March 02, 2004

I'm a smart guy. I know it, and I'm not ashamed of it. Being smart doesn't make me better than someone who isn't and it doesn't mean I don't occasionally do stupid things. I'm not the smartest guy in the world by any means: I used to be a member of a Linux users' group that included people who held multiple doctorates in nuclear physics. I can't hold a candle to people who watch subatomic particles move around for a living, but the simple fact of the matter is that I am more intelligent than something like 90% of the people in the world.

If this notion bothers you, I invite you to consider that Michael Jordan is naturally more adept at basketball than 99.99% of the people in the world, and that Bill Gates is a better natural businessman than 99.99% of the people in the world (regardless of what you think of his business practices). That doesn't make them better people than those 99.99%, it just makes them better at that one thing.

I don't ordinarily discuss what is apparently a genetic aptitude because it tends to bother people. Admitting that you're smarter than most people -- and you know it -- is usually interpreted as hubris, and I have no desire to alienate people in that regard. I bring it up now because it's important to consider.

My grandfather (William Stone, Senior) is an 80-year-old, former South Dakota cattle rancher. For sixty years, he made his living on the South Dakota prairie breeding and raising cattle to be sold to feed lots. If your only familiarity with ranching is the nonsense PETA spews every day, a brief interlude is probably in order:

Most cattle are born and live the first several years of their lives in pastureland. At an appropriate age, they're sold to feed lots. This is done because meat consumers don't like grass-fed beef. It's tough and not as good-tasting as grain-fed beef. The feed lot then keeps the animal another year or two in enormous pens, where they're fed grain. The animal is then sold for slaughter and processing into the meat you buy at the store.

What PETA tells you about feed lots are largely out-and-out lies. The animals are free to move around to some extent, and having observed their movements in the pasture and in the feed lot, I say with confidence that it's about the same. A cow has more freedom of movement in a pasture, but they don't use it. They stand all day in one place eating grass until it's gone, then move a couple of feet and eat some more. Their primary movement is to the nearest water supply from where they're grazing, a trip they make out of necessity rather than a desire to roam free.

My grandfather is a rugged individualist in the truest sense of the word -- you can't survive as a South Dakota cattle rancher if you're not. He is one generation removed from true pioneers of the American West -- and in many ways, the rural areas of South Dakota that I love so much have not changed since pioneer times. Indeed, my grandmother has a vacation cabin (my favorite place in the world, which I visit as often as possible) is still three miles from the nearest DIRT road, five from a gravel road, and another forty from a paved road. It didn't have an indoor toilet until two years ago.

Technology and ranching methods may have advanced, but in the end, the sheer remoteness of modern South Dakota cattle ranchers requires a self-reliance for survival that is totally unknown in urban America. There are a thousand ways a South Dakota cattle rancher can get into trouble, and only one way to get out of it: himself.

The loss of this kind of self-reliance has not been a good thing for the country as a whole.

My grandfather is a very intelligent individual. His early-20th century High School education is clearly far superior to the modern Bachelor's Degree, and his lifetime experience only add to this. He and my grandmother don't consider particularly intelligent, but when I point out that most people aren't capable of holding the kind of conversations that we do, they usually admit that I have a point.

I consider both my grandparents to be extraordinary individuals. They have lived through more dramatic events and changes in their lives than I'm likely to. When they were born, the standard mode of transportation in rural South Dakota was still the horse. Cars -- while not uncommon -- were reserved for long-distance trips. Most homes did not have telephones. There was no television, and even radio was fairly new to the marketplace -- not that it mattered, because they lived so far from town that it was difficult to receive a signal.

I spend a lot of time listening to my grandparents, because I consider that at their age, having seen and done the things that they have, they have a perspective on events and issues that I will never achieve.

For years, as American manufacturing industries have migrated overseas, my grandfather and I have held spirited discussions about the state of affairs. One of the things he's careful to remind me is that as an intelligent individual, I'm rather lucky: I have the luxury of having many career choices open to me. I can basically do whatever I want, and be assured that as long as I apply myself, I'll be reasonably successful. The other 90% of people, he points out, don't have that luxury. They simply aren't capable of performing the kind of "brain sweat" I am, and so their options are limited.

His next point -- which usually follows close on the heels of this observation -- is something that as a devotee of the Zero Aggression Principle I have a difficult time with:

My grandfather suggests that intelligent individuals as a group have a responsibility to ensure that there is something for the other 90% of people to do for a living.

While this sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea from one perspective, it involves concepts that fly in the face of my core philosophy. Specifically:

"No human being has the right -- under ANY circumstances -- to initiate force against another human being, nor to threaten or delegate its initiation."

For me -- and the other 10% of the population my intellectual equal or above -- to be responsible for the livelihoods of everyone else flies in the face of the ZAP. I am NOT responsible for anyone for whom I don't CHOOSE to be responsible. There is no way I can choose to be responsible for 90% of the population for the simple fact that I don't know them. I don't even know 1% of the population -- ANY population. For me to presume to be responsible for total strangers, whose lives and situations I cannot possibly know, is the worst sort of arrogance.

In fact, that sort of insane arrogance -- the cognitive dissonance that tells people they can be responsible for the happiness of total strangers -- is precisely what created a police state in a country that was once a bastion of individual freedom.

My grandfather suggests that people like myself have a responsibility to assure that people who can't do the kind of work we do still have a job. Since the Industrial Revolution, those jobs have typically been in manufacturing. There was a time -- most of my grandfather's life, in fact -- when a hard-working American could be assured of a good, decently-paying, manufacturing-related job in even the smallest towns. Even if that meant pumping gas at a local service station, the jobs were available and paid well enough that a person could feed a small family.

Indeed, my own father put himself through college as a married man with an infant child by pumping gas at a station not a mile from where I sit today. Since that time, the area has seen dramatic changes, including the rise and fall of an entire manufacturing industry.

Today, it is virtually impossible to find the kind of job my father held. What in the world happened?

Simple: government happened.

For most of my grandfather's life, government -- particularly the Federal Government -- was a tiny fraction of what it is today. Indeed, in the eighty years since my grandfather's birth, the Federal Government has grown from something most Americans never saw or to something no American can so much as cross the street without tripping over.

Prior to the growth of the Federal Government, innovators could quickly and easily create entire industries out of nothing but financial backing and the will to create. While the creation of certain industries destroyed others, the jobs created by the new industry represented an overall net GAIN in terms of industrial employment. For example, the automobile industry destroyed the buggy industry, but since cars are infinitely more complex than buggies and since every American family has multiple cars, manufacturing employment was a net gain.

This is the natural order of the free market: hundreds of millions (preferably billions) of creative individuals of all intelligence are in charge of their individual lives, destinies, and finances. Such individuals create new industries at a far greater rate than old ones collapse. The demand for new methods and employees to serve the new industries creates labor shortages in all areas.

Modern government cuts the free market off at the knees. Most importantly, it stops the creation of new industries through massive, immoral, Unconstitutional regulation. A modern Orville and Wilbur Wright could never create an airplane in today's America. Certainly a commercial air travel industry would never be allowed to exist, what with its potential for loss of life.

Secondarily -- but not inconsequentially -- modern government eats fifty percent of every American's money while giving almost nothing in return. At the same time, it increases consumer prices through inflation and taxation by at least EIGHT HUNDRED PERCENT. Having only half of their money to spend and being forced to pay eight times more than necessary severely limits the amount of money people can use to create industries as well as limiting the time they have in which to do it.

Modern government has replaced the medieval Lord, and the average American the medieval Serf. Modern Serfs are no more in charge of their own destinies than were their medieval counterparts. The difference is that the modern standard of living, established when more people were in charge of their own destinies, makes the modern Serf comfortable and therefore afraid to revolt.

In modern America, it is utterly impossible to create new industries. The last new one created in this country was the home computing industry, and that was over twenty years ago. Ultimately, this industry evolved into a simple commodity like televisions and radios, meaning that there is no longer any real money to be made from manufacturing. Indeed, the profit on the average personal computer to the manufacturer is generally less than a hundred dollars.

This has driven manufacturers to decrease production costs. As with every other industry, the highest of such costs are generally in labor, so it is only natural that they have migrated to countries where labor costs are significantly less.

Were there still a free market in the United States, the creative power of 250 million individuals would have long ago driven new industries. Anyone who believes that this is not the case need examine only a pair of the more obvious exciting possibilities:

Catalytic fusion promises to revolutionize power generation. Imagine the power for your home run from a generator in your basement the size of your hot-water heater. Imagine enough power to run literally anything you like, for as long as you like, generated for pennies of what the electric, gas, and nuclear industries charge. Imagine that this power is manufactured cleanly, and its only waste byproduct is a small amount of deuterium that you sell to an agent every month. Imagine your car being run similarly, a la the "Mr. Fusion" of the _Back To the Future_ movies.

Such power is possible, real, and within our grasp if only government would cease standing in its way. It will free a whole generation of individuals to create even more new industries that will in turn employ millions. Yet, because government has made it impossible to create new industries (in this case owing to the demands of fuel and power companies who wish to retain an immoral monopoly on power generation), the catalytic fusion industry languishes.

Another obvious example is the commercial exploitation of space. Despite what the Republican whores would have you believe, the FedGov regaining a foothold on the Moon and then Mars is NOT an appropriate way to proceed. The FedGov PREVENTS commercial exploitation of space by design -- indeed, the prevention of space exploration by non-government agents is NASA's primary function.

The commercial exploitation of space promises to totally revolutionize virtually every industry on Earth. Thousands, if not MILLIONS, of new industries would be created as a result.

Government makes it impossible.

There should be chronic labor shortages in the United States. That there is not can be directly attributed to the existence of government.

This situation will not continue indefinitely. Certainly it is now beyond the point where it can be salvaged while retaining anything resembling the United States. The modern socialist police state is no more stable than the former Soviet Union, and the ultimate result will be the same:

Some day -- probably far sooner than any of us imagine -- the Federal Government and majority of State and Local Governments will collapse of their own instability.

With luck, when this occurs, the cause of the collapse will be so obvious and the American Experiment to limit government so obviously a failure that individuals will support replacing external government with self-government guided by the Zero Aggression Principle. If not, the country will at best go through another cycle of rise-and-collapse. At worst, we'll be saddled with a government even more restrictive than the present one.

Government is not the answer to our problems. As my grandfather suggests, intelligent people -- people he considers the movers of our society -- do have a responsibility, but it's not to see that the other 90% of people have jobs. Our responsibility is to see that the next opportunity we have to create a government, we learn from history. Instead of replacing one force-initiating, life-destroying structure with another one, we'll learn from past mistakes and replace it with NOTHING.

Freedom, Immortality, and the Stars!

William Stone, III is a South Dakota-based computer nerd (RHCE, CCNP), security consultant (CISSP), and Executive Director of the Zero Aggression Institute . He seeks the Libertarian Party's nomination in 2004 for United States Senate.

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