THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume IX, Issue # 246, December 30, 2007
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
THE CHALLENGE OF 2008 & BEYOND
By Alan Caruba
HUMAN PROGRESS DURING THE PAST 100 YEARS: IMPROVEMENT OF THE HUMAN CONDITION THROUGH INVENTIVE
GENIUS, TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT, ELECTRICAL POWER, RAPID TRANSPORTATION, GLOBAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS,
CENTRAL HEATING, AIR CONDITIONING, REFRIGERATION, AN ABUNDANT FOOD SUPPLY, & EXTRAORDINARY MEDICAL
TREATMENT -- MAJOR PROBLEMS & CHALLENGES FACING AMERICA DURING 2008 & SUCCEEDING YEARS: STATISM,
THE ENVIRONMENTALIST & NO-GROWTH MOVEMENT, INFRASTRUCTURE MAINTENANCE, A DISFUNCTIONAL
EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM, THE UNITED NATIONS & OTHER THREATS TO NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY, INTERNATIONAL POLITICS
& THREATS TO WORLD PEACE, & POLITICAL ISLAM AS A THREAT TO WESTERN CIVILIZATION
FULL STORY:
The beginning of a new year is a good time to consider the many things that differentiate this new century from the last.
I’d like to recommend that everyone read It’s Getting Better All the Time: Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years
by Stephen Moore and the late Julian L. Simon. It was published in 2000 by the Cato Institute and is singularly the best
reference for anyone and everyone who assumes we have always had electricity, global telecommunications, abundant
food, and extraordinary medical treatment.
By way of comparison, consider the American Civil War that cost the lives of 620,000 men who fought on both sides of
the conflict. On December 24, 1864, General William T. Sherman sent President Abraham Lincoln a message by telegraph
offering him Savannah, Georgia, as a Christmas present. By April, 1865, General Robert E. Lee would tender his surrender
to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. All the parties arrived on horseback and, while the use of rail travel played a
minor role, there were no trucks, no tanks, nothing that involved the invention of the internal combustion engine.
The inventions we take for granted would largely wait until the 20th. century. In the 100 years between 1900 and 2000, the
improvement of the human condition would progress at a rate unknown in the whole history of mankind.
Ironically, the automobile, which is blamed for “pollution” and as a contributor to the bogus “global warming,” brought to
an end an era in which cities and towns were filled with horse dung and garbage. Before the modern era of sewage systems
and plumbing, cities were places of pestilence. In 1918-1919, an epidemic of influenza killed more than 700,000 Americans
and another 20 million to 100 million around the world.
In 1901, Americans had barely a 50-50 chance of surviving a trip to the doctor or, worse, the hospitals of the time, when the
simple act of washing one’s hand before surgery was unknown.
At the beginning of the last century, life expectancy was barely into the 40s. Today, Americans can expect to live to an
average of 78 years and, as anyone can see, Americans are living routinely into and beyond their 80s. The “obesity
epidemic” is the result of an economy that produces more food than ever before. The invention of genetically modified
seeds not only insures that more crops will be grown, but that forests will not be sacrificed to produce it.
Moore and Simon note:
“Most important of all, almost every great tragedy of the
20th century has been the result of too much government,
not too little.… Nazism, Socialism, Communism, Marxism,
and apartheid were all simply fancy names for statism —
for unreasonable government control over the lives and
liberties of the citizenry.”
The last century marked a major departure from previous ones, becoming a century of widespread abundance in almost
every sector of life. “Today’s farmer feeds three times as many people with one-third as many total farmers on one-third
less farmland than in 1901.” American farmers are about 40 percent more productive than their European counterparts.
Few, if any, Americans can think of a time when there was no radio, but it only came into being in the 1920s. Television
didn’t begin its claim on our attention until the 1950s. As recently as the 1960s, most shows were in black and white and
Americans had only three or four channels from which to choose.
While the nation goes through the problems associated with the failures of the banking system to take greater care in
lending for mortgages, in 1901, about 50 percent of Americans owned their own homes. Today that has risen to about
two-thirds. One of the primary goals of environmentalism is to drive people back into cities and off the roads, but such
progress cannot be thwarted. What the nation — now with more than 300 million citizens — requires is housing
development, not a return to an era when one in five families lived in housing with three persons per bedroom.
To demonstrate how idiotic the demand is that we “conserve” electricity instead of developing more sources, such as
nuclear power, Congress recently passed an “energy” bill that bans the sale and use of incandescent light bulbs,
beginning in 2012. By contrast, in 1901, barely two percent of homes had electricity. Progress demands more electricity,
not less, nor will it be supplied by such notions as wind or solar power that are utterly dependent on whether the wind
is blowing and sunlight is constantly available.
What today’s American takes for granted is largely the result of an incredibly inventive 20th Century. Its major
inventions included refrigeration, aspirin, electric heating, the telephone, the electric railroad, movies, radio, television,
air conditioning, fuel efficient automobiles and so much more that they cannot be listed, but can be found at prices that
make them available to working people throughout the nation.
Today we live with pollution myths spun by environmentalists, but our air and water is cleaner as the result of
regulations introduced in the 1970s. Despite a five-fold increase in population, the percentage of land space that is
covered by our forests has remained constant at about one-third of the land area of the United States. This is generally
true throughout the world as well, but in the nation today vast efforts are being made to put more and more land
off-limits to every form of development, whether it be for mining or the extraction of oil and natural gas. They take the
form of socalled “heritage” areas.
What Americans are not doing is the job of maintenance. When a bridge can fail in Minnesota and hundreds more are
at risk, we are failing to maintain the nation’s vital infrastructure. This is especially true of the electrical transmission
system — the grid— that is in urgent need of upgrade and expansion. Too many of our highways, many built in the
1950s, are in need of improvement. Some American roadways are being put on the auction block to foreign ownership.
The great task of this new year is to remove the nation’s educational system from the death grip of the central
government and the teachers' unions, which have imposed a curriculum that renders America’s children and youth
ignorant of the fundamentals needed for an advanced society and economy. Education must be returned to local
governance.
When the 20th. Century began in 1901, America was not committed to a vast military, whose presence is now found
throughout the world. The maintenance of peace has become the job of the United States of America, as the United
Nations failed to perform this function and many individual nation-states relinquished the responsibility, some
guarding themselves with the development of nuclear weapons. This is occurring as America's military has shrunk in
size and become entirely voluntary.
At the same time, we have witnessed the growth of international institutions like the United Nations, which has not
only failed to meet its original goal of preventing war, but evolved into a corrupt organization of self-serving
bureaucrats more interested in lavish conferences than the hard work of real progress -- i.e., the work of tending to
refugees and bolstering constitutional democracies, instead of disseminating the fairy tales of "global warming."
Similar groups like the European Union further enlarge governance over sovereign nation-states that should be more
responsible for their own affairs and agreements that serve their own interests. Globalization is coming with a price
that reduces individual liberty and freedom.
The scourge of Communism — another term for big government — has been pushed aside by the evident failure of this
and other Socialist economic systems, though it remains a threat. As the world's most serious threat, Communism has
been replaced by the resurgence of Islam, a religion invented in the Seventh Century to serve the interests of Bedouin
societies for whom conquest and theft was a way of life. Today, a large portion of Islam feels under attack at the same
time it strikes out against modernity and its benefits. It must either reform itself or continue its long record of failure to
move into this and preceding centuries.
The 21st. Century is at war with the past and its weapons are those of mass destruction. While there is much for which
to give thanks, given the progress of the previous century, there is much to fear -- e.g., fear that such progress will be
reversed in a global holocaust or fear that massive governmental institutions will strangle progress and freedom in favor
of exercising authoritarian power over the lives of everyone on earth.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Political Economy -- Philosophies, Systems, & Public Policies:
Government, the Economy, & Economic Prosperity
Political Environmentalism Versus Human Progress & Prosperity:
Policy Issues Relating to Energy, Environment,
& Natural Resources
Science, Ethics, & Human Health:
Human Health & Public Policy
Infrastructure Problems & Issues:
Energy, Transportation, Water & Sewer Systems,
Security Systems, Education, & Parks & Recreational Facilities
Education & America's Schools
The United Nations, Its Agencies, & U.S. National Interests
International Politics & World Disorder:
War & Peace in the Real World
Page Two
Page One
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
Counterterrorism & U.S. National Security
U.S. National Security Strategy
Alan Caruba is a veteran business and science writer, a Public Relations Counselor, and Founder of the National Anxiety Center, a
clearinghouse for information about media-driven scare campaigns. Caruba writes a weekly commentary, "Warning Signs," posted
on the Internet website of the National Anxiety Center, which is located at
www.anxietycenter.com.
Caruba has a daily blog at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com.
Caruba’s new book, Right Answers: Separating Fact from Fantasy, has been published by Merril Press.
© Alan Caruba 2007
Published with Permission of Alan Caruba
ACaruba@AOL.Com
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THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Conservative & Free-Market Analysis of Government, Politics & Public Policy, Covering Political, Legal, Constitutional, Economic,
Cultural, Military, International, Strategic, & Geopolitical Issues
Conservative Government Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity