sometimes formidable special-interest group.

Government provided much of the impetus for the growth of RCAs. Although Nichols's Kansas City project antedated extensive government land-use controls, the rise of those controls created an important and costly barrier to land development. Developers found it easier and cheaper, per unit, to invest the time and money to secure approval for a large project than for a small one. The larger the project, of course, the more profit was expected, making possible larger contributions to supportive politicians.

In response to the building industry's pleas, the Federal Housing Administration in 1963 became an aggressive booster of RCAs. For FHA bureaucrats, planned and controlled RCAs made it easy to predict the economic viability, and thus the insurability, of a development 20 or 30 years down the road. It was also easier to impress Congress by "running up the numbers" when the developers built and sold 1,000 homes at a crack. The larger the project, the more interested members of Congress were in seeing that it got FHA approval.

From the standpoint of local government, at least initially, RCAs offered a terrific deal. A private developer would build needed new housing, which would add to the tax base. In return for receiving permission to exist, the RCA would provide many of its own municipal services at the homeowners' expense, thus protecting the municipality from additional costs. In some jurisdictions local governments even offer a property tax rebate to RCA members to offset their RCA assessments for services provided elsewhere by the municipality.

To prospective home buyers, RCAs promise certainty in a world of unforeseeable change, especially in protecting the homeowner's investment against depreciation. They promise a high quality of life, where sound planning and attractive amenities respond to the home buyer's desires. They offer resident control of many "public" services--a touchy point to critics--instead of leaving the homeowner at the mercy of the larger municipality, which may be controlled politically by people from the other side of town. They offer a social life in a relatively homogeneous community, an opportunity for town-meeting-style democracy, and a strong sense of personal efficacy.

Indeed, the success of RCA-type experiments as diverse as Arden, Delaware, Ft. Ellsworth Condominiums and Reston, Virginia, and the private city streets of St. Louis prove to public-choice economist Fred Foldvary that it is feasible, as well as infinitely desirable, to organize the proprietary delivery of "public" services on a territorial basis. Drawing on the work of Spencer Heath and his grandson, Spencer Heath MacCallum, Foldvary's Public Goods and Private Communities offers the proprietary community as the model for a happy future: All services performed in support of property by governments can be delivered far better through the use of contract, covenants, and user fees than by politicized government bureaucracies. He appears to endorse MacCallum's dream of a network of proprietary communities united into a polycentric federation that simply pushes aside traditional units of government, becoming, in effect, local government.

The critics of the RCA, however, are many and varied, and Evan McKenzie, a lawyer and associate professor of political science at Pennsylvania's Albright College, has earned a place in their vanguard with Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government. His case against these "privatopias" goes like this: RCAs are based on an "ideology of hostile privatism," where the supreme goal is the protection of property values, to which all of the nobler aspects of human life are subordinated. RCAs glorify a "culture that links ownership of private property with freedom, individuality, and autonomy, rather than with responsibility to the surrounding community." McKenzie even calls RCAs "socialism by contract"--although he concedes that it is a defective socialism since RCA bylaws don't require others to lift up the downtrodden who, due to economic reverses, can no longer cover their RCA assessments.

McKenzie attacks the RCA--which he calls a common interest development (CID)--for exhibiting a "communalistic, even cult-like isolationist nature." He is offended that in a poll of residents at the giant Leisure World RCA in Southern California, 92 percent of the respondents rated security "very important," and were happy to have the development patrolled by 300 private security officers.

He even sees the CID as a corporatization of the home. The individual in a CID, he says, is subservient to a corporation and its detached, expert managers who carry out their functions in a way that makes life easier for them, not the residents. The CID idea, he says, begins with a plan, then property, then rules to protect the property, then a physical city, and then people who live in the city and obey the rules, or else.

"In short," writes McKenzie, "a CID is a prefabricated framework for civil society in search of a population. The population may come and go, but the property and the rules will remain, and the population will remain in service to the rules." CIDs undermine the "real city," charges McKenzie. They are illiberal and anti-democratic, and they represent, to borrow Robert Reich's phrase, "the secession of the successful" from the disaster areas they left behind.

If CID living is as onerous as McKenzie claims, it's a wonder anybody actually lives in them. But McKenzie is at pains to demonstrate that CIDs are not the product of a voluntary Lockean contract among people who wish to escape the state of nature in return for common benefits. Instead, he says, the associations are a compulsory residential nightmare. His wrath is heightened by horror stories about tyrannical enforcement of CC&Rs: a woman taken to court because her dog weighed more than 30 pounds; a man who sued his senior-citizen community because it disallowed residence by his new 45-year-old wife; and a man sued by his RCA because he erected a fence to keep his young son from wandering over a 400-foot cliff. He describes how RCAs rely upon state government to bolster their enforcement and collection powers, while at the same time bidding government to remain outside the gates.

McKenzie builds much of his attack on the highly dubious proposition that the residents did not consent to this oppressive private government. According to him, they found themselves living in CIDs because they had no realistic options for living anywhere else. This will probably come as a surprise to CID residents, who thought they chose CID ownership of their own free will, and to non-residents who must wonder how they came to be spared.

At times, McKenzie grants that residents were not forced to join CIDs against their will. But that merely means they chose to join, in which case McKenzie views them as small-minded, selfish, illiberal, greedy dropouts from the great duty of life--namely, to make municipal government work and to struggle bravely toward economic justice for all instead of feathering their own nest.

Foldvary's shining RCA vision is a polycentric world of proprietary communities, wisely and efficiently operated with the consent of the residents by disinterested princes akin to Swiss hotel managers. McKenzie's horrible CID nightmare is an equally polycentric world of walled and guarded enclaves of the rich, petty, and socially irresponsible, where every generous impulse and mark of individuality is confined by a CC&R designed to advance the single-minded goal of property value protection and enhancement. Between these two poles lies Robert Jay Dilger's Neighborhood Politics.

Dilger, a political scientist at West Virginia University, is not seeking to grind an axe. His goal is to illuminate the origins, principles, development, and policy questions relating to the RCA movement. He blends exhaustive knowledge of his subject with an exemplary clarity of presentation. Without rhetorical flourishes or involved economic and legal analysis, he makes clear the various cases for and against RCAs. His conclusions are generally favorable to RCAs, and his recommendations include offering better information to prospective buyers to avoid ugly surprises later on, achieving better relations with local government, and providing representation for renters. He is supportive of the RCA as a channel for political activity, and as a forum for the practice of civic virtue.

RCAs obviously meet an important need for millions of people. In a society where government all too often proves unable to defend public order, assure personal security, prevent destruction of property values, spend tax dollars wisely, deliver high-quality services, and refrain from misguided social engineering, RCAs offer an attractive alternative. If one believes it is everyone's solemn duty to remain, suffer, and sometimes perish in the midst of over-governed but under-served urban disaster areas in the name of civic altruism and economic justice, then the RCA is a cowardly escape. On the other hand, if one believes in using one's resources to acquire the ownership of a decent home for one's family, or for one's retirement years, in safe and congenial surroundings, even at the price of some intrusive regulation of private choices, then the various forms of planned communities will remain an attractive option. Whether governments will allow themselves to be replaced by a RCA federation remains to be seen, but it's far from the worst idea to come down the pike.

Brief Review

john@ethanallen.org (John McClaughry) — Mon, 01 May 1995 00:00:00 EDT

Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, by James Bovard, New York: St. Martin's Press, 335 pages, $24.95

In Lost Rights, journalist James Bovard chronicles the shockingly accelerating disappearance of the rights and freedoms of the ordinary American. Bovard has established himself through his two previous books (The Fair Trade Fraud and The Farm Fiasco) and countless columns as the preeminent exposer of government's responsibility for rigged deals, under-the-table handouts, special-interest ripoffs, and spectacular waste. Now he moves to a larger canvas: the whole range of government interference with the rights and liberties of the individual citizen.

"We face a choice not of anarchy or authoritarianism," writes Bovard, "but a choice of limited government or unlimited government." What have we chosen? After 335 bloodcurdling pages, it is crystal clear that, whatever the American people might have chosen, what they have gotten is virtually unlimited government. And when government has no limits, its subjects have no liberty.

Bovard's style is rapid fire. An indefatigable researcher, he inundates the reader with horror upon horror in a veritable tsunami of government atrocities. In the first page of the first chapter, he presents a vivid and wide-ranging summation of the different ways government can tyrannize today:

"The attack on individual rights has reached the point where a citizen has no right to use his own land if a government inspector discovers a wet area on it, no right to the money in his bank account if an IRS agent decides he might have dodged taxes, and no right to the cash in his wallet if a DEA dog sniffs at his pants. A man's home is his castle, except if a politician covets the land the house is built on, or if his house is more than fifty years old, or if he has too many relatives living with him, or if he has old cars parked in his driveway, or if he wants to add a porch or deck. Nowadays a citizen's use of his own property is presumed illegal until approved by multiple zoning and planning commissions. Government redevelopment officials confiscate large chunks of cities, evicting owners of homes and giving the land to other private citizens to allow them to reap a windfall profit. Since 1985, federal, state, and local governments have seized the property of over 200,000 Americans under asset forfeiture laws, often with no more evidence of wrongdoing than an unsubstantiated assertion made by an anonymous government informant.

"Government officials now exert vast arbitrary power over citizens' daily lives, from Equal Employment Opportunity Commission bureaucrats that can levy a $145,000 fine on a Chicago small businessman because he did not have 8.45 blacks on his payroll to federal agricultural bureaucrats that can prohibit Arizona farmers from selling 58 percent of their fresh lemons to other Americans. Customs Department inspectors can wantonly chainsaw import shipments without compensating the owner, Labor Department officials can nullify millions of employment contracts with a creative new interpretation of an old law, and federal bank regulators are officially empowered to seize the assets of any citizen for allegedly violating written or unwritten banking regulations."

The 10 chapters of Lost Rights contain the frightening details of these and many, many other invasions of liberty by governments beyond citizen and judicial control. The modern American police state has its way with its people through zoning, asset forfeiture, historic preservation, wetland controls, scenic rivers, urban renewal, marketing orders, antidumping laws, Superfund, banking regulations, licensing, labor regulations, gun control, union protection, transit monopolies, public school control, disability rules, and anti-pornography laws. Those who resist the dictates of the phalanx of repressive agencies at the local, state, and federal level are dealt with summarily, from fines and court orders on to outright murder and massacre, as at Ruby Ridge and Waco.

Bovard appears to be the most exhaustive researcher in the country. Lost Rights features over 2,000 footnotes, ranging from daily newspaper stories to court cases to congressional hearings. The evidence is overwhelming, and terrifying. We are losing our liberties, with no organized force or leadership working to reverse this terrifying trend.

Bovard concludes, "The time has come to face up to the pervasive failures and to radically reduce government officials' power to coerce, expropriate, and subjugate other Americans. The American people placed its faith in the State, and the State failed. We need a new faith in individual liberty."

More accurately, we need to revive the old faith. But if the last bit of American liberty glimmers and dies, consumed by the onrushing power of the uncontrolled and uncontrollable state, it will not be because no one sounded the warning. James Bovard has done so, powerfully and exhaustively. Our only hope to remain a nation of free people is for enough people to absorb this message, and resolve to reclaim their liberty and the genius of the Old Republic.

Local Matters

john@ethanallen.org (John McClaughry) — Sat, 01 May 1993 00:00:00 EDT

The quarter century beginning in 1993 will see startling changes in the ways individuals relate to their community and nation. The most important of these changes will be accelerated devolution, both economic and political.

Railroads, electric power, the telephone, and the interstate highway system have all had a powerful decentralizing impact on the American society and economy. In the coming years new telecommunications technology will drive another wave of economic devolution. Fiber-optic information highways will make it cheaper and easier for brain industries to disperse from large cities to small cities and, increasingly, to rural areas. More and more brain workers—people engaged in processing information rather than things—will relocate to what David Churbuck and Jeffrey S. Young, writing in Forbes, call the "virtual workplace."

This trend has for years been the stuff of Sunday-supplement articles: the software writer working from a hot tub on the deck of his Oregon mountain lodge; the meat broker selling shiploads of Australian lamb from a rural Vermont cabin; the catalog sales company whose order takers answer phones far out in the Nebraska prairie. But the telephone, the modem, and the fax machine are only the first-level instruments of this spatial devolution. Increasingly small and inexpensive satellite dishes will allow direct downlinking of data to individual homes. Fiber-optic computer networking will link company units together at the speed of light. Teams of architects and engineers will design products electronically while living many miles apart—and perhaps seeing each other only at the annual company picnic. Video conferencing will be cheap and simple, with large, flat wall screens bringing realistic, life-size images into each dispersed office. Holograph transmission may be a reality by 2018.

Fast, efficient parcel services like UPS and Federal Express allow overnight delivery of documents and products to co-workers or customers, at a cost often less than one employee's 20-mile round-trip commute to work. An example: Dell Computer is a retail firm with no store. It markets directly to customers through toll-free phone lines and next-day delivery via UPS from strategically placed warehouses.

The Lewis Galoob Toy Company of South San Francisco is a prototype of the global manufacturing business of the future. Galoob contracts with independent toy designers who think up new products. It contracts with manufacturing engineers who figure out how to make the products. It contracts with manufacturing brokers in Hong Kong who find workshops in China to put the products together. The brokers contract with ocean shippers to deliver the products to the United States. Manufacturer's representatives market the products on commission to wholesalers and retailers. A finance company collects payments on commission. The Lewis Galoob Company could be located anywhere in the world where modern telecommunication facilities are available.

The productive people who thrive in this kind of environment are not the sort of people who are content to live in, to use the worst example, New York City. They may enjoy the opera and the deli and MOMA, but they decidedly do not relish the crime, fear, stress, congestion, drug culture, pollution, rotten schools, filth, noise, graffiti, taxes, and endemic rudeness that infest the nation's largest (but shrinking) city. So why stay? Once their escape route led to the suburbs. Now, increasingly, it leads to the more distant reaches of the country.

Because the economy is rapidly becoming more global and more decentralized, and because it places ever greater emphasis on highly mobile brain power, competitive pressure will force governments to compete for the new entrepreneurial activity. High-tax, high-regulation Vermont and California will miss out on the economic decentralization wave. Low-tax, low-regulation New Hampshire and Idaho will win. And eventually the idea will percolate into the heads of even the most ardent statists that recreating the economic environment that has emptied out New York City is not conducive to anything desirable, unless their goal is simply to punish enterprise and impoverish their people.

The states led by economically smart political leaders will prosper, at the expense of their dull-witted competitors. And political leaders of regions within the loser states will demand more autonomy to shape their own policies and escape the curse of redistributionist legislatures enamored of more government spending and controls. This trend is already evident in Northern California and Southern Oregon, where sentiment is growing for secession into a new state of Jefferson.

Decentralization will also accelerate on the world stage. The explosion of nationalism that accompanied the disintegration of the Soviet Empire in 1989 has yet to run its course. But future fragmentations may increasingly emphasize not national but economic considerations. Pro-enterprise Slovenia wanted out of a stagnant Marxist Yugoslavia not only to get away from the quarreling Croats and Serbs but also to join Western Europe's market economy. Pro-enterprise Lombardy wants out of an Italy run by incompetent socialist bureaucrats in Rome. Pro-enterprise Guangdong is chafing at control from socialist Beijing.

We are heading toward the "World of a Thousand Flags'' envisioned years ago by Austrian economist Leopold Kohr. Many of those flags will fly over strong, vigorous little economies, whose well-educated, hard-working, property-respecting citizens will earn their way in the world marketplace. Switzerland, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea are early examples.

In sum, the world of 2018 will feature a dynamic, flexible global economy, with economic rewards flowing to those with brain power, a work ethic, and a governmental regime built on sound respect for property rights, stable currency, and governmental restraint. Cities, states, and nations where government taxation and regulations stifle enterprise will see productive people relocate to more congenial environments. The pro-freedom areas and profreedom governments will be the winners. Countries and states run by dumb statists will be the losers.

The demands of a global brain-work economy will stimulate increased parental concern about the education of their children. Parents will no longer be satisfied with the mandatory offerings of the local government school, especially if it is devoid of moral and cultural values and lacking in educational or any other kind of discipline. They will demand education that will equip their children to take advantage of new opportunities and meet the emerging competition. This parental pressure will eventually spell the death of many government schools, with their central mandated curricula, militant teacher unions, low discipline, and "anything goes" ethos.

Ultimately, many states will allow what residents of 92 Vermont towns have had since 1869: a full-blown educational, choice system. And a Supreme Court test will establish that a general system of education vouchers does not constitute an impermissible establishment of religion, even if the vouchers are used to pay tuition at parochial schools. There will be a surge of home schooling and the ancient practice of mentoring, making use of interactive computerized instruction, compact-disk reference libraries and fiber-optic or satellite downlinking of a wide variety of instructional programs. The combination of telecommuting, home schooling, and electronic shopping and entertainment on demand will overcome the barrier of distance from urban centers.

Higher education will be radically transformed for most students. The children of the rich will still attend four years of on-campus instruction (and entertainment), but for most middle-class families the price tag will have become far too high. Instead of requiring students to spend four years on campus to earn a degree, colleges will assign them to learning mentors who will devise for them (often via teleconference) a suitable program of electronic instruction. Students will learn Shakespeare, cell biology, and calculus from the nation's very best teachers by laser disc and satellite dish. (An Arlington, Virginia, company already offers courses by some of the nation's most renowned professors on videotape and is arranging to offer college credit through several cooperating institutions.)

Remarkable new computer graphics will revolutionize mathematics and science instruction. Photos, film clips, and computer-graphic sequences will increasingly displace the traditional talking head. Students will take examinations at a nearby resource and proctoring center, which will serve many colleges on contract. Much higher education will be given in conjunction with the student's employer, and certifications of competence in specialized fields, like the Professional Engineer degree, will come to be more valuable than the traditional Bachelor and Master of Arts, Science, or Business Administration. Intercollegiate athletics will lose its connection to education, already something of a fiction in the major national programs. City and company teams, as in the old AAU and women's softball today, will fill the space just below the professional teams.

Labor unions in the non-governmental sector—now down to about one-eighth of the non-agricultural work force—will continue to dwindle in influence. Joint labor-management work teams, largely prohibited under long obsolete labor law, will increasingly determine workplace conditions independent of contract bargaining. The rise of profit sharing, employee stock ownership plans, and participatory management techniques—all abhorred by most old-line union leaders—will eventually end the labor-management-owner distinctions, with great benefits to the economy and to the participants. The last stronghold of unions, the public sector, will be steadily weakened as taxpayers demand the benefits of privatization of many government functions.

After a disastrous experiment with a bureaucratic, price-controlled national health system during the Clinton presidency, the nation will move to restore individual responsibility in lifestyle and health care. Employer-provided health benefits will cease to be tax free, but individuals and families will be allowed to put tax-deductible dollars into medical-care savings accounts, from which they will purchase catastrophic (high-deductible) coverage. Families that make healthful living choices will see their accounts accumulate over the years, creating a tax-free means to cover their health and retirement-home expenses. Low-income families will, as always, have to be subsidized, but they will take part in the same system as everyone else. Putting consumers back into the health marketplace in place of third-party payers, coupled with effective tort reform, will help curb health-care costs.

The discovery of the merits of the tax-deductible medical care savings account plus the need to generate investment capital formerly supplied by commercial bank reduced to uselessness by heavy-handed federal regulation, will lead to a revolutionary change in the national tax system. Instead of taxing income, the federal government will adopt a cash-flow-style consumption tax. The taxpayer will add up his income; deduct funds devoted to investments, savings, and medical-care account; claim an appropriate subsistence exemption based on family size; and pay tax on the consumed balance. This approach not only encourages investment and frugality, it also puts an end to the complexities and inequities of capital gains and depreciation treatment.

Another serious bout with inflation will give impetus to currency competition. Contracts will be written in terms of the index price of a market basket of internationally traded commodities instead of a fixed amount of Federal Reserve notes, and privately issued currencies will become preferable to unstable and politically manipulated government currencies. Localities will experiment with local currencies as payment for locally produced goods and services.

Throughout this period there will be a remarkable efflorescence of self-help activity in rural areas, suburbs, and inner cities alike. Once governments see that Americans can do remarkably well at solving their own problems if only left alone to do so, there will be a new willingness to dismantle the barriers to self-help. Neighborhood corporations, for instance, will demand the end of such government afflictions as mandated wage scales and nonsensical building and housing codes, zoning rules, and occupational licensing requirements. The opportunity to participate meaningfully in self-directed civic activity will restore real power to citizens seeking to take part in the "little platoons" of a society in which they can once again have confidence and whose progress they can help to shape.