It was just over two weeks ago that Minnesota experienced what many politicians here declared was one of the greatest tragedies the State had ever seen — the collapse of the I-35W bridge in the heart of Minneapolis.

It was only a few days after that the finger pointing and political blame game started in earnest — along with some rather ill-considered partisan political attacks on the current Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, blaming him for the collapse and allowing the state’s infrastructure to deteriorate under his watch. The hyperbole started early, and it has yet to subside.

The attacks were nasty, but not based in facts. Over the last decade Minnesota’s budget for road construction has increased by slightly over 100%, and much of the Federal money coming to Minnesota has been diverted to massively expensive and underutilized transit projects and projects in the sparsely populated Northeast corner of the State, represented by Congressman Jim Oberstar, now chair and formerly ranking member of the House committee responsible for transportation funding.

In some ways, a more disturbing fact has come to light in the debate over the bridge collapse — and one that has implications far beyond partisan and parochial Minnesota politics.

There is a growing idea that Government can shield us from all ills, regardless of their source, as long as enough resources are poured into bureaucracies dedicated to shielding us from the contingencies of daily life. If we only pay enough in taxes, life can be safe.

Reality proves this thesis as not just wrong, but pernicious.

Two weeks after the bridge collapse here in Minnesota, another, much larger-scale tragedy has struck a wide swath of Minnesota. A series of flash floods tore through the State as up to 18 inches of rain was dumped on drought-parched soil baked by a mostly rainless summer. The collapse of the bridge was dramatic and telegenic, but the more common ravages of nature put the bridge collapse into a different perspective.

The scale of the current natural disaster is huge. Roads were washed away, hundreds or perhaps thousands of people are currently left homeless by the storms, and the Governor toured the area with local officials and met with local residents to help them cope with the disaster . President Bush will be here on a visit soon to a newly ravaged State, and will make another statement about how the Federal government will help rebuild the flooded areas.

On the one hand, it’s a blessing that here in America we can marshal the resources of an entire nation to help each other rebuild after such tragedies, but on the other, there is something vaguely disturbing about the whole political spectacle unfolding.

Some residents were quoted in the local paper complaining about FEMA ‘s response — it had been only been a couple days since the summer storm roared through the State, and yet there are already complaints that the response has not been fast enough. Undoubtedly the local and national media will use this as yet another example of how underfunded government is.

This begs the question: can government be asked or expected to protect each and every one of us against each and every potential disaster?

With the Katrina disaster, the fact was that New Orleans was a city built in a Hurricane-prone area, built below sea level, and someday a disaster was bound to strike someday. Many of the preparations for that disaster were made decades ago, and they were never going to be adequate to the task should the disaster strike, as it did in 2005. Yet it became fodder for political finger pointing within days.

In some ways the Minnesota bridge collapse bears the same hallmarks: the bridge was built decades ago, with a design that would never pass muster today. Extremely competent engineers made the choices that seemed best to maintain safety, were spending millions to upgrade the bridge, and yet an unexpected failure occurred. Nobody yet knows why, whatever speculation gets published in the papers every day. People of good will were doing their best, and spending millions of dollars, to keep the bridge safe.

And the floods that left so many homeless here in Minnesota — along with at least 6 fatalities — were simply an act of nature that occurs here frequently. Tornados and violent storms are the norm, not the exception in the wide plains and prairies of Minnesota and much of the United States, as Hurricanes are for the Eastern seaboard.

The new and bizarre assumption — that government should or could be Omni-competent in preventing or insuring against the risks of life is disturbing. It is right to ask that government do its best to provide public safety, ensure public health, and build and keep up the infrastructure it is responsible for. But it simply cannot ensure that nothing will ever go wrong, or be able to fix whatever bad things happen within days.

Government is not a benevolent mommy or daddy which can make everything better when it hurts. It is an imperfect tool we use to ensure, as the Founders put it, that we can all participate in the pursuit of “life, liberty, and happiness.” We ask it to provide public goods, but the tools it has — bureaucracies and money — will never do a great job providing what we are asking it to do.

No amount of money, no number of great and powerful bureaucracies, and no amount of planning will be able to thwart the ability of nature and fortune to overcome our best laid plans and preparations. And it will certainly never be able to eradicate the risks of living in a chaotic and sometimes violent world.

Yet despite this fact, I expect that soon enough the act of Nature that created the flash floods that have left hundreds or thousands homeless will be used to assign blame, and as another tool in the unending battle for political power.

As long as some people believe that government can solve any problem with enough money, every tragedy, act of Nature, or error in judgment made recently or decades ago will be turned into political fodder within days, or even hours.

A new fascist movement is on the rise, and proponents of individual liberty are losing ground.

Left-wingers often accuse conservatives of being fascists, but the reality is that fascism is simply another form of collectivism, like socialism and communism. The differences, such as they exist, are marginal between these collectivist ideologies when viewed from the perspective of Liberalism. Fascism idolizes the state, socialists idolize “society” and communists idolize “humanity” as a whole.

What holds these ideologies together is much stronger than what divides them: they are all dedicated to the proposition that the rights and desires of individuals are properly subsumed by the needs of the whole. Individualism is selfishness, rights are collective, and the “good” of the whole is the true measure of society.

Collectivism has been like a chronic disease in the body politic ever since the birth of Liberal Individualism in the 18th Century. For Locke, there was Rousseau. The American Revolution contrasted with the French Revolution and its guillotine. America had George Washington and Europe had Napoleon. Lincoln saved the Union as Marx was promoting Communism in Europe. For the last 300 years we in the Western world have been living in the midst of a struggle between the forces of Liberal individualism and the forces of collectivism.

Communism and fascism dominated much of 20th Century history as the alternative to Liberal individualism and free markets. Democratic socialism is still eating away at European societies, which grow poorer and more sclerotic every year as they continue to declare the superiority of their model to American individualism.

Even here in America, the home of Liberal individualism, there is a constant assault on individual liberty. The steady growth of economic regulations, income redistribution, speech codes (New York just banned the use of a racial slur in public!), the ever growing tax code, and ridiculous limits to what we can eat, drink, or smoke.

Still, compared to most of the developed world, American is remarkably free for the moment. And that’s a nagging problem for the believers in collectivism.

So today we are witnessing the rise of a new version of the same old collectivist ideal; instead of the State or Humanity being elevated above individualism, it’s an idealized version of the environment or the “Earth.” Call it Nature, call it Gaia, or even call it Climate, the ideologists of collectivism are just trying to sell us a new reason to subsume our individual liberty to a collectivist whole.

The “crisis” of global climate change is a ridiculous on its face. The very concept is bizarre and illogical, if for no other reason than simply because there is not a default “standard” climate to compare any particular momentary climate state to. Compared to what, exactly?

Today’s climate is quite different from that of even a few hundred years ago, and once you go back a few thousand years—a blink of the eye in the lifespan of the earth—much of the earth that is farmland and cities was buried under thousands of feet of ice. If you could run the history of earth’s climate as a movie, it would be a constantly changing before your eyes. No one minute looking much like the next. Different climate, different species, even different arrangements of continents and oceans would dominate at any given moment.

Simply put, there is no permanent “state of Nature.” Nature, Climate, the Earth, or “climate”—whatever you want to call it—is not some permanent unchanging ideal. It’s so dynamic that even in the span of a few years or decades changes can render a landscape unrecognizable, fundamentally altered.

“Climate change” is not something induced by human beings or a “crisis” to be avoided; it is simply the reality of living on earth. To the extent that human activities may contribute to climate variability, the same can be said of termites, trees, and even the slow action of plate tectonics. It’s true, but what’s your point? Literally everything changes the state of the earth, all the time. Fighting change is like fighting gravity; good luck! Call me when you succeed.

The steady drumbeat of fear mongering has nothing to do with a “crisis” of climate change, because climate change is not a crisis. It was reality before human beings existed, and will be long after we are all buried.

However, it has everything to do with promoting the solution to the crisis of climate change: the demotion of individualism and liberty and the promotion of collective solutions and collectivism in general.

The “solution” to the climate change “crisis” is exactly the same “solution” that was proposed to solve the “population bomb” crisis in the 70’s. It’s the same solution that was proposed to solve the “crisis” of capitalist “exploitation.” It’s always the same collectivist solution, whatever the “crisis:” the relinquishing of individual rights in order to promote the greater good.

We are told that combating the “crisis” of global climate change will require a wholesale revision of how we live. We will need to live “sustainable” lifestyles, as if there could be such a thing in a constantly changing world. (Imagine trying to sustain any lifestyle for more than a few decades; we call such sustainability “stagnation.”)

In reality “sustainable” is just another word for “controlled.” And controlled by whom? Not by you. In a “sustainable” economy everything would be controlled by the same elite who pushed collectivism on you in the first place. The people who warned you about the crisis are the very people who you need to follow in order to solve it.

In today’s rebirth of fascism the leaders of tomorrow are the academic-media-political elite who run the major Universities, the government bureaucracies, and of course the all important media.

The elite is those who know better than you what is good for you.

It may sound alarmist to decry a new birth of fascism. After all, we are hardly talking about an impending coup or anything like that.

But actually I am worried that it is already too late to start fighting back.

The ranks of academia are already being scrubbed of global warming “skeptics,” who are derided as “deniers.” The American Meteorological Society is already being encouraged to decertify meteorologists who don’t believe in global warming. Nuremberg-style trials for global warming “deniers” have already been proposed. And US Senators from both the Republican and Democratic Party have actively campaigned—successfully I might add—to prevent some private enterprises from contributing to organizations which oppose global warming alarmism.

The campaign to suppress debate on the global climate “crisis” is well on its way to succeeding. The “consensus” that a crisis exists is being built right now.

And once there is “consensus” that a crisis is upon us, how can we effectively defend individual liberty? Individual liberty is being portrayed as simply a right to destroy the environment. Can anybody have a “right” to destroy the environment? Goodbye liberty.

No, it’s not too early to worry about the creeping 21st Century fascism; instead, I worry it is already too late to beat it back.

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Originally posted Thursday, March 1, 2007 on Townhall.com.

I have always been a big believer that free markets tend to lead to freer political societies.

The logic—and empirical evidence—of economics is pretty clear: free market capitalism works when free people make free decisions in a free society. Such societies are not only the wealthiest and most successful in the world today, but in my view the most morally decent that have ever existed.

Part of the logic I have long accepted, and still doubt hardly at all, is that economic and political freedom are essentially indivisible. In fact, Adam Smith dubbed his Economics “The Theory of Natural Liberty,” a name that I consider entirely appropriate today.

As always, there are those looking for a “third way” in between the top-down social and political orders that always fail and the freewheeling “cowboy capitalism” of America. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were famously “third way” politicians, but any fair examination of either of their Administrations shows that if anything their policies were basically benign or even expansive when it came to liberty. (Yes, I know how much better things should have and could have been).

In other words, the Blair-Clinton “third way” was Reaganomics with a bit of retooling.

Today’s “third way” theorists look more to the economies of East Asia, and especially China, and wonder openly about the development of essentially free economies operating comfortably with highly controlled, elite-driven political systems.

To many in today’s political elite, this is not a theoretical question at all. As the economic expansion of the last 30 years has economically and politically empowered the American middle-class to an extent never imagined before in world history, the political and economic establishment that reigned from the 1930’s through the 1980’s and early 90’s saw its power diminishing toward extinction.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but they don’t want to let that power go. Not without a fight. I think they see the “third way” possibly represented by China and a few of the more politically repressive Asian tigers as a very enticing possibility indeed.

You see elements of that battle raging everywhere you turn today in the United States. And unfortunately, with few exceptions in either political Party, very few politicians are on the true side of the “little guy” versus the “big and powerful.”

Because the only thing good for the “little guy” in the battle against the “big and powerful,” whoever that group is at any one time, is freedom. Freedom to work. Freedom to trade. Freedom to move. And Freedom to speak his or her mind.

And freedom has been on the march—and the advocates of freedom and free markets have been winning battles around the world—largely because of one thing, and one thing only: the huge expansion of communications technology that has broken the “establishment” monopoly on information everywhere it has touched. The explosion of talk radio after the demise of the “fairness doctrine” in the late 1980’s helped break the essential monopoly of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the 3 big Networks on the reporting and discussion of news in this country. The internet is or will soon be the single-most important source of news in the world.

Which gets us back to the “third-way” capitalism I began with. Those who have lived quite comfortably in a world in which they have controlled the news, controlled the political agenda, controlled tone and content of political discussion, and in most cases have controlled the regulatory bodies that set many of the rules by which our economic trade both foreign and domestic take place, are getting mighty tired of watching that power slip away from them.

Mighty tired indeed.

So a movement has sprung up, led by a group called the “Center for American Progress,” which has begun to lobby vigorously for solving the problem of “imbalance” in the availability of liberal versus conservative points of view in commercial talk radio. It turns out, according to a study they just completed, that there is a dangerous “Structural Imbalance” in talk radio that must be addressed. Believe it or not, 91% of talk radio is conservative while only 9% can be considered liberal.

SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!

Of course, first thing to note about this study is how biased it is from the start: it excludes public and listener supported radio stations, which almost by definition have a much more liberal slant than your average commercial AM talker. Maybe your average limousine liberal isn’t just dying to hear Al Franken’s opinions every second of the day, when she has a perfectly good alternative in public radio that also happens to put out an excellent product?

Forget the facts, though, and let’s stick to the point: SOMETHING MUST BE DONE to restore fairness and balance to the mediasphere, and that something is already being talked about regularly on Capitol Hill: restore the fairness doctrine.

Which would essentially kill talk radio as we know it today. Radio stations would essentially be harassed and regulated out of that market, simply because the cost to produce and defend the product would exceed the economic benefit of providing it.

Trent Lott (who opposed eliminating it in the first place) has already been quoted in the New York Times as saying “’Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.’ At some point, Mr. Lott said, Senate Republican leaders may try to rein in ‘younger guys who are huffing and puffing against the bill.’”

Senator Diane Feinstein admitted on Fox News Sunday that Democrats in the Senate were “looking” at reviving the Fairness Doctrine “because I think there ought to be an opportunity to present the other side. And unfortunately, talk radio is overwhelmingly one way.”

This is an audacious power grab. And not one just being made by a Left which has been losing its ideological war with the Right, but by many in the current political and media elite, whatever their nominal political affiliation.

These politicians are at a loss to stem the tide of history that has taken more and more power away from them and placed it into the hands of average citizens like you and me. That is what is so intriguing to so many of them about the “third way” that Asian capitalist societies appear to represent: a stable political and cultural elite with a seemingly prosperous and compliant working class. Nirvana!

Of course, there is no such thing. The creative destruction that is at the heart of free market economies will never allow such a social arrangement to last for long. China will be faced with decades of social and political upheaval; the Asian tigers are becoming freer, in fits and starts, and the march toward freedom will continue to prevail as long as we can preserve the one essential freedom that is increasingly at risk, with few defenders: the right to free speech and the free flow of information.

Unfortunately, this is a battle we are not currently winning. The internet is censored in much of the world, often with the complicity of our own major corporations. Campaign finance “reforms” have attacked the very foundation of our political system, and now talk of regulating speech on the internet and talk radio is inching toward action.

This is a battle we cannot lose. Each stupid regulation, idiotic social program, ridiculous subsidy, or overtaxed dollar is a frustration to be fought when we can, borne when we must. But the attack on speech is another fight altogether.

If we lose this one, it’s for all the marbles. America could wind up looking a lot more like China, at least politically, than the other way around.

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Originally posted Monday, June 25, 2007 on Townhall.com.