In the world of business, no firm, even the giants, can stand

still for long. In trouble, Xerox fought back with its new and
improved 10 Series of Marathon copiers, and in 1983 the
company increased its share of the photocopy market for the
first time since 1970; and its record considerably improved in
1984.
So, Happy Birthday Xerox! The Xerox success story is a
monument to what a brilliant and determined lone inventor can
accomplish. It is a living testimony of how a small firm can
innovate and outcompete giant firms, and of how a small firm,
become a giant, can rethink and retool in order to keep up with
a host of new competitors. But above all, the Xerox story is a
tribute to what free competition and free enterprise can accom-
plish, in short, what people can do if they are allowed to think
and work and invest and employ their energies in freedom.
Human progress and human freedom go hand in hand.
!!
#$% &'( )* #$% +'(
O
ne of the fascinating features of the current political scene
is its bitter, and nearly unprecedented, polarization. On
the one hand, there has been welling up in recent months a pal-
pable, intense, and very extensive popular grass-roots movement
of deep-seated loathing for President Clinton the man, for his
ideology and for his politics, for all those associated with Clin-
ton, and for the Leviathan government in Washington.
This movement is remarkably broad-based, stretching from
rural citizens to customarily moderate intellectuals and profes-
sors. The movement is reflected in all indicators, from personal
conversations to grass-roots activity, to public opinion polls.
Enterprise Under Attack 201
First published in December 1994.
The bizarre new element is that usually, in response to such
an intense popular movement, the other side, in this case, the
Clinton administration, would pull in its horns and tack to the
wind. Instead, they are barreling ahead, heedlessly, and thereby
helping to create, more and more, a virtual social crisis and what
the Marxists would call a revolutionary situation.
Response of the Clinton administration has been to try to
suppress, literally, the freedom of speech of its opponents. Two
prominent recent examples: the Clinton bill to expand the def-
inition of lobbying (which would mean coerced registration and
other onerous regulations) to include virtually all grass-roots
political activity. Fortunately, this lobbying reform bill was
killed by obstructionists in the Senate after passing the
House.
Second, was the federal Housing and Urban Developments
systematic legal action to crack down on the freedom of politi-
cal speech and assembly of those opposing public housing
developments for the homeless in their neighborhoods. It
turns out that this elemental political activity of free men and
women was discriminatory, and therefore illegal, and HUD
legal harassment of these citizens was only pulled back under
the glare of severe public criticism. And even then, HUD never
admitted that it was wrong.
The latest Clintonian march toward totalitarianism has not
yet been unleashed. It seems that the White House has estab-
lished an advisory panel known as the White House Car Talks
committee, slated to submit its recommendations for action in
September. The need for car talks is supposed to be the men-
ace of the automobile as polluter.
The fact that the demonized chemical element, lead, has
already been eliminated from gasoline, or that federal mandates
have repeatedly made auto engines more fuel efficient at the
expense of car safety, cuts no ice with these people. It is impos-
sible to appease an aggressive movement bent on full-scale col-
lectivism: gains or concessions simply encourage them and whet
their appetite for escalating their demands. And so to the car
202 Making Economic Sense
talkers, automobile pollution remains as severe a menace as
ever.
The Car Talks panel consists of the usual suspects: Clinton-
ian officials, environmentalists, sympathetic economists, and a
few stooges from the automobile industry. Some of the innova-
tive ideas under discussion, in addition to higher taxes on gas-
guzzling cars and trucks (query: does any car ever sip daintily
instead of guzzle?):
establishing a higher minimum age for drivers
licenses;
forcing drivers over a maximum age to give up their
licenses;
placing maximum limits on how many cars any fam-
ily will be allowed to own;
enforcing alternative driving days for car com-
muters.
In short, the coercive rationing of automobiles, by forcing
some groups to stop driving altogether, and by forcing others to
stop using the cars they are still graciously allowed to possess.
If that isnt totalitarianism, what exactly would qualify? If the
American public is enraged about gun-grabbers, and they
indeed are, wait until they realize that Leviathan is coming to
grab their cars!
Now, of course, the White House aide who discussed these
ideas with the press admitted that some of the wilder ideas
will get killed in committee. Is that all we can rely on to pre-
serve our liberty?
Meanwhile, as usual, the only public criticism of these rumi-
nations has come from the Left, griping that the Car Talkers are
not acting fast enough. Dan Becker, of the Sierra Club, com-
plains that each second this yammering goes on in the White
house, hundreds of gallons of pollution are being sent into
the air. Who knows? Maybe Dr. David Kessler, apparently the
Enterprise Under Attack 203
permanent head of the Food and Drug Administration, can
issue a finding that the fuel emissions are toxic, and the
administration can then ban all cars overnight.
We should realize that the war against the car did not begin
with the discovery of pollution. Hatred of the private automo-
bile has been endemic among left-liberals for decades. It first
surfaced in the disproportionate hysteria over what seemed to
be a minor esthetic complaint: tailfins on Cadillacs in the 1950s.
The amount of ink and energy expended on attacking the hor-
rors of tailfins was prodigious.
But it soon emerged that the left-liberal complaint against
automobiles had little to do either with tailfins or pollution.
What they hate, with a purple passion, is the private car as a
deeply individualistic, comfortable, and even luxurious mode of
transportation.
In contrast to the railroad, the automobile liberated Ameri-
cans from the collectivist tyranny of mass transit: of being
forced to rub elbows with a cross-section of democracy on bus
or train, of being dominated by fixed timetables and fixed ter-
minals. Instead, the private automobile made each individual
King of the Road; he could ride wherever and whenever he
wanted, with no compulsion to clear it with his neighbors or his
community.
And furthermore, the driver and car-owner could perform all
these miracles in comfort and luxury, in an ambiance far more
pleasurable than in jostling his fellow democrats for hours at
a time.
And so the systemic war on private automobiles began and
moved into high gear. If they couldnt get our cars straight away,
they could, in the name of fuel efficiency . . . pollution, the
joys of physical exercise, or even esthetics, persuade and coerce
us into using cars that were costlier, smaller, lighter, and there-
fore less safe, and less luxurious and even less comfortable.
If they grudgingly and temporarily allowed us to keep our
cars, they could punish us by making the ride more difficult. But
204 Making Economic Sense
now, the Clintonians, in a multi-faceted drive toward collectivism
from health to gun-grabbing to assaults on free speech, and on
the rights of smokers have demonstrated that they never give
up.
Unlike previous administrations, they are tireless, implaca-
ble, and overlook nothing. Yesterday, the slogan: If you let
them come for our cigarettes or for our guns, next they will
come for our cars, would have seemed like absurd hyperbole.
Now, that prospect is becoming all too much a sober portrayal
of political reality.
Enterprise Under Attack 205