Many
of my followers have expressed interest in my transformation from Liberal
Socialist Progressive Democrat in Berkeley
to Pro-Capitalist Conservative Libertarian Republican. Here then is my story.
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I
was born and raised in Berkeley, California during the famous (or infamous)
1960’s and 70’s. Although I was never
particularly politically active, I was more or less completely immersed in the
reigning ideology of the time and place. Sympathetic to communism, I believed
that businessmen as a class were greedy, corporations were evil and that capitalism
was a system of exploitation of the poor by the rich. I saw America as an
imperial power, a danger to the world. I loathed the military and during the
1980’s I hated Ronald Reagan –
passionately. If Barack Obama had been elected President thirty years ago, I
would have been right at home, as close as family with the administration’s
agenda and cast of characters.
Even
so, there were seeds of doubt in my world view planted early on that would combine
with others to bear fruit many years later. The earliest of these that I
remember was nobel laureate Milton
Friedman’s 1980 PBS television series Free to Choose. Dr.
Friedman presented an amazing explanation of economics, how the price system
compels millions of people to collaborate in the production of goods as simple
as pencils and as complex as computers, and he had the gall to defended capitalism
as a system of voluntary cooperation among free people that results in the
greatest prosperity for the greatest number. I was not converted overnight (far
from it), but the first significant seed had been planted.
I
was philosophically inclined to a socialist worldview, yet I had an open mind
and intellectual honesty that I had learned from my father, Earl Hyde, a respected research
scientist and administrator at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; I was willing
to apply logic and principles to the analysis of facts.
Paris
In
my early twenties, I spent 4 years living as a marginally legal immigrant and
bohemian artist/musician in an immigrant (North African Muslim) neighborhood in
Paris, France. It was a wonderful
cultural experience for a young man and I made many rich friendships. I
subscribed to the daily newspaper Liberation, a leftist paper founded by
the former students who had almost burned Paris
to the ground in 1968. Echoes of Berkeley; birds of a
feather find each other.
Even
so, I can safely say today that the French economic model is nothing for
us to emulate, whether in Europe or in America. I remember very well
waiting on the narrow spiral staircase of a run-down apartment building along
with 25 other people, for my chance to see a studio apartment for rent in that
rent-controlled city. What we call a crisis in America, with double-digit
unemployment, they call ‘business as usual’. The unemployment rate is always
double-digits there. Yes, they have a
broad social safety net. But I have seen
enough drunken homelessness and despair in the Metro subway and on the streets to
tell you that that net has holes in it. The poorest and most corrupt regions in
North America are Louisiana, Quebec
and Haiti,
all former French colonies.
Several
years later I would take my first and only formal economics course in the MBA
program here at Woodbury University in Burbank.
Very early in the textbook, after the
basic principles of Supply and Demand
and their intersecting curves were laid out, the author explained,
simply and convincingly how government-imposed wage and price controls must
inevitably lead to shortages or
unsellable surpluses. Rent control makes it difficult or impossible to find an
appartment because it makes offering apartments for rent a losing proposition. Minimum
wage laws, rather than lifting all boats, aggravate unemployment of the least
qualified and most vulnerable workers in the labor market. Milton Friedman and Larry
Elder have argued earnestly that minimum wage laws are a racist policy, hurting
black youth above all others. Democrats
love to talk about ‘disparate impact’ to justify meddling in free-market
transactions such as mortgage lending, whether it’s ‘redlining’ on the one hand
or ‘predatory lending’ on the other. Let them apply the disparate impact
doctrine to minimum wage laws where there’s clear evidence of it.
But
I’m getting ahead of myself. When I left France
and came to Los Angeles
in 1986 I almost had a heart attack from the culture shock of driving around
and seeing all the ‘Apartment for Rent’
signs. “First Month Free!” “No Deposit!” “Move in Today!” I had to fight the
urge to pull over immediately and run in to submit my application before the
mob of competing renters showed up. ‘How
can they do this?’ I thought. In Paris,
apartment rentals were buried in tiny entries in the classified newspaper ads,
and in order to have a chance of getting one you had to show up at the
indicated address approximately 1 hour BEFORE the paper hit the newsstand. It
was insane (and to make matters worse, the ads were written in French)!
Nevertheless,
I settled into my extended bohemian artist-student lifestyle in LA, became a
daily listener to KPFK Pacifica Radio
(because PBS wasn’t Left enough for me), and occasionally donated portions of
my paltry resources to the ACLU.
I
was still committed to a leftist worldview learned in Berkeley and was eager to defend my ideas
using facts, logic and principles. I studied and read widely, but as much as
possible avoided conservative thinkers and publications.
But
I wasn’t able to avoid reading Julian Simon’s ‘The Ultimate Resource’, because it was required reading in
a geography course at USC, and it blew the lid off of my illusions about
environmental crises.
Simon
catalogued and debunked over a hundred cases of environmental scare campaigns going
back 200 years that all turned out to be just so much global hot air emitted by
carbon-spewing leftist political activists with an agenda to grab power and
earn frequent-flier miles. Simon systematically explained WHY objectively it
must be so that all such scares end up being recognized as hoaxes (not that
that ever deters the activists from inventing new ones with every generation,
if not season). ‘The Ultimate Resource’ is the core of the nuclear warhead
arsenal of the conservative and capitalist movements against radical
environmentalist fraud.
Simon
named his book ‘The Ultimate Resource’ to make the point that in the final
analysis, physical assets like minerals, oil, gas, water, food and a host of
others are only as good, as useful and as available as the PEOPLE who design
the processes to mine, extract, cultivate, harvest, refine, market and
distribute them. It is human ingenuity that takes icky gunk that oozes out of
the ground and sickens your cows, and transforms it into black gold and energy.
It is the entrepreneurial drive operating in a free market that responds to
every shortage of natural resources and invents new ways to extract and produce
more, to drill deeper under the ocean floor using only one tower where five
were previously required, to design new industrial processes, to multiply crop
yields, so that with every generation, in economic terms, these things are more
abundant, cheaper and cleaner than ever. The Earth is NOT going to Hell in a
handbasket; we are not running out of oil, coal, copper, food or even land, and
we never will for as long as we remain a free-market, capitalist nation.
It
is human beings living under liberty and the rule of law that are the most
precious, scarce, productive and needed resource. In the short run, physical
resources are of course finite; but in the long term, they are virtually
unlimited, only constrained by human imagination, ingenuity, freedom and hard
work.
It
was Julian Simon’s thesis that pried open my brain to consider the positive
power of the free market to solving human problems, including poverty,
inequality and even racism.
After
encountering Julian Simon I was open to consider more challenges to my received
wisdom. And the challenges came. The Clarence Thomas supreme court confirmation
hearings in 1991 opened my eyes to the fact that it was possible, even
reasonable for a black man (indeed many black men, for there were several who
testified on Thomas’ behalf) to be conservative, pro-capitalist, and Republican.
Such a thought had been inconceivable to me before, in spite of the fact that
Martin Luther King Jr. had been a Republican.
The Democratic party has been very successful in painting Republicans as
the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan, in complete contradiction to historical
fact.
I
started reading the Wall Street Journal
editorial page. Charles Murray’s book Losing Ground demonstrated the
failures of LBJ’s Great Society welfare state in aggravating rather than
improving poverty. I read George Guilder’s Wealth and Poverty, the
classic The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith from 1776, and The Road
to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist and Nobel laureate.
These
thinkers – plus eventually three attempts to open and operate a small business
of my own – transformed my worldview. By 1991, I was open to consider the views
of Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Prager, and Larry Elder. In November 1988 I had voted
the Democratic Ticket, with Michael Dukakis (Tank-Commander-in-Chief) at
the top. In November 1992, I voted straight Republican and haven’t looked back,
in spite of losing most of my former friends and being the subject of a good
deal of tension within my extended family.
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Republicans
aren’t saints, they aren’t all alike, and they aren’t all principled or
disciplined in their thinking. Some of them are unnecessarily hateful; others
are too eager simply to be more competent managers of the bloated welfare
state. But the Democratic party has gone over a harcore leftist cliff in the
past generation, and they are hell-bent to take the country down with them.
This must not stand.
Therefore
my mission is to move the Republican party in a principled, libertarian direction.
I have been disappointed and alarmed to hear some Republicans speak as
reflexively as Democrats of, for example the need to raise taxes (or of the
irresponsibility of cutting rates). This tells me that among other things there’s a need to review
the Laffer curve:
My
opinion is that if the Republican Party is to stand for anything, it must first
be limited, constitutional government that places individual liberty above the
state and the treasury. The trouble
with our economy is not that the government doesn’t have enough money.
The problem is that the government takes too much of it from the people,
flushes too much of it down the toilet, and engages in a host of other
fraudulent tricks that would get you and me and Bernie Madoff incarcerated if
we tried them.
George H. W. Bush never completely bought in to Reagan’s fiscal vision, which he had
derided during the 1980 primary election season as ‘Voodoo economics’. As a
result, this most honorable World War II veteran and hero surrendered to the
Democrats Speaker of the House Tom
Foley and Senate Majority Leader George
Mitchel under pressure of no crisis, broke his ‘read my lips, no new taxes’ pledge, got no credit for his magnanimous
bipartisan gesture and lost his 1992 re-election bid to Bill Clinton – in spite of enjoying MY vote, the first I ever cast
for a Republican. Two more decorated and celebrated veterans would follow in
Bush the Elder’s non-path to the White House: Bob Dole in 1996 and John
McCain. With respect, these honorable men didn’t get it. To put it more
bluntly, quoting Rush Limbaugh during the 2008 presidential campaign: “You
idiot! Get someone on your team who understands economics!”
Two
men who understand economics better than most mortals are Thomas Sowell of the Hoover
Institution, student of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, and Ludwig von Mises, Austrian-American mentor
and colleague of the nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek. These men and their thought matter to you.
Sowell’s book, Basic Economics,
written in plain English, will innoculate you against all manner of stupidity
and fashionable but bogus economic ideas. Understand what’s in this book and
you will be light years ahead of the majority of our politicial leaders.
If I were empowered to dictate just one law, it would
be that all public officials – legislators, mayors, governors, and presidents –
should be required to read this book and pass a factual examination on its
contents, whether they agree with its conclusions or not, as a condition of
their serving.
More Health care reform resources on the Obamacare page.