Free Trade And Capitalism (AMERICA'S OTHER DEMOCRACY) WILLIAM H. PETERSON Lundy Professor Emeritus of Business Philosophy at Campbell University and Adjunct Professor, Heritage Foundation *Delivered to the Captive-Aire Systems, Inc. Sales Meetings, Youngsville, North Carolina, January 16, 1999 Welcome to the dismal Science of Economics and that classic oxymoron, Political Science. Science? A definition of politics can be sensed from its derivation, from its Greek roots. Poli means of course many, and ticks means blood-sucking parasites. Economics can be sensed from a story told by President Harry S. Truman who had reporting to him the nation's first Council of Economic Advisers. He explained that a one-armed economist would never do, for how could that economist say, "On the other hand......"? My talk today turns on free markets, so on economics and politics, and on my immodestly-named Peterson's Law, to be unveiled in a moment. Anyway, economics got started, in case you didn't know, with Adam and Eve -- a couple who have been since renamed by the Feminists as Adam and Even. You recall that this couple had unrighteously partaken of the Forbidden Fruit and soon got into brazen politics' blame game: Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent, who, she said, did beguile her. An angry Lord Jehovah drove the two out of the bountiful Garden of Eden with a slap: "By the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." And so was born a primal law of economics, the dismal Law of Scarcity, a law whose pangs are felt in your tummy around three times daily, if not more often, a law with financial strictures such as your having to meet monthly mortgage or car payments, a law reminding you that to put bread on the table you have first to raise the dough. Scarcity in turn gives birth to another dismal law, the Law of Opportunity Cost, the dark idea that no matter what you do with your income or time, you do so always at the cost of income, time, or satisfaction denied in some alternative choice of action always, always. This Law of Opportunity Cost is also known as the law of tradeoffs, that in choosing A you have to trade off or give up choosing B, or if you choose B you have to give up options X, Y, or Z. That's the way it is. So no matter whether you choose little things such as what to wear, what book to read, or at what restaurant to dine -- or big things such as what profession to pursue, where to live, or whom to marry, you must reject alternative choices. No escape from this central fact of life, Life, after all, is choosing. Even if you choose nothing, that's still a choice. The Law of Opportunity Cost boils down to the idea there is no free lunch, ever. The law helps explain the last law in this Eco 101 crash review: the Law of Demand: the higher the price the less the quantity demanded and the lower the price the greater the quantity demanded. Yet, suprisingly, millions of naive Americans--present company excepted-- buy into state schemes involving "free money," i.e. subsidies or privileges: from Socialist Security, to crop price supports for farmers, to federally underwritten college tuition loans for students, to cheap flood insurance for farmers and land owners near the Mississippi and other rivers prone to overflow their banks, to Medicare, Medicaid and tax deductible company health plans involving third-party payments that make patients oblivious to cost and so help jack up medical prices, to many other delusions in which bedazzled Americans forget government has nothing to give save what it first takes away. Politics tries but just can't escape the law of no free lunch. Another mass delusion lies in what has been called Friedman's Law: Milton Friedman has given us his wisdom on government that nobody spends other people's money as carefully as he spends his own. Voters, be advised. (But, ironically, voters are the worst offenders in breaking this law. Politics ala Machiavelli and Friedman's Law, indeed.) Back to Adam and Even and all their offspring down to you sitting out there, every one of you having to cope daily, with the laws of scarcity, opportunity cost, and demand. Well, how do you cope? Man's figured out two ways: The first is the political or coercive way. The second is the market or voluntary way. Both ways are necessary in the Constitutional scheme of things. But let me ask you: Where did the Founders put the greatest scope, in the political or the market way? They put it into the market way; and to get there the Founders sharply limited the federal government by setting checks and balances: a written Constitution, a Bill of Rights, a tripartite government of judicial, legislative and executive branches, a bicameral legislature, a federalism splitting power between the central and state governments. As George Washington said: "Government is a helpful servant but a fearful master." Fearful master? Oh yes. For politics has a way of forgetting you, of denying your consent and choice, of rendering you into the Forgotten Man -- to use the phrase of Yale economist William Graham Sumner in 1883. Fearful master? Oh yes. Let me read to you the entire Tenth Amendment to give you an idea of the Founders' fear and their drive for limited government: The powers not delegated by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people. I repeat the last three words, "to the people," for they spell self-government, meaning government of self, the Fathers meaning Govern Thyself. For let me tell you of America's other democracy, its dominion within a dominion, its amazing second but quite nonpolitical government. Is expanding this Second Democracy under the rule of law the way to go? And how, let me tell you why via a riddle and a story. The riddle: Precisely, what and where is this second democracy? The story springs from Leonard E. Read, founder in 1946 of an early think- tank, the Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington, New York. Read tells of a shopper in a crowded department store during a Christmas rush. After buying some gifts, she remarks to a clerk on how jammed the store is. "Yes," says the clerk, "it's our best day so far." Then the shopper goes over to the post office to mail her packages, again remarking on the crowd. "Yes," says a postal clerk, "it's our worst day so far." Read's story bears on America's and the West's other democracy, a second government. Think: This other democracy flourishes in the land but does so without taxes, pork, politics, corruption, government waste or state coercion. Too, this second democracy, while imperfect, is bigger, reaching overseas for things like coffee and bananas, is self-regulating, again strictly voluntary, and a lot more moral than the first democracy. To cap it off, this second democracy turns the Forgotten Man into the Remembered Man, winning hands down on such critical matters as individual choice, consent, participation voting by virtually all the people, and at practically every age. Here people don't have to register to vote, am not disallowed because of residency, noncitizenship, and the rest. Here minorities win wholesome respect without coercion. Why? Look- Participation and consent are anything but 100 percent in the first democracy. In 1996 President Clinton won, according to the U.S. Statistical Abstract, on a turnout of 98 million or 49 percent of eligible voters. So less than one out of every two potential voters voted. 100 million eligible voters stayed home or went bowling -- a landslide of apathy. Thus less than one out of every four eligible voters directly consented to the Clinton win -- or of all Americans but 17 percent. Well, where is this second democracy, this much unappreciated, unsung, even unrecognized yet vast democracy in Western life? And when seen, why is it put down as self-seeking, narrow, materialistic, even if it involves the very essence of freedom such as choice and self-fulfillment? First, note that it's under your nose, as near as your phone to call a plumber or doctor, order a pizza or airline tickets, make an appointment with a barber or hairdresser. Look. This second democracy is but the everyday ordinary yet most extraordinary marketplace. It's more, It's the entire private sector, with virtually everybody voting many times daily. It is the very heart of a free society. It is social cooperation on a vast scale- private companies and schools, private charities and foundations, churches and synagogues, private TV, Internet, and newspaper firms, think-tanks, CPAs, law firms, private hospitals, book publishers, private charities, private clubs, millions of buyers and sellers, globally billions of producers and consumers busily, willingly, helping each other despite different languages, cultures, and governments. Think about it. In America's first democracy, again, under 100 million votes were cast in the 1996 presidential election, a quadrennial event. But in America's other democracy, where dollars make up ballots, billions of separate votes or transactions (a word I'll get back to) are cast daily. The market process is an hour-by-hour plebiscite, one that mirrors the changing wishes and demands, efforts and supplies -- the aspirations of people everywhere. Hail this 8th Wonder of the World, the free market. Private democracy then is dynamic, responsive, responsible -- yes imperfect-- but far more honest and democratic than political democracy, with far more choice and consent, with millions of voluntary governments, from the individual and his/her family, and including, say, GM, IBM, Yale, the Catholic Church, and Captive-Aire -- how's that for pandering, Bob? All are private hierarchies of power, all voluntary states in a free society. Think more on this other democracy of one-person-many-votes. See it as a discovery process for both consumers and producers, as all-pervasive: Apart from your handy telephone, polling booths are ubiquitous, many impervious to weather, some open 24 hours a day seven days a week, with such handy market facilities as an ATM, bank, magazine, mall, airline, restaurant, vending machine, movie house, coin laundry, doctor's office, supermarket, gas station, interactive radio and TV, yellow pages, E-mail, modernized PC --- the whole World Wide Web at your fingertips. All pray for your vote. All are, unlike the officious coercive state, wholly subservient to that vote. All remember you. You vote--the point bears reiteration--constrainedly with your money, not unconstrainedly with somebody else's money as in the first democracy. Here your vote does count, per Ludwig von Mises in Human Action (1966, p. 270): The consumers patronize those shops in which they can buy what they want at the cheapest price. Their buying and their abstention from buying decide who should own and run the plants and the farms. They make poor people rich and rich people poor. They determine precisely what should be produced, in what quality, and in what quantities. They are merciless. Note, Mises says you, Mr./Ms. Consumer are merciless, a sovereign who can return merchandise, comparison-shop, drop brands and vendors, induce efficiency, demand and usually get lower prices and better quality. So see U.S. living standards as the world's highest, and ask yourself: Why? Note too, that your voting in the marketplace is a snap relatively, that every day is Election Day, that the marketplace reflects your and everybody else's free choice, that it regulates itself with high prices spurring supply and slowing demand, with low prices slowing supply and spurring demand, with market prices adjusting then to ever new supply and demand forces, erasing shortages and surpluses as they arise. Again, the marketplace is imperfect. For example, con artists lurk there. Yet market democracy optimizes not only goods but--imagine-- civil liberties like the fight to vote, trial by jury, privacy, property Rights, freedom to choose, etc. Hear Mises in Human Action on market democracy and the rich: In the political democracy only the votes cast for the majority candidate or the majority plan are effective in shaping the course of affairs. The votes polled by the minority do not directly influence policies. But in the market democracy no vote is cast in vain. Every penny spent has the power to work upon the production processes. The publishers cater not only to the majority by publishing detective stories, but also to the minority, reading lyrical poetry and philosophical tracts. Yes, the rich cast more votes than the poorer citizens- but this inequality is itself the outcome of a previous voting process. To be rich in a market economy, is from success in filling best the demands of the consumers. Mises was right about the elected rich and the popularity of detective stories over philosophical tracts. The market reflects consumer tastes. If some consumers want pornography and prostitutes, pornography and prostitutes are what they get. Ditto drugs and alcohol, sky diving, bungee jumping, violent movies, mud wrestling, Internet obscenity. The market is human, fickle, hardly perfect. It mirrors mankind, warts and all. Yet consumer acumen and tastes can be lifted. Broadly, the market gave us Shakespeare and Cervantes, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Monet and Picasso, Mozart and Beethoven. The market came up with Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison--- both keenly aware of the market potential of inventions like the telephone and the electric light. So free markets furnish more goods, more value-- more for less, longevity from 30 years of age in 1750 to 75 years of age in 1997, a health and wealth explosion in the last 250 years for virtually everyone. No wonder Hayek hailed the market as a "marvel." Marvelous to see Adam Smith's Invisible Hand of self-interest work for dynamic growth and mutual help, spur savings and investment, invention and economic growth, entrepreneurship, and, technology- plus all manner of other spontaneous orders such as language and music -- and all for you, Mr./Ms. Consumer, Mr./Ms. Remembered Man. Remembered? Look at a Big Mac; it cost 30 cents or 27 minutes of work for the average family in 1940; today it costs $1.89 or 9 minutes or work, a saving of two-thirds. The market then is literally your servant. It follows that you are its master/mistress. You are sovereign. You are the law: with a life-and-death word over every producer, from General Motors to Captive-Aire, Bob Luddy loves my illustration of this idea, the whodunit mystery: Who killed the iceman? The answer: Depending on your age, it was your mother, grandmother, or great grandmother. How so? In the interim era between World Wars I and II she bought a fridge; now the iceman cometh no longer. In this Democracy No. 2 then, savers, investors, inventors, landowners, entrepreneurs, and all other owners of wealth risk the market, put up their wealth to the highest possible advantage of the consumers. But if these owners are inept in advantaging the consumers, they incur losses, If they don't mend their ways, they lose their wealth, i.e. consumers devour them. Hear Mises in Human Action: "Ownership of the tools of production is not a privilege, but a social liability." So the capitalist - creator, generator, entrepreneur, risk-taker- is also a servant. He must serve the consumer. Or else. Yet capitalists are widely seen as greedy," "tycoons," "captains of industry," as cartoon caricatures of fat bankers puffing cigars, standing astride Wall Street. Indeed, do the successful billionnaire-capitalists - the Warren Buffetts, the Bill Gates, the Mellons, the Rockefellers, the DuPonts, etc. - really run the show? No. Sovereign consumers run it for them, simply by choosing, by buying or not buying. Besides, the Buffetts and others of the so-called super-rich are relatively small change. Capital, particularly corporate capital, has long been privately democratizing. Rockefeller's Standard Oil empire has been remade, partly by a 1911 antitrust suit, into the likes of Exxon, BP, Amoco. Mobil, and Chevron - each of them bigger than old Standard Oil and owned by millions of individual shareholders. Besides, huge chunks of these firms are "individualized" further by also being owned by life insurance firms, trust companies, mutual funds, and employee pension funds - so-called "institutions." Buy into a mutual fund, get insurance, or earn pension fund rights at GM, and you get an indirect piece of the action. Work for United Airlines or other ESOP (employee stock ownership plan) firms, and you're a direct owner. Now, fathom Peterson's Law on innate interventionist ineptitude, and ask why is the U.S. overpoliticized, overregulated, overwelfared, overtaxed, overruled? Why all these "overs"? Isn't there a better way? You bet. It's: Play down America's first democracy, play up its second. It's: See America and the West as beholden to Caesar Politics, the handsome rogue of our drama on baneful if mostly legal wrongdoing. Yet for perspective, view Caesar' Politics as he views himself: a deus ex machina, the god in Greek drama who intervenes, who obliges you without your consent, who "fixes" many of your personal concerns such as Medicare and Social Security, who "stabilizes" the economy, who commits our armed forces in far-away places with few American interests, like Vietnam, Somalia, and Bosnia, who fights for your democratic vote while crowding you with a statist quo divesting you of much choice and reduces you to the Forgotten Man. See Caesar Politics then as a pompous colossus bestriding this narrow globe, as a crafty cabalist. Yet behind his bluster he's base, dull, "half -witted" -to use Henry David Thoreau's biting word. No question, Caesar Politics and his botch-ups hurt. Peterson's Law to the rescue: It explains why things go wrong, why the Bible (Psalms 146:3) wisely warns: "Put not thy trust in Princes." So here it is: It's just Murphy's Law focused on politics and, first, but three words long: Government intervention boomerangs. Or, longer and more precise, in 15 words: Every government intervention into peaceful private activity tends to make things worse rather than better. Peterson's Law reflects intervention politics: the art of seeking trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, applying state "cures," and, per Peterson's Law, making things worse, even, as in plunging into war, catastrophic. Virtually every time, As Ronald Reagan joked about LBJ's War on Poverty: "We declared war on poverty, and poverty won." Yet, for all this drift toward state bungling or worse, man is caught in a cosmic bind: Yes, states are loaded with TNT: they alone hold a lawful monopoly of coercive power. But man himself, recall, is a fallen angel, wide open to wrongdoing. Personal safety requires a minimal state: a constable, soldier, and judge to keep their fellow fallen angels in line. So a Catch 22 emerges: The state itself is run by fallen angels: So what kind of state is best? Ah, the answer is the key to this talk. A man is known by the government he keeps. Freedom and government can coexist, as America's Framers prescribed. But that prescription has been misfilled before and after 1776. Recall a few recent broken 'pledges: "Read my lips: No new taxes, and: "The age of big government is over. No wonder the social stress. Caesar Politics has you, the Forgotten Man, vexed and confused: torn between two popular if opposing perceptions of the state - one real, the other unreal: an unreal Compassionate State, a selfless state "doing good" - for example, unselfishly giving "free money" via grants- in-aid to states and localities, at some $230 billion a year, though with strings on the recipients. It also grants "relief' to millions of the "disadvantaged" and "underprivileged," as defined, via its deep pockets - sorry, I, mean your pockets and those of millions like you. Central then to Peterson's Law - and avoiding it - is how Citizens and the Forgotten Man view Caesar Politics and the roles of state and society, of the public and private sectors - of which is which and why. Confusing those roles is common and helps explain why so many people today buy the unreal view and vote themselves what they assume is a free lunch: a lunch would be funny were it not so personal and unsettling. This real view of things, as I seek to show, can awaken a sense of congenital IG mischief, an insight on insensitive tax-and-regulate friction between the public and private worlds. Take the matter of excessive business regulation and taxation. Who is in fact the one far excessively regulated and taxed? Who else but the Forgotten Man? Isn't he the one who has to meet business costs in the things he buys, whose free "business lunches" are hardly free? So see the public and private democracies at odds, raising another key inquiry: In this low-key cold war between the two democracies, between Caesar Politics and you, the Forgotten Man: Who wins, who loses? I hold that the ultimate winner swings on which perception holds: the real or the unreal view of the state - or on how government is used or, more accurately, abused in political democracy. People of short memory show little fear of democracy unlimited; they forget that even paranoids have enemies. They see the state as a servant, especially in its seductive interventionist guise, when it is in fact the master, always. The unreal view is deftly sold by the Pols or in Tom Wolfe's deft phrase in The Bonfire of the Vanities, the Masters of the Universe. But delusions of grandeur befog the Masters' vision. Again, they or their spinmeisters spin an overblown state into a do-good state, meaning, as a, rule, its exact opposite: a do-bad state, getting you (apart from the Masters) in a jam or in what President George Bush dubbed as "deep doo-doo." Or to rephrase H. L. Mencken: For each human problem there is a government solution - neat, plain, and wrong. Too, the Masters as self-assumed experts quietly downplay the Forgotten Man while secretly regarding him as ill-informed if not inferior. They dial up, subtly, state power, the state serving as all things to all people. They are steeped in what Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek called "the fatal conceit," a perception of interventionist government with a majoritarianism that marginalizes minorities, saps the other democracy, overrides FM, and denies his/her consent. The outcome is a state remote from what the Founding Fathers had in mind: a state hyping belief in Father Knows Best or Father Will Spank. Father Knows Best? See then the second and more realistic perception, the one holding for the mundane world in which you live and work, vote and hope, as one where things - apart from tornadoes, floods, and other natural disasters - go wrong with near clockwork regularity. This is a world where war, crime, recession, poverty, corruption, inflation, foreign aid, sick public education, regulatory snafus, etc. seem unnatural as to causation. Indeed, these things going wrong are man-made, mostly statemade - a reflection of Peterson's Law. The rub: They usually carry but an invisible tag of "Made in Washington" (or Rome, Tokyo, or some other seat of misgovernment). Yet though this tag is not widely perceived on why things go wrong - as they must - the Masters put down any challenge of IG power, any blaming of it for social stress, as they and their allies display standard hypocrisy and cant, blaming instead the other party or anybody or anything else handy. (De riguer in politics.) But read between the lines of the Pols - some are self-made but most are machine-made. Are the Masters not implying that their state mythology is their citadel, that their dream-world of beguiling delusions must be held sacrosanct, above reproach, that faith in the State demands more and more True Believers in the Great God State? They are adamant: Their citadel, their church, cannot, must not, will not be taken, not even shaken. It is their raison d'etre, their very soul. No wonder that, through their soul-mate Caesar Politics, the Masters are men who fight over myths and men, who reject any idea of a fallible state, of naked Caesar Politics. So they quietly let on who is top dog. Surprise! It's not the Citizen nor the People but the State; worse, it's the statist quo, the rule of men, a rule with four fated rubs: These men tend to be active, assuming, arbitrary, acquisitive. Their policies as a rule fail and touch off social stress. Their sincerity is not always sincere. They seem to take Hollywood producer Sam GoIdwyn's advice: "Sincerity is the most important thing in movie acting. If you can fake that, you'll be a star." They publicly use and stroke the Citizen as in charge, as a long lost brother/sister. But they secretly worship Caesar Politics and forget the Citizen, a patsy denied all manner of consent and told what to do, such as sending his/her child to Public School 27. Like it or not, The four rubs reflect the Public Choice School, the sharp idea of Nobel laureate James Buchanan and fellow economist Gordon Tullock that choices by voters, legislators, and bureaucrats in public democracy are just as self-interested as are their choices in private democracy. Self-interest is no crime of course - but is it when tied to coercion? For Peterson's Law rests on another basic inquiry in this talk: Is requisite economic interaction to be voluntary or coerced? Ah, coercion - IG's put-down of consent, its intrusion of state force, its tool of tension between the two democracies. Intervention explains much of history's stormy past and doubtlessly stormy future. Man, a political animal, becomes a fly trapped in the otherwise beautiful ointment of open-ended democracy. The fly is the co-opted Citizen himself: the ointment is IG politics: the rub is the citizen with a shiny image of a Super Pol president, state governor, U.S. senator, or big-city mayor - that compassionate protector, that charismatic leader on a white horse. En masse the citizenry vote for IG and Super Pol, chase the will-o-the-wisp free lunch, pledge allegiance, give up some liberty - and so get forgotten. Or per Pogo: "We have met the enemy, and they is us. Enter trouble. How? Politics. Look, the Citizen is at once both a producer and consumer, the very same person if in different modes. So, depending on which mode, he wears three different hats, travels three different roads, acts out three different and often conflicting roles. Yet he is still the same person, if often dazed or dejected as things go wrong. The three-hatted Citizen is the key on why things go wrong. With his producer hat (Hat No. 1), the Citizen wants to buy every production good or service at the lowest cost possible, and of course sell his wares at the highest possible price. No big deal, this is normal self-interest. But by putting on his Citizen hat (Hat No.2), our Producer-Citizen demands and often gets state favors - say, commodity price supports if a farmer, import quotas if an industrialist, minimum wages if a worker, and so on. Those demands, usually voiced by organized producer groups including labor unions, are usually accompanied by campaign funds and other political goodies as he seeks the "help" of his member of Congress. "Why not do the right thing?" suggests Mr. Producer-Citizen, with the right thing usually being the wrong thing - interventionism. The suggestion nonetheless falls on receptive ears and soon assumes the force of law. It gets worse. Wearing his consumer hat (Hat No.3), this very same Citizen wants conditions opposite those of his producer role. He wants to pay the lowest possible prices for his food, clothing, shelter, insurance, medicine, pensions, and other consumer goods. For again putting on Citizen Hat No.2, the politicized Consumer Citizen seeks state interventions such as rent control, food stamps, price controls, Social Security, Medicare, and the rest. And, once more armed with votes or financial support, and working through lobbies such as the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), he makes the usual suggestion of "Why not do the right thing" - again the wrong thing, wrong laws. All this further mixes up an already badly mixed-up Welfare State. Yet IG Pols and their liberal elite are shocked - shocked! - when things go wrong, when, for example, they see naked greed leading to a growing income disparity between rich and poor. But they forget: Such disparity tends to narrow in free-market societies. Free markets remember the consumer: IG forgets him/her. The underclass and homeless are victims of welfarism, which turns intended beneficiaries into ill-supported wards of the state. In a free society the rich become rich most often through the free market votes of the many, including the poor - in a sort of private meritocracy. Model T buyers, for example, willingly helped build the Ford fortune. Henry Ford remembered them, and they remembered him. The capital of the rich is the friend of the poor. Capital equips jobs, ups output; it's President Kennedy's rising tide lifting all boats; it lets private charity care for the truly destitute, the halt and the lame. The firm does a worthy social function by cutting transaction costs. Ronald Coase won a Nobel prize for seeing that a firm consolidates functions, that it makes life simpler and cheaper for its sovereign customers who learn where to advantage themselves, and what to expect. Well, what's a good government to do? Says your speaker: use defensive force to maintain the peace - protect life, liberty and property, as in nabbing robbers or repelling foreign invaders. Don't initiate offensive force, as in rent control, import quotas or aggressive war - No matter how contorted IG's logic, as in an old joke on the gentleman at the front door who declares: "I'm from the government and here to help you." Peace is the operative word above. For keeping the peace is, broadly, the state's only function. In his 1964 book, Leonard E. Read of the Foundation for Economic Foundation hit the bull's eye with his three-word rule for individual and state: Anything That's Peaceful. For what happens when the state itself is unpeaceful, when it foists legal larceny on its own people? Juvenal saw this Catch 22 circa 100 B.C.: Sed quis custodiet igsos custodes? But who guards the guardians? History attests Caesar Politics' character coercion as warped. Acton got it down to two words: Power corrupts. Said Nobelist James Buchanan: "Socialism is dead but Leviathan lives." Leviathan sullies a key rule in the doctors' Hippocratic Oath: "First, do no harm." Harm? Hey, why not enjoy intervention as if you are watching a zany ballet choreographed by Karl Marx and the Marx Brothers? The ballet features shenanigans such as paying farmers not to farm, subsidizing babies to have babies, bubbling the money supply to cheapen credit all right, but incurring inflation and recession, worrying over jobs while mandating joblessness via minimum wages and imposing costly taxes and stiff rules on otherwise job- creating capital, and then paying out unemployment compensation as jobs disappear. Talk about Chutzpah! This state ballet is prone to missteps and pratfalls. Note that it casts many if not most of your fellow Citizens in the chorus, that they are part of the show, part of a cabal to clip you, FM. Indeed, one may be your neighbor - another, uh-oh, may be that reflection staring back at you in your bathroom mirror. Not a pretty picture, as caught in P. J. O'Rourke's Pogoesque observation (1991): "Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us." Govern thyself, compete well, indeed. You've got a world to win' To these Framers' precepts, I add one more: Educate-educate-educate.