Power in hands of few replaces liberty for all

By John Kass
Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/
October 26, 2008

On those nights when they were young, they smoked pot in the streets and listened to Dylan in the car and dreamed of the risks they'd take.

But now, as Baby Boomers grow old, they welcome those police surveillance cameras on the light poles outside their homes, thinking the cameras make them safe. And they rush toward the warm embrace of big government and promised security.

What happened?

I suppose it's partly a function of age and the caution that comes with it. You see this on the highway. The kid keeps his foot on the gas through the turns. He can't imagine himself as the geezer in the next lane, riding the brakes even when the road runs straight. But age happens, and with it comes uncertainty.

Politically, the needs of the Boomers will be met, as they always have been, given the large numbers that allow Boomers to polish the lens through which America sees itself. In the '70s, the slogan was "Do your own thing." But today's slogan might be "Washington, please save us."

Fear happens. The 9/11 terrorist attacks happened, and the federal government—always eager to extend its reach—built its massive security bureaucracy, down to those spy cameras installed on the streetlights of so many cities and towns, thrilling America's mayors and the police chiefs. We're told the cameras keep us safe. We've become used to the eyes.

And when the economic crisis happened—when the credit bubble burst and the excesses of Wall Street caught up with us, and so many people lost their jobs and their retirement savings got whacked, and they started losing their homes—naturally people became fearful.

When you're worried about your family, you're not interested in the history of blame. You're interested in keeping a roof over their heads. You're interested in solutions. The solution so many want these days is more government.

Some of that is a proper demand for reasonable regulations on the markets and on lending that were eased during the Clinton years and continued. But today's crisis has also led to the massive federal bailout of the financial industry, with Washington picking who wins and who loses. We're told that this arrangement is only temporary. But partnerships involving almost a trillion dollars that grant even greater leverage to Washington have a way of becoming quite terribly permanent.

So the leviathan grows, and the bureaucrats and the corporate types attached to this bailout deal see the world in strikingly similar terms. They share the same type of mind and they share the common purpose of maintaining the status quo. Why wouldn't they? They're on the inside.

The casualty will be the entrepreneurs, those on the outside, the ones who createthe spark and offer up the products or the ideas that fire the economy. The entrepreneurial mind isn't willing to settle and wants to make more than $250,000 in salary or whatever the federal government deems proper. They don't want proper. What they want is to take risks and reach the American Dream.

Such men and women will be on the outside for decades now. When they get close to victory they'll get whacked with tax increases and the rug will be pulled out from under them. The rich will have their wealth. But new entrepreneurs will be hamstrung and without that creative spark, no government-administered economic system can survive. History has taught us this over and over again.

The bailout happened so quickly we haven't fully considered the effects. Will we recognize America 40 years from now? How long before we understand how fundamentally America has changed? What kind of generational conflicts will this new government market policy instigate? Will our children speak of liberty, as we once did before we forgot?

These days, liberty isn't in vogue. It's so, so olde. We forget to consider liberty as America's founders conceived it—as one of the rights given us by God. Liberty was something an entrepreneur could understand. But even before this economic crisis Americans were given a new word from the corporatist/bureaucrat dictionary: empowerment.

"Empowerment" kinda, sorta evokes liberty but not really, since "empowerment" is something a government confers upon its people (or its serfs) when government decides the serfs (people) are ready.

While writing this I received one of those chain e-mails, but this one wasn't about a politician or the widow of the Nigerian oil minister. It was about how to catch wild pigs. I don't know if you could actually catch wild pigs this way, but it really doesn't matter. In this method, you throw bucketfuls of corn on the forest floor. The pigs eat the corn. A month later you put up one side of a fence and more corn. Eventually, the pigs return, get used to the fence and keep eating. And another side of fence and more corn and so on, until you close the gate and you've caught the pigs. They've lost their freedom. They can't figure out what's happened.

We're not pigs, we're Americans, rightfully worried about the economic future. But the times are changing, and the Boomers should consider the costs and consequences of what they're being offered by our politicians before the last side of the fence goes up.

jskass@tribune.com