It is sensible and proper to sequester your financial assets and head for the encrypted hills—but this is not the same thing as saving industrial civilization; it is merely covering your own butt (for the time being).
People have been hiding cash under mattresses a very long time, to conceal it from the IRS and other thieves. Every American family does business in unreportable cash and fibs a little on Form 1040. For instance, Phil and Doris breed poodles. They get $500 a puppy, and federal, state, and local tax collectors get zippo. All well and good—but black market puppies, swap meets, garage sales, babysitters, and dope deals are economically insignificant (approximately 3 percent of U.S. GDP). An industrial society cannot function "underground," no matter how cleverly we hide a few pennies. The value of our pennies (i.e., our purchasing power) is determined by much larger, non-portable economic entities — farms, mines, factories, power plants, oil wells, etc. It is difficult to evade taxation on a natural gas pipeline or a meat packing plant. You can't even sidestep OSHA regulations in a dinky, small town bookstore.
Permit me to digress for a minute. About a year ago, before I came to Laissez Faire City, I had a part-time job at a bookstore. The bookstore thoughtfully provided a toilet and sink for use by employees. OSHA regulations require every business to post a Material Safety Data Sheet in plain view, describing the hazards of chemicals used in the workplace. The bookstore bathroom had soap. It was the subject of a detailed Material Safety Data Sheet, posted above the sink, which declared (in tiny print) that the soap was neither caustic, nor explosive, nor flammable, nor toxic. In case of accidental contact with soap, we were advised to flush the affected area with water. Here's the kicker — OSHA regulations required soap users to wear shatterproof eye protection at all times, while using the soap. I'm not kidding. I'm not making this up. The soap supplier could not legally sell his product to the bookstore, unless he filed a Material Safety Data Sheet in duplicate with OSHA and posted a copy in the bookstore bathroom.
When Ayn Rand was my age, about 25 percent of GDP was being siphoned out of the U.S. economy by government. Today, it's more than 40 percent of GDP — and during the past fifty years, no federal, state, or local U.S. official has lifted a finger to halt the mounting destruction of American industrial output. Does it matter? Yes. To fund our 1991 'Desert Storm' attack on Iraq, the world's mightiest superpower had to go, hat in hand, to the Germans, the Japanese, and the Saudis for cash. No wonder the U.S. Army neglected to rumble into Baghdad and finish the job. They ran out of money.
'Money' is the power to command real physical goods that are produced by real physical people, using real industrial plant and equipment. There is no reason to have money, except to facilitate the exchange of real products, and its value must remain fairly constant, so that the price of goods does not refer to guesswork about the future value of dollars, but rather the utility of real goods. Alan Greenspan's reputation as a central banker rests on his alleged ability to keep inflation (monetary expansion) in step with the output of real goods. As output rises, it is assumed in neo-Keynesian theory that the money supply should likewise increase. Dr. Greenspan's reputation for steadiness, however, is a sham. Per capita output of real U.S. goods (steel, cotton, timber, machines) is declining, while the per capita output of financial claims to U.S. goods (dollars, bonds, stocks) are multiplying. We were told that America became a 'service' economy, because Alan Greenspan is presiding over an industrial recession — a fact that has been carefully concealed from the American working class, because Federal looters and moochers are terrified of what might happen next, if the true condition of our economy was disclosed to real workers. Excluding public officials, defense contractors, and the services they commandeer, working class Americans work harder to earn slightly less every year.
The U.S. 'working class' is a diverse group. It includes factory operators, truck drivers, builders, doctors, electrical engineers, and two thousand other job descriptions — but it emphatically does not include pollsters, bureaucrats, lobbyists, lawyers, teachers, or TV producers. The 'working class' produce tangible goods (food, shelter, clothing, medicine). They do not pretend to educate their neighbors. They do not sit in judgment of their fellow man. They do not tell jokes for a living. They produce real, physical goods.
The concept of productive work is so alien in 'post-industrial' America, that I suppose I shall have to be more explicit. The Walt Disney Company has 60,000 employees. Not a goddamn one of them is engaged in producing tangible goods that sustain human life. No one can eat a cartoon, or a set of plastic mouse ears, or a roller coaster ride. No child was ever innoculated against polio or whooping cough by watching Toy Story. Disney does not produce electricity or heating oil on the set of Good Morning America or behind a curtain in Orlando. It is crucial to understand that John Stossel, Mickey Mouse and Ted Koppel manufacture nothing but hot air.
Being in the hot air game myself, I know whereof I speak. It is a fine thing to share our knowledge and opinions. It is not productive work. We can talk all day long, and it will produce no additional bread, no extra meat or butter, not a gram of physical work. If you expect to take delivery of a new Toyota by reading Wolf DeVoon, then one of us is badly mistaken about the source and economic significance of tangible goods.
It is sometimes asserted that education and training improve worker productivity, or motivation, or quality, or safety. This is mostly nonsense. The only thing that can increase productivity is profits (retained earnings), invested in capital plant and equipment. American industry has 40 percent less to invest, on an annual basis, thanks to government looters and moochers. Putting this in historical perspective, U.S. farms and factories are taxed twice as much today as they were in 1960, and four times more than 1910. Yes, we are far more productive today, thanks to science and relentless effort on the part of labor and management. That's not the point. We have been systematically robbed, at an ever-increasing rate of wasted capital, depriving America of roughly half of all civilian output this century.
A good chunk of that capital was wasted in wars — but not the lion's share. Since LBJ's 'Great Society' welfare state was inaugurated, America lost most of its potential wealth in crime, disease, and idiotic amusements. If you sometimes wonder who destroyed the American Dream, I suggest you examine Homer Simpson very carefully. He is not a real person. He is a drawn figure, carefully scripted and voiced and animated to convey an anti-industrial worldview — a sense of life so antithetical to reason that it had no media precedent in American history. Homer Simpson is a lazy idiot in charge of an unsafe nuclear power plant. Consider what that means.
Among other things, it means that 'post-industrial' Americans scoff at the idea of productive work. They view industrial technology (i.e., capital plant and equipment) as a dangerous folly, directed by evil madmen and captive, brainless stooges who are incapable of perceiving reality.
In a perverted way, that catastrophic view of American industry is true — because most of our nuclear installations are directed by evil madmen and their captive, brainless stooges — in government. The U.S. Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and two dozen assorted Federal and state bureaucracies operate dangerous, unnecessary, antiquated nuclear facilities. They have mountains of high-level radioactive waste that can't be stored or disposed of safely. They have stockpiled tens of thousands of nuclear warheads that can't be used in battle, without ending human life on earth — and, through sheer idiocy, they allowed Russia, China, Israel, Pakistan, India, and Iran to obtain the same genocidal capability.
I don't know which is worse: the calamity of 'democratic' government — with its wars, lies, and misdirection of industry — or, the buffoonery of Third Wave 'post-industrial' desktop amusements. If I see another government official cut the virtual ribbon at a grade school that's been wired to the Internet, I'm going to become a cyberspace Luddite and take an axe to every Packard-Bell in Pasadena. There is nothing for a child to do on the Internet, and damn little for productive adults, either.
I know that sounds paradoxical, because you and I are communicating on the Web. But look at the rest of cyberspace. Start small. Just surf the so-called 'libertarians'. In fact — limit it to one click and check out the Hazlitt Free Market forum, if you can stomach an hour or two of adolescent locker room humor. Or ask your favorite engine how many sites are returned by the keyword "government." The World Wide Wait is little more than a World Wide Waste of time and money, absolutely unrelated to the real job of industry, mining, and agriculture. In terms of bandwidth, the Web is a porno shop next door to an empty mail order catalog store, with no one at the till. In cyberspace, no one lives or loves there, except very sick and lonely people, whose physical existence has collapsed to a few keystrokes, a few bookmarks, and a recurring sense of bitterness.
I say this with conviction because a real person made me cry with pride and patriotism (not for modern America, but for the Rights of Man that were defended in 1776 by our colonial Founding Fathers). Nothing on the Internet has ever made me weep involuntarily. One must apprehend the kinesthetic power, the living totality of a person, to be moved by his or her inspiration. Tonight, a young man named Gino spoke briefly and frankly about liberty. I have never before witnessed such eloquence. Describing himself as a Latino, he explained that a passionate love of liberty ran in his blood, because Spain devastated his people with tyranny and disease in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the United States repeated those same crimes in the 19th and 20th centuries. To hear a man speak plain justice is an awesome (and for me, very emotional) experience. By comparison, the Web is 50 million posters with no spiritual clout at all.
Yes, we can create e-commerce exchange media, with perfect encryption and fail-safe communication. Yes, we can withdraw the sanction of the victim and stop supporting the parasites who dominate government, its idiotic 'public education', and the degrading amusements that gather pennies into Hollywood mansions and Democratic campaign coffers. Yes, we can move our families to safe havens, in loosely governed jurisdictions like rural Idaho, or Costa Rica, or Tonga. But real, physical industries cannot escape the maw of taxation. Sorry, folks. You can't replicate industrial plant and equipment in cyberspace. 'Virtual' wells produce no oil.
We can communicate — and hopefully grow in one another the courage to evict Homer Simpson. To shrug and let it go, as Ayn Rand suggested. To let America die. I believe that this is in fact inevitable, because Commissar Greenspan has no power to reverse or halt the growth of nonprofit 'government services' that are devouring U.S. industrial, agricultural, and mining capital-formation and physical plant. I advance this as a belief, because other men are more gifted in deciphering economic data.
But I am certain of this much. Our enjoyment of life is determined by real production of physical goods, the supply of which will likely erode as we migrate financial assets to untaxable safe havens — and our most profound communication with one another is best served by real intercourse and physical society.
Tragically, to save the world, we must let it go – starting with television. A widescreen DolbyPro THX surround-sound home theater, filled with reruns of The Simpsons, is a luxury I am prepared to do without. I've already heard as much donut eating, belching, and "Doh!" as any rational person could conceivably need or want.
During the next fifty years, the Third Wave transformation of society will work two miracles. It will destroy the so-called 'consumer of last resort,' and it will liberate us from the delusion of government. Be prepared to see your purchasing power evaporate, if you hold paper claims to goods that others are required to produce. I personally plan to buy a parcel of land and some chickens. I don't want to end my life at Cedars-Sinai, connected to a hundred plastic tubes. I'm willing to grow food. I'm willing to trade my labor for the goods made by other men and women who love freedom. But I refuse to spend any part of my remaining life at Disney, eating donuts and grieving for my native country as it crumbles — connected to two million plastic bureaucrats who are busily writing additional safety regulations concerning the use of hand soap, while U.S. soap manufacturers go out of business, one after another.
Don't underestimate the enemy. Al Gore may indeed be inspired to proclaim World Soap Day, to scold the working class about the virtue of conservation. I can almost hear the Advertising Council slogan, lathering across all five hundred TV channels, with animated banners on thousands of .gov websites:
THE VILLAGE THAT WASHES TOGETHER STAYS CLEAN TOGETHER. PLEASE PASS THE SOAP! (AND TAKE A BITE OUT OF CONTRABAND SOAP CRIME)
Postscript to my pals in the IT section: I think if you check the data, you'll find that all of the installed digital hardware and software amounts to less than one percent of U.S. industrial assets. The 'Third Wave' is economically dinky — far less significant historically than the introduction of electricity, internal combustion engines, wide-body jet transport, etc. This augers against a happy ending, when cyberspace prompts a financial exodus and taxes fall more heavily on the folks who work to keep the lights on, truck food to market, and deliver your next FedEx package.
It's not a coincidence that Alvin Toffler and Al Gore are big buds, chanting at Beltway press parties that everything's fine, everything's fine, and things can only get better – while inflation takes off at a gallop and Wall Street conducts a fire sale of unprofitable, unproductive dot-com 'services.'
From The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 4, No 18, May 1, 2000