Free Enterprise Foundation

Annual Ethics & Civic Responsibility Luncheon and Awards

2007-04-15T12:41:00.000-05:00

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Free Enterprise Foundation Announces Ethics & Civic Responsibility Luncheon and Award Winners

Date and time: Monday, April 30, 2007, 12:00 noon-2:00 PM
Location: The Citadel Alumni Banquet Hall, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, Hagood Avenue at Congress St, Charleston, SC 29409. Guest Speaker: The Honorable Edwin Meese, former Attorney General of the U.S

The Free Enterprise Foundation will present its second annual Awards for Ethics and Civic Responsibility during a luncheon at The Citadel’s Alumni Banquet Hall on Monday, April 30, 2007. The luncheon will feature a keynote address by The Honorable Edwin Meese III, former Attorney General of the U.S. This annual award recognizes business, philanthropic and academic leaders for their contributions to our community, which represent the ideals and goals of the highest ethical standards and civic responsibility.

The 2007 Free Enterprise Foundation Award for Ethics and Civic Responsibility will be presented to three couples from Charleston, S.C: former SC Governor and Mrs. James Edwards, Mr. and Mrs. William Hewitt, and Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Zucker. These awards are being given in recognition of their generous support to so many of our City’s institutions but particularly: The Citadel, College of Charleston and Medical University of South Carolina.

During the luncheon, Ed Meese, a member of the Free Enterprise Foundation’s board of trustees, will provide his perspective on the value of civic responsibility in our society.

Robert Freer, Jr., Founder and President of the Free Enterprise Foundation says of this Ethics and Civil Responsibility award “We created this award to recognize individuals for their commitments to civically oriented service. The noted and deserving honorees for the 2007 awards are among the top tier of individuals in Charleston today, who place service above self. The award recipients’ efforts to ensure bright futures for The Citadel, College of Charleston and MUSC reflect a commitment to philanthropic stewardship in this community that will serve as a leadership role model for decades to come. Their efforts on behalf of our community and the of State of South Carolina are greatly appreciated.”

Tickets for the 2007 Free Enterprise Foundation Awards for Ethics and Civic Responsibility luncheon are $75.00 and may be purchased via a link on the foundation’s Website, located at www.freeenterprise.tv. Sponsorship opportunities for this event are also available. The Free Enterprise Foundation is a Charleston-based not-for-profit academic business institute that inspires and promotes responsible practices in the global economy. For more information about the 2007 Award for Ethics and Civic Responsibility luncheon, sponsorship opportunities or the Free Enterprise Foundation, please contact Robert E. Freer, Jr. at (843) 953-4944 or robert.freer@citadel.edu.

For further information:
CONTACT: ROBERT E. FREER, JR, FREE ENTERPRISE FOUNDATION FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT
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Best of Times, Worst of Times

2007-04-15T12:35:00.000-05:00

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity . . .

Thus Charles Dickens begins a Tale of Two Cities, the tale of another era of upheaval and societal change. Each generation since our own revolution could say the same. Each has overcome its own unique challenges. Each has known triumph and the euphoria it brings as well as the vinegar of misery brought on by natural or manmade disaster and pestilence. Ours is no different. We have seen incredible advances in science, standard of living, and the prospects within our own lifetimes of overcoming life’s mysteries that have challenged us since the beginning of time.

As we stand on the edge of what could be a golden era in which we and all mankind could benefit, we face only our own human limitations. Man’s dual nature of good and evil continues to stand resolutely before us, unyielding as it has been for eons. This generation’s challenge is not just our relationship with hotspots like Iraq.

As indicated in my last article, we are bedeviled by a Scarlet O’Hara approach to the future. I have news for you. Tomorrow is already here. The Ship of State is much bigger than the Queen Mary. It takes a long time to turn her from her disastrous course. In our last article we looked at what needs to be done to the assault on our borders by illegal aliens that have overwhelmed our ability to absorb them into our society. This week I would like to talk about entitlements.

First a few facts; we are headed towards a permanent change in our demographics. The number of Americans 65 or older will almost double and rise from 12 percent of our population to 20 percent over the next 25 years while what is currently referred to as the “working age population” will only grow by 10 percent during the same time.

According to The Congressional Budget Office, if you assume that that the growth of health care costs does not abate, Medicare and Medicaid will grow by nearly five times as a share of the economy by 2050. They will absorb as much of our economy themselves by 2040 as our entire budget does today. Those figures are for our health care related entitlements only and don’t include social security which, while not as bleak, is pretty bad. Current predictions are that outgo will exceed income around 2017, and the system will be unable, unassisted by general tax revenues to pay full benefits in 2041.

Even under the sunniest of assumptions, government’s share of national expenditures (GNP) within the next 25 years would have to exceed 30 percent to meet its entitlement burden, thus threatening national growth and employment. Increasingly business would be working to meet the government’s obligations rather than building for its future and that of its employees.

Deficit spending won’t work. The demographic changes are permanent and thus as debt grows exponentially, it will threaten our viability as a functioning state. Even now we have seen the percentage of the national debt in the hands of the public grow to 37% and will grow to 46% under a best case assumption by The Congressional Budget Office. The real bad news is that an increasing portion of that debt is foreign owned. Japan holds over 700 billion dollars in our public paper, and China has over a trillion dollars of combined foreign and private sector debt.

We also are not saving. Our national rate of savings has steadily decreased since the early 90s and is now a negative figure and when combined with our government’s behavior, we present a picture of a nation consuming itself like there is no tomorrow.

I am sure I have missed a shocking statistic or two, but you get the point. We either have to trim the programs and the promises they reflect, descend into penury by ignoring the problem or pull together in the best tradition of Americans to work ourselves out of the mess we have created. I have never seen a problem that a committed America couldn’t solve. It is no different here. We are up to it and I encourage you to engage your national representatives about your expectation that they will work in good faith to get it done.

The Medicare and Medicaid programs are worth a column on their own, but before concluding, let me suggest a few ideas for reform of Social Security. It was never intended as anything other than a supplemental income system. Reality today is that it is much more, and for those nearing retirement it must be fixed to assure its sustainability.

For those just entering the workforce and looking at retirement 50 years away, I don’t believe that is so. They have a lifetime to plan and work. I say 50 years because it is increasingly clear those expectations that older Americans are going to take their watch and retirement at 62 or even 65 and enjoy their golden years are badly flawed.

If we readjusted our actuarial expectations for Social Security to those when the program was created, workers wouldn’t be eligible until 75. I wouldn’t propose we do that that, but how about requiring those 25 or younger in 2007 to wait until they are 72? For those 35 or less, we could add a year from age 62 for each year as a transitional strategy to ease the program into place for those who still have an almost 40 years before expected retirement.

To encourage savings early, there should be a super saver rate of five percent or even 0% for capital assets held 20 years or longer. It would most effectively be available to these individuals in partial recognition of the changes we are making in the entitlement age for Social Security benefits. We should also leave in place the shelter amounts for all existing deferred tax recognition programs and their eligible withdrawal date to encourage those who do retire at 62 to have the money useable for that or a new career.

As a final suggestion I would add that while it is fine to index the ceiling for taxation of earnings for social security benefits, I would not materially raise the cap so that it remains but one part of the younger workers’ package of retirement benefits.

Robert E. Freer, Jr.
Free Enterprise Foundation Founder and President
Charleston Mercury, April 12, 2007; p. 16

Generational Heritage

2007-04-04T18:21:00.000-05:00

Here I sit on a Sunday afternoon struggling with my words for this column. I know generally what I want to say, but the words aren’t coming with their usual facility. I guess I could blame it on the “brain fatigue” that comes with completing a substantial effort.

On Friday, our all day conference, “Do Ethics Really Matter” featuring former Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and “an all star cast” of participants got to the nub of that question and surpassed even my expectations with the power of their insight. We have over 8 hours of tape that we will reduce to two or three digestible doses for you to view on our website, and if we are successful in convincing educational television to carry an hour of it, we hope that its lessons can be carried state wide.

Initially I was intending to write on our crisis in illegal immigration and what it is doing to our country. I will get to that in a few paragraphs, but having already done two columns on that over the past two years, I find it difficult to shed more wisdom on that issue than I have already. As I catalogue “likely suspects” for this column, I find a common theme for most of what challenges us daily. That theme is the possibility that we may be the first generation in America’s history to leave the country in worse shape than it was when we received responsibility for its welfare.

A year ago I wrote of having become our parent’s generation. If that is so, we are the “in charge” generation. What does that mean regarding the heritage we are going to leave to our children? With the velocity of change that challenges us daily, we don’t have too much longer to refine the stamp of our generation on our country and our world. How will we be remembered? Is it going to be as the generators of back breaking individual debt that must be funded during our children’s lives? Are we going to resolve our culture war around a set of sustainable values that we can claim as “American” or descend further into “feel-good” chaos? Can we properly preserve a perspective on our ancestors that will help our children to hold them dear for their momentous accomplishments without punishing them or us for the prevailing attitudes of their times.

Most importantly, can we pass on to our children an acceptance of our own humanity and our responsibility to lead the rest of the world toward a better tomorrow? No other nation has the mix of idealism, strength and heritage to do so. Lincoln described us as the last best hope of earth. It was true in 1865, and it is even more so today.

The destructive power today of one individual or a few deranged individuals can be on a par with an entire ravaging army of times past. The corruption of our national values can be just as devastating to our society. Without national purpose we are left unable to exert the willpower required to prevent our own destruction and that of the civilized world that looks to us for leadership. A turning away today could see the world destroyed or pitched into a new dark age.

Space doesn’t permit my laying out here all our challenges and possible solutions for what ails us. The next several years will tell the tale whether we have the intelligence, character and “fortitude”…..(there is that word from the last column again), to leave the next in-charge generation a better republic than we inherited , or whether we will be the first American generation to fail in that regard. It is totally up to us.

In the last several months, we have discussed a number of issues like energy independence and the war in Iraq, and in the weeks ahead, we will tackle others. This week let’s turn back to immigration. I have done two columns about a year apart that both cite the inscription on the base of The Statue of Liberty, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost (sic) to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

In a jointly sponsored event by The Free Enterprise Foundation and The Citadel on March 8, former Attorney General John Ashcroft referred to the same inscription and particularly to the reference to “wretched refuse” that we have historically welcomed with opportunity and transformed into solid Americans through their acceptance of our unlimited opportunity and the freedom to pursue their dreams while accepting our customs, laws and the responsibilities that being an American entails. My previous columns did not dwell on that reference, but it is just as apt today as it has been in the past.

We are the descendants of that “refuse” of prior generations. We are now all proud Americans. I have some doubt that this generation of immigrants will continue that history. They can! I hope they will! But we can only succeed if together we do not allow the wave of undocumented illegals to overwhelm our ability to assimilate them. In the past we had Ellis Island to process a 40 year stream of new Americans. Now we have undocumented immigrants coming by all means of conveyance including treks across arid and dangerous lands or shark infested waters, all willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to reach our shores.

Many in our society feel the battle is already lost. “How do we cope with 12 million souls already here with more coming in an endless stream?” Others respond, “What is the harm? Don’t we need them for jobs Americans and legal aliens won’t do?” I will tell you plainly that we won’t have an America you will recognize or one that will be able to live up to its traditional responsibilities, if we don’t control our borders soon. The flood of humanity is undermining the social safety net and tearing at the fabric of our society.

Here are some figures for you that come mostly from the Los Angeles Times. My original source was dated 1997, but my research assistant tells me they are still accurate and has supplemented them with others. 40% of all workers in Los Angeles County are working for cash and not paying taxes. They are predominantly illegal immigrants without green cards. 95% of the warrants in Los Angeles for murder are for illegal aliens. Two thirds of all births in Los Angeles are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal whose births are taxpayer supported. More than 380,000 “anchor babies” were born to illegal aliens in the United States in 2005. 97.2% of all costs incurred from those births were paid by the American taxpayer. Total tax burden on U.S. citizens in 2005 was an estimated $11,000 for each of us. 25% of all inmates in California detention centers are illegal immigrants and half of all gang members are illegal aliens from south of the border.

This data can be compared to similar data for other states along our Southwestern border. Perhaps more importantly, these immigrants are not assimilating as did prior generations. 40% of Los Angeles’ ten million population are native Spanish speakers with minimal skills in English and still think of themselves as from their homeland. It is estimated that net of taxes paid by those that do pay, the annual cost to U.S. taxpayers of our uncontrolled immigration is $70 Billion.

Congress has made a down payment on controlling our borders with its passage last year of $1.2 billion that will create an impenetrable barrier along our entire southern border. That should be completed as soon as possible. Border Patrol, other enforcement personnel and judicial resources need to be allocated to process expulsion of those who have come here illegally and are continuing to flaunt our laws by their criminal behavior.

Respect for the law is not just a problem with the illegals. Knowing full well what they are doing, in some parts of our country, there is total contempt by the businesses that continue to employ illegals, There is no more efficient solution to our problem than closing this loophole. In fact there is no solution unless we do. An effective immigration control program begins with employers’ respect for the law.

The “opportunity” is the fuel for the hordes that besiege us. Providing for an effective guest-worker program to document those who hold such jobs, could be one of the most important actions Congress can take this year to recognize a chronic regional need while restoring order and respect for the law to our immigration program. While they are at it, Congress should provide incentives for employment south of the border for maquiladoras and Mexican entrepreneurs that will help employment on both sides of the border.

President Bush who initially proposed a process to allow those here to stay may have better luck with a Democratic Congress in fashioning a bill that will make it into law. To be effective, it needs to assure effective border control first so the problem doesn’t get worse before it gets better. Perhaps those who are allowed to stay under whatever process is ultimately agreed to should also be required to have an American citizen sponsor their continued status so that we effectively separate those who are productively contributing to our society from those who are not.

Robert E. Freer, Jr.
Free Enterprise Foundation Founder and President
Charleston Mercury, March 29, 2007; p. 16

Shift Happens

2007-03-15T19:20:00.000-05:00

I expect most of you suffer the same malady that I do: chronic junk mail “itis”. It is part of the cost of our modern society. Every day, my computer in-box is jammed with almost three hundred unwanted emails that get shunted to my “junk mail box” so that I can approximate some semblance of efficient review and handling of the rest. Every day I delete. Every day it is filled. It has become a ritual. Someone mails it thinking I will read it. I pretend to at least review them, but in fact summarily dump virtually all into oblivion.

In the brief time available to review this unwanted mail, an occasional gem will catch my eye. “Shift Happens” is just such an item. A DVD Created by Karl Fish and modified by Scott McLeod, it takes, in about six minutes, a sobering view of the situation faced by our children and theirs in competition with the newly emerging centers of technology on the other side of the globe.

Mr. Fisch reminds us in the presentation of an array of statistical material of the pre-eminence of Great Britain at the beginning of the 20th Century and the expectation that it was an unassailable pinnacle. Having gotten our attention, he proceeds, backed by some eerie highland violins, to shock us into awareness of our plight:

For every one in a million student in China, there are 1300 just like him. In India there are 1100. The 25% brightest students in China exceed the total population of North America. (That’s 28% for India.) They have more honors students than we have students. China is about to pass the United States as the country with the largest population of English speakers. If we exported all our jobs to China, they could fill all of them and still have a surplus population. In the time it took the DVD to run, 60 babies will be born in the U.S., 244 in China and 351 in India.

The Department of Labor tells us that one out of four of us have been employed by our present employer less than a year, and one out of two has been with their employer less than five years. They cite former governor Riley for the fact that the top ten jobs in 2010 have not been invented yet. In fact an individual starting their technical education today will have the information taught in the first year become obsolete before the end of year three. “We are educating kids for jobs that haven’t been invented yet with information that is outdated to answer questions we don’t even know we have.”

Google processes 2.7 billion queries monthly. The pace of creation of technical information is doubling every two years. To handle the processing of this information, we shipped 47 million computers last year and are fast nearing the ability to ship to the third world fifty to one hundred million $100 computers. By 2013 we should have a computer that will exceed the computational ability of the human mind and by 2023 that computer will cost around $1,000. By 2049 we expect to have a similar cost computer that will exceed the computational ability of the human race.

We send more text messages every day than there are people on earth, and if “My Space” were a country, (106 million users) it would be the 11th largest in the world. The velocity of change is so great that a week’s worth of the New York Times has more new information than an average 18th century Englishman would encounter in a lifetime. We are now close to installation of third generation fiber optic cable that can handle 150,000,000 simultaneous phone calls per second or 1900 CDs. That capacity is estimated to double every 6 months for the next twenty years. By 2010 the amount of new technical information is expected to double every 72 hours.

The challenge is stark. The challenge is immediate, and our survival depends on how well we embrace the challenge. The authors note that the government is not even spending half of the 140 million a year on educational innovation that Nintendo spends on research and development. What I get out of that is that it is, never-the-less, being spent. R & D spending by Nintendo and many others is propelling a huge innovation employment market.

One thing is certain; this market will be filled by our children or those who can do the job. Government’s failure to properly fund public education is significant in the risk it poses to our society of social stratification and its accompanying stresses. Our free society is up to solving both the educational and social problems that confront us, but time is passing and our failures to protect our basic values are compounding our challenge. Porous borders, distain for individual responsibility and self absorption are all sapping the national will.

In a recent report to CEO’s by a prominent former senior intelligence official, there is, in our transformation, a ray of hope. They were advised that the restructuring of American business harkens the end of the age of employer and employee. Employment cannot be guaranteed nor the shape of the business itself even a year into the future. We must think like independent contractors. Husbands and wives are economic units making tradeoffs to balance their needs both emotional and financial.

This requires a huge shift in the American economy. The good news is that we are doing it and inventing the only truly 21st century model economy in the process. The bad news is that we are doing it, and it is socially disruptive, painful and is happening at warp speed to compound our social dislocation.

The official makes it clear that our competitors are not supermen by noting the severe unpublicized problems in the transformation of Far Eastern societies and praises our new economy as “fast, flexible, highly productive and unstable in that it is always fracturing and re-fracturing. “It will,”… increase the gap between the U.S. and everybody else, especially Europe and Japan.”

He concludes and I do as well:

“At the same time, the military gap is increasing. Other than China, we are the only country that is continuing to put money into their military. Plus, we are the only military getting on-the-ground military experience through our war in Iraq. We know which high-tech weapons are working and which ones aren't. There is almost no one who can take us on economically or militarily.

“There has never been a superpower in this position before. On the one hand, this makes the U.S. a magnet for bright and ambitious people. It also makes us a target. We are becoming one of the last holdouts of the traditional Judeo-Christian culture. There is no better place in the world to be in business and raise children. The U. S. is by far the best place to have an idea, form a business and put it into the marketplace. We take it for granted, but it isn't as available in other countries of the world.

“Ultimately, it's an issue of culture. The only people who can hurt us are ourselves, by losing our culture. If we give up our Judeo-Christian culture, we become just like the Europeans. The culture war is the whole ballgame. If we lose it, there isn't another America to pull us out.”

Robert E. Freer, Jr.
Free Enterprise Foundation Founder and President
Charleston Mercury, March 15, 2007; p. 16

Plan B

2007-03-01T21:25:00.000-05:00

Back in 2003, writing the first of what is now almost a half dozen articles on the war in Iraq; I noted that although the allies had superior force of arms to prevail, the real question was whether the alliance will have… “The fortitude to persist…to set the seeds for a new political stability in the Middle East. Fortitude in the aftermath of battle will provide a better life for millions of Muslims and Jews alike and leave the rest of the world a safer place.”

I have returned to that theme several times in the intervening years and believe “fortitude” is still the ultimate question. Right now it isn’t looking real good for “fortitude.” The mainstream press would have you believe that the prospects for success are dim and getting dimmer, that little in the way of civil sector improvement has been accomplished, and our military is being sacrificed for no good reason.

Admittedly our past errors have dug a hole upon which the press has composed their defeatist dirge, but in fact there are signs of progress that General Petraeus and his Princeton brain trust can build on. 47 countries have re-established their embassies, the Iraqi military leadership battalions are coming on stream as promised, and recently in a joint operation, the Deputy Secretary of the Health Ministry was arrested for embezzlement of government funds diverted to the Mahdi Militia. This is an important demonstration that the previous protection for Shia members of the government connected to the various militias is no longer in existence. The Iraqi Air Force and Navy are operational as well, and there is hope that armored vehicles, communication equipment and sufficient arms for them to prevail will soon be forthcoming.

With 55,000 trained police officers, Iraq’s 5 police academies are turning out 3500 new officers every 8 weeks. 96% of Iraqis under age 5 have received the first 2 series of polio vaccinations and 4.3 million Iraqi children are enrolled in primary school. The civil rebuilding program is going ahead full steam despite the everyday acts of terror. There are more than 1100 building projects including 364 schools, 67 public clinics, 15 hospitals, 83 railroad stations, 22 oil facilities 93 water facilities and 69 electrical facilities and the trend is accelerating not diminishing in the face of the sectarian violence. With determination to win, the war is at a tipping point where it could go either way, but in Washington you couldn’t get a plugged nickel for a bet we will see it through to victory.

While there is hope in Baghdad, in Washington the pressure of a superheated early campaign for president and the partisan blame game virtually assure that some action to lower our exposure before 2008 will be forthcoming. How did a campaign begun in such promise end up this way? It didn’t have to. The anger and angst we feel today is a result of strategic and tactical miscalculation by the Administration that has fueled a political firestorm. The issue is now “competence of the war’s managers,” not WMD and certainly not political doctrine. Regrettably all of us including those living in the Mediterranean Basin will pay for our mistakes.

General Powell is looking increasingly Delphic in his “Pottery Barn” pronouncement that, if we break it, we own it. Well, we do own it. It is now our mess not just this president’s or the Republican Party’s. Powell’s first corollary is not to attack until you can do so in overwhelming force. We were at least 200,000 soldiers short of the force needed to keep control of the ground once it was occupied. To compound our error, once we made it to Baghdad, we sent the old Iraqi Army which, in its lower ranks, was just as much a victim of Sadham, home without purpose, training of any kind and without assets to do anything but cause mayhem.

While praying for our troops and their commander on the ground to overcome the obstacles that confront them, and praying for us here at home for our failure of will and intellect, I feel sure the Administration is quietly planning for “Plan B” in case progress on the ground is not visible by early fall at the latest. What might that be like?

John Chipman, Director General of the International institute for Strategic Studies, (IISS) recently noted that “Great power relations are in a state of flux due to the US not being strong enough to enforce the international agenda it seeks to impose.” You can read that as meaning that the interests of peace and global trade have been set back and global intrigue increased. Mr. Chipman went on to suggest, “US power is strong enough to establish an agenda for international activity, but is too weak effectively to implement that agenda globally.” Conversely, he states, “the power of others, whether states or sub-state actors is strong enough to resist an American agenda, but too weak to shape an internationally attractive alternative or to implement an enduring local agenda free of outside influence.” Mr. Chipman is pessimistic that the troop increase in Baghdad will accomplish its goals, noting that level is well below the new U.S. Army and Marines field manual recommendation of 50 per 1,000 for counter insurgency.

Any “Plan B” needs to start with an increase in authorized permanent troop strength. I suspect existing ceilings and manpower mission limitations had a real hand in the initial mistake that put us in the fix we are in. The President has already requested a permanent increase in the Army and Marines of 92,000. Using the aforesaid manual as a guide and considering the number of National Guard units called up for second tours and regular units extended for second and third tours, I doubt if that is enough for an Iraqi sized problem that might confront us in the future. Whatever the figure is for Plan B, it needs to include prolonged assignment of civil affairs units once the area has been pacified, and these units need enhanced language and cultural training to work effectively in those areas thought to be high risk.

The authorized strength ought to substantially increase special operations troops (our spear point) and the logistics to get them anywhere we need quickly. This “bookends” approach with highly trained special operations troops in sufficient number ready to go, regular troops in sufficient force to sustain its operations and pacify and civil affairs units to speed reconstruction and the creation of local government responsive to local needs, gives us the highest likelihood of a credible force required to meet the shifting needs of today’s battlefield. It also gives us third world credibility sufficient to be an inhibiting factor against terrorism at home or abroad.

As our forces prepare to withdraw from Iraq, we will need to retain an appropriate level of force credibility. Troops in effective unit mass will need to remain in the vicinity. Whether we are talking Qatar, Kuwait, Kazakhstan or shipboard in the Indian Ocean, I am not enough of an expert to judge, but suspect that some mix consistent with force needs and regional politics will drive the answer. To facilitate our troop withdrawal from Iraq, there will need to be a mission change from suppressing the conflict in Baghdad to training and border control that will minimize our weakened force strength and leave the heavy lifting to Iraqis. There is an argument that at some stage of the conflict (critics say we are past this point), our troops become the destabilizing force and should be removed to force the political solution we seek. Effective border security would be just the mission to allow us to depart in an orderly fashion as the cities are pacified by Iraqis.

The issue of how many of our troops remain, I leave for a later day when we will know better the situation in Iraq. The ultimate outcome here has always depended on the Iraqi people. The Sunni bloodbath of Shia following our withdrawal after the first Iraqi War and this war of mutual destruction can only be solved by the contending parties. We can only do the best we can to contain its harmful effects in the region and for our economy. For the future, may I suggest that we mimic Theodore Roosevelt who opined that the policy that was best required the United States to talk softly and carry a big stick.

Robert E. Freer, Jr.
Free Enterprise Foundation Founder and President
Charleston Mercury, March 1, 2007; p. 16
(Titled "Fortitude, The Future of Iraq")

Smiling Faces. Beautiful Places

2007-02-16T11:15:00.000-05:00

It gives me a warm feeling whenever I am traveling to see in the array of license plates along the way one from the Palmetto state. In a reflex, it immediately transforms my own face into one of our aforesaid “Smiling Faces.” No one can doubt we have a glorious home. Wonderful, courteous people and the 32 million others who annually visit our “Beautiful Places,” moderate weather, historic culture and nature’s abundance all make South Carolina special.

Even as we smile, challenges to our continued prosperity cause our brows momentarily to knit. All is not perfect in our paradise. While tourism is up and appears headed even higher, our public educational system is in crisis, near the bottom of the national pack. We are producing neither the knowledge based businesses we need to compete in the 21st century nor the technically able workers required to make them go because of our educational gap. We simply must do better. Additionally, because of the unavailability of sufficient risk capital for nascent firms struggling to gain a toehold in our commercial soil, we are discouraging our own entrepreneurs from founding their ventures here.

What is particularly frustrating is that solutions are at hand but have been stymied by our need first to pass a broader set of reforms. We simply haven’t had the political will to get the job done. For at least a dozen years, reform of our antiquated form of state government has been pursued in hope of giving us the executive structure we need to compete with the states in our region. While experts may differ on detail, there is unanimity that our executive branch is in critical need of reform. Thomas Friedman of “Flat World” fame would have us worry about India and China. Heck, I am scared to death of an aggressive Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida.

Our state constitution, reflecting post civil war social and economic tensions, was inspired by “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman in 1895 and continues more than one hundred years later to reflect the populist fear of a strong executive. It sharply limits the power of the executive to see to the efficient and accountable operation of state government. With eight other executive officers, all reflecting their own popular constituencies still required by our constitution to be elected along with the governor, it makes effective administration impossible, and if that isn’t bad enough, the Lieutenant Governor, not necessarily part of “the team,” is elected on a separate ballot from the governor and has at times in past administrations been at odds with his goals.

Whatever the tensions in the South Carolina of 1895, those pressures are of another era, and if we are to place the state on a forward looking path to sustained growth and competitiveness with our neighbors, they are not worthy of holding us from doing what we must today.

In many important markers, our state is very near the bottom of the pack, and unfortunately, despite our apparent frugality, our citizens according to the Executive Budget pay one-third more per capita in state taxes than average throughout the country, and our rate of increase in government spending is 2.4 times the rate of growth in income for our citizens.

The Executive Budget for 2007 notes that “our government is duplicative and unaccountable…. “State government is a hodgepodge of some 50 independent agencies and departments.” and quotes Alexander Hamilton for the truism that, “One of the weightiest objections to a plurality in the executive…is that it tends to conceal faults, and destroy responsibility.”

In the present situation, who can we hold responsible? Our government is structurally fragmented and operationally uncoordinated. The end result is that it is often not responsive to our needs, and its structure and divisions hampers us in effectively doing anything about it.

I ask our public servants in Columbia: “With the governor in his second term and with the pressure on government to be both frugal and effective, isn’t now the time to fix this? And who better to do it than this legislature and this governor?” I do prefer government in the sunshine, but after the fits and starts of the past, I wonder if it wouldn’t be better if our legislative and executive leadership went fishing together for a weekend and worked this out in seclusion with recreation, good fellowship and then hard bargaining on whatever the impediments have been that have held us back. We’re all praying for you, and I am hopeful that our prayers will be answered. We can’t always expect, with the majority of the migration into our state coming from the North, that we will be able to count on the level of political consensus we enjoy currently.

National policy is my usual beat, but inasmuch as I am unburdening myself this week in the state arena, there is one more step we need to take to propel our economy forward and to transform our society into the knowledge based economy we seek. I have now been in this state long enough to feel confident when I say we have both the intellectual and financial capital to transform our economy. We even have described our goals in some detail, but we are going to fail until we handle the financial "Chasm" for the companies/economy we want.

The financial chasm comes for the start-up company when the investor/founder has used up all his capital and ability to fund debt, and he can't get to the revenue flow figures that even the most entrepreneurial venture fund insists upon before investing. It is at this point, we need to look to Pennsylvania for a solution that has proven to be both cost effective and has helped transform their rust belt into an opportunity belt for technology ventures.

Pennsylvania has created a state sponsored venture fund that emphasizes knowledge based employment growth through its Ben Franklin Technology Partners. Originally capitalized with $60 million in state funds and divided into four regionally targeted breeder funds, loosely attached to prominent research universities in the state, the funds, when they make an investment, get back convertible preferred shares or notes and warrants that allow them to participate in the up-side at the same time they have a debt that experience proves will be paid in sufficient percentage to more than nullify the cost of the investment to the citizens of Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania model includes a state board with non paid directors and local boards, also non-paid, for the four breeders. The funds universally will tell you that their success in meeting their goals to help build a new Pennsylvania has been a function of the professionalism of their decision making process that is devoid of politics.

South Carolina is not as big as Pennsylvania and can get good coverage with three regional funds which I would propose be at Clemson, USC and The Citadel/MUSC. The state currently provides some funding for pure research, and a South Carolina version of Ben Franklin would help attract and retain the innovative capital we need to get promising technology firms to the point that our own commercial risk capital can then provide the capital to get them the rest of the way.

These two proposals, when considered as sequential steps, will succeed in breaking the logjam that has held us back. I would welcome the support of my readers to help get this done. I am confident that if we can find the political will to undertake these two actions, we will unleash the forces that will put South Carolina into the forefront in our region and will lead us to the vibrant economy that will secure our future.

Robert E. Freer, Jr
Free Enterprise Foundation Founder and President
Charleston Mercury, February 15, 2007; p. 16

Pandora's Box

2007-02-07T12:06:00.000-05:00

In mythology, in punishment for Prometheus’ theft of fire from the gods and its presentation to mankind, Zeus and the pantheon punish both Prometheus and mankind for Prometheus’ transgression. Prometheus is doomed to have an eagle peck away at his liver, but mankind receives a special punishment.

Each of the gods provides the gift of a trait to the creation of Pandora, a woman conceived as man’s ideal. Not all of her traits were alluring. Zeus made her idle, mischievous and foolish. Hera endowed her with unquenchable curiosity, while Hermes endowed her with cunning, boldness and charm. Pandora also was given a large earthen storage vessel as a gift for mankind.

When Pandora arrives on the scene with her vessel, mankind lives an Eden like existence. At this point, I am sure you are way ahead of me…..Despite Prometheus’ warning to her not to accept any gifts from the gods and Epimetheus insistence that she never open it, Pandora accepts the vessel, and in quick order lifts its lid, and all the world’s woes are released to plague us forever.

Not all was lost; however. In addition to pestilence, fire, disease, evil and death, man received self awareness and, through the exercise of will and the noble part of his being, perfectibility. From the depths of our fall, we have stumbled, crawled and gradually lifted ourselves towards self respect and our lost nobility. We may be fallen creatures, but we don’t have to stay that way. Pandora’s “gifts” are still with us, however, and we are constantly presented with the dilemma of good and evil.

Genetic engineering and testing, thought to be a part of the distant future, present us with just such dilemmas. Since Watson and Crick discovered DNA, scientists and researchers throughout the world have been manipulating the gene pools of numerous plants and animals by introducing new genes into the key to identity. Often the research is in an effort to better understand and treat diseases and cancers. This is not always true, or it is not always the only by-product of the research. The research and discovery creates a profitable market for scientists, universities, and corporations which sometimes overshadow the benevolent efforts of those who work for the common good.

Public polls have shown that 92% of the American public is against the bioengineering and genetic engineering industries. Genetics’ complexities provide very few concrete resolutions, but huge potential for profit. The public yearns for the benefit but is properly scared of the potential impact of “mutants” on our society and is alarmed that the vast profitability that beckons will blind us to its risks. Genetic research regulation is in its infancy, and there is no worldwide consensus on an appropriate protocol to follow. Whatever we may do, labs elsewhere will not be bound, and there is little we can do to channel the knowledge that has been discovered along pathways with which we would be comfortable.

To continue the classical allusion, we are twixt Scylla and Charybdis. Genetic research proffers cures for cancer and other debilitating diseases, healthier lives, and healthier plants and animals on the one hand and potential genetic disaster on the other.

Not unexpectedly, Michael Crichton in his copyrighted manner weaves an edge of disaster story in his most recent novel, Next, that plays our responsible selves against our greedy selves in looking genetic disaster in the eye before pulling us back from the edge.

He argues and I agree. The implementation of rules and regulations is essential to channeling the value and benefits of genetic research along a responsible course. Courts have decided research issues according to property laws. They analogize tissues to, say, the donation of a book to a library. But there is only one such “book” in the world, and we have rightful feelings of ownership about our unique selves, and that feeling will never be abrogated by some skewed notion of contract law. The law should ensure that a patient has permanent control of his or her tissue. “If a magazine can notify you that your subscription has run out, a university can notify you if they want to use your tissue for a new purpose.” And it should require your permission and not impair your children’s rights who bear similar if not exact DNA.

Research data needs to be made public so that the public awareness will help channel the research along responsible pursuits. Researchers are hiding the adverse results of their experiments saying that they are trade secrets. Deaths during research should be fully disclosed in a timely manner. Studies publicized about a drug or research should not be sponsored by the researcher who owns the rights to the drug or research. This practice creates skewed results and the lack of public confidence in the results.

Patenting genes has become a lucrative market. It is highly questionable whether gene patents should be permitted at all. If at all they must be under the most stringent restriction. Not only does patentability encourage a eugenics approach to procreation, genes are part of nature and unique to each individual. They are in no way inventions by the human hand. The purpose of patents is to insure that a person’s invention is protected but encourage others to make their own versions. With gene patents, no person can innovate any other use of the patent without violating the patent itself, so further innovation is closed. Gene patents are bad public policy. They suppress research and that harms patients. Dr. Crichton argues that while scientists, universities, and corporations fear the end of gene patents saying that it threatens research, it is more likely to result in a burst of new products for the public.

Crichton argues that in order to stimulate research efforts, all bans on research should be avoided. Bans serve no purpose. If research is not allowed in the United States, it will be conducted illegally or in some other country where it is lawful. Finally, Dr. Crichton argues that we must rescind the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 that permits university researchers to sell their discoveries for their own profit, even when that research had been funded by taxpayer money. The Act led many scientists to create corporate ties to biotech companies skewing their judgment through the inherent conflict. Today, universities attempt to maximize profits by conducting more and more commercial work themselves, thus making their products more valuable to them when they are fully licensed.

The velocity of technological change in the last half century leaves most of us stunned. Mankind is quick to make use of the product of our own inventiveness, but the interplay among the digits in the digital world we have created has not been lived with long enough to weigh cost versus benefit to us as a species for the velocity of ongoing genetic research . I realize to say that is to shout at the surf that graces our shores. At times like this we are thrown back to Pandora, who in her second look into the vessel released Hope to sustain us in times like these.

Robert E. Freer, Jr.
Free Enterprise Foundation Founder and President
Charleston Mercury, February 1, 2007; p. 16

Leaders of Principle - OpEd

2007-01-20T13:54:00.000-05:00

What is a leader of principle? I have done a recent Google search and found its use ubiquitous to the point of becoming a cliché. It is used mostly in the political context but for everyone from George Washington to Cho En Lei and for all of our national candidates at one point or another. It makes you wonder.

At The Citadel, producing leaders of principle for a global community is not a cliché. It is the goal to which we aspire for our students and for ourselves. I have been teaching Law and Ethics for Business Executives at The Citadel for the past three years, and the course has evolved beyond mere identification of legal rules and court decisions for the wary business executive. We do plenty of that, but increasingly as I have understood the essence of what makes a Citadel education unique, the course has become Law and Ethics for Leaders of Principle. In that regard some of our distinguished business and legal community leaders have helped in that transformation by their guest lectures and by the model of their purpose filled lives in our community.

While typically an entering class has students from 40 states and 10 foreign countries, you can assume that wherever they hail from, they are typical of youngsters anywhere. They are bright-eyed and full of dreams. They undertake the challenge of The Citadel for a complex assortment of reasons but with hope we will show them the way to success in life.

No matter what they have heard, knob summer is no picnic. Life for the next four years will be lived on a 24 hour clock, and the summer “Hell Week” is a shock to youngsters inexperienced in its rigors. Like recruits facing basic training in any military organization, they are stripped of their individual identity and forged into a unit. The Corps is not for everyone, but for those who endure, they emerge as knob privates on their way to becoming the Phoenix of legend. They are tougher, more resilient and with core values that will, with three years of polish, equip them to lead the Corps in their fourth year and assume their role as Leaders of Principle upon graduation.

To endure, a knob has learned that he is fallible and not the center of the known universe. He has learned that others depend on him or her and that his or her success is dependent on adapting to the group’s ethic. The knob also learns that the essence of leadership is service to that society of common values of which he or she is a vital part. Looking right on the parade ground on Friday afternoon is but a metaphor for the interconnectedness and the application of core values consistently applied.

At the center of this ethic are hard work, honesty, trustworthiness and loyalty. The cadet begins to understand “accountability” in a larger context of their responsibility to the Corps and enjoy the pride in themselves that comes from being true to that responsibility.

Ok, so far we have identified values that include a rigorous honesty, recognition of responsibility to something bigger than your own immediate wants, hard work, and acceptance of fallibility but ability to come back from failure better for the failure, tougher, wiser and more resilient. We also have defined leadership in the context of service to a community of common values. The constant repetition of the stress to achieve these traits builds a way of living that endures well beyond a cadet’s time at The Citadel.

The elusive impact of four years in this family of sufferers does not normally strike the uninitiated observer, but I have heard it said that former cadets can recognize the “initiated” who have endured either a Citadel education or that at one of the service academies. I have also heard it said that The Citadel is a place you are delighted to see in your rear mirror when you are done but also one that you ache to see out your front windshield after experiencing life post-graduation

I am fond of quoting John Adams on our Constitution being for “a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.” He better than most of our Country’s fathers spoke to the nature of the world into which, both then and now, we are putting our young men and women when they graduate.

Ralph Parlette notes in his School of Hard Knocks, “Strength and Struggle travel together; the supreme reward for struggle is strength. Life is a battle, and the greatest joy is to overcome. The pursuit of the easy makes men weak.” That is hardly uplifting but accurate as to the unknowable road ahead. If we can prepare the next generation for that world and equip them with the ability to obtain satisfaction from surmounting whatever challenges they have ahead, both they and the society into which they enter as servant/leaders will be the better for it.

As they approach graduation, and have my course, what I am trying to do is to have them reflect on the behavior pattern that has been thrust on them while at The Citadel and leave the school with more awareness of the context in which they have been challenged. Hopefully they will come to accept their new behavior pattern with full knowledge of what they are doing and not mere habit.

This is not just a paean to The Citadel experience. It really is not for everyone, but I expect that The Citadel will expand at a modest rate consistent with its elevated academic standards and facilities to the point that it will be the largest military academy other than our national service academies. The point I ask you to think about is the state of education generally. What kind of society are we creating with young adults who think in the half hour cycle of a sitcom and feel entitled to their comfort? How are we to navigate the dangerous period into which we have sailed? I will be frank that it scares me, and it should scare you too.

Robert E. Freer, Jr.
Free Enterprise Foundation Founder and President
Charleston Mercury January 18, 2007; p. 16

Pollyanna New Year - OpEd

2007-01-20T13:35:00.001-05:00

In 1913 Eleanor Hodgman Porter published the first of two novels about an orphaned girl, Pollyanna Whittier, who arrives in Beldingsville to live with her strait laced and strict Aunt Polly and transforms all about her from frowns to smiles and elevated spirits by her own inexhaustible optimism and determination. The books had such an impact on pre-war America, flushed with its growth into a world power, that being “Pollyannish” became part of our language to describe anyone who was optimistic to the extreme.

Surely it is clear, optimism as a philosophy of life will get you farther than pessimism; it is an editorial attitude of this newspaper. The challenges, both personal and national, we face cannot be overcome if we merely wring our hands and say the “sky is falling.” Regrettably, as a nation we haven’t even reached the state of consensus to agree as to the state of the heavens, falling or not. We remain in a Pollyannish state of denial.

While my view on our state of denial is not limited to energy policy, it is clearly accurate when applied to our national energy policy and practice. We continue to mindlessly gobble huge amounts of the world’s supply of fossil fuels, compromising our national security by our dependence on undependable foreign sources of supply. Our practices challenge our stated principles of non interference in the affairs of foreign states and require huge, unproductive expenditures for environmental control measures to protect our atmosphere from further degradation. What are we thinking? Even Pollyanna wouldn’t assume that continuation of our national energy addiction won’t lead to disaster.

The world produces 84.6 million barrels a days of crude oil. The United States consumes 20.7 million barrels a day. That is almost 25% of the world’s supply. To put our national jeopardy into context, we only produce 6.8 million barrels a day from domestic sources and can only refine 17.7 million barrels in domestic facilities. Please remember the use figures are not static but growing apace while the world supply figures are not. Additional unproven reserves are proportionally small and require a long lead time to secure. We are hung up on those 14.1 million barrels a day difference between domestically produced and imported daily consumption. Nothing short of a “Moon Mission” dedication by the nation will get us out of this mess.

Our enemies are counting on Pollyanna to prevail. They invented the earliest form of abacus and know how to bring us to our knees. By the way, don’t count on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It is a short term band aid of 700 million barrels. You do the math. It won’t last long. Any substantial interruption of supply, and our economy would implode.

Our technological sophistication would, as our enemies intend in best guerilla warfare manner, become the Achilles heel to bring us down. I will admit that the math is not quite as simple as projected because of allied source oil that might still be available in some amounts, but those societies are largely advanced as well, and in a jihadist warrior inspired interruption of oil to the West, market interdependence would end up working against the developed world.

We can, with dedication and the marshalling of the skills we do have, work our way out of this disastrous dependence, flip the dependence back on the oil supplying nations and spur our own economic development through the use of clean non-imported energy. What it takes to accomplish this is to adopt some variant of the following strategy with a determined exercise of national will.

It is beyond scandal to allow ourselves to have gotten into this mess. If we have the courage and the will, coming together to solve our energy dependence will propel our society throughout the 21st century and provide the economic underpinning to work on many of our other glaring problems.

If you consider bio-fuels to be what is growing in the neighbor’s cornfield, think again. A strategy based on corn grain, is, at best, a zero sum game from both a net energy and environmental perspective. It also cripples the important role corn plays in our being able to feed the third world and in regaining a positive balance of payments to underpin our currency. Bagasse from sugar cane works and perhaps the stalks of the corn plant and certain grasses may in time yield a positive exchange for the effort. They do nothing for the environment or to wean us from the internal combustion engine. In the short run for national security reasons, it may be worth the effort, but it is decidedly not where our effort needs to be concentrated.

In the transportation arena, we need to concentrate on non internal combustion solutions. U.S. and world suppliers of passenger vehicles need to receive every inducement we can think of to bring hydrogen cell vehicles to the market in large numbers. A gallon of gasoline has the same energy content as a kilo of hydrogen, but hydrogen vehicles get 2 to 3 times higher mileage.

We have sufficient resources to accomplish our conversion to hydrogen, and because of critical national security exposure, it is a process that government should be leading. Assurance of markets, incentive for research and national fueling availability all should benefit from government policy that reflects itself in the private sector. One unplanned benefit of this will be convergence of transportation, electrical, and chemical industries that may well facilitate product development and career opportunities not yet envisioned. While substantial conversion of our fleet should be a ten year goal, progress in the short term toward the goal would itself be an important curb on oil markets.

The transportation sector is not the only area in which we are exposed to foreign source of supply. Approximately 20% of our energy grid is supplied by oil and gas and is subject to the same limitations as indicated earlier in the article. We need to do all we can to reduce that dependence. Currently about 20% of our power generation is Nuclear. In this day and age, nuclear energy safety, cost and effectiveness as well as its environmental benefits should no longer be in question. It provides 75% of our clean energy now and is the only clear alternative to do so going forward.

All the renewable resource energy on which we can rely, can only be useful at the margins. Wind, photovoltaic, tides, geothermal should be encouraged, but we should not plan our future on their being able to bail us out. It is estimated that our need for electricity will be 45% greater in 2030. To avoid giving up the security purchased by effective hydrogen fuel cell conversion in the transportation industry, we must maximize all our domestic source alternatives both clean and fossil to secure our future.

While no new nuclear facilities have come on stream since 1995, a number are under construction or well along in the licensing process. Those planned or in licensing would only keep nuclear’s share of the market where it is today. To be secure, we need to do better going forward in replacing the 20% of foreign supplied energy stocks with domestic nuclear, renewable, and U.S. or Canadian fossil fuel sourced energy. While nothing in Washington is beyond politics, this, as a national priority must be beyond partisanship. The stakes are just too great.

If we begin in the new Congress to insist on immediate action to address this impending catastrophe, like Pollyanna at the end of book one, we may be able to say, “-Oh, I can- I can- I can walk! I did today all the way from my bed to the window... How good it was to be on legs again!” We have much further than the window to travel, but we must begin the journey today. Even Pollyanna would agree.

Robert E. Freer, Jr.
Free Enterprise Foundation Founder and President
Charleston Mercury December 26, 2006; p. 16

Duty - OpEd

2007-01-20T13:29:00.000-05:00

As a young cattle rancher in Dakota territory, Theodore Roosevelt began his speech to a boisterous crowd of Fourth of July revelers in Dickinson with the following: “…But as you already know your rights and privileges so well, I am going to ask you to excuse me if I say a few words about your duties. Much has been given to us…and we must take heed to use aright the gifts entrusted to our care. It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use it.” The future president continued…he liked “big things” and did not undervalue America’s material prosperity, “But we must keep steadfastly in mind that no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue.” Robert E. Lee, the paragon of virtue, pronounced “Duty, the sublimest word in the English language.”

As a nation we can agree to the ideal of duty, but we seem to have a heck of a time applying the principle to our lives. Our over emphasis on “rights”, human and otherwise, without a corresponding emphasis on responsibility has obscured the “duty” each of us has to protect this society from abuse. No one who enjoys its benefits should criticize our society unless they are contributing by their intellect, their physical labor or financial investment in its protection and betterment. Surely we cannot advance as a nation, if we are preoccupied with tearing down its institutions or leaders.

I have a real problem with those of our fellow Americans who denigrate the President’s elected service to our Country. I am not speaking about limiting free speech. Yes, we all have that. Just because “you can” doesn’t mean “you should”. Our society, though robust, does require decorum in how we express our dissent. What I object to is the sometimes vicious, almost always ill informed personal abuse heaped upon the president.

“43,” as he sometimes calls himself, to distinguish from his father “41” who also served as President, is the product of one of this country’s oldest “immigrant” families and one, which, as their actions for generations of service to this country confirm, does know the meaning of “duty.”

Differ with his policies if you want. Question the implementation of those policies with which you differ, but when you attack the character of this country’s president, or verbally disrespect him or his office, you reveal a personal character defect that is a far larger mote in your eye than any deficiency in our president.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s look at “duty” as it relates to the public debate regarding the administration’s leadership of our actions in Iraq.

The difference between success and failure in a protracted battle is often a matter of imagination and will power. Wars test a country’s mettle, and it is on the home front we aren’t doing so well. Those thousands of young men and women serving in the combat zone represent our Best, not second raters who would have done almost anything “better” if it had been available to them.

Many have volunteered for second and third tours of duty at great sacrifice to them and their families. They believe in their mission, and their actions represent an understanding of what duty is. They are living it every day.

If the will power of the public were equal to that of our troops, there would be no question of the victory of a free Iraq. And in any case, whatever national command leadership deficiencies our troops may be experiencing, we will still be better as a nation for their experience. For anyone to question their patriotism or their mental ability is the height of churlishness.

Duty begins with an emphasis on self respect. When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Who is that person? Is that person trustworthy; respectful of other’s rights, respectful of their own person and not abusive toward others or themselves? Individuals who respect themselves are emotionally invested in their community. Are you? Do you appreciate that it is the mutual dependence we embrace as citizens that builds strong communities and fulfilling lives?

I am fond of quoting John Adams regarding our republic being created for a “religious and moral people”. It is not “fit for any other.” While the right of dissent must be respected, our preservation is dependent on our mutual acceptances of core Judeo Christian values that are ingrained in our Constitution and The common law.

On that score, I fear we are failing. Our kids in Iraq get it, but our mass media don’t. They are particularly to blame in encouraging violence, crudeness, and the celebration of the lowest common denominator of behavior, all in pursuit of ratings. We are celebrating the banal, the self indulgent and the wholesale pursuit of pleasure. Is it any wonder that by most measures, there has been a coarsening of our social values and a weakening of the mutual ties that bind us as families and as a nation?

As we end 2006, let me urge all of us to resolve to strengthen our mutual ties in 2007, to humbly accept our deficiencies and work toward repairing our self respect as together, we strengthen the national bonds that make us a great nation.

Robert E. Freer, Jr.
Free Enterprise Foundation Founder and President
Charleston Mercury December 6, 2006; p. 16

The Bell Curve Election - OpEd

2007-01-04T17:01:00.000-05:00

Well, after twelve years of trying, the dog finally caught the truck! It remains to be seen whether the Democrats will know what to do with control of Capitol Hill now that they have it, nor can we know whether the “Republicrats,” who lost control by forgetting who they were, will have the good sense to return to being Main Street Republicans.

What interests me from the perspective of national policy is the almost perfect bell curve of voters, representing a substantial percentage of independent or loosely affiliated partisans that swung this election from Republican control to Democratic. We have previously noted the growth in the independent block from 30% to almost 40% of the electorate. This is larger than either major party can claim and represents a real opportunity for political realignment.

If the utterances of the incoming Congressional Committee chairs are any indication, they realize the potential, understand they are on a short leash with a fickle public and are sounding a whole lot more middle-of-the-road than anyone can remember. The recent interviews with a newly humble Charles Rangel discussing the limitations of what he can do as Chairman of Ways and Means are a far cry from his histrionics as a minority member of the committee. Cliché though it be, control brings with it responsibility and accountability.

In this regard, I expect continuing low level warfare for the heart and soul of The Democratic Party. In order to capture the major portion of Bell Curve voters and turn them into Democrats, the party would have to disavow the liberal voters who are identified in the public’s mind as the heart and soul of their Party. Those Democrats who made up the Democratic Leadership Council that powered Bill Clinton to two national victories, only to be repudiated by the Democratic left wing, may now be its salvation. They certainly will be the power behind Hillary’s campaign, which in truth is already well advanced. The radical left will not go quietly, however, and many of its finest are in critical positions within the Party machinery to wage trench warfare.

For Republicans, it is a waiting game. Will Speaker Pelosi, representing one of the most liberal districts in the country, backup her new centrist voice with moderate proposals or replace her new found moderation with liberal action consistent with her record. I know where I would put my bet! Charlie Cook reports in his column that one long serving Republican has advised that he and his colleagues would do well to work with moderate Blue Dog Democrats to remain relevant in the new Congress. I suspect that advice will be ignored. In its place, I expect a replay of Newt Gingrich’s strategy from the 90’s of guerilla warfare leading up to a rematch in 2008.

Speaker Pelosi’s First 100 hour proposal is already under threat with not all factions of the Party willing to adopt broad lobbying reform. Other aspects of the program appeal to the Democratic base but will alienate small business by substantially raising the minimum wage.

The Democrats promise as well to promote stem cell research and authorize direct negotiation with drug companies to lower prices for Medicare. While the former is likely to survive a veto, it will be at the cost of a re-energized right to life lobby. As for direct drug price negotiations, while such negotiation, in the short term will be successful, the cost in the pace of new drug development is likely to be significantly slowed. The Drug companies are realizing significant profits currently, but the cost of new developments is so astronomical, many of these companies are only one failure or one law suit away from forced merger with a rival.

Other aspects of Democratic control will rile financial markets by threatening the existing tax cuts scheduled to expire in 2010 and the 15% tax on capital gains and perhaps, even threaten an increase in the top tax bracket to pay for adjustments to the alternative minimum tax that will trap an estimated 23 million taxpayers. The Washington Post recently estimated an additional 100,000 homes in the Washington Metropolitan Area will be captured by the drop in the level of its threshold amount that is already part of the law.

The forces of disunion in the Democratic Party are almost irresistible in the absence of White House Control. Any strategy hatched by party leadership to capture the “Bell Curve” will almost assuredly be scuttled by the rank and file. As for those Democrats representing “Republican” districts, they will be trapped between a party leadership forced to the left and energized campaigns already begun by many of the same candidates they overcame in this election. They will be hard pressed to fashion a winning strategy to overcome the rematch in the absence of George Bush on the ballot.

It appears that neither party is in a position to realize on the opportunity provided by The Bell Curve to sustain a realignment of the American electorate. Like the demise of the Federalists and the Whigs, the 40% of our electorate who hold the balance of power are likely to wander back and forth between the two major parties unless a new entity powered by leadership from within that speaks for their interest comes along.
--
Robert E. Freer, Jr.
Free Enterprise Foundation Founder and President
Charleston Mercury December 7, 2006; p. 16

Thanksgiving - OpEd

2007-01-04T16:56:00.000-05:00

Devoid of the commercialism of the yuletide season, Thanksgiving, has always been my favorite time of year. It is an annual gift we give ourselves before succumbing to the frantic dash to the end of the year and the challenges that await us there. No gifts other than a giving attitude are required at the Thanksgiving table. Just bring your love for your family and your prayerful thanks for our bounty and soak in the reciprocated feelings of those you care for the most. As we prepare for this special time, let’s reflect upon the many blessings of this land and carry with us into the New Year what is at the heart of this uniquely American holiday.

385 years ago, 46 hearty settlers in what is now Massachusetts, survivors of the horrible winter of 1620-21, joined with 91 Wampanoag Indians for a three day harvest festival to celebrate their survival and the Indian kindness that had made the difference. After their struggles, these pilgrims had much for which to be thankful. Their harvest, after their near starvation the previous winter, had been bountiful, and it seemed their foothold in this new land was now secure.

It cannot be said, however, that the holiday was an instant "hit". It was repeated in 1623 but not again until 1676. In October of l777, and in 1789, more than a hundred years later, George Washington, called the new nation to celebrate a national day of Thanksgiving. His message for 1789 was particularly eloquent. In setting Thursday, November 26, 1789 as a "day of Service" to that ..."Great and Glorious Being who is the...author of all the good that was, that is or that will be," Washington proclaimed it was the "duty of all nations to acknowledge the Providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits and humbly to implore His protection and favor." But again the holiday was to fall into neglect until rescued in the midst of that horrible war that would finally complete the promise of our War for Independence.

President Lincoln, not long after the Battle at Gettysburg, called for the last Thursday in November to be a day of "Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father" who has provided the "large increase in freedom." His call restored Thanksgiving to a prominence from which it has not receded. It did take until 1941, however, for Congress to officially sanction the day as a national holiday.

Our presidents ever since have recognized the holiday with messages calling for our prayer and thanksgiving. Some messages have been more notable than others. In words to be echoed by his cousin three decades later, Theodore Roosevelt reminded the nation in 1901, "Let us remember that as much has been given us, much will be expected from us, and that true homage comes from the heart as well as from the lips and shows itself in deeds". Again in 1905, he added, "....We are not threatened by foe from without. The foes from whom we should pray to be delivered are our own passions, appetites and follies, and against these there is always need that we should war."

Cousin Franklin, in a similar vein thirty years later, urged the nation to prayer as follows: "During the past year we have been given courage and fortitude to meet the problems which have confronted us in our national life. Our sense of social justice has deepened. We have been given vision to make new provisions for human welfare and happiness, and in a spirit of mutual helpfulness, we have cooperated to translate vision into reality. More greatly have we turned our hearts and minds to things spiritual. We can truly say, 'What profiteth it a nation if it gain the whole world and lose its own soul.’ With gratitude in our hearts for what has already been achieved, may we, with the help of God, dedicate ourselves anew to work for the betterment of mankind."

Through wars, depressions, and the challenge of our western migration, our presidents have in their Thanksgiving messages called for us to be mindful of that eternal Power that binds us together and makes this nation of immigrants "special". Three centuries apart John Winthrop and Ronald Reagan would speak in similar terms to the special nature of this land we call our home. John Winthrop in the following stark words called us to our duty:

For we must consider that we shall be as a City Upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us,. ..we shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants and cause their prayers to be turned into curses until we be consumed out of the good land whether we are going...

Winthrop’s “City Upon a Hill” became Ronald Reagan's "Shining City on a Hill" and should be considered the harvest of John Winthrop's "Covenant". To John Winthrop, as to Ronald Reagan, both Roosevelts, Lincoln, Washington and thousands upon thousands of our settlers throughout the centuries, America beckons as the home of the New Testament, a land inclusive of all people thirsting to be free and to pursue their worship as they will.

Following this recent hard fought national election, we are not so much a nation of blue states and red, but citizens still thirsting to achieve that one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all to which we pledge our allegiance. While the quest is not yet achieved, nor may it ever be fully realized, we, as a people are freer than anyplace on earth to work toward that goal. The covenant continues so long as we strive with God's help towards that Shining City on a Hill.
--
Robert E. Freer, Jr.
Free Enterprise Foundation Founder and President
Charleston Mercury November 23, 2006; p. 16

Privacy - OpEd

2006-11-10T08:23:00.000-05:00

"The right to be left alone -- the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by a free people."

- Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v. U.S. (1928).

So simply stated, so utterly correct! With this succinct description of our rights, Justice Brandeis in a losing cause dissented in the very first federal wiretapping case. The case involved Federal wiretapping to bring to justice a substantial criminal enterprise to distribute alcohol in violation of the Volstead Act. The Supreme Court in this case found the wiretap legal even in the face of an existing state law that would have found the eavesdropping illegal under its law.

Needless to say that is not the law today, but considering our contemporary tendency to discover a new right every day, our citizenry would be amazed to the point of disbelief that it could ever have been found otherwise. Olmstead is worth studying, however, not only for its shock value and its outstanding dissent on the essence of our civil rights, but for it representation of the era in which it was decided.

Chief Justice Roberts, in his recent appearance before a large audience assembled by Charleston’s stellar new law school responded to the question of what he found most challenging in the cases coming to the Court today. His thoughtful response was that the progression of technology really was at the heart of what most challenged the Court in applying our Constitution to the period in which we live. Similarly it can be said of the Olmstead Court that it too was struggling with applying an 18th century document to 20^th Century society transformed by electricity, a transcontinental railroad, automobiles, airplanes, the radio and telephones.

Today the Court is even more challenged by our era of technology transformation and our knowledge based economy. How do you protect individual rights from government intrusion in an era of pinhead size cameras and microphones, fiber optics, wireless technology, machines the size of molecules, earth-and building- reading technologies?

What do you do to protect privacy in an era with technology that makes the walls no more than veils to what occurs within, and of course, what do you do for privacy in our age of digital dependence in which our cell phones and automobiles pinpoint us to a spot on the globe? Virtually all that we do is reduced to instantly searchable data that includes even the keystrokes on our computers and PDAs.

In Olmstead, the Court was dealing with a medium, telephones, that it reasoned could be avoided and thus was not inherently protectable under the fourth amendment. What do you do today when notions of privacy have been constitutionally extended to an extent never before considered? This right of privacy goes beyond the fourth amendment’s protection of government snooping to implicate the vast amount of personal information in the hands not of government but of commercial interests as well.

Government is not the greatest problem. Commercial interests intent on having the masses of data on each of us fractioned so precisely that if I accidentally open an email from a company offering me a cruise vacation, tomorrow I will receive 50 such emails and the next day 100 more is far more threatening as it is not as limited under current readings of our Constitution to stop its invasion.

It is a regrettable truth that just as no good deed goes unpunished, there is no such thing as an unmixed blessing. It is the agony of our age to struggle to fit our thirst for “progress” within our historic desire to be left alone. In a society under assault from both within and without, Chief Justice Roberts has put his finger precisely on the issue that resonates with Americans the most.

We have an implacable thirst for personal liberty and feel like we are losing the essential quality of being American. Pandora in the form of the cornucopia of ever changing, ever developing new generations of technical wonders threatens to make itself the master and us the servant. Our senses are overcome with data, most designed to sell us something, be it ever so simple as an attitude. If we rebel against this manipulation, we are massaged to feel “un-American” “unenlightened” or just downright paleolithic. Ooops, as we know from the Geico advertisements, we better be careful there too.

There is a phenomenon we perform with our pets in which we endow them with our feelings, engage in conversations and feel certain that they exactly mirror our world view. Our intellectual elite are guilty of that on a worldwide scale, and woe to anyone who disagrees.

With our pets it is largely harmless and may be even therapeutic. With the world at large it is downright dangerous. We engage with our enemies as if their minds must work as ours, their desires and their hearts mirror ours. They must want what we want, mustn’t they? And there must be someplace where we can find agreement? Right?...... Wrong!

This assumption is flat out incorrect and leaves us open to heartache and worse, defeat! For some forces in the world there is nothing for us to do but battle to defeat or victory. Even with our fellow citizens it presumes too much and that brings me back to the Chief Justice’s conundrum. How do we protect our liberty in the digital age?

We are juggling the “good” that endows our society with so many of its marvels and blessings against its cost in privacy. We are juggling security of one kind with the fear and reality that unless technology is carefully checked, there is no place to be truly alone.

Our privacy is an illusion. Into this realm comes the Supreme Court, asked in cases before it or in the pipeline to apply The Constitution in a way to carve out our zone of being left alone. The Court and Congress together can make the difference here to preserve the best of our technological sophistication with those unique qualities of our civilization. That we must do so in wartime adds to the stress, but nevertheless, we must count on them to do their best. Pray for them and our Republic that they get it right.

_._

Robert E. Freer, Jr, President of the Free Enterprise Foundation, is a Visiting Professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence 2005-2006, at The Citadel. He is a regular contributor to the Mercury and can be reached at Robert.freer@citadel.edu. Have a favorite column from the past? Copies of his earlier columns can be found in the archive at www. FreeEnterprise.tv.

Charleston Mercury November 8, 2006. Page 16.

Political Corruption - OpEd

2006-11-10T08:12:00.000-05:00

According to Wikipedia, “In broad terms, political corruption is the misuse by government officials of their governmental powers for illegitimate, usually secret, private enrichment. Misuse of government power for other purposes, like repression of political opponents and general police brutality, is not considered political corruption.” Not that misuse for such other use is commendable; it just travels under another name such as tyranny or dictatorship. To these descriptors we can add the highly evocative “sleaze.”

In time it may be found that former congressman Mark Foley may have violated no Federal or Florida laws with his salacious emails. Whatever is the result of that process, we can be assured that with his life in tatters, he has been and will continue to suffer real punishment. What concerns us is the odor of “sleaze” and the righteous indignation at someone in his position of power carrying on in such a way. It hurts our confidence in government generally. More particularly it hurts Republican government more because the party and its members hold themselves to a higher standard of behavior. Congressman Jefferson can be caught with $90,000 in “cold” cash in his freezer, and there is only a muted cry at this Democratic misdeed.

The fact for all of us to accept is that there is no corner on either morality or dissolute behavior in either party. Our founders knew this and wisely protected us against our weaknesses by dividing power so that personal weaknesses in one branch would not doom us all. Personal corruption, “sleaze”, as opposed to the formal definition above knows no political affiliation. It is highly personal, and its punishment should be personal. We can assume that if you put 535 ambitious, bright people at the center of a honey pot, at least a few of them will be other than paragons of virtue. Over time their weakness will be revealed. How much do we really want to spend on watching our legislators every step? The press does a good job of that already. The occasional occurrence of “sleaze’ is personal and does not necessarily reflect adversely on governmental diligence.

Scandal, whether you are speaking about Bobby Baker from the Johnson Administration or Mark Foley from this Congress, has been with us down through the ages. We need a healthy sense of proportion to keep our eyes on the donut not the hole. Politics and corruption was a frequent target of Will Rogers’s humor. He speaks for the man in the street when he says, “The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.”

What should be important to us is how those in charge face up to both corruption and “sleaze”. It remains to be seen as far as the current election year maneuvering how it will be handled by The House and what its effect will be nationally on our midterm election only a few weeks away, but remember Speaker Tip O’Neal’s proscription that “All politics is local.”

If you want to prove that for yourself, ask yourself or your neighbors about your local Congressman or your state’s Senator. How do you or they feel about him or her? Do the national news stories make any real difference in how you will vote? Almost unanimously the answer to that question confounds the pollsters. Despite a lean one direction or the other in national preference polling, Tip is invariably right. It is the local issues and how those issues have been served by your representatives that determine whether he will be returned to office. In a recent poll, 60% of voters expressed an individual preference for their serving representative though favoring control by The Democrats.

What is perhaps more significant and may signal a coming party realignment is that in 2006, 38% percent of voters identify themselves as independent. That is up from 30% not long ago, and I am noticing in my correspondence, a common trend regardless of party affiliation on issues of civil rights, and other issues that directly reflect on our understanding as to what America stands for.

Conservatives as much as liberals are deeply troubled about what winning this war may signify in what it means to Americans to be American. We have traditionally felt superior to the rest of the world because of our standards, and this war has made doubters out of liberals and conservatives alike. Are we like Pogo philosophized a generation ago, “We have met the enemy and it is us.”?

While understanding my friends’ concerns and in no way minimizing the risk, I don’t think so. Again I turn to the great wisdom of Will Rogers and his comment during the very difficult days of the Depression. With his “[t]his country is not where it is today on account of any one man. It is here on account of the real common sense of the Big Normal Majority.”, he makes us realize that while our form of government is designed to protect us, it is we ourselves with our “hard wired” insistence on protection of basic values that is the continuing sentinel on our behavior.

This great land reflects us. We are a great people in part because we care so very much about these issues. We are a great people also because throughout two centuries, regardless of the compromises we have had to make to survive, and no matter our chagrin at our own “lapse” of principle, the “Big Normal Majority” has moved almost as one to restore our individual liberty and national progress once the danger was vanquished.

Today only historians talk much about the substantial damage the great liberator Lincoln did to our liberties to preserve the Union, and much of what was done during WWII to maintain our national security has yet to be fully told. In neither case was it pretty, but the nation does not hold its head in shame for having done what it had to in order to survive.

To survive as a nation, eternal vigilance is required but that is at all levels and in all precincts. The anxiety is a symptom of our continuing humanity. I am glad for it. As for some of the bitterest rhetoric, rather than damn the House leadership, let’s see what unfolds. Rather than assault our President, let’s pray for him and take comfort that he has deliberately put together such an outstanding bipartisan commission to consider all of our options in Iraq and promised to listen with fresh ears to their suggestions.

_._

Charleston Mercury October 25, 2006. Page 16.

Behold the Frog - OpEd

2006-10-13T09:05:00.000-05:00

Behold the frog, that ubiquitous creature. We are told by those who say they are in the know that if you place a frog in hot water, it will immediately realize its peril and escape. Ahhh, but if you are clever and place the frog in temperate water, it will remain contentedly as you gradually turn up the flame beneath the pot until it is boiled quite nicely to death. My fellow Americans, We’re the frog! We’re in the water, and the water is approaching boil.

We have been the object of war since at least the first attack on The New York World Trade Towers, and we just don’t get it. To compound our confusion, we cannot directly blame one nation or one easily definable group as we flail about trying to contain a growing conflagration fought by warriors who reject the very pillars of our world as decadent.

The Pope gets it! In his recent speech at the university at Bonn, The Pope pays obeisance to the traditions of the university process, the specialization of study but coming together truly as universitas scientiarum to consider questions of blended specialization. He finds nothing inconsistent in the attempt to correlate faith and reason, and it is the coming together of these separate approaches that has provided the basis for the humanism that propels western society. Without limiting God we seek reason to understand Him, and at least since the Reformation, find nothing inconsistent in that approach. We believe the scientific progress that has created the modern world permits us to better understand God and in no way separates us from Him.

To the Pope, “God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats…to convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…”

To the enemies of his world view, ( i.e. Islamic jihadists), he would have been in trouble enough if he had stopped there, but citing Theodore Khoury, editor of the 14^th century text of a dialogue of emperor Manuel II and an educated Persian, he continues by citing the dialogue: ‘But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality’ (not even his own word). It was Manuel II who said ‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached’.

In this dictate, Mohamed crosses over from faith as we understand it to political action. We cannot imagine the God we worship ever doing so, but for the jihadists it is Allah’s will and that is enough. Our Western ways are “decadent” and mark us for extinction.

There are rewards for the warriors in the after life if they die striking a blow for Allah, and thus time as we think of it and our relationship to the world around us is also just a measure of our corruption. As I wrote two weeks ago, this is not a time to be debating giving Miranda warnings. These are warriors from outer space that blend in with several hundred million other Muslims that just want to lead a peaceful life.

Here I do have a gripe. It would be easier to justify our western notions of equal rights to not “profile” those who may pose our society a lethal threat if the hundreds of millions of Muslims who wish nothing to do with Wahabi Jihad would vocally and actively stand up to denounce what they are doing to Muslim society. We do have many allies in the region, but it is for those who live in the Middle East to help us to eliminate from their midst this cancer eating at their vitals.

For us “no good deed goes unpunished”. We are a foreign element in a far land discordant in our ways. Even if they do not like the jihadists, they might wish us to be less in evidence. Will Roger’s quip comes to mind, "When you get into trouble 5,000 miles from home, you've got to have been looking for it." Well, we were asking for it, if not exactly “looking for it”. There is a great deal of truth to the notion that we are there because of oil.

Our Founders warned against entangling alliances. To that proscription I would add as even more important entangling resource dependencies. They are an even graver threat to our nation’s security. We should never have allowed ourselves to become so dependent on critical supplies for our modern economy from such an unstable part of the world.

We NEED to be there now. We SHOULD be there now to protect our national security. That is what nations do, but to be so dependent on energy resources from the region is truly a castle built on sand. It also provides ammunition that has been used effectively by our enemies and the forces of chaos to paint us as self serving invaders not liberators.

At the end of 2005, we produced 4.86 million barrels a day of domestic oil and imported a little over ten million barrels a day, much of that from the Middle East. Our other potential sources of supply Russia, Mexico and South America are also problematical. The permutation of possible solutions is complex and perhaps the subject of a future column. Whatever we do the solution to our dilemma will be long and painful in coming, but we’d better get at it today. Tomorrow may be too late.

_._

Robert E. Freer, Jr., president of the Free Enterprise Foundation, is a visiting professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence 2005-2006 at The Citadel. He is a regular contributor to the Mercury and may be reached at Robert.freer@citadel.edu. Have a favorite column from the past? Copies of his earlier columns can be found in the archive at www. FreeEnterprise.tv.

Charleston Mercury October 11, 2006. Page 16.

The Question of the Day - OpEd

2006-09-30T09:57:00.000-05:00

With the passage of Labor Day, we have officially entered the silly season, otherwise known as the political home stretch. Regrettably our partisan passions are being appealed to just when we need to be thinking as one folk, one people. There is a reason that our tradition as to foreign policy has been non partisanship up until recent times, and our factionalism now is playing into the hands of our enemy.

One of our great Chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Arthur Vandenberg noted it was essential to unite our official voice at the water’s edge so that America speaks with maximum authority against those who would divide and conquer us and the free world. On a very contentious issue, he once noted as to President Truman, “He is the only President we shall have, and this is the only Congress we shall have during the next two critical years; the quicker we reach a working relationship so that we can have a united policy, the safer our country will be”

Well, here is the problem. There don’t seem to be any Vandenbergs out there today, and our ship of state, the only bulwark we have against the raging seas that seek to overwhelm us is doing its best to not be swamped by the partisanship of the day. The loyal opposition is doing everything it can to shovel water into the boat rather than help bail. It is harmful, and it has to stop.

If I can restate the case of the opposition, it is that we got into Iraq by mistake, and they believe that the case for invading Iraq was purposely overstated, and therefore they were misled into their support. In their view, Iraq is not properly part of the “War Against Terror”, and we should…..? We should…what?

I am not really sure what it is they say we should do. And that is the problem. It gets very foggy at this point. Why would I decide to pass control of funding and oversight to them if I don’t know what they propose?

Whether Iraq should have become a shooting war may have been debatable three years ago, but that train has already left the station. It was, is and can only now be considered a crucial part of the war. Don’t kid yourself. We are at war, and it cannot be fought as if we are using our criminal justice system trying to corral a few law breakers. Miranda rights don’t apply here.

Whether or not, according to Senator Graham, “It is a mess”, we got into this war on a nonpartisan basis. The intelligence failures that led to our sincere but mistaken belief that Sadham had significant stores of WMD were based on information that on a worldwide basis was thought to be reliable and should be attributable to failures by both the current and last administrations, and both should be held equally responsible.

The Clinton administration literally had Osama Bin Laden in its gun sights, and the special ops team was denied permission to take him out. Further the most authoritative book on Operation Iraqi Freedom indicates we had only 4 sources of human intelligence in Iraq at the start of the war. Why is that? It is because The Clinton Administration drastically cut back on our sources of human intelligence. That the intelligence was flawed is clear, but according to the best sources available, even the Iraqi generals were not told until December of ’02 that they had no WMD.

The war began based on the best information available to prevent a proven user of WMD from continuing to pose a significant risk of harming us by his continued development of WMD and by his continued support of Wahabi jihadists. To play this blame game now does us discredit. It clouds our focus and weakens us. It is the United States that is fighting this war not one party or the other, and it is the welfare of the United States we should be thinking about. Are there better alternatives for us to pursue? I sure don’t know of any.

There are not better alternatives if we wish to preserve our way of life. Melting pot that we are, we still believe that each of us is entitled to pursue life, liberty and happiness. We also believe we have certain inalienable rights, and our neighbor has them too.

Many of us find it almost impossible to accept that there are enough people in the world who fundamentally disagree with that notion that it could in any way affect our lives. And even if they come to grudgingly accept that it is possible, they assume we can leave them alone, and we will be fine. “Gee”, they say, “the Middle East is playing out a 1000 year war, and it has never been of concern before. Why do we need to care, let alone substantially change our behavior now?”

We cannot disengage now without inviting a quiver of arrows in the back as we depart, nor can we leave without being responsible for the bloodbath that will follow. Let me say what Senator Graham said the other night at the College of Charleston. It is not a quote, but he pointed out that it is impossible to negotiate with someone who doesn’t believe you have a right to exist. That is the case for Israel and for us. Our enemies in the fascist jihadists want to kill us whether we are there or here; they will come after us and must be defeated. It is better to fight them there than have carnage in our streets here.

Whether the Administration has made significant errors or not, the loyal opposition has been devoid of rational suggestions to improve our prospects, and the task that has now in “tar baby” like fashion been thrust upon us cannot be accomplished quickly.

It is legitimate for Democrats to complain that the administration vastly underestimated the number of boots on the ground it would take to seal the borders and pacify the populace, that they never understood the problem to be posed by the fedeyeen, and they built an invasion plan based on using the defeated army to police the public and then told them to go home. But if the opposition is going to complain, it has a responsibility to say what it would do to make the situation better.

In truth while the Administration has relied too much on “contractors” and has never properly staffed the occupying force, we are making progress in meeting our delayed goals for having a viable national Iraqi Army and may be able to reduce our forces in 2007 as they stand-up. The meeting of the Iraqi Premier and his opposite number in Iran also poses the possibility that he can gain the cooperation that we cannot in taming the shia death squads. We are making progress in creating the basis for a free and independent state when we leave. What is not clear is whether any of the Arab states can withstand the Wahabi jihadists who insist that the world does it their way or is destroyed.

The jihadists also believe our democratic traditions make us weak. They will use our democratic traditions against us by manipulating what the public sees and reads and by doing all they can to inflame the Arab world.

They believe our rules of civil debate can be used to further divide us and make our society unable to defend itself and ultimately collapse. Senator Graham particularly noted as to Israel that he understood their difficulty. How would you like to be surrounded by states that want you destroyed just because you don’t believe as they do? He went on to note that unless something can be achieved as to the Iranian pursuit of atomic arms in the next several years, your children and mine and our next generation too will have a very difficult future.

I wish we could disengage, but in the “flat world” about which Thomas Friedman writes so eloquently, one Wahabi jihadist with a chemical/biological weapon or suitcase size atomic device can cause almost incalculable damage. While it might be therapeutic to rant at our own frailties, the forces that got us where we are far transcend them as a cause for the challenges we now face.

As we approach the next election, is it better to wring our hands, point and shout or ought we to hunker down, get over our differences and work together to defeat these evil forces that would destroy us? I know my answer to the question, and while polls disagree, I do not believe the American people are ready for two years of finger pointing, investigatory hearings, and calls for impeachment that would follow a change in control of Congress.

_._

Charleston Mercury September 27, 2006. Page 16.

Stem Cells - OpEd

2006-09-14T12:15:00.000-05:00

Robert E. Freer, Jr.

Special Public Policy Correspondent

This is another in our quarterly series of articles on the scientific wonders of our age. I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Craig Knowlton, one of our Baker Free Enterprise Fellows in the research for this article.

Last week, researchers at Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) announced the development of a method to extract embryonic stem cells without destroying the embryo. In doing so, they tried to address the concerns of opponents of stem cell research, who oppose the consequential destruction of embryos. Scientists hypothesize that stem cells may, at some point in the future, emerge as the basis for treating diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, and heart disease. Despite the possibilities for tremendous medical advancements and ACT’s recent breakthrough, ethical objections still remain. Those who object have convinced the federal government to deny federal funding for any research that utilizes stem cells except for certain lines that existed prior to the imposition of the ban. Ethical research standards published by the department of Health and Human Services also speak to this restriction, and the real inhibition is found in the regulations of the Food and Drug Administration that require their notification of any new investigational drug research utilizing stem cells.

Stem cells differ from other kinds of cells in the body. One intriguing property is that they are unspecialized. This means that a stem cell does not have any tissue-specific structures that allow it to perform specialized functions: it cannot pump blood like a heart muscle cell, and it cannot carry molecules through the bloodstream like a red blood cell. However, unspecialized stem cells can morph into specialized cells like heart muscle cells, blood cells, or nerve cells. Scientists hope through their research to reliably direct this process, called differentiation, to create healthy specific cell types that could be used as effective transplant treatments that may not require continuing immunosuppressive treatment for a wide range of currently incurable conditions.

Traditionally, human embryonic stem cells are extracted from an embryo that has developed for four or five days into a hollow microscopic ball of 150 cells called a blastocyst. The extraction pulls the embryo apart and destroys it. Although the frozen embryos used have typically been leftovers from in-vitro fertilization procedures that would otherwise be discarded, this destruction of a possible life incites most criticism of stem cell research. Yet, researchers believe that stem cell lines can now be grown using blastomeres—less developed balls of eight to ten cells—which could be left intact. The head of Dartmouth College Ethics Institute, Dr. Ronald Green, believes that the new extraction method solves moral concerns and “appears to be a way out of the current political impasse in this country and elsewhere.”

The new method depends on in-vitro fertilization, the generation of embryos outside the womb from a couple’s egg and sperm. IVF clinics commonly extract a single cell from an early stage embryo in order to scan for genetic flaws, and while the procedure risks damaging the embryo, removing a cell does not appear to interfere with later fetal and childhood development. This extraction and testing already occurs, and ACT believes that these cells can be used to create medically viable stem cell lines.

Still, even the relative harmlessness of this new development may not dissuade critics. Some people still worry that a single cell extracted from an embryo harnesses the capability of becoming a human being despite there being no evidence to suggest that a single cell from blastomeres could develop into an individual. Another concern is the long-term development of a person from an embryo missing one eighth of its cells, and perhaps not enough individuals have grown using this IVF practice to make a comprehensive study.

Most opponents of stem cell research base their arguments from a pro-life standpoint. This outlook identifies human life in a clump of cells birthed in a test tube and perhaps in the presence of a single living stem cell. This stance is absolute and will not be swayed, yet stem cell research remains a necessary track which medicine must follow. The millions of people who could benefit from research and the relatively few stem cells presently available make this a certainty not a speculation. What I worry about is the rush to embrace this research elsewhere on the globe, where the resources will not be expended under our carefully nuanced regulations to balance the ethical concerns. If our nation does not lead stem cell medical innovation in a progressive yet principled manner, then other countries may control the emerging knowledge and reap the benefits without the necessary ethical oversights.

Our religious beliefs guide our actions, yet in life we are faced with dilemmas that force us to choose among unattractive choices where we recognize our human limitations. In the case of a natural disaster, for instance, medical personnel are often forced to “triage” their patients and the service they render into groups that their judgment tells them will live to receive delayed treatment, those who will most likely die whether treated or not, and those who will live only if they receive immediate treatment. These same medical personnel are daily selecting areas of most promising research and are facing the ethical issues of animal testing where it is often true that animals are sacrificed in the process.

We proceed because, distressful as it is, the experience gained can be shown to directly save countless lives, and as to the research, human lives aren’t sacrificed. In the case of stem cells, the unrealized promise of its exploitation holds out an even greater promise of greatly extending useful lives and saving countless others. These are human beings in which countless years of love and attention in many instances have been invested, and the ripple effect of their salvation holds almost incalculable benefits to society. Under that scenario, I choose the living. This is particularly so when I choose to permit the use of blastocysts, that others have already decided will never be allowed to develop into human beings and will ultimately be sacrificed

On the one hand, patients with traumatic spinal cord injuries, heart and organ disease, muscular dystrophy, and other neurological disorders will gain from the possibilities of stem cell research. On the other, some clumps of cells stay on the freezer shelf or disposed of without ceremony of any kind. To not support the use of stem cells research dooms thousands of individuals from the potential benefit of their only hope of salvation from their insidious diseases. Now that is immoral.

_._

Chareston Mercury September 13, 2006. Page 16.

Is There a White Rose in Cuba's Future? - OpEd

2006-08-31T13:03:00.000-05:00

In a hospital room 200 miles or so south of Miami, Cuba’s past half century is slipping into history, and an unknown future awaits. Whether or not Fidel Castro manages to rally from his life threatening surgery, it is certainly only for the briefest of time. His single-minded rule over the Island’s eleven million citizens is entering the shadows from which it must surely pass into history, and the transition has already begun.

The future beckons all Cubans wherever they are to carefully consider the options just ahead. For much of the past 20 years before I came to Charleston, concern with Cuba and things Cuban have kept me at or near the center of the relations between the United States and Cuba. Though an “Anglo”, I am proud and fond of the many Cuban American friends and associates I have come to know in this period and care as deeply as they do that Cuba chooses the right path for itself.

Which road will its people decide to walk? Both are strewn with the obstacles of Castro’s construction. Isolation, a continued lagging economy, and a society that chooses to be united only in its universal misery lies down one road, while the proven potential of free enterprise engaged in by a free people beckons down the other. It is this second road which holds vast promise for all Cubans.

Those on the island consider this. Until each Cuban is free in their life, their liberty and to pursue their individual happiness, the tremendous potential of the Cuban people and its land will be shackled to another larger economy that subsidizes bare existence. There was inequality and corruption under the Batista regime, but does not the present regime have its corruption? While not approving of the abuses of the Batista era from which we all have learned, at least during his time in office there was the possibility that you could better your and your family’s circumstances in an economy that produced a higher per capita income than most other countries in the hemisphere.

Looking for non market based solutions to the running of your economy will always leave you politically reliant on a “Patron”. Reliance on Russia has been succeeded by a dependence on subsidized oil from Venezuela and will last only so long as you do as Hugo Chavez demands. Is that the future you wish? Will China be next?

While Raul’s succession, particularly if, as rumored, he follows the China model, holds some promise of holding back the tides for a while, his time is likely to be brief. Dr. Jaime Suchlicki at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies puts it this way. “[Raul] would face significant challenges. A bankrupt economy, popular unhappiness, the need to maintain order and discipline in the population at large, as well as to increase productivity within the labor force….Raul would continue to be critically dependent on the military. Lacking the charisma and legitimacy of his brother, he would also need the support of key party leaders and technocrats within the government bureaucracy.”

Rafael Diaz-Balart, father of our two Congressmen of the same name as well as Univision’s anchor, responded some years ago to my query on Raul’s prospects for being able to stay in control for very long by responding in Spanish “…About as long as an ice cream cone at the school house door!” Rafael, who was my client for a period during the 90’s regrettably, has passed away before being able to see this day. He had much wisdom that could have made a difference in the challenging days ahead.

One additional challenge that doesn’t get mentioned much is the loss of the managerial class that ran Cuba’s economy before Castro and left at the time of The Revolution or in the two substantial boat migrations and daily “bolsa” migration that continues to drain Cuba of those who have both confidence in their own skills and God’s assistance to get them to the United States and a fresh start.

This migration has transformed the island from a mostly white, free enterprise centered economy to one which is heavily mulatto and black. Trained exclusively in socialist ways for the past half century and forbidden to engage in anything but the most basic of free enterprise, they are ill equipped to quickly adjust to a free market reality. For them, any substantial success brings only punishment rather that security. Although Castro deserves credit for his emphasis on universal education and health care, the emphasis on socialist thought as the only approved solution for the problems crippling its economy leaves a potentially explosive situation for those Cubans who inherit his bankrupt economy and have been only awaiting his death to begin to assert their desire for fundamental change.

There are many models from the Eastern Bloc that may prove helpful in tackling the confiscated property issues that confront us before relations between our nations can be fully normalized, but it is clear that the United States will be prepared to come more than half way in achieving normalization. It is also clear those American investments made throughout the pre Castro days were of a higher order of “investment backed expectation” than those found not certain enough to warrant a responsibility by the U.S. government to require their satisfaction when we normalized our relations with China.

The investments in Cuba were made pursuant to an unusually close relationship between our two governments and the active encouragement of their occurring including the stationing of a brigade or more of U.S. Marines at one end of the island in perpetuity. Also the legislation in which I had such a major laboring role and its implementation by our government specifically recognizes a statutory right of recovery. These factors and the strong representation of Cuban Americans in Congress are likely to result in a strong role for the government in fashioning a solution that will be fair for all parties.

Cuban-Americans are red white and blue Americans, and the hyphen is useful only in describing, even in the second generation, their love for the homeland from which they have fled. While most have full lives here, I do expect a number will want to expand their businesses to Cuba and that virtually all of our principle industrial, financial and communication’s enterprises stand eager to invest large sums of both financial and human capital in the Island.

One area in which they may not need much help is hospitality. Cubans are naturally good hosts. The beauty and exotic quality of a Cuban holiday has provided “world class experience” in the hospitality industry for its people. After relatives’ remittances, tourism now must be considered Cuba’s main source of continuing hard currency. Virtually all of those in this area would receive a huge boost from being able to fully realize income commensurate with that earned by those in similar positions in the free world.

I continue to be concerned about the political challenge of the returning Cuban American investor and those who stayed behind who have only known Castroism. Perhaps, both groups equally loving their land and its traditions can find unity in the words of Jose Marti, a poet and hero of Cuba’s attempts to free itself of Spanish rule in the late 19^th Century.

Writing in 1891, Marti wrote a poem entitled “Cultivo una Blanca Rosa” which has been translated simply as “The White Rose”. It reflected his goals of fighting for Cuba’s freedom from Spain without the loss of the historical affection between Cubans and Spaniards. The English translation goes like this; “I cultivate a white rose/ in June as in January/ For the sincere friend who shakes my hand frankly./ And for the cruel person/ Who tears out the heart with which I live,/ I cultivate not thistles nor thorns,/ I cultivate a white rose.

Today it laments the loss both in Cuba and abroad between those who remain and those who left and is a token of the affection that yet remains. If both those who went and those who stayed will bring their differing gifts to the task with a sense of what unites them rather than that which divides, the years of bitterness may be lifted.

In exile, Rafael Diaz-Balart formed an association called La Rosa Blanca that celebrated strong individual freedoms and opposition to Castro’s dictatorial rule. Going forward the imagery of the White Rose can be a talisman for those who wish together to construct a firm foundation for a free market Cuba that protects individual right but also is determined to go forward with a strong social conscience and commitment to avoid the mistakes of the past. May that be so! Both our countries would be the beneficiary’s of such an effort.

_._

Charleston Mercury August 30, 2006. Page 16.

Summer of Our Discontent - OpEd

2006-08-18T14:15:00.000-05:00

Fred Benson, one of the more astute of the Washington commentators recently described our political system in the following terms:

“The American political system is badly bent. Not broken, but misshapen. For starters, our political system has been described by various observers, including some members of Congress themselves, as: self-centered, irresolute, money-hungry, fractious, gutless, disingenuous, and recently, corrupt. On that latter point, it is unnerving that the U.S. stands in 17^th place on an international rating of clean government well behind Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand.”

A similar lament has crept into a number of my columns in the last few months, and more columnists are treating this summer of discontent as being more than a matter of thermometric concern. I think it is time we put into perspective the source of our angst.

There is nothing wrong with our country or our countrymen. We are a true melting pot of nationalities, races and religions, and we are free. Protected by the best Constitution yet devised by man, we are free to pursue our own happiness as one of our constitutionally protected rights. Though life today is a lot more complex for all of us than it was when the nation was founded, feelings are no less strong. It is important to understand that strong counter currents in our national direction have been with us since soon after our independence. Strong opinion is basic to our social intercourse, and given our diversity and our enshrinement of free speech, it is surprising our discontent isn’t worse.

It has been worse at several points in our history, and we shouldn’t forget that. Remember, no one has been caned in the U.S. Senate chamber since Congressman Preston Brooks from the Palmetto State caned Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in 1856 for slandering his uncle during debate about the expansion of slavery to the Western states. Recall that dueling was legal at that time, but Congressman Brooks considered himself a gentleman and dueling was done between gentlemen, which was not what Mr. Brooks considered this “damn Yankee,” Senator Charles Sumner. Hence, Congressman Brooks chose a cane to inflict damage in the same way he would have treated a biting dog. Those are serious divisions; yes, it has been much worse.

Our national crankiness first reared its head after the adoption of the Constitution. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, the two primary advocates and allies in its adoption had vastly different visions of the republic they were creating. Madison never dreamed that he was signing onto a Republic with the strength in its central government that Hamilton knew to be essential if the new country was to hold its own among the wolves that surrounded us from Canada, Florida and the mouth of the Mississippi.

Both men worshipped national independence, but for Madison it was the freedom of an Arcadian dreamer dependent on vast lands dedicated to a few crops and on slavery for its economic viability. Many of the planter class also had a very jaundiced view of the English mercantile class to whom they were indebted and to whom they must look for the financial lifeline that kept their lives in a precarious financial balance.

To his credit, George Washington, early in his husbandry of Mount Vernon broke this chain of dependence by diversifying his crops and breaking the lands into smaller operating farms supporting local agricultural needs. Hamilton, a product of an urban environment and a region representative of shopkeepers, smaller farms, and manufacturers felt very comfortable in the world of commerce He understood the need for a seamless financial backbone including ready credit for the growing nation, saw the English as our most compatible trading partner and was comfortable with a strong central government to create the structure binding thirteen economies often at odds into one dynamic whole.

Hamilton’s energy and genius itself became an issue as he tirelessly produced reports on public credit and manufacturing and with their adoption in bruising battles in Congress, the system that energized the new government evolved. The result of the adoption of Hamilton’s proposals was as he predicted and brought a real boost to commerce. To the planter class the aggregation of power in the central government and “the class of money changers” that came with it smacked of English rule; hence Hamilton was lambasted as Royalist and conniving to substitute a monarchy for the freedom they had so ardently fought to achieve.

Let’s be clear about this dispute. This was no Marquis of Queensberry ruled contest. Hamilton, because of his ability and energy overwhelmed those who opposed his views and was vilified at every turn. Also, much as today, his moral lapse in what became known as “le Affaire Reynolds” involving his falling into the clutches of a blackmailing seductress was the scandal of the age and was used to weaken his proposals. His ultimate death at the hands of a political rival in the famous duel of 1804 also gives you some feeling how bitterly the divisions were contested.

These differences, based in an economic worldview in which slavery was the most visible mote, would consume much of the 19^th century until the Civil War completed the war of independence by settling the issue of federal preeminence in a perpetual union once and for all and further setting the notion of individual rights on the track we still are pursuing 140 years later.

If the War Between the States settled one issue of national governance, the social struggle to define and refine the issue of social and economic equality of opportunity continues. Industrialization and its ills followed as a source of discontent, and urbanization followed that. With the closing of the frontier and completion of the great immigration, economic angst replaced the issues of a prior age, and in different clothes we continue that national contest.

What has changed as we have debated and agonized is what I call the digital divide. Before digital convergence, there was some sense of locality to our lives that has been banished with 24-hour trumpeting of even the personal misfortunes of celebrities a nation’s expanse away.

The information age has brought with it almost infinite information about everything and everyone. Couple that with the emphasis in our society to break us into camps and to get us as riled up as possible to sell products including political candidates like soda pop, and we end up with a stew of our own devising, and it isn’t tasty. We are assaulted 24/7 with data individualized to the most personal level based upon what “the watchers” know about us. The purpose of all this information is to make the sale. Whatever sells magazines, diapers, movies, political candidates, beer and social causes, whatever!

Our commercial barons have decided that to fill the infinite need for programming on the expanded broadcast spectrum and to pay the bill getting it to us, the “product” has to grab us as it informs. It draws more favorable ABC/Nielsen numbers if it makes you feel and that pays the bills. Only by appealing in successive quick kicks to the gut do the media achieve their corporate numbers, and their lives are largely determined by those numbers.

In the political realm, those numbers are voters turned on and turned out on Election Day. The process has become as professionalized as the TV networks can make it. Very little in our society is built to encourage us to broadly agree.

Natural differences are encouraged, as is a tendency to demonize those with who we are not in lockstep.

Though it would be a very dull life if we all were in lockstep and a certain amount of controversy is good for the circulation, we have gone too far, and it is for us the consumers to do two things: 1. Let our entertainment and information providers know: “We have had enough, and we aren’t going to put up with it anymore.” Give us encouragement to find agreement not discord. And, 2. We must watch our own words and our own conduct. Words do hurt more than we know. Words can uplift us to new heights, and they can coarsen our lives. Know that we share the planet. Preserve your independent thought, but guard your words that they not intentionally injure. Disagree if you must but be not disagreeable.

As for the media, give us nuanced news coverage that understands and accurately presents that many problems out there are just not going away no matter what we do. To prevail in a disorderly planet, we need to treasure that which is good in our society, stick together and accept we will have to absorb many blows to the head and body no matter what we do. We are not living a sitcom.

-.-

Robert E. Freer, Jr., president of the Free Enterprise Foundation, is a visiting professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel. He is a regular contributor to the Mercury and may be reached at Robert.freer@citadel.edu. Have a favorite column from the past? Copies of his earlier columns can be found in the archive at www. FreeEnterprise.tv.

Charleston Mercury August 17, 2006. Page 16.

National Backbone - OpEd

2006-08-06T11:37:00.000-05:00

John Adams was the first president to visit our then nascent professional military to extol its role in our Republic. Though echoed often over the two centuries since we first graduated a class at West Point, none have been more direct in noting our nation’s dependence on our Long Gray Line to maintain our freedom. It is not just the skill at arms of our military that makes them so important; President Adams noted that Republics are designed for a moral people:

We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.

For two centuries now President Adam’s utterance has been our central guiding truth, and for two centuries presidents have often traveled to West Point in the spring when the new class of graduates is poised to leave the long gray line for the khaki of active duty. They come not only to pay tribute to the United States’ military, but also to absorb some inspiration from that place and from the Corps. It is not only for their military skill and courage that we need our armed forces but for the example of their lives lived for a greater purpose than themselves.

Late in his life, President Eisenhower noted that his time at West Point had transformed him. When he donned the uniform, ever after, the expression “The United States of America”… [meant] something different than it had ever before. “From [thereon] it would be the republic I was serving, not myself,” he said.

The backbone of the “religious and moral people” referred to by John Adams is constantly renewed, constantly extended at West Point. Each year a new class takes its place at the end of that Long Gray Line, and each year a new class of young officers graduates to take its place both as guardian and beacon of the liberty so dearly paid for by those who came before.

West Point’s two centuries of unbroken production of our nation’s military leaders has been supplemented by The Virginia Military Institute, The Citadel and then in 1845 by The U.S. Naval Academy. Perhaps with the Citadel and VMI, we have come closer to Adam’s ideal in that these institutions produce leaders of principle not just military professionals. Though schooled in the arts of war, their graduates predominantly have in peace time selected to return to the service of their communities, often rising to positions of civic leadership won with honest effort based on their leadership skills and moral fiber.

Soon after this is published, Charleston’s own heralded Long Gray Line will receive its newest class of “knobs,” its 164th. You can be sure it will be scoured, lathered with polish and buffed for four years to a high gloss ready to join either the military or the company down the street and to provide leadership to either.

As we celebrate this new reaffirmation of the eternal values upon which this nation has endured—and must continue to cherish in order to endure—let us recall the most eloquent summation of what this service means. I offer this quote as a reminder to the community and a welcome to the newest members of our Long Gray Line. If they will be guided by this excerpt from a speech by General Douglas Macarthur at West Point in 1962 upon his selection to receive the Silvanus Thayer Award for a lifetime of service epitomizing, “Duty, Honor, Country”, I feel sure of their successful time at The Citadel. I feel sure as well that our community will continue to thrive and benefit from the values they enshrine.

“Duty Honor Country”, began General Douglas Macarthur in his final address to the Corps of Cadets at West Point, “those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you want to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.

“These are some of the things they [these words] do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation's defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.

“They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for action; not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness; the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.

“They give you a temperate will, a quality of imagination, vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, an appetite for adventure over love of ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman…

“The code which those words perpetuate embraces the highest moral laws and will stand the test of any ethics or philosophies ever promulgated for the uplift of mankind. Its requirements are for the things that are right, and its restraints are from the things that are wrong…

“You are the leaven which binds together the entire fabric of our national system of defense. From your ranks come the great captains who hold the Nation's destiny in their hands the moment the war tocsin sounds.

“The long gray line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: Duty, Honor, and Country….”

General Macarthur ends,“The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished—tone and tints. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen then, but with thirsty ear, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll.

“In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, and the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, and Country.

“Today marks my final roll call with you. But I want you to know that when I cross the river, my last conscious thoughts will be of the Corps, and the Corps, and the Corps. I bid you farewell.”

Welcome Knobs! You are undertaking life’s most worthy challenge to become men and women of principle. May you grasp the baton resolutely that is passed to you by The Long Gray Line that has gone before and carry it and us through your leadership to a brighter tomorrow.

_._

Robert E. Freer, Jr, President of the Free Enterprise Foundation, is a Visiting Professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel. He is a regular contributor to the Mercury and can be reached at Robert.freer@citadel.edu. Have a favorite column from the past? Copies of his earlier columns can be found in the archive at www. FreeEnterprise.tv.

Charleston Mercury August 2, 2006. Page 16.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors - OpEd

2006-07-20T15:42:00.000-05:00

In a column about a year ago, somewhat piquantly titled with the inscription at the base of The Statue of Liberty offering refuge for the world’s “Huddled Masses Yearning to Breath Free”, we ended by noting that the moral high ground that stems from the open borders we share with our immediate neighbors must be curbed to meet the post 9/11 reality. “The sense of nationhood begins with the ability to control our borders effectively. Without this we can’t begin to provide the opportunities that have characterized our country for all.”

Since then The Senate and The House of Representatives have passed starkly separate bills. Conference has been delayed while the political forces align. The President has indorsed the Senate version which provides for beefed up border security but limits its penalty to a stiff fine for those illegals already here; The Senate version also contains various bureaucratic hurdles for these immigrants including the applicants’ necessity to demonstrate his/her mastery of English and a requirement to return home years from now for final visa issuance when their turn arrives. The effect of the bill would be that it will greatly extend the period before which any illegal immigrant here now can become a citizen.

House Republicans point out that a rush to citizenship isn’t the issue. Border security is, and the Senate bill does not have its priorities straight. Whatever “guest worker” program is ultimately considered, they insist right now any law must first effectively close the border to illegal entry. The President’s response to this is to authorize dispatch of National Guard troops to our southern border with Mexico for non law enforcement support of our border authorities. About 6000 have already been dispatched, and still the “huddled masses” come in record numbers.

It is like the postal refrain that “neither rain nor snow, nor sleet nor... can deter…” these immigrants. They are unstoppable in their determination to reach freedom’s home. Proving that Democrats are not the only party with a split personality, the House Congressional leaders’ adamant insistence that Border security comes first is met by The Senate sticking to its position that a balanced bill must include a guest worker provision that does not require the 12 million illegals here already to leave. Faced with this lack of unanimity within the majority, The House Conference Managers are slow walking the scheduling of a Conference with the Senate.

There is a very real possibility that while we fiddle, our string may run out. The race for president in Mexico between a big government leftist and a free market capitalist has pitted poor versus affluent and northern province versus southern in a Mexican version of old fashioned New Deal politics. It also threatens to become the Mexican version of our 2000 election.

While Felipe Calderon, who wishes to continue the free market reforms of President Fox and remain aligned with the U.S. has a 1% margin of victory as we approach 98% in poll returns, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and his supporters refuse to concede . Street violence and a lengthy period of recount and challenge may occur. Regardless of outcome any prolonged uncertainty is likely to set thousands streaming north to avoid the gathering storms at home and the tightening of the border they see coming in the North. And an Obrador victory would seriously compound the consequences.

The lesson of history is that the failure to control our border creates internal pressures that ultimately can lead to the destabilization of our Republic. Border First! Resident Illegal immigrants second! That has to be our watchword. Our Roman ancestors were beset with a similar dilemma for their “peregrini” and ultimately could not control the hordes at their borders and succumbed. Today, in the interest of those immigrants already here as well as those to come, Robert Frost’s dictum that “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” must be our watchword.

Under existing authority, planning for a fence and other obstacles to keep illegal entrants out has progressed to a point at least sufficient to supply the data on which some fencing around San Diego has already been authorized. Non government sources estimates for a “fence” effectively closing the 1951 miles of our border with Mexico run anywhere from shy of a billion dollars to north of 8 billion dollars depending on how elaborate an obstacle we decide to construct.

Passage of a border security bill that carries that fence to a reality is of the highest priority now. The issue of the 12 million that are here does not require the same level of immediate concern. Competent enforcement of existing law can permit the focus be kept in line with that portion of the House bill that creates effective border security. Surely we can accomplish this goal.

_._

Robert E. Freer, Jr, President of the Free Enterprise Foundation, is a Visiting Professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel. He is a regular contributor to the Mercury and can be reached at Robert.freer@citadel.edu. Have a favorite column from the past? Copies of his earlier columns can be found in the archive at www. FreeEnterprise.tv.

Charleston Mercury July 19, 2006. Page 16.

Last Best Hope - OpEd

2006-07-07T12:23:00.000-05:00

Writing to Congress near the end of 1862 in the depths of a bitter national struggle with the outcome seriously in doubt, Abraham Lincoln called the country to its rendezvous with destiny:

“Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the last generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We - even we here - hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free-honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”

In starkly setting the stakes, in calling for the best in us all, Lincoln concisely stated what has from our founding made us different from the rest of the nations of the world. From the arrival of the first European settler, this new world accepted for itself, rising from the aspiration of its people the responsibility to always seek for the best that was in us, not just for ourselves but for the many nations from which we sprang.

Call it arrogant, call it prideful. I call it magnificent! Our best leaders have always been attuned to that spirit universal to the American saga. Our frontier pioneers did not feel they were merely felling trees. They knew to a certainty that they were felling the shackles of outdated notions regarding their relationship to the nation which they, with their sweat and their individual initiative, were creating.

They were showing the world a better way to live. In seeking freedom for the individual human spirit, they were seeking to provide the model for nation states everywhere. The citizen is possessed of the ultimate power, not the state. The citizen is primarily responsible for his or her welfare and cedes only so much power to the state as agreed in a free and fair process.

From the Virginia House of Burgesses and John Winthrop’s City on a Hill to Ronald Reagan’s now burnished city, aglow with the triumph of our example to a shining luster, our citizens have exercised their right to manage themselves, and the nation has accepted its responsibility to lead the world to a better future.

While in some quarters that fact is greeted derisively, it also cannot be denied that as a nation we have tried to be that “… Last Best Hope of Earth”, to which Lincoln, in the depths of our national agony, called us.

As a nation we have often demonstrated that when called, we will be our brother’s keeper. We have met the competing “isms” of the 19th and 20th century and triumphed. We have armed the democracies in war and rebuilt the world in peace. We have given generously of our treasury in time of famine and catastrophe abroad. While individuals may have fallen short from time to time, as a nation we have lived Lincoln’s creed and for that we should be proud.

If you read or listen to the mainstream media and believe the angst they peddle, you would believe as a people we are divided. We are not. Though we are again in a time of national challenge, deep to our core we resonate Lincoln’s summons. From Carolina’s Diamond Gate to California’s Golden Gate, we have harkened to freedom’s call for too many generations to turn aside now. Americans of the 21^st century like our ancestors of yore will prove equal to the task. While there is seldom a straight line in any human endeavor, in our current struggle against messianic terrorism, we will endure; we will succeed because we must.

_._

Robert E. Freer, Jr, President of the Free Enterprise Foundation, is a Visiting Professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel. He is a regular contributor to the Mercury and can be reached at Robert.freer@citadel.edu. Have a favorite column from the past? Copies of his earlier columns can be found in the archive at www. FreeEnterprise.tv.

Charleston Mercury July 6, 2006. Page 16.

In the Beginning - OpEd

2006-07-04T07:04:00.000-05:00

“In The Beginning” … thus begins the book of Genesis and upon that notion’s application to us and our world is about all we can agree. The rest is speculation. Being a curious sort, man has pursued a quest to answer the ultimate questions about the origin of our world and ourselves. History reveals that that pursuit has followed many paths which we have refined into bodies of knowledge. Some are referred to as belonging to a family we have called “science”. These follow rigorous rules of inquiry, verification and then application. Others which depend upon the experience of our species, free thought and intuition ultimately, when faced with the unverifiable, depend on faith.

Science for many generations was corrupted to serve faith, and humanity was ill served by that enslavement. Since the Enlightenment a general rejection of placing the straight jacket of faith on scientific pursuit and its application to the practical and immediate has created a deep divide between scientific and faith related pursuit of the knowledge of the ultimate questions about our origin. The two communities often cannot engage in polite let alone constructive dialogue. Yet much of our nation’s extraordinary history has seen these two flourish alongside each other to enrich our soul while laying a path for unprecedented affluence and scientific progress. I have written a number of columns dealing with the meaning of separation of church and state as it was actually intended by our Founders and can assure you it was not the iron curtain envisioned by much of our current judiciary in its decisions of the past 50 years.

Two cases have come to epitomize the position of the warring parties. The first in 1925 is State of Tennessee versus John Scopes for violation of its anti evolution teaching statute and more recently in 2005, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District which forbids the teaching of “intelligent design” in public schools as an alternative explanation for evolution. These cases act as book ends for the debate. It’s ironic that in 80 years we have gone from you can’t teach Darwinian evolutionary theory to you can’t teach anything but.

What in part is fueling the current inflammatory rhetoric on the different perspectives is the success of the scientific process itself. Our advances in understanding human DNA have themselves revealed more complex questions of biologic sequencing which boggle the mind in ever reaching a conclusion that the result could be random. While scientific inquiry continues, we have yet to come up with an explanation other than the hand of a creator. In some of what I am about to discuss, I would like to acknowledge an outstanding article by Margaret B. Edwards in the Summer 2006 issue of the University of Virginia Magazine. It is clear, concise and yet comprehensive in its attention to the speech issues as well as the scientific.

We need to understand first that Creationism is not the same as intelligent design. Intelligent design does not identify the world’s author as “God” nor deny evolution while Creationists do. What adherents of intelligent design say is that the confluence of natural phenomena that have been explained leave a number of questions that scientific principle itself suggest are beyond chance. According to Michael Behe, professor of biological sciences at Lehigh and sighted in the UVA article says that in a his research on the delineation and design and natural selection, one experiment particularly requires 40 distinctly different types of proteins to produce a working synthesis. Like life itself, which requires a greater number of syntheses than this to have evolved into homo sapiens, it “…could not have started unless an intelligent agent put the right pieces in place, together at the same time.” Adherents of intelligent design also point to weaknesses in evolutionist’s time line as further support for at least the consideration of their line of inquiry.

Darwinists say no, because what the inquiry into intelligent design pursues is the unknowable and thus not science and most certainly should not be foisted off on young impressionable minds taking high school biology……….Where have these people been? What high school students have they been exposed to? -Certainly not ones on this planet. There is not a more skeptical, questioning group on planet earth than the typical American teenager! Thus what strikes me is that the battle as being fought out in the school rooms of America isn’t over who is right but over free speech and the intellectual free pursuit of ideas. The world is being turned on its head. What was forbidden 80 years ago is now the required. And this “gag rule” is all the result of a specious argument that we are turning our classrooms into Creationist churches. What the intelligent design folks are saying is that the existence of a creator of some sort can be posited pursuant to scientific method. In the same way we can prove alternative dimensions, the presence of Quarks and other quantum physics we can posit the presence of a creator.

According to Bryce Paschal, advisor at U.Va to a campus group pushing intelligent design and himself an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at U.Va. , “Good Science identifies weak links in what is known. Science should acknowledge the shortcomings in evolutionary science, especially as regards what is known about transition species.” Much in Darwinian Theory is also inferred according to Professor Paschal. The presence of the courts in all of this seems misplaced. In Thomas Jefferson’s words, “[I]t is error alone which needs the support of government.” Left to real freedom of intellectual pursuit including the non sectarian consideration of the threads created by biology’s advances, man will sort it out and shouldn’t be prevented from including those questions and the consideration of all possible answers. As for myself, I cast myself with that other 18^th century scientist and philosopher, Benjamin Franklin. When debating the divinity of Jesus, Franklin disclaimed an opinion saying he had never studied the question and “…think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the Truth with less trouble.” I enjoy you, my readers so I hope it isn’t too soon.

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Charleston Mercury June 22, 2006. Page 16.

"A Billion Here; A Billion There" - OpEd

2006-06-14T13:11:00.000-05:00

The late great Republican senator from Illinois, Everett Dirksen, had a droll sense of humor and wit to match. Once, when pressed by a reporter about the budget process in the U.S. Congress he replied, well …"A billion here; a billion there and soon you are talking about real money.” Such pearls pass into Washington legend and become today’s clichés.

Regrettably the wisdom underlying his wit has not fared well in the intervening years. Any monetary sanity we could have laid claim to has gone the way of the Congressional earmark. Instead of billions we are now talking about trillions, and the odd billion of Dirksen’s day gets lost in rounding.

We become insensitive to the truth that even today those odd billions do mount into “real money” Although a billion saved is only a little over $3.00 of additional debt for each of our almost 300 million citizens, it’s time we stopped the insanity. We have gotten into our 8 trillion dollar debt a dollar at a time. We need to start paying it back the same way. The cavalier treatment of our taxpayers which disrespects the sacrifice it took to earn each dollar and layers pork on pork is at the root of what needs attention if we are to restore responsible governance to our great country. Cutting the Pork is where we must start.

When the President submitted his most recent budget, the military was still totaling up requests for the needs of our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Once calculated they were bundled into a supplemental appropriation request along with additional amounts aimed at post Katrina assistance for the Gulf States and approved by The Office of Management and Budget before being forwarded to the Hill for action. The amount requested, 92.2 Billion dollars, was acted on quickly by The House at the requested amount, but The Senate added additional programs, some only loosely germane to the requested purpose, for $14 Billion more. Now that may only be an additional $43 per citizen, but the appropriation itself is an additional $280 per citizen to start with and is probably not a model of budgetary restraint. They seldom are in wartime.

No one wishes to deny our troops the very best equipment and logistical support they need, or to deny meaningful focused assistance to the gulf region for infrastructure replacement caused by Katrina, but the legislation should not be a Christmas tree for every “worthy” project that has failed to make it into the normal budget process.

One particular project strongly advocated by Gulf States senators would spend 700 million dollars to relocate a rail line that has already been repaired by the company which owns it. There is no doubt the project which would permit the creation of a new boulevard on which to locate what will now be land based casinos would add to the attractiveness and convenience of the rebuilt casinos, but that is no reason to use the accelerated process for supplementals and the heightened urgency for a defense related measure to attempt to slip through a measure that couldn’t make it through the ordinary budgetary process.

While I have real doubts that this project should receive federal funding at all, I shouldn’t pick on this one project. It is only symbolic of hundreds of others that our legislators try to affix to crucial legislation every year. They are just doing their job the way it has been done for the past two centuries. Isn’t it what their constituents sent them to Washington for? To bring home the bacon? The more successful they are, the happier their electorate and the less likely anyone can run successfully against them.

I will tell you what is wrong with it. It is the magnitude of the huge sums of money now being directed by the federal government. We are dealing with more than a two trillion dollar budget. The sums are so huge; they breed greed, dishonesty and destroy our trust in government. It also is a serious blow to federalism. The amounts of money and the strings that come with it from Washington are overwhelming our regional diversity.

In an earlier column, I suggested the federal government be limited in what it can spend annually as a percent of GDP. There is nothing that has happened in the last year to change my mind. A 60% super majority in both Houses in Congress to exceed 15% of GDP should be required, and each measure that is thus proposed should require the same majority to be enacted. Coupled with this, the federal government needs to be held accountable for expenses it requires the states to pay for federally required programs. These so called “federal mandates”, swamp the ability of the states to determine their own priorities. In combination, federal mandates and the huge federal money machine are destroying our federal system and making the states vassals of federal hegemony.

This is a vast land. We do have our regional differences and what fits one state in the way its people interact with government for local services does not fit another. The wisdom of the federal system is that it allows the best to rise to the top, to be modeled by one state for the others. It allows problems to be solved closer to home, and it allows our lives to be sufficiently diverse that we aren’t smothered in a blanket of federal requirements for everything from what the guardrails on our highways look like to what our standards of intoxication may be.

Using the lure of federal money, the states and localities have become dependent on that federal money. Once dependent we become subject to all sorts of smothering regulations. It would be far better to limit the money going to and from Washington. The states need to decide for themselves what services are appropriate and to pay for it with local taxes and fees in a way acceptable to its citizens out of the funds no longer sent to Washington. Have a problem that is regional? Solve it with a regional multistate compact, but let’s stop subjecting ourselves to stifling federal control. We will all be better off and our liberties more secure.

We are a sensible people, but there is another problem preventing our finding a solution to the forces of disunity that prevent progress in implementing solutions on which there would otherwise be a consensus. We are a competitive society. There is a compulsion to compete. There is also a fascination with the sensational, and there is an emphasis on material reward. The Media have decided that it serves its financial interest to glorify our differences, to milk disputes no matter how inconsequential, to stretch them out, to personalize and to accent the seamy rather than the honest efforts to come together. Politicians picking up on this, knowing they need the campaign funds that come with a polarized electorate further add to the forces of division, and it has become a vicious circle making politics the newest blood sport. My friends we are better than this. We have to look for ways to reward agreement not dissension; to come together rather than to divide. This is worth a full column at a later date; meantime, if you will send me your ideas on how to achieve budget sanity, I will be glad to include them.

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Charleston Mercury June 14, 2006. Page 16.

“1001110011010” - OpEd

2006-05-26T09:39:00.000-05:00

It is time for another in our series on the effect of technology on our life. I am indebted to my grad assistant Craig Knowlton for the research on this article.

Well, that numerical title is either the beginning of the alphabet, the first few notes of the Star Spangled Banner, instructions from your cell phone to your home to turn on the lights, lower the temperature on the first floor and turn on the oven to 350 degrees, the picture of your cat speeding through phone lines and cyber space to your sister in Jakarta, or instructions to an intelligence satellite to photograph a suspicious formation in a far flung land……….. Or it might be all of the above, and that is the point.

Whatever the device, whatever its chore, our communication with it, and its communication with interconnected devices or with its own sub systems is increasingly likely to be in 1’s and 0’s, pulse--- absence of pulse, tone--- absence of tone indicating its dependence on a universal digital key that is wrapping us together ever closer to each other. Small world, big village is today’s reality. The opportunities and challenges we face are increasingly from this digital convergence creating a cat’s cradle of interconnecting lines tying devices together and culture to culture-- whether we are ready or not.

In the future, almost every device will be a network device. Some will be large and immobile, like home entertainment screens, and others will be small and portable, like cell-phones, watches, and digital wallets allowing us to access our financial accounts and arrange for payments for everything from a movie to a house. Given current display technologies, people mostly dislike reading online, but researchers at MIT have invented a new kind of ink that turns a sheet the thickness of a piece of paper into a black-and-white monitor—and they are working on the color version. Extremely high-resolution, reader friendly, screens will one day be everywhere. People will have the capability to carry, perhaps even wear, their computers and use them anyplace, anytime, to send and receive telephone, fax, video, or mail messages.

Some extreme predictions assert that eventually no books, photographs, movies, televisions, stereos, letters, post cards, billboards, telephones, or fax machines will inhabit the average day. Bits, the electronic 1s and 0s that create digital language, are cheaper to produce and store than the cost of cutting down trees to manufacture paper. Instead of paying $30 for a hardcover book, we can read the inexpensive and environmentally friendly digital version. Already many people no longer spend $15 on industry-packaged compact discs; instead they opt to download music directly onto their computer or cell-phone. While I don’t envision production of all tangible information and entertainment objects completely disappearing, one day they could be seen as artifacts more than practical devices. Already libraries feature electronic books and documents so that researchers can access material from around the world. At the College of Charleston, students normally receive teacher handouts via the university network; in this way, they can choose to read it onscreen or print it out.

Nowadays coffee shops, colleges, and private homes and offices feature wireless networks. Downtown Charleston has been promoting its up and coming wireless corridor, and New Orleans has instituted wireless service to help speed emergency service and communication in Katrina’s aftermath. Eventually, a global network of wireless connections will have profound affects on everyday devices that we use. Not only do automobiles access GPS data to provide street maps and car locations, but other products and appliances will access the network as well.

Cable, telephone, and entertainment companies now busily labor towards their digital futures, and eventually the distinction between the television and phone companies will become technological and cultural history. It’s estimated that by 2015, ninety percent of all households in the developed world will have a home media center, which will operate all network transmissions. Computers and televisions will be able to display the same media, so that people will cease distinguishing between them. All information, whether stored data, live streaming sporting events, or downloaded movies on demand, will come from the local—or worldwide—broadband network. People already conduct commercial transactions safely online, whether renting a movie or buying a car and the development of digital watermarks will protect intellectual property and advance business communications as well.

Ian McEwen, the Booker Prize winning author, is currently writing the introduction of a book in which one hundred and forty thinkers, mostly scientists; answer the question “What do you believe that you cannot prove?” While working on this project, McEwen has observed that “They appear to be working towards the formation of a common language. They need each other…The old Enlightenment dream of a unified body of knowledge is beginning, only just beginning, to emerge.” Digital convergence is both an immediate reflection and instigator of this worldwide unification of knowledge. Ordinary people will have resources that Caesar Augustus, Thomas More, or Thomas Jefferson never imagined.

There exists in digital convergence the fabulous opportunity for a renascence of human potential. Traditional societies might resist the effects of digital convergence upon their mores and daily life, but the open communication of a global network also promises to expose those traditions to a wider audience. While there will always be much left to prove and more to discover, it seems that consumer and communications revolutions occur daily. While much more enthusiastic about the beneficence of digital convergence for mankind than I am about the risks of nanotechnology which itself reflects the principles of digital convergence, like all change it is not an unmixed blessing. Already it is challenging the third world in ways that are very disturbing to cultures very resistant to change. While the Indian subcontinent may thrive by embracing it, other cultures through their resistance are at the heart of much of the misery that has held back the region and its people and now threatens us oceans away. It is too soon to predict its geopolitical impact, but I suspect that the forces of change are too great for technologically unsophisticated societies to withstand. They will change and sometimes change violently, but our republic is likely to change as well from the digital interconnection of interest groups on all sorts of issues who can more effectively make their wishes known to all levels of our government.

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Robert E. Freer, Jr, President of the Free Enterprise Foundation, is a Visiting Professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel. He is a regular contributor to the Mercury.

Charleston Mercury May 24, 2006. Page 16.

Faith Reaffirmed - OpEd

2006-05-10T11:40:00.000-05:00

Life is a leveler. Even for the great, life proceeds as it does for the rest of us, day by day. Their lives like our own consist of routine which in time becomes a rhythm. We are all equal and alike in our mortality, and experience the same aches and joys along life’s journey. We all dream mostly about the people most important to us, those people with whom our involvement provides the meaning for our lives, the mileposts and its measure.

You won’t read this for a couple of weeks, but my family and I have just experienced one of those defining events which gives each of us cause to reflect and catch a glimpse of our life’s meaning. On April 22, my youngest daughter was married to a fine young man here in Charleston.

While feeling joy that two highly principled, loving young adults have found each other and have agreed to face life together, I am keenly aware of the challenges facing today’s families including our own, how temporal and fragile relationships can become when assaulted by the images, speed and complexity of our digital age as well as our own frailties. I could be daunted and afraid for them when considering the forces of discontinuity that will confront them, but I am not. Instead I am strangely comforted by the experience.

The French author Alphonse Karr is reputed to be the source of the famous aphorism, “Plus ca change, plus c’est la mime chose.” (The more things change, the more they remain the same). My comfort comes from that truth. For human beings the successful life is about the values that bind us to our society, and this has been so for at least the last two millennia

In selecting verses to read at their marriage my daughter and her husband, like many before them selected from First Corinthians, Chapter 13, describing the importance and character of love as the core of their relationship with each other.

Writing 2000 years ago, the apostle Paul tells his flock back in Corinth, “Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy; it does not boast. It is not proud; it is not rude; it is not self seeking; it is not easily angered, and it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres” Paul ends by reminding the Corinthians “…And now these three remain: faith, hope and love but the greatest of these is love”

Sounds pretty contemporary to me. The whole Book of First Corinthians connects us to our past and is as modern as today. Like our time, theirs was plagued not only by the forces of nature but also by the emptiness of faithless non enduring relationships and the search by men and women alike for comfort and meaning in their attachment. The value to society of The Bible in general and First Corinthians in particular throughout time immemorial is not just its message of our salvation through Christ but its practical, time tested counsel on how to live a satisfying life. It is this practical aspect of ordering of life that made it the favorite reader for our founding fathers.

Paul’s life affirming counsel is as good today as it was then and connects us to our ancestors over a two millennia span of human experience. We can identify with their anxiety, their frailty and their faith. We know innately their resilience and their failures. We are not so different. They endured. We have endured, and our offspring will endure.

From my experience, I would say that not only will they endure but thrive and carry mankind to a better outcome than the society we are yielding to them.

We will yield to them sometimes with protest and sometimes willingly, but we will do so a little bit each day. As we became our parents on some distant day in the past, they are becoming us. Whether we are willing to pass quietly into obscurity and then onto our ultimate reward, they are fully ready and capable of taking the baton and carrying us wherever it is that we are headed.

I was particularly conscious of this passage at the rehearsal dinner when after I had given my father-of-the-bride toast, my daughter, my shy, quiet well behaved daughter stepped forward and just took over. She spoke with conviction, poise and assurance, and it seemed to me that she spoke for the first time as a mature adult and wowed everyone. She had transformed before all our eyes into this benign but powerful presence. I couldn’t have been prouder, and I rejoice with the rest of you who have already experienced a similar life affirming experience.

I continue to be concerned about all the national policy subjects I normally write about. Fiscal irresponsibility, taxation insanity, immigration reform, the war in Iraq, apathy among too many of our citizens, and the everyday assaults on the values about which I write will all return to these pages soon, but today, just today let me share with each of you the hopeful message that all is well. Despite the challenges thrown our way, America and its people will survive and prevail. Our youngsters are more than our equals, and they will find the way.

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Robert E. Freer, Jr, President of the Free Enterprise Foundation, is a Visiting Professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel. He is a regular contributor to the Mercury.

Charleston Mercury May 10, 2006. Page 16.

National Resource Development: Priority #1 - OpEd

2006-04-26T12:06:00.000-05:00

Given the media-driven consumer-oriented society that rules in America today, it is crucial for all Americans to understand the personal and societal effects of their every day spending. As our society is transformed from the societal safety net of the New Deal to one emphasizing personal responsibility, saving for the long term is crucial. We are inundated on a daily basis with images, jingles, and slogans telling us to spend our money on one item or service as opposed to another or at one place or another. The temptation to buy on impulse is a constant threat to personal economic welfare. For children particularly, it is crucial that they be taught the values and responsibilities that will enable them to thrive in our self reliant society.

Many young people today are entering their first jobs with virtually no awareness of the need for a lifetime savings plan, the importance of spending wisely. They haven’t a clue how to do either with any confidence they are doing it right. The opportunity to establish good habits of money management- stewardship, if you will- is critical at this time in their lives. Without it, many give in to the temptation to blow their first paychecks on the newest sneakers or stereo equipment instead of putting even a small portion away for a rainy day or the family college fund.

Assuring the right outcome to this economic fork in the road should be a societal mandate of paramount importance. The young people of this nation are its future. They are our greatest national resource. With growing worries over the job market and whether Social Security will still be there 30 years down the road, the time is ripe for instilling in pre-teens and teenagers the importance of responsibility for their own economic success. Parents should teach their children how to spend wisely by encouraging them to buy what they need rather than what they want. Teachers should also reinforce good economic behavior by their students. We should also see that basic information is supplemented as they progress through their teen years so by the time they hit twenty, the variety of investment opportunities available is at least generally understood...

Here in South Carolina we are lucky to have the South Carolina Council on Economic Education lodged at the Darla Moore School of Business in Columbia. The Council, in its words is “a non profit business education partnership dedicated to providing teachers with continuing education in economics and personal finance”. Its website, (sceconomics.org) is filled with economic education tools for kids from primary grades through high school that make learning the tools to navigate life’s economic challenges fun and relatively painless. While the Council has been here for thirty years, we are neglecting to use it to full potential. Too often this aspect of education is ignored.

Our kids are “over programmed” we are told, and this subject is one that quite often is left for life to teach. We can and ought to do better. Public schools should be required to demonstrate that their students can not only read and write, but they understand what is necessary in the way of prudent use of their earnings to survive and thrive in today’s fast changing world economy. From my perspective, I sure would like them to understand as well that each of them has a responsibility to utilize at least some of their prudently retained earnings to help those institutions in their community dependent on public charitable support. Our future is not only dependent on their economic sophistication but their moral maturity

In one particularly effective example of how to do this, parents, teachers, and young people joined together in Franklin County, Colorado several years ago to hold an event with the United Way and the National Endowment for Financial Education, Young Americans Education Foundation, and various local community groups to educate young people on personal finance, entrepreneurship, and career planning. The groups focused on educators and students during an economic education expo by staging a hands-on learning curriculum, animated financial concepts, business training, a high school financial planning seminar, and other events. The expo was held in response to local public outcry to give young people tools necessary, while they are in school, to make good, responsible financial decisions throughout their adult lives.

Events such as these succeed on two levels: they instill the ethics of personal financial responsibility in young people, and they build a sense of community in a city or town. Through a whole community banding together, adolescents will get the message that personal economic responsibility is crucial to their security and happiness both for the future and in the short term.

If such an event is not possible for individual parents and teachers, these adults should still work to instill the values of responsibility, frugality, and saving and investing into young people. Without these values, teens and pre-teens are at risk in our dynamic economy of not having the skills and personal habits to succeed.

The future of America depends on responsible individuals who spend and invest wisely.

Charleston is not so large that we wouldn’t directly benefit by creating our own program, and we are fortunate to have two fine public business schools here to help lead the way. The Citadel, its mentor association and the College of Charleston are excellent institutions dedicated to the welfare of our area who should undertake this effort as a joint project. Working with The Council on Economic Education, our Foundation and, The Board of Education, I would suggest we look at developing a pilot project this year to leverage our resources and create our own local program that will merge both moral and economic educational growth.

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Robert E. Freer, Jr is a Visiting Professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel and a regular contributor to the Mercury.

Charleston Mercury April 26, 2006. Page 16.

Churchill's Peace (II) - OpEd

2006-04-17T07:52:00.000-05:00

Following my column on Churchill’s Peace, one of my readers sent me an article sited as the view of the Arab world by an Arab. Haim Hariri is described as Chair of the Davidson Institute of Science Education and past president of the Weizmann Institute of Education. His comments were delivered before the international advisory board of an unidentified trans national corporation.

Having read a dozen or more such offerings in the past year or so, I can tell you his views are numbered among the more moderate and least cataclysmic of those I have come across. All confirm we are in the early stages of a world war. All express optimism we will eventually overcome the challenge to civilization posed by the terrorists, but all also say we have many rough days ahead of us and imply the battle if won will require us to change as well.

Dr. Hariri first notes that Israel and its intrusion into God’s cradle of civilization has little if anything to do with the roiling storms tossing the Muslim world. He notes many examples from Iraq, Algeria and Afghanistan to prove his point and concludes by saying that... “[t]he root of the trouble is that this entire Moslem region is totally dysfunctional and would be so even if the Israelis weren’t part of the picture”. He describes the Arab world as consisting of 22 nations, with 300 million people covering an area larger than the U.S. or Europe. He notes their wealth in energy resources and suggests that one measure of their dysfunction is that with all this going for them, they only collectively produce one half of the GDP for California and concludes… “That almost everybody in the region blames this situation on The United States, on Israel, on Western Civilization, on Judaism, on Christianity, and on anyone and anything except themselves.” He indicts the “vast silent majority” of “decent honest good people” in the region as enablers of those who have brought this plague on themselves and the rest of the world.

Dr. Hariri points to 4 main pillars of the world conflict: The first pillar he states is suicide-murder which creates terror well beyond the total numbers for such deaths. Any comparison with deaths from AIDS in Africa or all the deaths in Russia or Bosnia as a result of the war in Chechnya would dwarf those caused by murder suicide. But one 9/11 incident or any similar scenario shocks and frightens by its sheer unpredictability. The impossibility of effectively countering these threats while maintaining anything like free movement of our citizens creates a level of continuing terror previously unknown. It also forces us to consider changes to the ordering of our society that appear Hobsonian in what they force us to sacrifice in cherished freedoms.

The second element is lies. “..The level of incitement and total absolute deliberate fabrications… have reached new heights in the region” says Hariri. I would add that the Western press has become a handmaiden to the deliberate distortions by giving those distortions and the ensuing round of additional falsifications that occur far more respect than they deserve. By failing to project a Western humanistic perspective in its reporting, our free press is failing to follow the precedent of most of the media in prior wars not to give aid and comfort to those who would destroy us. Thank heavens for email from our service personnel which counters the falsehoods and is for the most part supportive of our mission as well as their role in it.

The third element is money in obscene amounts that circulates to support munitions, travel, terrorists, hideouts, logistics, the layered support of planners, commanders, preachers and others all serving as a “terror infrastructure”. Again we need to decide that if we are at “war, we will use all the tools at our disposal to starve it of the resources used to wage its crimes against humanity.

Faced with this situation the Administration has had to scramble to reorder staffing and resource priorities for a war of ideas, a war that could in the view of one senior military commander very well last thirty years, and it has to devise a strategy that allows our society to continue to advance while satisfying the public that the very real losses continuing to be suffered are necessary, that we will win because we are right in the long run and that there is no less painful approach to make it all just go away.

The last pillar of the Muslim war is the breaking of all laws both moral and state ordained. Nothing other than the total victory of their medieval view of society is acceptable to them. They offer no quarter and view us as ripe for the taking because of our soft and fuzzy humanistic values. Reason is not to prevail in their system, only their rigid view of the requirements of the often conflicting dictates of their faith will do.

While I don’t have the answer to make it all go away, I have made the point to one member of the President’s national security team that the public is prepared to sacrifice so long as they understand what is at stake for them. Under close questioning, the response is that the President is firm in his resolve, is speaking out regularly laying out the case and is not receiving the media coverage necessary to reach our citizens with his cogent message. The administration understands that it has a serious communications problem but doesn’t seem to me as if they have any well thought out plan to solve it. Maybe it is the media moguls who need to be called to The White House for a chat on what is at stake and perhaps as well, the administration needs to add some right thinking Democrats to its team to make it clear that at least in this area we must be united. When accepting the reins of responsibility for defending the British Isles, Winston Churchill noted that all he had to offer his fellow citizens was “blood toil tears and sweat…” While our situation is not so dire, it is equally as serious, longer in term and more difficult of resolution. Our leadership is being tested but more importantly each of us is being tested as well, and this is a battle we dare not lose.

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Robert E. Freer, Jr, President of the Free Enterprise Foundation, is a Visiting Professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel. He is a regular contributor to the Mercury.

Charleston Mercury April 13, 2006. Page 16.

Churchill's Peace - OpEd

2006-03-21T09:32:00.000-05:00

As all wars do, Iraq tests the resolve and staying power of the combatants. Long wars prove particularly difficult for democracies. Because the United States is positioned as the leader of the free world, our engagement in the world war against terror has been particularly troublesome. Will power is never monolithic in a democracy. Will power pools around the various outspoken opinions that thrive in our republic, and these differing wills reflects world opinion. Such varying pools of sentiment expand and shrink in concert with the war’s progression.

The Iraq war presents some particular challenges because its burden has not been evenly shared, thus creating the aura of falsity in the United States. Our expanding economy and our separation from the bloodshed abroad make the growing casualty list seem unreal to our disconnected population. Additionally, the relative freedom from incessant combat everyplace but Iraq confuses the public into thinking Iraq is the focus of the war—when in fact we face an implacable foe with a worldwide intention to cause mayhem.

Some time ago I wrote that we would reach a time such as this which would sorely test our staying power. While continuing to support seeing the mission through to its end, I question what an acceptable definition of success is. The creation of a democracy that models ours is an unrealistic goal unworthy of prolonged loss of American blood.

Pursuing freedom does not mean requiring the adoption of our political model. The President has stated our policy to assist all those thirsting to be free; he sees a peaceful world assured by democracy. I doubt this possibility. The adoption of that aggressive policy for the United States’ goal puts us on a collision course with many countries on whom we must rely in order to win our present battle. We would be guilty of great hubris to insist that “victory” result in a democracy mirroring ours. A democracy will reflect the best and worst of the people it represents. Just as that is so for us, it is true in the Middle East. The result in the Middle East is likely to be far different from here. Without a Pax-Americana, the region is not likely to be peaceful for years to come.

In 1921 Winston Churchill, while speaking about the Cairo Conference, said, “I feel some misgivings about the political consequences to myself of taking on my shoulders the burden of the Mesopotamia entanglement.” The addition of Israel into a thousand year old tribal and religious boiling cauldron during the intervening years has done nothing to improve matters. Churchill saw an ungovernable morass and it hasn’t improved.

Bismarck cautioned that, “Nations do not have friends. They only have interests.” We would do well to remember that. We rest on a slippery slope if we insist on defining a Middle East that looks like us. In 1921 Mesopotamia, responding in part to Woodrow Wilson’s ringing words favoring national self determination, rampaged after perceiving that France and Britain betrayed them in the Sykes-Picot agreement that carved up the region. The Cairo conference was called to see if a more palatable result could be found that would limit the need for occupying troops and all the consequential expense and exposure to entanglement in Mideast intrigue that would necessarily ensue.

This resulted in the acceptance of borders that reflected tribal concentrations and traditional trading routes. Occupying forces would be kept out of the way in a few selected spots and local administration would be encouraged. The political turmoil that still exists is a reflection of the continuing aspiration for nationhood by those persons long denied a place they could truly call their own. The creation of Israel, oil politics, and the religious differences that I previously have mentioned all have caused displacement and tension.

While waiting for Secretary Rice to appear before his panel on February 16, Chairman Henry Hyde of the House International Relations Committee—who strongly supports President Bush’s strategy of promoting universal freedom—questioned whether the United States can produce worldwide peace and stability by financing and encouraging democracy: “The magic formula of democracy alone” will not work. It must be supported by “unbounded power” and “an open ended commitment of time and resources which we cannot and will not do.” The administration seems to be putting its hope in Sunni and Shiva clerics forging an agreement that would allow the Iraqi state to carry forward a new government. Given the historic nature of their feud it remains a slim hope that they will be successful in stifling the already existing internecine tensions.

Like the administration, I hope that a national unity government will take office in Baghdad before the summer. At the end of the day, we may, like Churchill before us, have to accept this as the best achievable goal, adopt a neutralization posture, and rethink our long term strategy against the religious terrorists that threaten us as well as the rest of the modern world.

_._

Robert E. Freer, Jr is a Visiting Professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel and a regular contributor to the Mercury.

Charleston Mercury March 16, 2006. Page 16.

Regaining Its Balance: A Supreme Court Voyage - OpEd

2006-03-02T13:04:00.000-05:00

The judicial Power of The United States shall be vested in one Supreme Court and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.

Today the majesty of our Supreme Court is fixed within the fabric of our nation. It works as a bulwark, with the executive and legislative branches, against the daily passions which would stampede us into irretrievable harm. It has not always been thus. During the administrations of Washington and Adams, the Court’s relationship to the other two branches was ill defined. Only good Federalists were selected for appointment, and the cases that appeared before it did not call for the Court to interpret its relationship and the rule of law with the other two branches. In 1801 that changed. The newly elected President and Republican majorities in Congress moved promptly to rescind legislation creating a number of new judgeships that President Adams filled in the waning days of his administration. In a few cases appointments duly made had not been delivered prior to President Jefferson taking office. One such appointment, William Marbury’s, steered the Court onto the course it now comfortably assumes as the arbiter of the Constitution. This case first tested the limits of both executive power and Congressional authority and, moreover, secured the Court as the arbitrator of Constitutional disputes.

To view William Marbury one wouldn’t think him a likely figure to test the basic bonds of a nation. Trained in finance, he developed a wealth of experience working for the state of Maryland. One history notes “He helped his friends, and they helped him,” but his timing was almost always bad. He sought influence in Annapolis just as Baltimore was replacing its commercial influence, and he later moved to Georgetown which by then had not only lost influence to Baltimore but been replaced as Washington’s port by Alexandria. However, Marbury did possess one superior trait that served him well wherever he resided: He had an impeccable reputation for honesty. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars passed through his hands in all of his offices of public trust, with little suggestion that he had diverted any money to his own pocket.” He was also a staunch Adams Federalist, and the departing administration, in one of its last acts, rewarded him by designating him Justice of the Peace for Georgetown. Though the appointment made it through the hoops of Senate consent and signature by the Outgoing Secretary of State, it was not delivered prior to the appointment of James Madison as Secretary of State in Thomas Jefferson’s administration. Madison refused to deliver it. It seemed Marbury would again suffer from his wretched timing. To make matters worse, the Secretary of State who signed his commission would as Chief Justice deny him the right to any relief for its non delivery—but we get ahead of ourselves.

Marbury, faced with Madison’s refusal to deliver his commission, filed under the Judiciary Act of 1789 in the Supreme Court for an order that would require its delivery. In the opinion of the Court on Marbury’s request, Chief Justice Marshall carefully set out the origins and limitations of Congressional power, and in measured prose, established the paramount power of the Constitution and The Court’s role as its interpreter—including the right to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional. As it pertained to William Marbury, Justice Marshall found that the Judiciary Act exceeded Congress’s Constitutional authority to hear a case such as Marbury’s as a court of first review. Original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court was restricted under the Constitution to “…Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public ministers and Consuls, and those in which a state shall be Party, in all other cases before mentioned, the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction…” By resisting an expansive notion not found in the Constitution, by chiding a prior Congress (Federalist) for exceeding its authority and the executive branch for exceeding its authority in not carrying out its responsibilities under the law to deliver the appointment, Marshall established the authority of the Court but dodged a confrontation over the appointment by dismissing the case as improperly brought. Advanced under an unconstitutional statute, Marbury’s complaint should have not been set forth in The Supreme Court. It would be 54 years before the Court would again find a statute unconstitutional.

When reading the Opinion today, its wisdom and clarity of thought strikes us. Chief Justice Marshall assumes the Delphic robes of the ideal Justice in his retrained assertion of the Court’s jurisdiction. His appointer, John Adams, in what is oft sited still as the description of the ideal judge, called for… “Men of experience on the laws, of exemplary morals, invincible application, unruffled calmness, indefatigable application… [and] subservient to none.” As a nation we have just gone through the confirmation of the court’s 110^th judge, Associate Justice Samuel Alito, who is a man that would have drawn praise from John Adams and should draw praise from us as well.

Justice Alito has earned commendations from judges and members of the Bar deemed both philosophically liberal and conservative for his judicial rectitude, scholarship, and clarity of opinion. I predict that ten years from now neither the political right nor left will be able to rely on his making any decision other than that firmly founded in the law. His conservatism resides in the non-assertion of the Court’s concern for matters not squarely required to be decided in a given case. This conservatism properly preserves Congress’s lawmaking function, and that is what we must insist on in our judicial branch.

Should we depart from this norm, the judicial branch will cease being a balance for the other two and take on trappings of the legislature, thus ruining our Founders’ well thought plan and dooming us to a gradual forfeiture of our freedom as well.

_._

Professor Freer is a visiting professor and the John S Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel. He is a regular contributor to The Mercury.

Charleston Mercury March 2, 2006. Page 16.

The Cowboy - OpEd

2006-02-10T20:32:00.000-05:00

He’d come west several years before after the loss of his wife, drawn by the vastness of the land and the opportunity to test himself against the rigors of life on the range. Despite his unlikely appearance that earned him the name “four eyes”, he had prevailed. He’d won the respect of both owners and ranch hands by his indefatigable spirit and toughness. They had even made him a deputy sheriff to chase down the outlaw, Redhead Finnegan, and their confidence had been rewarded when he caught the outlaw after a grueling chase. Now in 1886 he operated two ranches and had been asked to address the first Fourth of July picnic in Dickinson, Dakota Territory. The cowboy worked hard on his speech and with a small group of his friends, jumped aboard the eastbound freight in Medora just after daylight and arrived in Dickinson, 50 miles to the east, in plenty of time for the festivities. Trestle tables filled the town’s square for the large crowd that had gathered for the parade and the festivities. After the parade and the prayers, the speeches began.

The cowboy was last, and the crowd had become restive. He began in a reedy voice that carried to the back of the crowd and drew catcalls from some of them; next the bright sunlight reflected off of his spectacles blinding him and right into someone eyes in the front of the crowd. This was not a promising start, and the speaker removed his spectacles and poked fun at his own inability to read his speech. Buoyed by their laughs and cheers he began again.

“…But as you already know your rights and privileges

So well, I am going to ask you to excuse me if I say a few words about your duties. Much has been given to us…and we must take heed to use aright the gifts entrusted to our care. It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use it.” The cowboy continued…he liked “big things” and did not undervalue America’s material prosperity, “But we must keep steadfastly in mind that no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue.”

President’s Day 2006, 120 years later, we are still being tested. We do have much for which to be grateful. Yet for so many of us who have been so singularly blessed there is no peace. We scratch at our good fortune like an itch that has now become a soar. We are afraid to celebrate our good fortune and the values that got us here. While we languish, the promise of this land continues to lure pioneers from the farthest corners of the globe, all thirsting for freedom and the opportunity to make a better life. We have just left behind our season of joy and thanksgiving, but I worry that in the affluence we have achieved and the never ceasing attempts to recognize constitutionally protected “new rights,” we may as a people have lost sight of our duties to stand up for what we have.

I founded the Free Enterprise Foundation because along with our board and co-founders, I believe that as citizens of this great land, we have a responsibility to each other to define ethics broadly. It is not just adherence to a general notion of fair play that makes us ethical. We must consistently be decent to each other and affirmatively support our communities. We look to government for many services to enhance our welfare and are disappointed. Bureaucracy, waste, outright graft and all around failure to get the job done confront us. Government is needed to protect our security but increasingly we see that it is the volunteer effort of thousands of good citizens from around our great land that has the power, the skill and the persistence of the giving spirit to transform our society into the world of which we dream. Duty is as much a part of the American ethic as is liberty. Without acceptance of our duties, freedom will perish.

Corporations, which draw their existence and their privileges from the state, have a special responsibility to foster an ethical culture that permeates their every fiber. Our Foundation reaches out to recognize those enterprises that do and to provide tools of Best Practice to all. We also intend to educate the public on the continuing need to keep the cowboy’s words ever in mind. As for the Cowboy, though he soon returned to the East, he is still very much a part of the Dakota landscape gazing out from Mt Rushmore. Theodore Roosevelt never shirked his duty, and we as citizens should do no less.

_._

Robert E. Freer, Jr is a Visiting Professor and the John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel and a regular contributor to the Mercury.

Charleston Mercury February 16, 2006. Page 16.

Best Friend of Charleston - OpEd

2006-02-08T07:43:00.000-05:00

Not long after its founding in 1670, mercantile interests in Charleston became leaders in broadening commerce and transportation to assure profitable markets for this region’s precious cotton, indigo, rice and other products not available in more northerly climes. It has been a leader in broadening commerce and transportation ever since. Recently a replica of The Best Friend of Charleston spent time on Wall Street to celebrate Norfolk Southern being listed on The New York Stock Exchange. This article is by way of a cheer and a prayer

What an auspicious day! It was Christmas 1830 in Charleston, South Carolina, and Nick Darrell pinched himself at the luck that had befallen him. Since October 1830 when the contraption in front of him arrived on a packet boat from New York, he had worked hard to assemble and test it and now was to make history. Before him in its festive and seasonally appropriate green and red paint stood The Best Friend of Charleston, the first steam locomotive in the United States to establish regularly scheduled rail service. It was all going to start today, and he was its engineer. He was really excited; bands played, and the sound of firearm salutes exploded into the sky.

Today the locomotive was only going to run six miles on its wood and metal rails, but it was intended to quickly open up the interior to reliable and fast connection with Charleston. The Charleston Courier described this first trip in the following terms, “The one hundred and forty one persons flew on the wings of wind at the speed of fifteen to twenty-five miles per hour, annihilating time and space…leaving all the world behind….” Though this first trip went without incident, the Best Friend’s future was to be short lived, a careless fireman, tied down the pressure relief valve on the engine, and it blew up within two months of its maiden trip.

Not to be thwarted, however, it was rebuilt as “The Phoenix” and along with a second engine named “The West Point”; the railroad pierced the continent—or at least as far as the 136 miles to North Augusta. Along with four additional engines, it succeeded in returning prosperity to Charleston and revolutionizing freight and passenger transportation. No longer dependent on river or weather conditions, commerce boomed. Mr. Darrell didn’t realize how potent a force this bit of free enterprise had loosed on the nation. Before he died in December 1869, he would see not just one state spanned but the whole country.

In May 1869 at Promontary Point, Utah, the symbolic golden spike was struck creating an endless ribbon of steel binding the nation together. Rather than taking months to span the nation, travelers could span it in a week. Of course today the miracle of free enterprise and technology allow us to span the country in a few hours, and our images, voices, and data span the globe in microseconds. Today we gather not to see a train take leave but to see a Rocket hurtle men into space. Today we can create a permanent environment for man to work and live in space, and today we reach out to the stars. Truly the imagination and determination of a free people are daily demonstrating what can be accomplished when they are allowed to seek what their imaginations tell them is possible.

I ask, however, that you do not allow unbridled enthusiasm for technology’s gifts to blind us to the hazards of falling into the hazards of its thrall. Man has a dual nature. Man has both mind and soul. Good and evil both come from our inventiveness. Without time for the soul to contemplate, to feel the rightness of the order in the universe, our journey is pointless. We ask our Creator how He permits so much misery here on earth, but we deafen ourselves to His echoing question back. It is for our better nature to respond to the suffering we’ve created. While curing disease is for the uniquely qualified, many embody consistent kindnesses to all they meet: the willingness to cut their brother a break, to reach out to the burdened with a smile, a hug, and a helping hand. Everyone in our society is a roughly hewn stone, but through simple considerations we can polish ourselves into gleaming jewels. Charleston and the Low country seem to have an almost permanent lock on the national crown as the most courteous city in the nation; so, I expect I am largely preaching to the choir, but I ask that you encourage compassionate humanity towards all of the living jewels you encounter each day.

You too can and should be such a jewel. Technology has provided so much to us, but we must never forget that it serves us, not we it. A great man I knew who died recently startled me by suggesting the accelerating agility of machines meant that “silicon” based “life” could replace “carbon” based intelligence within 50 years. That is the risk recently explored in my column on “To Nano or Not to Nano”. To prevent that from occurring, we must grow our souls and humanity to rival our mental acuity or be undone by our own machines. After all, it is our humanity that connects us. Bless each of you…pass it on! You too can be a best friend of Charleston!

_._

Robert E. Freer, Jr., an attorney, former general counsel of Kimberly-Clark Corporation and sometimes federal government official is President and CEO of The Free Enterprise Foundation, a tax-exempt think tank located at The Citadel dedicated to the study of Ethics, Civic Responsibility, Leadership and Enterprise Best Practice. Mr. Freer is also a visiting professor and The John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel’s School of Business Administration.

Charleston Mercury February 2, 2006. Page 16.

Be it Resolved - OpEd

2006-01-21T10:35:00.000-05:00

2005 has come and gone, and ready or not 2006 is upon us. As I thought about what to tackle for this week’s column, one wag suggested I write on what I don’t know about the fairer sex. Both my editor and I, given my vast ignorance on the subject, quickly rejected that suggestion as requiring volumes, not just the limited space of one column. I am not sure just how, but that did lead to a discussion of how our nation might do better this year than last. Not to say that 2005 was terrible economically; the Dow went down by 8 points; the workforce grew by nearly 3 million jobs, and while the Christmas sales figures are somewhat spotty, consumer confidence is ebullient. So what ought to be on the nation’s list of resolutions? How can we improve? Well here is my list. I invite you to send me your own, and I may share your suggestions in a future column.

First: stay the course in Iraq. It is the right thing to do and is in keeping with our national responsibility and our own security. The new Iraq will be a work in progress for some years. It will continue to be messy, but the emerging country will be a beacon of democracy in the Mideast. Arabs of different ethnicities and traditions are learning it is better to make political deals than kill each other. They are being drawn into the democratic process in record numbers. By late spring we should have a lawfully elected Iraqi government to cede the responsibility for the protection of Iraqi citizens. While no figure anyone wants to talk about is available, the feeling grows that a substantial number of our troops will either come home or be withdrawn to established bases in the region before the end of the year. Loyal opposition beware: oppose the president on this issue at your peril.

Second: adopt a realistic budget that aligns obligations with resources. Not long ago the national debt was in the billions. It now tops 7 trillion. Folks get a grip! We have to be able to do better than this. Our representatives are only bringing you what you are asking for. If you want sane balanced budgets, then you have to let Washington know that balancing the budget is paramount to our future and our children’s future. We ought to conduct a national series of “town meetings” on this issue. Government revenue and its creation are fundamental to our security as a nation. The government does not produce wealth. It spends what we give it. How much of our hard earned dollars does the federal government deserve to spend? I continue to believe that we can spend our dollars locally and more effectively with less bureaucracy, but I certainly don’t want to create an excuse for leaving those most in need without recourse. I have been in favor for some time to limiting the portion of our GNP allocated to the federal government. If that were done, then regional compacts, states, and localities would need to look closer to home to find solutions for what are homegrown challenges. All allocated revenue ought to be raised in a straight forward and fair manner. A national flat tax, which provides at least limited credits for charitable donations and basic housing expenditures, should be agreed to. Congressman Armey’s proposal from some years ago didn’t tax a family of four until it received almost $45,000 in income. HR 25 is somewhat similar and ought to become the vehicle on which hearings can be held and a workable solution agreed to.

Third: meaningful lobby reform that breaks the cycle of legislators spending all their time chasing money and lobbyists chasing legislators has to be adopted. Lobbyists are an important part of the legislative process. I have done my fair share of lobbying over the years, but my company was very conservative in its approach and the campaign donations of our executives would barely cover donuts and coffee, yet legislators were always happy to hear from us because our corporate units employed a significant portion of their constituents. We always knew more about the issue on which we lobbied than anyone else, couched our contacts in terms of the interest of the community we served and sought only competitive fairness. I think most legislative specialists take a similar approach, but the magnitude of the dollars flowing in the political arena today is scandalous. The spectacle unfolding before us corrodes the respect for our government.

Fourth: get control of our borders. We periodically reorganize, and we spout rhetoric but nothing has changed. Last year an estimated 400,000 illegal immigrants pored into our country and joined our society. Thousands more were caught and sent back in an endless revolving door. No effective control will be adopted until employers identify their self interest with successful enforcement. The President’s proposals deserve close and respectful attention as a point of departure to look at our need for the skills and labor of these immigrants. We must balance that need against the lawlessness we encourage with our current ineffective program and implement a solution that can be effectively administered.

A final suggestion: while President Lincoln suspended Habeas corpus during the Civil War, we should not encourage that sort of action by any president. Our liberties are too precious. My sense of the current controversy regarding the U.S. wiretaps that came out of 9/11 and the state of war in which we find ourselves is that no matter how quickly we need to act, the special court that has been set up to grant broad wiretapping authority to the president must be involved in the process. If the president truly has a problem, and I take him at his word that he does, the Patriot Act in its renewal should include an effective provision that assures that this wire tapping will be done in a way most consistent with our traditions.

_._

Charleston Mercury January 19, 2006. Page 16.

To Nano or Not - OpEd

2006-01-02T11:11:00.000-05:00

“So,” I said, “What you are telling me is this swarm reproduces, is self-sustaining, learns from experience, has collective intelligence, and can innovate to solve problems? “Yes”
-Michael Crichton from Prey, his number one blockbuster about technology run amok.

As a rule, I tend to be optimistic about society and its potential for generational progress. Yet the pace of technology convergence and the pall mall introduction of one stunning development after another has me yearning for the simpler age of my childhood. Somehow with the passage of our society from 12 inch black and white television and coaster brakes on my gearless bicycle to the 21^st Century where we spring a new technology on the public just as soon as we figure out how to program yesterday’s new convenience, our innovative nature has pushed us to the brink of the abyss.

Dr. Michael Crichton, truly one of the most creative minds of our age, has unhinged me with Prey. In his story of nanotechnology unleashed, he envisions a world where research and adaptation of creation at the molecular level results in a blurring of the lines between life and machine, a reality in which the molecules themselves become the builders, develop self awareness, the ability to adapt, to defend themselves, merge with human organisms and ultimately to kill. So what is this technology that has frightened me? Well. It is the understanding and manipulation of matter at dimensions of roughly 1 to 100 nanometers. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter; this paper is on the order of one hundred thousand nanometers thick to give you a tool of reference.

Nanotechnology is the new “it” technology with so much promise that President Clinton in 2000 asked for a 227 million dollar increase in the government’s investment in nanotechnology research and development including a new scientific initiative called the National Nanotechnology Initiative. In 2003 the U.S. Military reportedly spent over one billion dollars on nanotechnology and one medical authority suggests it could catch cancer before it spreads. Other authorities see it creating the stronger fibers for the space elevator I wrote about a few months ago and to eventually be able to replicate anything including “diamonds, water and food. Famine could be eradicated by machines that fabricate foods”… at the molecular level. In the medical industry “….[p]atients will drink fluids containing nanorobots programmed to attack and reconstruct the molecular structure of cancer cells and viruses to make them harmless.” The same commentator also sees them slowing the aging process, performing delicate surgeries and even being programmed to change your physical appearance. Contaminants could also be removed from the environment and nanomachines programmed to replace nonrenewable resources. To most researchers, my examples are only “teasers “of a future unimagined a few years ago.” Jeff Harrow of the Harrow Technology Report puts it this way. “The bottom line is we can only barely imagine the changes to come…. Few saw the potential [of many of our recent advancements.]”

Yet the potential from nanotechnology could make those historical watersheds look like a drop in the lake.” But is it the bright future of its adherents or the Pandora’s box envisioned in the introduction to Prey. Creighton notes, “Sometime in the twenty-first century our self deluded recklessness will collide with our growing technological power. One area where this will occur is in the meeting point of nanotechnology, biotechnology and computer technology. What all three have in common is the ability to release self replicating entities into the environment.”

Once a thought is communicated it is set free for all time. I am not so unrealistic to think that man will retreat from the full exploitation of this new technology, but the fork in the road is more clearly before us than anytime since the explosion of the atomic bomb as to man’s ability to control those whose thirst for power blinds them to mankind’s danger from their pursuits. What is being set before us is a question of man’s ability to transcend his moral weakness and grow to meet the responsible use of the power his mind has unleashed. Just because we can do something is no reason to do it.

Are we capable of responsibly controlling our appetites? Can we establish an effective ethical code of behavior for scientific exploitation? Viewed in this light, civilization’s war with militant, religious zealots determined to force their world view on the rest of us is not encouraging to our ability to survive the challenge presented by the gifts from our intellect. The twenty-first century, most of all, needs to be the Ethical Century. Man must learn to value not only those who can invent wondrous technology but also those who can show us the way to an effective world consensus on effective humanistic ethics or we will surely not survive the century.

_._

Katrina Christmas - OpEd

2006-01-02T11:02:00.000-05:00

Our meteorologists confirm that we have just concluded the worst hurricane season since we began keeping records of such things back in 1865. Katrina alone is the most devastating natural disaster in our history. Together with Hurricane Rita their winds and water have devastated an area stretching from New Orleans east to the Alabama border. It may come back better, but it will never be the same, and its redevelopment will evolve over years not months.

Few events in the last few years have so engaged the hearts of the American public. Our attention during the storm centered on the pain and destruction as well as the role of government and its responsibility both for relief and rescue of those in the hurricane’s eye. Thanks to ubiquitous media, it was focused as well on affixing blame for the government’s inability to effectively protect the people of this area from the devastating affects of nature’s wrath. Since our founding, our country has existed under a federal system in which the states have sovereign authority for the care of its citizens, and the federal government is expected to show proper deference to the states for the first line responsibility for their citizen’s welfare. Admittedly, this arrangement has largely deteriorated through federal mandates and regulatory requirements tied to federal largesse on which many states have become dependent; nevertheless, the forms remain.

For the most part it works. There is little doubt, however, that for Louisiana and the needs of its citizens, the system failed horribly, and this bad example may cause changes in the relationship between the states generally and the federal government. Federal power may be enhanced, and state prerogatives eroded. If so, social scientists will view this incident as another step in the emasculation of the states and their transformation into vassals of a federal master. Without in any way minimizing the devastation of both Katrina and Rita, such a transformation is an ill wind that blows no good. I submit there is another way to look at the events that provides a more promising model for our nation, one that looks at effective care of our citizens and allows our governmental structures to conform to the way we really act in an emergency.

Let me first say that Katrina confirmed the goodness of the vast majority of our people. Sure there are crooks and knaves out there aplenty, but the tsunami of goodness that flows from the hearts of the American people dwarfs them. We are a great land, a great people who have much to celebrate! As this year comes to a close with our traditional season of thanksgiving and festivity, foremost we need to celebrate ourselves! The same generosity that has been there for lands far away now pours from the American soul in sustained support for those who bear the brunt of this disaster here at home. Because our nature is humane, we find that indeed we are our brother’s keeper. The Center on Philanthropy at The University of Indiana began tracking non governmental charitable support soon after the hurricane struck. By November 15, they tracked more than 2.6 Billion dollars in non governmental charitable giving. While an impressive demonstration of charity, it doesn’t hold a candle to the unmeasured and perhaps immeasurable charity of the thousands of volunteers giving millions of hours both on site across the gulf coast and back in homes across our land. Almost too many of us to count voluntarily implemented clothing and food drives, assembled volunteers to come at their own expense to the region to help carry the burden for charitable aid groups who need to supplement and replace those generous citizens who gave until they were ready to drop from exhaustion. Many have given that last measure of help and must return to lives strained by their efforts.

So far volunteers still come in record numbers. Here in the Low Country, I hear constantly about church groups and others planning trips to take their donations directly to the people in need. We are far from unique in this. Help in our area also continues to see to the needs of those for whom we have found shelter in temporary homes throughout our region including, as time passes, finding them new jobs, medical care, furniture, and whatever else is necessary to salvage the thread of lives destroyed by the wind and rain. This help is for the most part provided on the basis of person to person volunteer help unburdened and undirected by governmental authority. And that is the point. In a number of instances various state and federal agencies have only gotten in the way by requiring forms in triplicate and subjecting volunteers to various tests of appropriateness that only frustrate the efforts’ effectiveness.

Surely there is an appropriate role for federal and state authority, but often it best serves by getting out of the way and letting goodness just flow. While I will admit to not having all the answers, I am encouraged that these daily demonstrations of goodwill can fashion a process, which speeds the assistance and shrinks the government’s part of the process back to the traditional service of replacing infrastructure and restoring public safety. Providing a friendlier interface between government responsibility and volunteer assistance could greatly increase the effective delivery of help and reduce the cost of politically straitjacketed governmental assistance. The sheer administrative cost of compliance with the governmental interference is more than we can afford in dollars or in human suffering. Perhaps we need less government rather than more. Although it is counterintuitive, we may find that limiting federal spending without a super majority in Congress to 15% of Gross Domestic Product will grant more resources to the states and allow people’s pockets to freely provide the charity that we see demonstrated everyday.

_._

Charleston Mercury December 21, 2005. Page 16.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus - OpEd

2005-12-08T12:04:00.000-05:00

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus

“Dear Editor

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon”

It started with a little girl named Virginia in 1897 struggling with her faith in Santa Claus. Santa had always been good to her but not to all her classmates. Considering the disparity created doubt in her mind. As was the custom in her family whenever they wanted to have a reliable answer to any question, she wrote to the Question and Answer column in the New York Sun. All really difficult questions at The Sun found there way to Francis P. Church who wrestled with how to respond to Virginia's question. He ultimately decided to handle her question head on. An excerpt from his now famous response goes something like this:

“Your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds....Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas, how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias....The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished....No Santa Claus? Thank God! He lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”

Not only did that response settle the matter for her, it settled it for much of the nation which reprinted the column from the Sun coast to coast in the tens of thousands. It certainly settles it for me too, but regrettably our national elites, grown cynical in their worldly palaces, have failed to learn faith’s lessons. They have grown insensitive to the world of faith.

For most Americans faith continues to fill an abiding role in our lives. The respect for the values of our ancestors is the rock upon which this nation was founded. For the sophisticates who control much of our media, not only must Santa be relegated to a bygone era, but all religious figures are but a figment of our craving. They save their finest vitriol however for Christ. One national talk show host declared on a nationally televised show that Christians and others who are religious suffer from a neurological disorder that “stops people from thinking”. In his view evangelicals are an “embarrassment”. As former Vice President Dan Quayle puts it, “What the media wants and what the media demands of Christians is very simply this: your silence”.

I am thankful to live in a land where this media bigwig can voice his opinion, but appalled that he and his cohorts feel free to discourage the rest of us from openly building our daily lives around our faith. As Ronald Reagan put it, “Without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure.” And as another commenter noted, “This shift away from the Judeo-Christian basis for law and the shift away from the {proper reading of} the restraints of The Constitution automatically militates against religious liberty.” President Washington in his farewell address also advised us that “…Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports…Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” For Washington religion and morality were the “great pillars of human happiness”. It is no less so today.

To suggest that because Santa is associated in the minds of the public with a Christian holiday, commercial enterprises should no longer have him at the center of the celebration of this season of holiday and joy is foolish to the extreme. Watching this from above, our forefathers must think we have lost our minds. The most central freedom is to worship as we wish, and indeed, we worship not only on our knees but in our celebrations. I mean no offense to those who believe differently when I say “Merry Christmas”. It is a reflection of this joyous season which we all share regardless of our religious beliefs. As a nation we will be better off when we can unashamedly accept our differences and celebrate them rather than hide them for fear we will offend.

Tolerance is not denial. Faith and its active expression are at the center of our national values. Though beliefs differ from one of us to another, our respect for the importance of joyous exercise of our strongly held beliefs is the rock to which we cling. Yes, Virginia there is a Santa Claus.

May I wish you Merry Christmas…..and bless you every one!

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American Anthem - OpEd

2005-11-27T12:31:00.000-05:00

Three years after Professor Turner declared the American frontier closed, a young professor from Wellesley College teaching a summer course at Colorado College took the time to join her colleagues on a trip to Pikes Peak and was so overcome she commented “… [W]hen I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse.”

The young teacher was Katherine Lee Bates, and when she returned from her experience, she was inspired to write these words as well, “Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed his grace on thee and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.” In Stanza two she pleads “God mend thy every flaw, Confirm thy soul in self control….” We are an anthem loving people with such a rich tradition that her words aren’t the only ones that inspire reflection on our failures to hold precious the democratic legacy our ancestors secured for our safe keeping.

As I write this, Lee Greenwood’s lyrics also come melodically to mind, “I am proud to be an American where at least I know I am free. And I won’t forget the men who died who gave that right to me.” Lest we forget, young men and women are putting their lives on the line for us every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our national politicians, particularly the “loyal opposition,” need to reflect on that reality before choosing to trash the Administration’s efforts to keep terror away from our shores by finishing the job begun with almost universal bi-partisan support following the attack on the Twin Towers. While hardly unprecedented in our history, gutter sniping attacks serve the public interest poorly by deflecting the discussion from the substantial issues that deserve debate. I don’t know any thoughtful observer of the Administration who actually believes that George Bush or anyone of responsibility lied to get us into Iraq; everyone was reading the same intelligence gathered not only by our intelligence services but also those of our allies. It appears they were all sadly mistaken, yes, but a recent review I have made of the Annenberg Foundation’s fact check service leads me to conclude they did not lie.

Yet politicians, who have a strong public record of support for taking the action we did, today lead the wolf pack trying to prove the Administration’s dishonesty. Knowing this President, I am confident of his integrity as are most Americans. That integrity is a national resource; do they really want to drag him down? Beyond the seaminess of these attacks, the loyal opposition is missing the opportunity to debate the real issues. Is the war being fought competently? Are we putting as much into it as we should? We seem to have stumbled into this war, but it would also be legitimate to question what our future position should be in undertaking wars of liberation. Could the loyal opposition have no thoughts on these issues? Are they driven to sling mud by the emptiness of their policy alternatives? Do they, for instance, really want us now to pack our bags in Iraq? Afghanistan? What if we leave the fledgling democracies we have helped create to succumb to the dark forces born of the medieval world view of the Ottoman Empire? Will our effort have been in vain? Is that what we want?

In pillorying Democrats, I don’t mean to leave Republicans unscathed. After all we’re in charge here. The President has convinced most of our citizens we should be there, but as to tactics and size and application of applied resources, he needs to do a better job. He has also, nobly but unsuccessfully, led the party into major fights on Social Security, and now appears headed towards a battle on tax reform that if fought poorly will end up with the same result. To be successful as the majority party, we need to show the public we can deliver. We certainly haven’t delivered a smaller more efficient Executive Branch; we have spent like Democrats, and in the face of problems like Katrina, need to give serious attention to our position on federalism. The information age makes what happens in Louisiana as close to us as what happens on our local street corner. In the wake of all the noise on local issues receiving constant national attention, Congress is overwhelming our federal courts by federalizing local crime best handled by state and local courts. Federal paperwork and conflicting requirements are stifling the ability of the states to innovate. We both provide too much money and not enough. We are extending our federal jurisdiction through money bills with mandates attached that make the states in many instances dependent extensions of federal authority. What are we doing?

My sources tell me the Administration has good defenses for much of what is being hurled at it but has chosen a passive posture to face most of it. Well, maybe that should be rethought. There is a federal election a year away; let’s have at it in a civil but thought provoking way .The public deserves no less, and the nation will be well served by debates designed “to mend its flaws”. We need new ideas. I am told that Henry Kissinger once said that “… intellectual capital is not created during your term in office. It is only expended”. I fear ours may be near exhaustion. The “Think Tank” revolution in DC should provide the tools to see we have well thought out national policy alternatives throughout an Administration—not just at its beginning. Well, gin up those word processors and let’s see what comes forth. Let’s not engage in personal attacks. It is becoming tiresome. The times in which we live are too challenging and whatever our differences, we need to have that serious debate not a food fight. Whatever the outcome, if we pursue freedom’s responsibility with honesty and self control, I am confident we will assure that, “our flag {is} still there o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave”.

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Robert E. Freer, Jr., an attorney, former general counsel of Kimberly-Clark Corporation and sometimes federal government official is President and CEO of The Free Enterprise Foundation, a tax-exempt think tank located at The Citadel dedicated to the study of Ethics, Civic Responsibility, Leadership and Enterprise Best Practice. Mr. Freer is also a visiting professor and The John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel’s School of Business Administration.

Charleston Mercury November 22, 2005. Page 16.

Let Their Voices be Heard - OpEd

2005-11-09T17:24:00.000-05:00

Let Their Voices be Heard

The history of the United States offers a map for democracy’s often slow, often emotionally explosive progress towards citizen enfranchisement consistent with the broad declarations of our Constitution. In the two hundred eighteen years since its birth, our republic has confronted slavery’s transgressions against human rights, embraced women’s suffrage, and exposed the cruel violence of Jim Crow. In addition, our democratic process has survived the impeachment of two presidents and the disputed Presidential elections of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 and George W. Bush in 2000. Perhaps it is because of our democracy’s history of increasing inclusiveness that citizens feel generally self-assured about the accuracy of our polling system. Yet, in our pride of accomplishment, we overlook the shabby story of how we treat those who have sacrificed most to keep us free.

In 2004, approximately 25% of overseas citizens and military personnel who tried to vote were unable to do so because they received their absentee ballots too late or not at all, and while recent complaints about naturalized citizens’ voting rights have incited the United States Department of Justice to sue the city of Boston, our soldiers in Iraq have to cope with antiquated state laws that all but make it impossible for most of them to reflect their will at the ballot box back home. Ironically, while Iraqis raise violet-stained fingers to establish legitimacy and solidarity in their burgeoning democracy, the soldiers who have fought to bring them that right stand unable to effectively vote back home. It is high time to re-evaluate the electoral process that we champion and do what is necessary to turn it into the global model that it should be. The Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform, led by former President Jimmy Carter, recently suggested voting reforms including provisions for centralized ballot processing stations, but otherwise offered rather tame modifications like making sure that absentee ballots are mailed out 45 days in advance of an election and requiring that defense officials provide postcard applications to troops during federal election years. That simply is not good enough.

Currently, there are 7,838 local election offices—this means 7,838 County Clerks, County Auditors, County Boards of Elections, County Election Supervisors, etcetera—that administer absentee voting for Federal elections. Aware of this bureaucratic labyrinth, Congress recommended that the processing of military and overseas absentee ballots be centralized for every state, but no states have implemented that recommendation. Only Alaska and the District of Columbia conduct absentee voting on a centralized basis. The military voter in the global War on Terror seldom stays in one place long enough for normal postal and certification procedures to coincide with local franchise requirements. How are the thousands of local election offices supposed to coordinate the back and forth of paper ballots with individual servicemen when the federal government can’t accurately predict whether they will be in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Fort Bragg in the months before an election? Instead of obsessing about postage and airmail, we need to move our global electoral system into the global electronic age. The military transmits classified information electronically, and every day businesses safely conduct major financial transactions electronically. If such networks are protected enough for national secrets and corporate fortunes, then there should be a way for deployed military personnel to vote by secure electronic means. The men and women of our armed services sacrifice for us everyday. 2,000 of them have now paid the ultimate price to protect us in Iraq. We must assure that each of them enjoys the fundamental right that is the basis of our democracy.

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Robert E. Freer, Jr., an attorney, former general counsel of Kimberly-Clark Corporation and sometimes federal government official is President and CEO of The Free Enterprise Foundation, a tax-exempt think tank located at The Citadel dedicated to the study of ethics, civic responsibility, leadership and enterprise best practice. Mr. Freer is also a visiting professor and The John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel’s School of Business Administration.

Charleston Mercury November 10, 2005. Page 16.

So What's the Fuss? - OpEd

2005-10-17T13:07:00.000-05:00

So What’s the Fuss?

It might have been expected that with the nomination of Harriet Miers to replace the retiring Sandra Day O’Connor, President Bush would ignite a din of criticism. What has confused the public is that the often bitter invective has come from his own party. While no nominee selected by this president would meet with approval by Democrats, the left has been gleefully restrained. In the face of the strident criticism from his staunchest supporters, the President has remained Ms. Miers’ primary cheerleader and assures his base that they will like what she does on the Court. The Left would like to know more about her position on abortion, but has been largely silent, and there appears sufficient Democratic support gathering for her among Democrats on the Hill that she would receive at least the 22 Democratic votes given to Justice Roberts and perhaps a few more.

What we know about the Nominee is that she is a native Texan whose career and life have been circumscribed by her state’s borders. In Texas, she has blazed the trail for women wanting to succeed in what used to be a man’s profession. She was the first women to make both partner and then managing partner for her Dallas firm. She has served as chair of the Texas Lottery Commission, been president of both the Dallas County and State Bar Associations and served as a member of the Dallas City Council. She has also served as the President’s personal attorney and in government she has been a staunch loyalist. Of perhaps key importance, unless there is something catastrophic in her background, it is strongly likely that she will be Madame Justice Miers before Christmas.

Beset by problems domestic and foreign, the President needs all the support he can muster on Capitol Hill and cannot afford a bruising battle over this nominee. If you take the President at his word that he “knows her heart” and that she is a committed Christian and conservative who will not legislate from the bench, what is the “Right” really upset about? The President and the right to life portion of his coalition are facing different realities. The President has to manage a broad array of issues while keeping together a ruling coalition. For him to win in today’s “contact sport” approach to policy implementation requires finesse in an independent minded Senate. He knows that today’s opponent is likely to be tomorrow’s ally. For the “Far Right” the President’s reality is their disappointment. They are focused on actually having the battle. They have supported Republican presidential contenders since Ronald Reagan totally focused on turning the clock back to a simpler age where the social fabric coalesced around traditional Judeo-Christian values. They cannot imagine how that was allowed to change. They are spoiling for the fight before another election puts its majority at risk for them; it has become an end in itself. Ms. Miers, conservative or not, just doesn’t do it for them. They want to collide in the U.S. Senate with Ted Kennedy’s legions over a candidate that is a proven conservative symbol. Re-nominate Bork! Nominate Estrada, Pryor, Owens or any number of candidates highly identified with an activist agenda. For the “Far Right” Miers’ stealth candidacy takes away the fulfillment of the years of toil to meet the Left head-on and roll over them.

I hope this won’t get me run out of the “club,” but I am with the President on this one even though I suspect Ms. Miers will be an “O’Connor” not a “Scalia”. To continue as a ruling majority we must take our victories with as little blood on the floor as possible. We must also recognize that dynamic conservatism is tasked with ruling in the first decade of the 21^st century—not 1980. It is essentially a weak position for the Far Right to presuppose the battle must be fought with blood on the floor before next year’s congressional races. It does not bespeak confidence as to the political future for the conservative coalition, which does not yet have a candidate for 2008 when Hillary Clinton is the likely opponent. Dynamic conservatism’s timeless values—fiscal prudence, individual responsibility, a strong defense but smaller central government, federalism, and free enterprise—continue to represent the view of the conservative majority. I am more concerned that the ruling party is losing its way in applying these principles than I am about its flexing muscles over Ms. Miers.

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Robert E. Freer, Jr., an attorney, former general counsel of Kimberly-Clark Corporation and sometimes federal government official is President and CEO of The Free Enterprise Foundation, a tax-exempt think tank located at The Citadel dedicated to the study of ethics, civic responsibility, leadership and enterprise best practice. Mr. Freer is also a visiting professor and The John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel’s School of Business Administration.

Charleston Mercury October 27, 2005. Page 16

Meeting the Global Challenge - OpEd

2005-10-08T15:22:00.000-05:00

Meeting the Global Challenge

Listen—that noise you don’t hear is our society slipping into subservience to economic decisions made elsewhere on the globe by those who at best may not be our friends and at worst wish to do us real harm. Even today, our currency and the continuing stability of our national government is hostage to decisions made in Tokyo and Beijing. As of July this year, we have passed two trillion dollars in foreign debt of which more than 40% is held by Japan and China. The potential impact on our national foreign policy options in this climate is serious and could be calamitous. Like Katrina it is a silent menace of which we are aware and which we ignore. It is not; however, too late to read the signs and equip our next generation with the knowledge and attitudes required to preserve the best of our civilization. I am not being alarmist when I say we cannot rest on our laurels. Our opponents, unimpressed with our codes of conduct, jealous of our affluence and not a product of our heritage are focused on their goal and are coming on fast. We also need to keep in mind that the challenges to our way of life are not merely economic. The president has called us to arms in a war against terror, but the challenges we face are much broader than bombs and bullets. They are political, social, and philosophical as well.

Western societies, by which I mean those in Europe and The Western Hemisphere with the exception of Cuba, are relatively affluent. Many people of us have become addicted to the wide variety of social services we receive without understanding and accepting that those services come at a cost. Western Europe has particularly become so self absorbed that notions of self reliance and responsibility to equip the next generation to handle the challenges we know are just beyond the horizon are thought to be just so much scare tactics. They are not.

The number of highly educated professionals produced in India and China will soon dwarf our current output of pragmatic and scientific intellectuals. Possessing practical and applicable skills, these foreign workforces challenge us to integrate into a world view that does not diminish them and yet leaves our heirs equipped to stand tall in a future only dimly outlined by the flickering light of global change. If these challenges were solely economic, the task would be daunting enough. The revolution in communication technology makes workers’ locations irrelevant in economic terms. Billions of people spanning from the Near to Far East thirst for the better life they can now see on media in their own country. Not unexpectedly, having tasted some improvement from the production of textiles and footwear, they want more. Fulfillment comes not only making sneakers and cheap textiles but also in the micro-processing industry and by handling the global needs of the information age. India’s rapidly excelling economy is currently causing the upheaval of its caste system, gender biases, and labor laws. Meanwhile China has centralized, modernized, and specialized its national education system. Now their students encounter physics, biology, and chemistry in junior-high—two or three years before the average American student—and decide whether to pursue the humanities or sciences while young teenagers. As feudal structures dissolve, these foreign citizens acquire their own affluence, and by subsequently pressuring their own rulers, they pressure us as well. While we expect our past affluence to continue, they strive to capture that which we take for granted.

After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, our nation responded with the bi-partisan National Defense Education Act of 1958, which called for a dramatic increase in funds for scientific research and education. Soon after, President Kennedy’s call to place a man on the moon energized the country’s patriotism and scientific curiosity. We recognized the umbilical connection between our international dominance and its sustenance: Education! While the Cold War Era stimulated suspicion and isolationism, the twenty-first century demands that we once again galvanize our education system, this time to provide the tools to shine in the multilateral marketplace of the future.

Extremist religious beliefs, often an aberration of Muslim theology, glorify social structures that in the rest of the world went out with the advent of electricity. Proponents of such rigidity and intolerance are doomed, but their struggle against the democratic enterprise we champion exposes the stress points in our own society and calls for all of us to reaffirm our national theology. This is not a promotion of any specified religiosity but rather an incitation to dedicate ourselves to the future souls of this nation. We may have been endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, but we sure won’t keep them unless we treasure and protect those rights with the same energy and dedication that gained their recognition in the first place. Uneducated and unmotivated our children are ill equipped to respond to the diverse requirements of globalization. With hard work and our own faith as a shield, we are unbeatable. We need unapologetically to arm our children with our own faith and reaffirm the importance and nobility of individual hard work and community responsibility. The generosity of our population’s response to Katrina demonstrates we have the stuff to fix the problems concerning poverty and education that it exposed. We require leadership in examining the global challenge in all its parts, its symptoms, causes, and proper responses. At the Free Enterprise Foundation, we plan on doing our part through academic study, forums, conferences and publications. We ask an enlightened public to join us to do what is required to reclaim the rising sun for the next generation.

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Charleston Mercury October 12, 2005. Page 16.

Stairway to the Stars - OpEd

2005-10-08T15:09:00.000-05:00

Stairway to the Stars

If one enjoys the often rare opportunity to gaze up at a clear nighttime sky, free from the distortions of society’s ambient light, he or she will notice dim stars that never rise or set, fixed motionless in the heavens. These are the growing number of satellites that hang in geosynchronous orbit (21,700 miles altitude) moving above the equator at the same speed as the revolving earth, remaining forever in the same spot. These industrial pinholes in the blanket of night shape our everyday lives in escalating proportions. Governments and corporations depend on them for communication and data, and consequently, so do many of us, citizens of a shrinking world dependent on cellular phones, Google searches, NFL Sunday Ticket, and other now commonplace marvels in our lives. Space, still the final frontier, has become, unnoticed an integral part of our daily existence.

The President and NASA hope to return to the moon and put a person on Mars. However, despite our nation’s more than forty years of space exploration experience, a space shuttle’s 15,000 miles-per-hour blastoff from Earth’s gravity and atmospheric friction still proves extremely dangerous and expensive. Increasingly those favoring a more reasonable alternative are being heeded. Miracle materials and nano technology are paving the way for a far better solution. Why not enjoy an elevator ride beyond gravity’s demanding tug and remain suspended like a great yoyo in space tethered to the earth below? No, this is not a suggestion to re-read Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, but rather to be thrilled by the very attainable goal that scientists and engineers now are exploring with carbon-nanotube technology.

In his 1978 novel, The Fountains of Paradise, Arthur C. Clarke asked: “If the laws of celestial mechanics make it possible for an object to stay fixed in the sky, might it not be possible to lower a cable down to the surface, and so to establish an elevator system linking earth to space?” Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky conceptualized this elevator nearly a century before Clarke, and Kim Stanley-Robinson’s 1990s Mars Trilogy recalled its wondrous possibilities to the minds of science-fiction readers. Currently the notion of a smooth ride up 62,000 miles of cable is being propelled into reality by physicist Bradley Edwards, who is backed by NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts, and Ray Baughman, director of the Nanotech Institute at the University of Texas at Dallas. There is even an upcoming Space Elevator engineering contest, Elevator: 2010, hosted by The Spaceward Foundation, which hopes their competition will provoke technical advances as well as demonstrate the feasibility and simplicity of the Space Elevator concept to a wide audience.

For a Space Elevator to work, a cable with one end anchored to the earth’s surface stretches upwards, rising clear through the atmosphere and beyond to a space station tethered in gyro synchronous orbit. Then the competing forces of gravity at the lower end and outward centripetal acceleration at the farther end keep the cable under tension. The simple physics of the design would allow a climber vehicle powered by electric motors to carry anything from people to scientific or industrial materials into space in safety and at lower cost. The cost of transporting matter could drop from the $20,000 a kilogram on a space shuttle to as little as $250 a kilogram because of the reduced amount of energy used.

In theory the idea is simple and achievable. The toughest challenge for moving forward has been developing a strong enough cable material, and the answer lies in the commercial construction of carbon nanotubes. The current challenge is that nobody has yet woven the miniscule nanotube ribbons together in a way to make sheets that are as strong as their individual fibers. Still, scientists and engineers working on the concept consider it little more than ten years and ten billion dollars away.

Besides re-instilling people’s sense of scientific awe, currently dulled by the continuous unending stream of ever smaller music machines and multitasking phones, the construction of a Space Elevator has global political implications. Because of the equator’s relative nearness to space, plausible designs would anchor the elevator to the ground of an equatorial country. Consequently, equatorial countries will profit significantly from whatever cargoes are shipped from their real estate into the sky. If international developers stress good business practices and the necessity of operating in a politically stable environment, this could positively alter the balance of power along the equator, a region where up until now, turmoil has seemed relatively commonplace.

Several millennia after zealots were rebuked for building the Tower of Babel, this project is no pipe dream. A modern stairway to the heavens lies within reach. It beckons us to accept its promise. Hopefully its possibility and man’s quest for the heavens will coincide in the next decade to give us and our posterity a more economical and cost effective stairway to the stars. Its completion in the next 15 years will serve as an inspiring and uniting pathway to the future, and a real shot in the economics of the Andean region.
_._

Robert E. Freer, Jr., an attorney, former general counsel of Kimberly-Clark Corporation and sometimes federal government official is President and CEO of The Free Enterprise Foundation, a tax-exempt think tank located at The Citadel dedicated to the study of ethics, civic responsibility, leadership and enterprise best practice. Mr. Freer is also a visiting professor and The John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence at The Citadel’s School of Business Administration.

Charleston Mercury September 29, 2005. Page 16.

My Mother Used to Say - OpEd

2005-09-18T19:40:00.000-05:00

MY MOTHER USED TO SAY

My mother used to say, “Why is it we so soon get old and so late smart?” As summers in countless numbers speed by me, I have thought about that numerous times without arriving at a satisfactory answer. Usually my musing is reserved for some particular stupidity on my own part where life’s lessons should have been well learned before my current alleged maturity. But this time of year as the temperature rises to levels previously only experienced in a barbecue pit, my mind turns to our fragile supply of electric energy. I guess it is the image of being trapped in a high rise elevator that I think of every time the news media warns me of the heightened risk of blackouts this time of year, or maybe it is just the number of times I have been caught in unbearable heat without the air conditioning. Yet, there is a reliable, environmentally sound solution to the problem.

“Build more nuclear generation capacity into the grid” I think and then hear the hue and cry of many environmentalists who still haven’t accepted what more and more well-informed citizens now understand. Nuclear energy is safe, used widely in industry, agriculture, medical treatment and diagnosis, and it is 100% environmentally clean. In this era of heightened concern for national security, not to mention $3.00 a gallon gasoline, additional sources of nuclear power would make the United States more energy independent.

Since the time of the first oil embargo in 1973, nuclear plants have avoided the emission of 87 million tons of sulfur dioxide and 40 million tons of nitrogen oxide. In 2000 alone, nuclear plants in the U.S. avoided the emission of sulfur dioxide in an amount almost equivalent to the entire savings (4.5 million tons) since 1990 by the rest of the industry as a result of the Clean Air Act. Nuclear energy creates no significant adverse effects to water, land, habitat, species, and air resources. It’s the only practical solution to avoid increasing greenhouse gasses as our society grows. In Connecticut, a 500 acre site designed for 3 nuclear plants produces nearly double the megawatts of electricity that a 35,000 acre solar park or 150,000 acre wind farm would produce. These renewable-energy industries deserve encouragement, and the use of solar energy by individual homeowners certainly saves money, conserves against waste, and promotes self-sufficiency. However, wind and solar power are not pragmatic answers for the great needs of our vast urban societies. Nuclear energy is the most economically and environmentally efficient solution. Other alternatives, including the use of natural gas, all generate greenhouse gasses and can be prohibitively expensive.

The environmentalist in my head says, “But what about disposal? What are you going to do about that?” I took a look and found that all the plants in the U.S. together produce only 2,000 metric tons of used fuel annually. This is in pellet form inside fuel rods, and if all the fuel used by the industry from the beginning were put in one place, it would total some 40,000 metric tons which is about enough to cover one football field to a depth of about 5 yards stacked side by side and end to end. The fuel is in depleted form and could be recycled, further saving the need to add to even this small amount. To prevent any possibility of amounts escaping into weapons use, our country decided years ago, that we would not permit a commercial industry to be created in this area, and fuel rods are, despite the removal of the executive order banning reuse, only used once. Currently nuclear generating plants themselves store the spent rods until a national remote facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada is prepared to receive them. This program which is behind schedule ought to be accelerated.

Incentives in the new Energy Policy Act provide the nuclear industry with tax credits, loan guarantees, risk protection, and $2.7 billion for research and development. This should lead to the financing of new plants on a level playing field when compared to other power generating sources. A new nuclear plant has not been constructed since 1979, but with just over 100 nuclear generating facilities, nuclear still holds second place behind coal as a source of power. We cannot expect to reduce air pollution or increase our nation’s energy autonomy without reliable nuclear energy, and our federal and state governments have finally adopted policy which will not discriminate against the nuclear industry. While late, we are beginning to get smart. My mother would be pleased.

_ . _

Robert E. Freer, Jr., an attorney and former general counsel of Kimberly-Clark Corporation is President and CEO of The Free Enterprise Foundation, a tax-exempt think tank located at The Citadel dedicated to the study of ethics, civic responsibility, leadership and enterprise best practice. Mr. Freer is also a visiting professor at The Citadel’s School of Business Administration.

Charleston Mercury September 15th, 2005. Page 16.