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Posted October 1, 2002
Some truths are easy to admit: I am not normal. The average guy and I have little in common. But there is one thing we do share, a dislike for weasels. Not the sleek mammals with sharp teeth. I'm talking about speakers and writers who weasel their way around an issue, who avoid addressing a question with a simple yes or no when a yes or no is called for. Weasels are people expert in evading uneasy truths and unsettling problems.
We see such weasels most often in politics. But they are nearly as abundant in the media, asking pointless questions rather than the most pertinent. One of the reasons so many normal folk supported Ross Perot a few years back was that he seemed, at first, so anti-weasel. Whenever another politician or a journalist started their usual song and dance, weaseling their way around important public policy questions, ol' Ross just called 'm on it. He pinned the weasels down.
It was a pity, wasn't it, when Ross was proven to be just a new and different kind of weasel?
But weasels' ways are not limited to mainstream TV pundits or well-publicized politicians. Weasels can be found at work even in (gasp) libertarian advocacy.
This has struck home to me in many libertarians' reactions to recent big business scandals. While every libertarian I know opposes the kind of fraud that has gone on in these companies, no libertarian I know has directly confronted the problems these frauds pose for standard libertarian policy recommendations. This includes me, though I'm more than willing to cop to the poverty of my study in this regard.
Mostly what I see are ... evasions. For instance, the recent story of corporate execs turning to Rand's writings didn't strike me as very savvy on their part. (Of course, perhaps the writer was at fault, egging the businessmen on to say borderline indecent things.)
And then there's a recent article by Adam Young, Public Turns on Business
, on the Ludwig von Mises Institute site. His primary concern seems to be the manipulation of public opinion by media. But after questioning the integrity of the pollsters, he then lists some causes of the current crisis of faith in honest business . . . causes that seem to me just a bit like evasions:
fed a steady diet of economic ignorance, especially so since the bubble burst;
fantasies and conspiracy theories of politicians who's [sic] only claim to expertise is gaining election to Washington or appearing on television;
Big Medianot educating the public on
rational principles of investingthat would help them avoid the temptations of
the boom phaseof markets.
not the size of business that is the problem; rather, it is its relationship with the state...
This is something the media fail to comprehend. It's difficult to know whether Enron was from the start a taxpayer-looting ring or if it simply became one later as opportunities arose. With its extensive collection of celebrity/mediaconsultantboards, troupes of lobbyists, and a Rolodex of politicians always eager to lend an ear, Enron tapped into the security of the federal government's public/private initiatives of loans and subsidies from the public treasury.
I guess I've said similar things. From the beginning of George W. Bush's presidential candidacy, when leftists began yelping about Enron, I understood just how much a product of the state Enron was, how closely tied to the government, how dependent on special attention, it was. Enron, it seemed to me, shined as a living example of what trendy Democrats and liberal Republicans have long celebrated, a Big Business/Big Government partnership. And I admit: I was amused to see it go down, if only to fondly remember the leftists who had a year or two earlier gone on and on about how monstrous it was, how impregnable, how only Ralph Nader (or was it Al Gore?) could stop it, etc.
But the manner in which it went down was not pretty. And the way its managers hid what should have been public information the better to swindle their stockholders, well, does that seem like a necessary consequence of Enron's close partnership with government? And surely this fraud has little to do with Young's favorite libertarian hobby horse, the Fed's inflationary policies. This is what I talk about when I use the word evasion. Young's points do not seem all that relevant.
And, if they can be shown as relevant to Enron, do they explain Adelphia's problems, too?
And do they help explain the shady deals that made Cheney and Bush so rich? Do they justify
these deals?
I guess I'd like someone to offer a better perspective than Young offered. I want what the average American wants: a perspective that explains, not a perspective that sweeps under the rug the precise kind of shenanigans that led to these current spectacular business failures.
But of course libertarians, who have for years argued against regulation of public corporations by the SEC, remain oddly silent when it is the SEC prosecuting the frauds. Book-keeping and debt-hiding like these businessmen practiced is (or should be) a crime; and the SEC, by mounting prosecutions, seems to be serving a respectable function. Which libertarian will now call for the abolition of the SEC? Which libertarian will even mention the issue when writing about corporate swindlers?
While your average guy would just dismiss libertarian evasion as so much crankery, I turn in another direction. It's back to reading Herbert Spencer's Railway Morals and Railway Policy
for me! Here is an essay by a major (if long dead) libertarian that squarely addresses the practice of corporate fraud. In Spencer libertarians had a proponent of free markets who did not pretend that businessmen were heroes, or that fraud was not a part and parcel of too much trading and enterprise. Was he right? Was he wrong? Is this relevant today?
Though libertarian publishing houses continue to publish many of Spencer's writings, for some reason this essay has long fallen out of print.
Could it be that libertarian publishers are weasels, too? Or the body impolitic of libertarians, are they the weasels? Some questions are just too uncomfortable for settled opinion, and libertarians long ago rejected certain ideas (suspicion of corporate rules and practices) as just too similar to their enemies' ideas (full-blown and wholesale opposition to corporations).
Of course, the average guy would never read Spencer because his prose is too steady, too ponderous, too Victorian.
Well, I'm not an average guy. I'll take stately prose over stylish evasion any day. Spencer, at least, was not a weasel.
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