LIBERTY IN THE NEXT MILLENNIUM

The century just ended,began with such high hopes,has been the bloodiest in
human history,with untold millions killed by wars, famine aggravated by
stupid policies and the hazards of fleeing political turmoil. It has also
seen technological developments unimagined even by turn-of-the-century
optimists, impressive strides in conquering disease and early death and
unparalleled improvements in the living standards of those who managed to
avoid being slaughtered by the minions of some dictatorship or democracy.
Human beings went into space, learned more about one another and made the
world seem smaller.

Can we do better in the next century and the next millennium? We managed to
learn during this century - at least all but a few benighted intellectuals
did - that the modern totalitarian variants of despotism known as Nazism
and Communism are not healthy for human beings and other living things.
When you cast your gaze over the last millennium, you hardly descry the
steady, uninterrupted march of progress so many Western intellectuals
expected to be the pattern during the 19th century. But it hasn't quite
been one-step-forward-two-steps-back either. The notion of the Divine Right
of Kings has disappeared even if we haven't quite gotten the hang of
self-government yet. The scientific method undermined the power of
authority and the practices of the past by insisting on basing knowledge on
evidence and experiment. The Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence and
Bill of Rights symbolized genuine and beneficial changes in public
philosophy.

And Johann Sebastian Bach lived, worked, produced music of surpassing
beauty and perfection, and after dying in obscurity had his music
rediscovered to enrich the spirits of generations yet to come. That by
itself would almost be enough to redeem any millennium.

What might happen in the next millennium to advance human liberty and
well-being? Aside from being confident that we haven't reached the end of
the search for solid scientific knowledge or useful technological advances,
I won't be so bold as to try to predict in these fields. But I have some
ideas for developments in the social and political spheres that would be
most welcome.

The first thing is to end the war on drugs, which has been an expensive
failure that has harmed millions of innocent people. Since we're talking
about millennial wishes, let's go one step further and ask that adults be
treated like adults, with full power to make their own decisions in all
matters related to their own bodies. If their decisions harm others that
might be justification for intervention, but if they harm only themselves
they should be able to do it - and take the full consequences themselves.

Sometime early in the next century it would be helpful to effectuate the
separation of school and state. The institution of government schools is a
relatively recent development, begun only in the 1840s in the United
States. It hasn't been a complete failure - most students get enough
training to be reliable factory of office workers - but it has been
inordinately expensive and has come with a near-toxic dose of
indoctrination into state-worship, a religion hostile to the inquiring
spirit of genuine education.

That would be an important step in the larger goal of shrinking the bloated
and cancerous state apparatus itself. My friends Durk Pearson and Sandy
Shaw once asked Nobel economist Milton Friedman what would happen if the
federal government were shrunk to its enumerated constitutional functions.
He thought about it, then quickly calculated that such an institution would
take about 7 percent of Gross Domestic Product, compared to the 20-plus
percent it takes now (state and local governments take about the same).

The impact of such shrinkage on economic growth, Professor Friedman
figured, would be dramatic. It would probably be more than 10 percent a
year, without inflation. That would mean a doubling of wealth every seven
years or so. That kind of increase in available resources wouldn't solve
all of human-kind's problems, but it would ameliorate a lot of them.

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised to see the end of the nation-state as we
know it in the next century or so. The nation-state as an institution came
into its own in the 17th century, mostly in Europe. It has facilitated war
and conquest and in some cases might have speeded up some forms of
commerce. But as would-be U.N. nation-builders in other parts of the world
are finding out, it isn't appropriate to every human culture. On balance it
has slowed down economic and scientific development. And it slaughtered
millions in the 20th century.

It's time to try something else.

Although it's a bit of a simplification, it wouldn't be entirely inaccurate
to think of the millennium now passing (I know, it really has another year
to run) as an era of scientific advancement and increasingly bold
experiments in human liberty. It doesn't seem entirely implausible to me
that the next millennium could be viewed in retrospect as the Era of the
Sovereign Individual.

The Internet and millions of private and informal interconnections are
making institutions of coercive authority increasingly obsolete and
irrelevant. We can coordinate our activities and seek to fulfill our dreams
much more efficiently and justly through voluntary relationships. When will
we have the intellectual vigor and confidence to cast off institutions that
hold us back as so much unnecessary baggage?