Living as a free man – that is, living without cable television – may have made me miss some spectacular events, but by and large I had at least heard or read about them. I know that President Bush arrived on a naval ship somewhere from a fighter jet and announced "mission accomplished." But I never saw it, nor his Thanksgiving speech in Baghdad. And I've managed to miss his last three State of the Union Speeches.
I also missed Joe Namath's embarrassing, but understandable, come-on to Suzy Kolber. And Madonna locking lips with a girl half her age on MTV.
While missing cable tv, I've managed to miss not only the President, but pro-war propaganda Fox News, and also propaganda for long-ago wars from the History Channel (what me and my friends used to call, along with A&E and PBS, one of the "Hitler Channels"). I also managed to miss many a meaningless college basketball and major league baseball game, plus "Behind the Music" and "True Hollywood Story."
But what I didn't think I'd miss, was a celebration of 100 Years of Flight. But I did. I had no idea what date it was in 1903 that the Wright Brothers successfully launched their airplane – I just knew it was sometime in 1903. Most of the time I didn't even think about it, but as the year progressed, I began asking around: Does anybody know if there's going to be some big celebration of the Wright Brothers?
No one had any idea.
The year passed me by without a single notice of a Big Celebration for 100 Years of Flight. And, though I don't watch tv, I listen to radio and surf the Internet quite a lot.
Sure, there must have been some television program and some ceremony somewhere, but it didn't get the coverage I would have expected: the point is that I didn't look for it because I assumed it would come to me.
Though I didn't really know what, in reality, I'd expect from such a program. The impact of the airplane on the world is really impossible to fully grasp. And it is impossible to say if it's actually been a net benefit on the world. Yes, millions of people are able to get from point A to point B quicker. Vacationing in Europe is possible for people with average incomes who don't have the allotted vacation days to take a train to New York and then spend several days on an ocean liner.
On the other hand, the father who wants to walk out on his wife, but still keep in touch with his kids, is less likely to move from Chicago to San Francisco if he had to travel by rail or highway instead of air to see his kids several times a year.
And then there's the social cost of the government exercising "eminent domain" to demolish private homes to build runways that benefit privately-owned airlines. And of the government's direct subsidies of airlines at the cost of the taxpayer. Airlines have a hard time making a profit. George Will has estimated that the entire airline industry has not profited the nation by a nickel, and certainly not since 1945.
And, of course, the airplane has been the world's deadliest weapon – or should I say, the indispensable carrier of the deadliest weapons. From Dresden to Tokyo to Vietnam to Belgrade to Baghdad, the victims of modern war have been primarily civilians, not young men who at least have rifles in their hands and can shoot back. And then there's Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And Sept 11, after which we could say, "airplanes don't kill people, terrorists kill people."
But this is no knock on Orville and Wilbur Wright. None of the tragic consequences of their own successful but risky experiments in flight are their responsibility. There is nothing wrong with what they accomplished.
Just as there was nothing wrong with the steam engine or in building an automobile. But the government subsidies of the railroads beginning in 1861, which helped provoke Southern secession and our shameful wars against the plains Indians, seems like a mighty high price to pay.
As Garet Garret pointed out in The American Story, the problem began with the unconstitutional Louisiana Purchase. The United States had too much land, and too few Americans to settle it. This problem was made worse when the United States conquered half of Mexico during the Polk Administration – a war based on lies – followed by the Gold Rush in California in 1849.
Too many people moved West, became farmers, and, well, grew too much food. And then the government-funded railroads exacerbated this problem by making the transport of American grain back east relatively convenient.
The ideals of Thomas Jefferson and Albert Jay Nock had been replaced: the farmer who lives independently, diversifying his crops and livestock so that he can feed his family off of his own land, and then sell the surplus at market in order to purchase other supplies he can't produce himself, had been replaced. His replacement was a cash-crop grower, and economic "producer" who relied on mass-production techniques for his crops. The problem is, there were too many producers, spurred on to move to the Plains, deceived by the government's ill-gotten acquisition of those lands. Mass-production of various grains and livestock saturates the market and prices fall.
Agriculture in the United States has never recovered. At the cost of the taxpayer, the government unjustly conquered lands and, instead of leaving the free-market alone to decide when inter-continental railroads would be profitable, the government encouraged both settlement (that is, way too many farms) and the railroads by advertising free lands to easterners and Europeans.
The fascist idea of the government paying the farmer to not grow food, and its regulations and management that raise food prices on the poor, are today's social costs, the residue of the evils the government did in the 19th century. Whereas once the allure of farming was relative self-sufficiency and independence – freedom – now farmers are virtual wards of the State.
Because of the federal government, the United States got too big, too powerful, too quickly. As we are still a young nation, we don't even realize that this is what happened, and we tend to trivialize the massive injustices of the past, and overlook the massive injustices of the present. And gloss over the injustices of the future (debt-induced inflation, Social Security bankruptcy, perpetual warfare).
So I think the Wright brothers haven't gotten their due. Despite the mess the federal government accomplished in the 1800's, by 1903 two brothers were still free to test their machines at the risk of their own death. The government didn't prohibit them from doing what they were doing. The government didn't even require them to wear crash helmets. Better yet, the government didn't hire them at cushy salaries with the hope that, in two or three decades, they might come up with something. Nor did the government hire similar people by the hundreds in a sort of nationalistic contest with Britain, France and Germany as to who will "conquer the air" first. (Although if the idea came to him, no doubt President Theodore Roosevelt would have encouraged such a fiasco).
It is not because the government did too little, but because the government did much too much with the Wrights' invention that we can look upon it with some sense of regret. Homes destroyed to build runways. Massive bail-outs and labor protection. Massive security lapses which no unregulated private insurance company or security firm would have tolerated. Decades of government price-fixing.
And all of it seems to prove that either the market has not found a way to launch an airliner justly and inexpensively, or that if this is possible today, government intervention has made it impossible.
I can't say if that's true or not. But it is clear that our "mobile" society was created by government robbery and jobbery. The free market didn't build most of our inter-continental railroads. The free market didn't build our highways.
These are usually given as excuses in favor of government subsidies and "public projects." The reality, however, is that the free market failed to purchase Louisiana from France, or steal land from Mexico either. Or invade the South to collect a tariff to protect northern industrialists.
It is only because "Government" claims that which it does not own, that it can then justify doing what the market doesn't desire. If the free market demanded a cure for AIDS sooner than for cancer, I couldn't complain. But because the government wants to allocate my money for one instead of the other, I have every right to object.
When the government, by its force of coercion, artificially creates an "opportunity," then profit-seekers will naturally go to it. Why compete in a free market when the government is providing subsidies, regulatory protections, and give-aways?
This is when Frdric Bastiat's classic essay on the "Broken Window" reaches its uncomfortable effects. What would have been done, if there wasn't government coercion in the world. The classic view of the Statist, of the utilitarian and the neo-conservative, of the communist and the fascist, is that "you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." But then again, an unbroken, fertilized egg becomes a bird.
What would have happened if, every step of the way, Americans chose independence over coercion, liberty over taxation and regulation? Freedom instead of force? Bastiat gives us the answer: that which wasn't needlessly destroyed (whether it be a pane of glass, or our liberties, or our lives, or our wealth not confiscated by taxes) is an asset to society. Greater social benefit comes from greater production from the division of labor, not from taking from some to the benefit of others.
Whether it's taking from some who'd rather donate their money to fighting leukemia who see that money taxed because the government prefers battling AIDS, or from those who prefer ocean exploration to space exploration, or from those who create popular art instead of unpopular art, the principle is the same. Every time the government decides to crack down on our lives, liberties, and properties for the sake of the "greater good," the only people it really benefits are the politicians, government bureaucrats, and clients who decided it's easier to make money off of the generosity of the government than learn how to earn it from the free market, from the actual choices of free individuals. It's easier, and therefore more alluring, to live off of the taxpaying slave than from the free individual consumer.
I'm not suggesting that we undo every wrong from the past; that is impossible. But we can start changing our ways. We might not give back Louisiana Territory to France, or the Southwest to Mexico. But we can give each person, in the here and now, a decent chance for a better life free from government interference. The evils of generations past is not our generations' fault. And what we owe the descendents of the victims of past evils is not some sort of "restitution" which our generation doesn't, morally, owe them, but rather just the end of such evil ways.
No more regulations and licenses to keep people down. If an unemployed woman can give a decent hair cut, let her charge her own rates, even if she has a housecat or barefoot children on her premises. If you got fired from your job but own a car, make a sign on your car and become a taxicab to make some money.
For too long we've thought that "social justice" means favoring some industries over others, some tax brackets over others as a sort of "payback" for previous social injustices. But true social justice begins with individual liberty and personal responsibility. If the Wright Brothers would try to conquer the air without helmets or parachutes, surely the market would benefit from those who can give cheaper haircuts or taxi rides at virtually no risk to the consumer.
The triumph of Orville and Wilbur Wright is a witness to the freedom that once existed in our country. It's too bad that the government tried to "fix" what wasn't broken, with the airplane and much else, and that we're still paying the price.
February 2, 2004
