Remnant Review (Oct. 29, 2011)
Jesus has 12 disciples, and one of them was a ringer. They changed the world. The time was right. The Roman Empire had crushed the Mediterranean pirates two generations earlier. This opened up trade, including the trade in ideas. The road system did the same. All roads led to Rome . . . and back out again. The Apostle {Paul took advantage of this, though not deliberately. He probably died in a Roman prison. His ideas didn't. He wrote letters. They survived. The technology was just right. The ideas were just right. The world was changed by these ideas.
The power-seeker seeks to be the last man standing. This works for a handful of men (and fewer women) for one generation. Then most of the power-gainers are forgotten.
It all depends on your time frame. It depends of the power of your ideas. I want to talk about the comparative rates of survival: men vs. ideas.
The operational principle of the last man standing is probably most faithfully honored by the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, more commonly known as the Mormons. The senior officer in the organization is the president. He gains his position by living longer than anyone else in the Council of 12. When the existing president dies, the oldest man automatically becomes the replacement. It is a system entirely governed by the principle of seniority. As far as I have ever heard, no president has ever become senile and lingered on for a long period of time. They live to a ripe old age, and then they drop dead. So far, the system has worked.
I want to speak of a much older organization, the Roman Catholic Church. The principle of the last man standing has governed the operations of that organization for many centuries. Certain men outlast other men, and in doing so, are able to implement their interpretations of the best way to run the church. In our day, the most obvious survivor is Pope Benedict XVI. Before he became pope, he was known as Joseph Ratzinger. He was made a cardinal in 1977. His rival was Augustino Casaroli. Pope John Paul II made him a cardinal almost as soon as he became Pope, in 1979.
Ratzinger is a hard-core conservative. Casaroli was a liberal. It was not clear which of the two men the Pope favored in the 1980s. Casaroli died in 1998. Ratzinger obviously has survived him. But, for almost 2 decades, it was not clear to outsiders which of the two men would become dominant in the church. Each of them had considerable influence.
In 1979, it appeared that Casaroli was favored by most of the cardinals, at least cardinals outside of Africa. The drift toward liberalism had become visible at Vatican II (1962-65). Little that the Cardinals did after 1965 indicated that this drift into liberalism could be reversed. Yet, as it has turned out, Pope John Paul II favored a more conservative movement in the church. Ratzinger became one of the few candidates for Pope in the last century who was favored to win the position when it came to the vote, and who actually was elected Pope.
Movements must survive irrespective of the leaders. A leader can give direction for a period of time, and he can effectively represent a particular movement to the public, but any movement that becomes exclusively dependent upon a leader cannot survive. When men die, their organizations must carry on without them. If a leader has been so dominant that his replacement is unable to gain the confidence, financial support, and self-sacrifice from the organization's members, then the organization will fade into obscurity. This is what happens to most organizations. Only a tiny handful survive the transition from a charismatic leader to two or three replacement bureaucrats in a row, who never have the same degree of authority that the founder did.
This means any founder has got to take into consideration the leadership skills of whoever will replace him. He must also carefully consider whether or not members of the organization will grant allegiance to his replacement. Finally, he better be certain that the replacement shares the basic worldview that he has promoted. Will the successor abandon them? It happens all the time.
This is the problem of succession that every organization faces. Not many organizations successfully make the transition for over a century. Ideas survive, but organizations tend to fade away. We all hope that the organizations that we support will be among the survivors, but we know that this is probably not going to be the case. Especially in an era such as ours, where technological change is historically unprecedented, survivors cannot be easily predicted.
Something has taken place over the last 8 years that is unprecedented in the history of mankind. Because of the advent of YouTube, it is now possible for an individual to present information that will surely survive his death. Anyone can say his piece on YouTube.
In the past, writers have hoped that their publishers would keep their books in print. For the vast majority of writers who ever lived, this has been a vain hope. Very few books get into a second printing, and almost no books stay in print for longer than a century. Books fall out of favor.
Even worse off is a man who is an effective speaker. Until the advent of audiotape, which was developed in Nazi Germany, no speaker could hope to have much influence beyond the time when he lost his ability to speak effectively. The quality of the sound recordings prior to audiotape was poor, and records were limited to about 3 minutes. No speaker could imagine that his greatest performances would be recognized much beyond the evening's presentation. Then, with the advent of audiotape as a commercial product in the 1950s, speakers did begin to think that it would be possible for their speeches to persevere.
The problem, however, was that audiotape did not last very long. So, somebody had to copy tapes, generation to generation. A speaker knew his presentation might be lost. Also, with analog recording, each successive copy of the tape deteriorates in terms of sound quality. So, the technology of audiotape guaranteed that, over time, even the best speech would be lost.
Then came digital communications. With digitalization, it is possible to have a faithful reproduction of a speech indefinitely. This became a commercial possibility with the development of CD-ROM technology in the 1980s. From that point on, a speaker had at least a possibility of seeing his speech extend through time. Even though the life expectancy of the CD-ROM is probably limited to about 50 years, it is possible to create a perfect imitation of the CD in just a few seconds for practically no money. So, a public speaker began to think that his work might survive as long as writers' work does.
But the hopes of both the writer and the speaker became pinned on someone actively keeping their work available to the public. This meant that, in all likelihood, hardly anyone's work would survive. At some point, publishers would lose interest in maintaining the material for sale to the general public.
Then came YouTube. It is now possible for an individual to make a video and post it on YouTube free of charge. Once it is on YouTube, it is unlikely ever to come down. Only if YouTube goes out of business will a video be taken off line. Assuming that it is not so controversial that it offends some powerful group, a video posted this year is likely to be available to the general public in 1000 years. Nothing like this has ever happened before.
A writer also has comparable technology to keep his work alive. Because of WordPress.com, which now has over 50 million sites, it is possible for an individual to put his words in front of the public on a permanent basis. Search engines will be able to find the text in 1000 years. If we combine this technology with PDF files, it is possible for books, reports, and other materials to stay in front of the public indefinitely.
Another organization, Scribd.com, lets an individual post materials in any length free of charge on its site. The last time I checked, the site had over 20 million documents posted. The site is sufficiently popular so that it is unlikely that it will ever be taken down.
So, the last man standing needs to be the last man to get his ideas accepted in the future. A person can post a video presentation on YouTube, embed it on a permanent free website, and supply links on the page to documents posted on Scribd. It is now possible for an individual to make his presentation and not fail to gain an audience merely because there are no paying customers to keep his materials in print. This has created a technologically level playing field, in which a person's ideas can survive his death in a format or formats that will be just as useful in 1000 years as they are today.
The amount of useless material will increase geometrically. Most books are not worth reading. They are surely not worth keeping in print. But, with new technology, bad books will be able to survive as long as masterpieces. The public will determine which of these books has greater impact in their lives. The survival of every digital book is now almost guaranteed.
This means that it is at least conceivable that an idea that has no cultural impact in the writer's lifetime can, a century or millennium later, gain followers. They will find that the ideas that seemed irrelevant to the general public in the distant past now seeing remarkably relevant to the present situation.
What about the technical quality of the presentation? These days, it does not matter much. If you hear a tape recording speech that was given in 1950, the audio quality of the speech is probably very close to the best quality that is available today, assuming that the person used an expensive microphone to record the speech. The quality of the microphone has more to do with the quality of the copy than anything else. Microphones of very high quality have been available to the general public ever since the early 1950s. Not everybody was wise enough to buy one back then, but falling prices have made top-quality mics available for $25. In today's world, a $25 microphone, which in terms of purchasing power would have cost three or four dollars in 1950, is just about as good as a $500 microphone when it comes to reproducing the human voice. People's ears are the limiting factor today rather than the price of the mic. To make a high-quality recording, a speaker in 1000 years will have no particular advantage over a speaker today, if the speaker today has used the $25 microphone.
I recognized this 40 years ago. When I worked for the Foundation for Economic Education, I told the boss, Leonard Read, that he should let me go out and buy a high-quality microphone. He was wise enough to let me do this. So, in 1971, I bought a $65 ElectroVoice microphone and brought it back to FEE. In Today's money, that was $350. From that time on, FEE's recorded guest lectures were top quality. It was a very good microphone, and the audio tapes were of very high quality. I don't know if those audiotapes were preserved, but at least the master tapes were of such quality that reproductions made from those tape masters over the years probably maintained much of the original quality.
Not many people 40 years ago understood this, and the surviving tapes are not very good. The best example I know was a man who a tape ministry of Protestant speakers around the country. He would bring his tape recorder to record those speeches, year after year, at his own expense, at conferences around the Southeast. He lived in Mississippi. He made those tapes available for free rentals. He was a postman. The problem was, he used the cheap microphone that came with his original tape recorder. If he had just spent $50 on a decent microphone, those surviving tapes would be of very high quality. He spent all that time, all that money traveling, yet because he used a $2 microphone, he essentially wasted his time and effort.
These days, people are sufficiently technologically savvy that they won't make that mistake. Even when they use the built-in microphone of a laptop computer, the sound is recognizable. It is not high-quality sound, but you can hear what the individual said. As more and more people use separate microphones for such purposes as Skype communications, the quality of the videos that are posted on YouTube will improve.
Another major advantage of these technological developments is this: individuals who would not otherwise have had an opportunity to make their ideas available to the general public will now be able to gain an audience. I suppose the most obvious recent example is Rebecca Black, a 13-year-old girl who posted a YouTube music video. She became instantly famous around the world. Her video hit 167 million hits before her mother and the lawyers decided to take it down. I am not sure why the video was taken down, but it made Rebecca Black celebrity. She would not have expected this the day before she recorded the video. Nobody could have expected it.
There is no way that anyone can forecast what the public will do with a video. In all likelihood, only a few hundred people will see the video, but nobody can know for sure. This is a tremendous transformation of communications in the modern world. It means that the entry barrier hardly exists from the point of view of finances. It also does not exist from the point of view of gaining access to a distribution system. Those businesses that are geared to profitability based on control over distribution might as well shut down shop today. That power is rapidly disappearing. It is now possible for the producer of content to gain direct access to the consumers, as long as what is consumed is transmitted digitally.
The percentage of creative people probably never changes very much. If it does, there's no way to measure it. On the assumption that the percentage of creative people does not change, society will benefit from the reduction of costs associated with posting new ideas. People who are creative, but who would never before have been able to locate customers who were willing to pay them, can now find them. Rather, the customers can find them. New ideas will have greater effect than ever before, simply because these ideas can reach those individuals who are in a position to implement them. The producers and the implementers can get together digitally, 24 hours a day, and this process is not limited by geography, money, or temporal extension. It is possible that the creators and the implementers will be able to get together even though the creators have been dead for a century.
We should expect to see an enormous increase of creativity, because the creators will now understand that the time that they spend in developing their ideas and putting them in a format that individuals will be able to access, recognize, and implement will not be wasted time. Even an individual who finds that no one pays any attention to his ideas has the hope that somebody in 100 years will pay attention. This opportunity will keep him working on his ideas. In earlier generations, he would have quit. He would have run out of hope.
Hope is an important thing. It is one of the great motivators in life. When people lose hope, they stop creating. They cease to invest the emotional capital that is required to bring great ideas to fruition. It is not that they run out of time. It is that they run out of hope. The digital revolution that has taken place during the last decade will do more to extend hope to creative people than anything else in the history of man. There is hope: hope of continuity over time, hope of succession, hope of gaining disciples, hope of staying in print, and the hope of having significance, despite the fact that nobody is paying any attention to you for the moment. Hope can now expand across the barrier of death, which it rarely did for any promoter of ideas in the days before the development of cheap digital technology and a data storage.
The average person gives no thought to the motivation of the creative person. He does not know how creative people change the world around them. He does not give any thought to the process that takes an innovative idea and extends it into a product or service that changes people's lives. Nevertheless, as people become more familiar with digital technology, they will begin to post their ideas or thoughts on YouTube or other video storage sites. They will become familiar with the technology. They will buy the tools necessary to participate in the digital age. There's no question that Facebook is going to change the way people view the presentation and preservation of ideas. Some of these people, who would not have given any thought to the possibility of creating videos, will now think that it is a good idea to create videos, post them, and link these videos to Facebook.
As the skills associated with digital technologies spread, the general public, the creative minority that would have existed anonymously will find outlets that did not exist before. They will not think systematically about becoming international gurus, but because of the phenomena of viral communications, they will become celebrities. I think the best example in the realm of education in Salman Khan. He posted videos in order to help his nieces and nephews with mathematics. Soon, those videos went viral. He is now one of the most important educators in the world. The Khan Academy is visited by a million students a month. This was not his original plan. I think his example will be imitated by many others.
Also, other people who are not deliberately imitating his example will find that something comparable to what he has experienced will take place with them. Their videos will go viral. They will become convinced that they can have more impact than they ever dreamed of as a result of the fact that the videos started to go viral. That is, creative people, who otherwise would not have understood that they had an opportunity, will be shown by the number of hits on their videos that they are having an impact far beyond anything that they ever dreamed of.
All of this is because of the reduction of entry costs. The old economic principle is correct. When the cost of anything is reduced, more of it will be supplied. Similarly, when the price of anything is reduced, more of it will be demanded. While it is no doubt true that demand for third-rate videos has increased, and it is also true that the time we have to spend watching videos must be taken from the time we spend doing other things, I think we have reason to believe that high-quality presentations will be successful in penetrating a much broader market than would have been possible for most purveyors of ideas a decade ago. Compared with what was possible prior to 1995, we have lived through a revolution.
Whether or not you are taking advantage of this is not the question. The question is whether or not people with capacities and visions similar to yours are taking advantage of the opportunities. Yes, there is a lot of mediocrity out there. There is always lots of mediocrity to go around. But in this sea of mediocrity are islands of enormous creativity. We can now find those islands, because search engines, Facebook, and other means of digital communications let us find those islands.
I always come back to the article written by Albert Jay Nock in the late 1930s, "Isaiah's Job." Nock was convinced that good ideas will attract good followers. He was also convinced that people who have ideas that will change the thinking and habits of what he called the remnant cannot be successful if he sets out to create a mass movement. He was convinced that mass movements are the product of the remnant, and members of the remnant do not respond well to techniques of political mobilization. He had very little faith in politics. He did have faith in good ideas. He was convinced that the truth will win in the long run. This takes a great deal of faith. We are going to see the test of that faith as never before in history as a result of the rise of digital media.
The decentralization that is implicit in YouTube and WordPress.com will have transforming effects on world civilization. People are going to recognize that they can achieve a great deal, free of cost, with only the investment of time.
They will find that the people they listen to most are the people on their Facebook pages, or the people who have websites, or even YouTube channels, who express what they believe in an effective way. This will carry through into people's attitudes regarding tax-funded education. It will not take 20 years for people to figure out there is more education going on by means of Facebook, YouTube, and free websites than is going on in any institution of higher learning, let alone the local public high school. The kids are figuring this out already. Teachers are not going to be able to convince the students of the importance of the public school system, when, even in the classroom, the students are getting their information off the Internet by means of digital phones.
The best teachers and the best students can get together formally or informally on the Web. If somebody has something to say, he can say it. Positive responses get people to say even more. The listeners can then contact people in their circle and let them know that there is a new source of information out there. None of this is dependent upon special favors granted by owners of printing presses. The writer does not have to please the publisher, and the publisher does not have a monopoly over the channels of distribution. This is reducing the power of the gatekeepers. I have been talking about this for over a decade, but now it is becoming clear, especially to the gatekeepers.
The decentralization of digital communications is going to lead to decentralization of transactions. This will cut sales tax revenues. This is sure to have negative effects on the income of local governments. They can implement new policies and try to collect sales taxes from the Web, but the cost of collecting the taxes across the board, let alone across national borders, will protect all but large-scale retail organizations, such as Amazon. The little guy can continue to sell his wares on the Internet directly to consumers.
How will defenders of central planning convince people of the truth of this position, when the means by which the ideologists gain access to their audience are entirely decentralized? How are people going to rally in the streets without digital technology? While most of the participants in the Ooccupy Wall Street movement are liberals, statists, and Marxists -- believers in the power of government to fix everything -- they are really doing libertarians a favor. They are exposing the emptiness of their position for public view. They don't like the banks. Join the club. They don't like rich people. They are on fire to repeal Pareto's law. The videos of their efforts will expose for all to see the futility of using the state to control business, when business has been in control of the state, around the world, for over 100 years.
It is going to become apparent, especially when winter hits, that these people should not be trusted to restructure civilization.
The last man standing will be the person whose work still gets traffic on YouTube or WordPress.com sites. This person's digital work remains online to present an idea that is better suited for the future. Its time will come after he is gone -- maybe long gone. It is possible for ideas to hibernate. We cannot know what technologies will exist in the future. But we can expect future continuity of YouTube. Most people like videos far more than they like to read. There will be traffic. It is the #2 site on the web after Facebook.
We know this: with these new digital technologies, ideas can persevere through time, despite the fact that they never gained traction in the interim. The video or book can be discovered in a century or 1,000 years, despite the fact that they are overlooked by contemporaries. There is no way that an individual can know for sure whether his ideas will stand the test of time. What he does know is that he will not stand the test of time. He may be the last man standing, but soon enough he will be several feet underground.
The last man standing has always had a tremendous advantage, because his rivals were no longer standing. He could be the last man standing in his generation, and if he gained enough direct followers, he had hopes that his ideas, his vision, his plan for the future could be extended into the future. But he was penned in by a very narrow collection of disciples. They were disciples in his lifetime. What about after his death?
Hardly anybody knew about Karl Marx when he died in 1883. Those few who did know about him were rarely familiar with most of his works, which went out of print. What made Karl Marx's reputation was Vladimir Lenin. Lenin's success in the Bolshevik revolution retroactively baptized the writings of Karl Marx. In a sense, Lenin resurrected Marx. But that chain of causation could have been broken at any time.
The chains of causation are multiplied by digital communications. The last man standing today who does not gain what I would call digital traction in the next generation will not be regarded in the future as the man who changed civilization. We now have technologies of communication that are decentralized and therefore enable an individual to have influence across borders and across time, and all almost free of charge. This would not have been possible as recently as 1995. The last man standing knows that he will not remain standing for very long. The last man sitting in front of a WebCam with a lapel microphone to present some idea may have more influence in 60 years than the last man standing had in his lifetime.
This has undermined Lenin's theory of the transmission belts. Lenin saw the centralization of power, which required the elimination of competition, as the means by which a legacy is extended across borders and through time. These transmission belts, because they were physical, could be controlled. The government could control printing presses, the supply of paper and ink, and the distribution channels. But, with the rise of digital technology, there is no way that the ruler in any particular nation can control the flow of ideas and money. When things are digital, they cannot be easily controlled. As digital technology extends to ever larger numbers of people, the ability of central planners to control the flow of ideas and the flow of money will decline. Their control will be an ever smaller percentage of the total number of ideas and exchanges that are taking place digitally in the societies that they are attempting to control.
We have seen another last man standing over the last month. Muamar Ghadaffi is no longer standing. For 42 years, he controlled Libya. He did so by controlling the flow of oil. He gained his position first by a military coup, and then by stealing the oil property of Bunker Hunt. He set the pattern for OPEC over the next decade. He got away with it. But, 42 years later, he did not get away with it. Part of this was because of digital technology, but more of it was the result of the intervention of the British with their SAS organization and the intervention of NATO. He was driven out of power by domestic and international forces. But, clearly, he is no longer standing. First you have social standing, or political standing, or economic standing, and then you are no longer standing. His influence in history has ended. He will not have successors who carry on whatever vision he really believed in. His would-be replacements are hated. He is despised. Any statues of them will come down. All the statues of Lenin came down. Most of the statues of Stalin came down. The last statues standing are digital.
People believe that what they are committed to will spread. It will spread across borders, and it will spread across time. The more that they believe in the spreading of their ideas in the future, the more committed they will be to spreading those ideas today.
Today it is possible for little people to have legitimate faith that the ideas which they are committed to will spread. When I entered the conservative movement in 1956, it took a great deal of faith for anyone to believe that Communism would be overthrown, and overthrown domestically rather than internationally. No one had heard of Barry Goldwater if he did not live in Arizona. Ronald Reagan hosted the General Electric Theater on television. Neither Reagan nor anybody else believed that he would later unleash the forces in military technology that would bankrupt the Soviet Union, because the Communists thought that they had to keep up with American military technology. They couldn't. Their system did not allow them to do this. If they were not willing to launch nuclear missiles, they could not legitimately hope to defeat the West militarily. They were not willing to launch the missiles, so their cause did not survive. But that was clear to no one in 1956.
In 1956, National Review had only been published for a year, and The Freeman only began publishing in that year. There were no high level think tanks for libertarians or conservatives. The control over mass communications possessed by the Establishment seemed almost total. Anyone who had hope in the ability of a handful of conservatives or libertarians to persuade the voting public to rein in any aspect of the federal government was a person of very great hope indeed. More like a crackpot.
Today, every Republican candidate for the nomination for president calls himself a conservative. Romney is certainly more conservative than Barack Obama. He is also a lot richer. He's worth $250 million. The other candidates are openly fiscal conservatives. This would have been inconceivable in 2008, let alone 1956.
The decentralization of communications will inevitably lead the decentralization of power. I realize that a lot of people who grew up in the conservative movement from 1964 to 1990 will find this difficult to believe. They have suffered so many defeats politically; they have watched so much expansion of the Federal government; they have seen so much inflation by the Federal Reserve System. They find it difficult to believe that decentralization in the realm of communications will be able to overcome the seemingly unstoppable centralization of money, politics, and regulation. They don't see what is under their nose. They get their information digitally, and they are able to bypass the mainstream media, yet they still do not emotionally grasp the fact that the technologies available to us are the social equivalent of the rifles that were available to American farmers in 1776. They do not see the decentralization of digital communications has even greater implications for the decentralization of political power than the decentralization of weaponry had in the 18th century.
This really is the case of the Wizard of Oz. The little old man behind the curtain is no longer able to conceal the fact that he is not the great Oz. Over the next decade, it will become obvious to billions of people around the world that the Western alliance of central banks, commercial banks, and national governments is no longer able to deliver the goods. The gatekeepers will not be able to conceal the enormous failure of the alliance between big government, big banks, big oil, big Pharma, and big Wall Street. As an idea, big doesn't cut it anymore. Big means means political favors, and the public is getting fed up with political favors for the elite. The public accepts this only for as long as Medicare and Social Security still deliver favors to them, but when it becomes clear that the favors to big banking, big Pharma, and big everything else is reducing the ability of the government to deliver on its promises to the elderly, the elderly in every nation are going to figure out they have to cut back on government spending.
People vote their pocket books. When it becomes obvious that their pocketbooks are being cleaned out by the bailouts, they're going to elect congressmen who are committed to bailing out the voters. We have not seen this yet, but we're going to see it. As the bailouts visibly eat into the income of the typical voter, the ability of congressmen and other politicians to conceal their role as agents of big business, big oil, and big banks will be reduced. The voters are going to impose vengeance on those politicians who act as agents of big everything. The little communications digits are going to undermine the big alliance.
This has not happened yet, but it is clearly beginning to happen. The old boy system that has governed every civil government from the beginning of time is now being threatened by the easy availability of information regarding the corruption and profitability of politics. The ability of people to communicate information is becoming so great that the politicians and the big businesses that control them are finding it difficult to operate in the shadows any longer. Operating in the shadows has been basic to politics and big business for over 200 years.
The public doesn't know what it wants to substitute for the present system, but the public is becoming convinced that the present system is working against them. Now, what to substitute? The old rule is true: you can't beat something with nothing. At present, the public has nothing specific to replace the existing system. The game will go on for as long as the economy appears to deliver the goods to the voters. But it is becoming clear to the voters that the economy is less and less able to deliver the goods. James Carville's statement, "it's the economy, stupid," is on target. But the economy is working against both political parties now. Both political parties are visibly committed to the same system: the alliance between big government and big everything else.
Margaret Thatcher was correct: socialism works for as long as it has access to other people's money. Trouble is, the money today is supplied by the central bank of China. The Federal deficit is being sustained by the Chinese central bank. What if it ceases to buy our bonds? Then spending must be cut, or the Federal Reserve must inflate, or interest rates must rise. There will be political screaming in each case.
There should have been political screaming about big government in 1956. It was not possible in 1956. It is going to be possible in 2012. This is why I think the Tea Party does represent the wave of the future. I think the public is fed up, and I do not think that the left-wing crazies who are demonstrating in the Occupy whatever movement are going to be successful. They're going to call into question many of the institutions and practices that the Tea Party is also opposed to. But the crazies do not have the votes. They do not have the personal self-discipline to get involved in local politics. They also don't have any money. So, all the attention that the media are focusing on them, around the world is going to work against the Establishments of the West. The attention given to the crazies is going to remind the voters in general that there has to be a better way.
The crazies want centralized political power. They want more regulation. They want more government jobs. The people who are on the fringes of the Tea Party will see that there is no hope in occupying Wall Street. Once people in politics begin to see this, they will begin to understand that the problem is the Federal Reserve System, the Congress of the United States, and the representatives of big everything who control the flow of funds and used to control the flow of information, but who no longer control information. What is at risk now is their continuing control over the flow of funds. At present, they do control this, but that control over the flow of funds is beginning to weaken. It is based on politics, and skepticism regarding politics is in a bull market.
The last man standing politically is going to be the man whose ideas spread beyond his funeral. That's why I think Ron Paul is the key candidate today, not because I expect them to win, but because I expect his ideas, his videos, and his stand against the centralization of power to extend beyond his funeral.
It is my goal to add to the chorus that Ron Paul has assembled. That was my goal in 1976, when I was on his staff, and that remains my goal, for the period beginning in 2013, when he will be out of office. His stand will be the last stand standing. Why? Because his stand is consistent with the technology of the Internet. This is why he wins all the polls where people on the Internet cast the votes. This ought to terrify the establishments all over the world. It is clear that as the technology of the Internet spreads, it is consistent with Ron Paul's call for decentralization. His continuing victories in the digital polls is sending a message to anybody in the Establishment who wants to pay attention. People with keyboards are skeptical of businesses with monopolies and governments that granted them.
As this technology spreads, the ideas associated with decentralized planning will also spread. I am not saying that the new technology is the source of the ideas. I am saying that certain ideas are more consistent with the new technologies than other ideas are. The ideas that are most consistent with the new technologies are ideas in favor of individual decision-making, which are opposed to the idea of central planning.
The last man standing is not the last man standing. The ideas promoted by the videos of someone who has been planted will be the source of his influence long-term. This was always true, but what makes our generation different is that so many more people can get involved in the spreading of ideas. Decentralized decisions made by people who were committed to specific ideas will determine which of the last men standing become in retrospect the shapers of civilization.
This has always been true. It is individuals in the general public who are responsible for implementing the ideas of specific innovators. The man on the street accepts one set of ideas or another set. He may do so unconsciously, or he may do so systematically. It doesn't matter; he is still responsible for his ideas, and he is still responsible for the implementation of his ideas. People are responsible. Large numbers of people are responsible.
The basic idea of representative democracy is correct: personal responsibility for imposing political sanctions. The advantage of democracy, above all its other advantages, is that it forces individuals to take responsibility for their own actions. In a democratic order, people can't logically say, "this was all imposed on us." In a democratic order, people decide which ideas, as represented by which people, will dominate the political order. There is no escape from responsibility in this. This is not some sort of medieval hierarchy. We do not live in the Soviet Union, where voting was irrelevant. We still have the power, one way or the other, to throw the rascals out. We still have the power, at the precinct level, to determine which people are going to rule over us locally. Democracy takes away the excuse that "I was just following orders." I am in favor of democracy, not because I expect democracy to produce a better mankind, but because I expect democracy to remind people that they did it to themselves. It makes it more difficult for them to point the blame elsewhere. This is all to the good.
When I look at the people running for president today, I look for the person who will best articulate the best ideas that are likely to become prominent in the future. In terms of articulating rival positions, it is clearly between Ron Paul and Barack Obama. They are the hard-core representatives of the rival positions: central planning by the state versus decentralized planning in a free market. The other candidates may articulate some variation of commitment to the free market, but the Establishment knows who the enemy is: Ron Paul. They know this because they know he is consistent, and they know that, ever since 1976, no special interest group has been able to buy him off. He is not for sale. That's because he is dominated by a set of ideas. He is more dominated by the ideas than he is by a dream of getting reelected: the dream of becoming the last man standing.
In 1964, Phyllis Schlafly wrote a paperback book, A Choice not an Echo. We had a choice in 1964, but my choice was not elected. We have a choice in 2012, and I suspect that that he will not be elected. But YouTube, websites, and digital books will continue to be published by people who are committed to a set of ideas that Ron Paul has presented to the American public by running for President. These ideas cannot be suppressed. That is the benefit of Ron Paul's Presidential run. It is not that he is going to be elected; it is that he has articulated these ideas, and he has created a massive market for these ideas, which did not exist in 2008, and surely did not exist in 1956.
The last man standing will be the man whose ideas go viral and stay viral for 100 years. I don't see anybody else running for President today who is likely to have his YouTube videos watched by millions over the next century. I do think it is possible with Ron Paul's videos, and I think it will be much more likely if he creates a free homeschool curriculum. If he uses his reputation to train people to become active at the precinct level, and to begin to take over local governments, then he really will be the last man standing.
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