Columnist Charley Reese of The Orlando Sentinel is --deservedly -- one of America's most respected Constitutionalist conservative commentators. But, as this piece of his demonstrates, even Babe Ruth occasionally strikes out.

The original column is reproduced below in its entirety under the "fair use" doctrine, with my comments interspersed.

Craig Goodrich
December 26, 1997

Beliefs of the ruling class will send America down the tube

by Charley Reese of The Sentinel Staff
Published in The Orlando Sentinel
December 14, 1997

Civilizations rise or fall on the basis of the beliefs of the ruling class. Nothing mysterious about that. Belief always precedes action. The success or failure of an action depends most often on whether the belief on which it is based is true or false.

People, for example, who try to beat a train do so in the belief that they can get across the tracks before the train arrives. If their belief is correct, they live; if it is incorrect, they die. And so it is with nation-states and empires.

The ruling class of America, that mix of political, corporate, academic and financial people who occupy positions of power (one academic estimates there are only 7,000 such positions in the public and private sector combined), holds a number of false beliefs. Unless these beliefs are corrected, the United States is down the tube.

So, if we value our future, we would do well to examine the beliefs that underlie American policy -- domestic, foreign and economic -- that are pointing us toward disaster, pain, suffering and general misery.

One of these false beliefs is that numbers don't matter, so therefore immigration can be virtually unlimited. False. The difference between a prosperous China and a poor China is about 700 million people. Continued population growth will degrade the environment, the economy and the ability to enjoy life.

Sorry, Charley: The difference between a prosperous China and a poor China is freedom. Consider Hong Kong, with its four million people crammed onto a small spit of land with no natural resources except a harbor. Thanks to low taxes and little economic regulation, they have one of the highest standards of living in Asia -- although it remains to be seen whether this will survive the Red Chinese takeover. (And note that Hong Kong is surviving the recent Pacific Rim financial crunch, while dirigiste "crony capitalist" countries like Korea and Indonesia are in real trouble.)

Malthus was wrong two hundred years ago, and I'm sorry to say Reese is wrong now. I'll return to the issue of immigration below.

A second false belief is that diversity or multiculturalism is good. No, it's not. It is a breeder of perpetual conflict. There's no nation on Earth with a diverse, multicultural population that is politically stable, democratic and prosperous.

Sorry, Charley: Diversity and multiculturalism -- however defined -- are neither good nor bad in themselves. It would be hard to imagine a more "multicultural" society than New York City at the turn of the century, with immigrant Jews, Italian, Irish, and Eastern European Catholics, Germans, blacks, and Asians living together in a stable, democratic, and -- all things considered -- prosperous polity.

Or consider Switzerland, with its French, Italian, German, and Rumansh cantons. Or, for that matter, the Dominican Republic, which does indeed have political problems, but they have little to do with its multiracial demographics.

The crucially important factors are a shared belief in fundamental ethical values strong enough to outweigh any of the tribal intolerance to which you refer later, and a shared confidence that one's fate lies primarily in one's own hands. And again, forced "diversity", forced community integration, is, as we have seen all too clearly in the recent past, a foolproof method of strengthening intolerance and cultivating tribalism.

The false belief that diversity and multiculturalism are good is based, somewhat paradoxically, on another false belief that there exists a universal man or, as they would say today, a universal person. This is the belief that human beings are all basically the same and therefore, with a little social tinkering, can be persuaded to live peacefully and happily together.

Just a minute, Charley. I seem to recall that once there were in this country a group of influential men who believed quite strongly in "universal personhood" in a very specific sense, which they explained as follows:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

I happen to agree with them (and I've always thought you did, too). So you are quite right that there's a problem with the universalist beliefs of the elite, but it's not that they believe in "universal personhood". Rather, it's what they believe about the nature of that personhood, and, more importantly, their incredible arrogance in imposing this faddish morality on the rest of us by force -- the "social tinkering" you rightly deplore.

This is not so; it never has been so; and it never will be so. Humans are tribal, and tribes compete for territory and resources. The more world population increases, the more intense the competition will become. America is already experiencing an undeclared race war. It is an interesting commentary on people's ability to delude themselves that we now think that it is normal to have armed police posted in public schools. Just 30 years ago that idea would have struck Americans as absurd.

I weep, Charley, to see a writer I have so long admired for his clarity and logic pile so many non-sequiturs upon a half-truth.

• Yes, humans are "tribal", which means only that they tend to live in groups with shared metaphysical beliefs, organizational traditions, and technology. In a contemporary society, though, each individual member will have allegiance not to one tribe, like primitive isolated peoples, but to many, depending on the particular social context.

  For example, I grew up in a small town in rural Wisconsin and now live in a small town in rural Alabama; that's my "tribe" when, for example, I attend church on Sunday or shop at the local Wal-Mart. I'm a computer programmer by trade; that certainly influences my approach to certain kinds of problems, and perhaps to some extent my entire world-view (just ask my wife). I'm the father of young children, which implies that in many respects I share more concerns and priorities with the black mechanic in the car ahead of me dropping his kid off at the local school than I do with some young batchelor programmer.

  The mistake of viewing people unidimensionally, as though you could neatly partition a diverse population of individuals into discrete, non-overlapping, uniform "tribes", is one of the underlying perceptual errors of our ruling elite, and it's disappointing beyond words to see an intelligent commentator such as yourself falling into this mental trap. Recall, for example, George Allen's campaign for Governor of Virginia some years ago. The Democrats started running ads in predominantly black areas accusing Allen of being a conservative Christian, with the political agenda of the Christian Coalition. The ads backfired, of course, because most of the black electorate in those areas were themselves conservative Christians, and shared more of the values and beliefs of Ralph Reed than of the black urban socialists of the Democratic leadership.

  In addition, and much more fundamentally, every human being on the planet is a unique individual, different from every other individual. You rightly decry the elite's view that "everybody is basically the same", only to replace it with the equally mistaken "everybody in a certain (arbitrarily defined) tribe is the same." For shame, Charley!

• Yes, tribes compete for territory and resources. But so do individuals within whatever tribe you observe. Competition, peaceful and otherwise, is universal among humans, regardless of the size and nature of the group. But since long before Adam Smith, philosophers have recognized that competition for resources is not per se a bad thing, and that one effect of this competition is to actually increase the available stock of resources. More on this point below.

• As to "undeclared race war", this foolish alarmism is utterly unworthy of you. When the overwhelming majority of Americans of all races are peacefully going about their everyday lives, making their livings, raising their children, worrying about keeping the old Ford running another year, and cheering for their local high school varsity team, what earthly sense does it make to interpret the sociopathic violence of a vanishingly small minority -- again, of all races -- as a "race war"?

  One of the favorite rhetorical tricks of apologists for the elite is to try to foist off stereotypes onto us, so they can strengthen their grip on American society by dividing us into interest groups set against each other. But most black Americans, for example, do not live in inner-city ghetto wastelands, and of those who do, the vast majority wish for more police protection from the small criminal minority victimizing them. Overwhelmingly, white Americans -- of whatever social background -- find racism as morally objectionable as the most "enlightened" intellectuals, and have no more sympathy for the minuscule minority of violent Klansmen and skinheads than you do. (They may well object to being constantly nagged and preached at by politicians who claim that somehow they are responsible for the misfortunes of other Americans, but that is a different matter entirely.)

• Who, precisely, thinks "that it is normal to have armed police posted in public schools"? I personally certainly don't, and obviously neither do you. Perhaps Hillary Clinton does, particularly since she didn't even send Chelsea to a public school. The pervasive violence in our inner cities is due entirely to government policy: the socialism which has made it possible for generations to be raised without the normal economic incentives to a responsible lifestyle and to healthy, stable family relationships; and the paternalistic fascism of drug prohibition, which has insured that criminal activity will be highly profitable and that law-enforcement resources will be squandered and corrupted enforcing laws against victimless crimes. That this violence is reflected in our public schools should not be surprising; the same government that has destroyed our cities is running the schools. But what does this government-induced pathology have to do with competition for resources, or even with some (imaginary) "race war"?

Still another false belief is that unlimited economic growth is possible. It isn't. Resources are finite. The carrying capacity of any given piece of ground is limited. If that were not so, archaeologists wouldn't have anything to do. The world is a graveyard of once-powerful and prosperous nations and empires. Unequal distribution of wealth, of resources and of opportunity is, always has been and always will be a fact of life.

Here again, a non-sequitur is deduced from a half-truth. In one sense, since we all are, at the moment, confined to a rock eight thousand miles in diameter, circling endlessly 93 million miles from the nearest refueling station, resources are indeed finite.

But that's not the real question. The question, as you say, is one of carrying capacity -- and, as you do not say, prospects for the future. Just in terms of living space, for example, if we were to put the entire population of the planet into suburban family homes on eighth-acre lots, the resulting mega-subdivision would be about the size of Texas. (This would never work, of course; it would be a four-hour drive to the nearest supermarket for most people.) The point is that the planet is nowhere near its carrying capacity right now, and every claim by neo-Malthusian alarmists that we're "running out" of something vital or other has proven completely false.

An excellent article in the current (Dec. 20, 1997--Jan 2, 1998) issue of England's The Economist magazine notes,

... predictions of ecological doom, including recent ones, have such a terrible track record that people should take them with pinches of salt instead of lapping them up with relish. For reasons of their own, pressure groups, journalists and fame-seekers will no doubt continue to peddle ecological catastrophes at an undiminishing speed. These people, oddly, appear to think that having been invariably wrong in the past makes them more likely to be right in the future. The rest of us might do better to recall, when warned of the next doomsday, what ever became of the last one.

In 1972 the Club of Rome ... said total global oil reserves amounted to 550 billion barrels. "We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade," said President Jimmy Carter shortly afterwards. Sure enough, between 1970 and 1990 the world used 600 billion barrels of oil. So, according to the Club of Rome, reserves should have been overdrawn by 50 billion barrels by 1990. In fact, by 1990 unexploited reserves amounted to 900 billion barrels -- not counting the tar shales, of which a single deposit in Alberta contains more than 550 billion barrels.

The Club of Rome made similarly wrong predictions about natural gas, silver, tin, uranium, aluminium, copper, lead and zinc. In every case, it said finite reserves of these minerals were approaching exhaustion and prices would rise steeply. In every case except tin, known reserves have actually grown since the Club's report; in some cases they have quadrupled. [The Club's report] "Limits to Growth" simply misunderstood the meaning of the word "reserves".

We are both old enough to remember vividly the predictions of the 1970s that world famine was inevitable. Then came the "green revolution", and nowadays what famines occur are invariably the result of civil wars (as in Somalia) and government mismanagement (as in North Korea) -- they have nothing whatever to do with the carrying capacity of the land.

So anyone who claims, as you do here, that unlimited economic growth is not possible (in any sense relevant to current affairs) bears a very heavy burden of proof, given that similar claims in the past have invariably proven spectacularly wrong, and given moreover that those who make such claims are putting themselves squarely in the camp of such charlatans as global warming guru [né global cooling guru] Steven Schneider, and of such opportunists as clueless fencepost Al Gore.

We are also both old enough to remember films of the '30s and '40s, in which the ultimate luxury of the very rich was a private movie theater in their mansions. We now live in a country where more than three out of four households with incomes below the official poverty level own VCRs and color TVs, and where one of the principal poverty-related health problems is obesity. Yet the population is now nearly double what it was in 1940. Tell me again about economic impossibilities and the limits of technology, Charley.

European-derived people seem to have lost the will to survive. Garrett Hardin, the biologist, has said, "The politicizing of universalism by Western elites and their legal and social institutions ... has deluded many European-derived people into believing that it is immoral to survive as a distinct group. As a result they can find no reason to resist the Third World flood inundating the West."

OK, now we come to the point of the article: immigration is bad and has to be (presumably) stringently controlled. But here again I can find no serious argument in favor of this opinion -- every serious study has shown that, even given the pervasive socialism of most levels of government in this country, immigration has provided economic benefits to the United States, now and throughout its history -- including even illegal immigration.

For example, a study published jointly by The Cato Institute and The National Immigration Forum concluded (inter alia):

• Immigrants, even those from countries that are much poorer and have lower average life expectancies than the United States, are healthier than U.S. natives of the same age and sex. New immigrants have better records with respect to infant mortality and health than do U.S. natives and immigrants who have been in the United States longer.

• New immigrants are unusually mobile geographically and occupationally, in large part because of their youth. Such mobility increases the flexibility of the economy and mitigates tight labor markets.

• First- and second-generation immigrant children do unusually well in school. They win an astonishingly high proportion of scholastic prizes.

• Immigrants do not cause native unemployment, even among low-paid or minority groups. A spate of respected recent studies, using a variety of methods, agrees that "there is no empirical evidence documenting that the displacement effect [of natives from jobs] is numerically important" (Borjas 1990, 92). The explanation is that new entrants not only take jobs, they make jobs. The jobs they create with their purchasing power, and with the new businesses which they start, are at least as numerous as the jobs which immigrants fill.

• Re wage effects, one recent summary concludes, "Immigration has no discernible effect on wages overall... Wage growth and decline appear to be unrelated to immigration--a finding that holds for both unskilled and skilled workers" (Fix and Passel 1994, 48).

At the same time, "immigration control" has frequently been used by politicians as a pretext for violation of Americans' basic civil liberties -- for example, the first victim disarmament law outside the Jim Crow South was New York City's 1911 Sullivan Law, passed ostensibly to keep firearms out of the hands of "undesirable" recent Italian and Jewish immigrants. Or look at Dianne Feinstein's universal biometric ID card, which we'll all have to carry, and the Federal employee database -- every American will have to get permission from some Federal bureaucrat before he can be hired! This outrage was passed, you will recall, in the name of "immigration control."

So you see, Charley, I'm a lot more worried about damage to American society from power-hungry government bureaucrats and politicians than from a couple million hardworking wetbacks, even if they bring the wife and kids with them. And given your uncompromising commitment to the American traditions of personal liberty and mistrust of the government, I would have expected you to feel the same way.

I believe that we are now at the point at which the ruling class will have to be replaced or we will proceed into the gloomy and dismal future where its false beliefs and bad actions are taking us.

Agreed. But the "false beliefs and bad actions" have to do with their own arrogant assumption of omniscience and faith in their own moral authority to accumulate unlimited power, rather than with anything they may pretend to believe about humanity in general.

I don't know if Americans will commit national suicide or decide to resuscitate themselves. It will depend on how many Americans can stand to look reality in its stern and unfriendly face.

The only "stern and unfriendly face" I see staring back at me is the Puritan glare of that personification of the Nanny State, Everett Koop, Santa Claus' evil twin. The reality is that, left to itself, a free society of free human beings will solve its own problems, dynamically reinventing and adjusting itself in a million tiny ways every day.

What you're seeing, Charley, is the frightening visage of Leviathan, standing between the people and the prosperous, exciting future that freedom offers. I'm not surprised that you mistook it for "reality", since the government has grown to surround and pervade every aspect of our lives. But I'm still somewhat disappointed that you were not perceptive enough to see through it.

Best wishes and Happy Holidays,

Craig

G4C: Politics for the Thinking Redneck