The Freedom Revolution / To Renew America
Gingrich, Newt & Armey, Dick
All successful partnerships are based on the Principle of Complementarity: Whether it's a baseball team, a marriage, or a political alliance, each partner brings something to the table that the...
...Is that clear...
...Gingrich believes that the central challenge facing American civilization today is making the transition from the industrial Second Wave we're leaving to the post-industrial Third Wave we've barely entered...
...If nearly half of what you make is spent by someone else, that means that half your work time is spent working for someone else...
...Our feeble efforts to do so only leave us looking ridiculous...
...Unlike Armey, Gingrich is not bitter...
...Rather, it's that Big Government is bad for the soul...
...At the same time, I can't help feeling that, as a serious historian (he earned a doctorate in history and taught at West Georgia College in the 1970s), Gingrich must surely realize that much of what he is spouting is drivel...
...People who do not see the great insult at the heart of Big Government do not, I think, fully understand their own country...
...Probably because it gives him a "vision," and endows both his person and his policies with a warm glow that the American voter finds so endearing...
...Nor does he share the libertarian aversion to Big Government per se...
...If we fail, we will at best have a lower standard of living and at worst find that another country has moved into the new era so decisively that it can dominate us...
...It's clear that he despises his liberal opponents and won't rest until they're done in...
...But while Reagan made his arguments with a smile, Armey makes them with a snarl, his normal affability nowhere to be seen...
...For, if Big Government's power is sharply and severely curtailed, it simply won't be able to erect any barriers against the Third Wave—no matter how much the lawyers, doctors, unions, and trade associations kick and scream...
...Call me a radical, but I think that comes dangerously close to being a form of indentured servitude...
...Given the way our government is currently structured, and the huge powers it now enjoys, chances are that such groups will succeed in blocking or seriously delaying our transition to the Information Age...
...If we can grasp the true significance of these changes, we can lead the world into the Information Age, and leave our children a country unmatched in wealth, power and opportunity...
...Only by scrapping the welfare state, decentralizing authority, and returning power to the people can we get around this problem...
...Armey hates "the zealous environmental regulator sitting in his comfy office" who never sees the men and women he "throws out of business...
...It should come as no surprise, then, that read separately, Newt Gingrich's To Renew America and Dick Armey's The Freedom Revolution aren't nearly as interesting as their authors...
...The problem with it, Armey explains, is not that it's inefficient (although it is) or ineffective (although it's that, too) or that it costs too much (which it most certainly does...
...indeed, if he were any lighter, he'd probably float off into cyberspace...
...Ronald Reagan, it might be recalled, drew up a very similar bill of indictment against Big Government years ago, and it was Reagan's success, in fact, that inspired Armey to enter the political arena...
...Instead, he compares America's liberals to the Soviet and Chinese nomenklaturas: "Behind our New Deals and New Frontiers and Great Societies you find, with a difference only in power and nerve, the same sort of person who gave the world its Five-Year Plans and Great Leaps Forward...
...If successfully exploited, he believes, the opportunities opened up by the Information Age will be great enough to create "a revolution in goods and services that will empower and enhance most Americans...
...Gingrich is clearly exhilarated by the prospect of all this change...
...The scientific and technological changes going on around us are far more significant and unprecedented than we have recognized...
...After May 5 you may look after your own needs and ambitions, but report back to us next January...
...Such tenacity is admirable, if also a bit off-putting...
...I don't think it is distorting Gingrich's argument too much to say that, in his view, an America that had successfully adapted to the Third Wave would by the year 2025 have the same relation to today's America as Ronald Reagan's had to Brezhnev's Soviet Union...
...A legitimate argument can be made, he believes, for a powerful, centralized government THE FREEDOM REVOLUTION: THE NEW REPUBLICAN HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER TELLS WHY BIG GOVERNMENT FAILED, WHY FREEDOM WORKS, AND HOW WE WILL REBUILD AMERICA Dick Armey Regnery /318 pages/ $24.95 TO RENEW AMERICA Newt Gingrich HarperCollins / 260 pages / $24 reviewed by JOSEPH SHATTAN 74 The American Spectator October 1995 under some circumstances—a depression, for example, or a war...
...Read together, however, they help to explain why the House Speaker and House Majority Leader have been so successful in shepherding the conservative revolution through Congress...
...As is now widely known, he wants to replace it with a flat 17 percent rate that would apply to all Americans, regardless of income...
...Now move along...
...More generally, he wants to "scrap the whole apparatus of social engineering" that liberalism has erected...
...Of course, Big Government apologists would counter that whatever its shortcomings, it is basically an expression of America's social idealism, compassion for the poor, and commitment to social justice...
...Born in Cando, North Dakota, in 1940, the former economics professor at North Texas State University is a principled libertarian and a battle-hardened settler of scores...
...As he puts it: We must accelerate America's entry into the Third Wave Information Age...
...He writes that, under today's rates Government is saying to the average citizen every January 1: "For the next five months you'll be working for us, for goals we shall determine...
...All this is fine, as far as it goes, but it's hardly original...
...Above all, Dick Armey Joseph Shattan is a writer living in Silver Spring, Maryland...
...This democratization of the law—plus the astonishing decline in government regulation—has drastically reduced the demand for professionals...
...Why, then, does Gingrich insist on singing the praises of the Third Wave...
...Armey doesn't buy into any of that...
...Fortunately, since most lawyers were reasonably smart and well-educated people, they have been able to find other lines of work...
...Americans," Armey writes, "do not dream, strive, sacrifice, build, and produce in order one day to find themselves answering to an army of little potentates on the Potomac...
...Third Wave," of course, was coined by two of Newt's gurus, the sociologists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, who call the Agricultural Revolution the "First Wave," the Industrial Revolution the "Second Wave," and the Information Revolution inaugurated by the computer chip the "Third Wave...
...All successful partnerships are based on the Principle of Complementarity: Whether it's a baseball team, a marriage, or a political alliance, each partner brings something to the table that the others lack...
...Would that Armey could lighten up a little...
...Speculating about the future is not unlike speculating about God...
...But while Big Government, in Gingrich's view, may have played a positive role earlier in our history, it's dead wrong for America today, because it stands in the way of the Third Wave...
...Of the two politicians, Armey is clearly the ideological heavy...
...Though Newt the historian is probably scandalized, Newt the politico recognizes that sometimes scholarly standards must yield to political expediency—particularly if you're contemplating a run for the presidency...
...Gingrich even goes so far as to call Franklin Delano Roosevelt, architect of the New Deal, "probably the greatest President of the twentieth century," something Armey would sooner die than acknowledge...
...Armey's alternative to our current tax code is radical indeed...
...Compare Armey's anger at his liberal opponents with the great Friedrich Hayek's generous admission, in The Road to Serfdom, that his adversaries were "authors whose sincerity and disinterestedness are above suspicion...
...N o one needs to advise Newt Gingrich to lighten up...
...hates Big Government and all its works...
...To cite one of Gingrich's many illustrations of such empowerment, Americans will no longer depend on lawyers: People now bring their own lawsuits, file their own briefs, even represent themselves electronically in court...
...But he recognizes that it will upset lots of groups—lawyers, for example—who will naturally try to mobilize the government's coercive power on behalf of the status quo...
...What the American, Soviet, and Chinese ruling elites all have in common, Armey argues, is "a craving for power over other people...
...He hates the "chattering class" of intellectuals, writers and journalists "who have a gift for feigning altruism and humility even as they amass enormous personal power and adulation...
...Every once in a while we may be lucky enough to get fleeting glimpses or brief intimations, but we simply don't know enough to paint a full-fledged portrait either of the Lord or the twenty-first century...
...Gingrich's vision of the Golden Age that awaits us around the corner infuses his book with optimism and good cheer...
...The single most revealing expressionof that craving, Armey believes, is our tax code...
...At the heart of his vision is the libertarian cri de coeur: "The people themselves, not their government, should be trusted with spending their own money and making their own decisions...
Vol. 28 • October 1995 • No. 10
