Reihan Salam's Forbes column today runs the gamut from science fiction to Arnold Kling to Chinese-dictator-in-waiting Xi Jinping. Highly recommended. The column ends with this interesting observation:
The real value of the work of Kling and Macey isn't to offer detailed blueprints for reform. Rather, it is to question assumptions about democracy that are almost never questioned. And that's also the value of The Unincorporated Man's libertarian utopia: It offers an imperfect solution to the problem of free-riding. Behind the push for universal health legislation lies an anxiety that millions of young and healthy Americans aren't doing their part to maintain the actuarial soundness of private insurance. People go without insurance yet expect to receive care. We drink, smoke, and eat with abandon, and expect Medicare to pick up the tab when our livers and lungs fail us. Social Security allows the childless among us to free-ride on the poor saps who choose to invest in the next generation by sacrificing money and sanity to raise children. Liberal democracy hasn't solved this crisis of responsibility, and it isn't getting any better.
But that isn't the QOTD(SF!), which comes from this Irving Kristol lecture from 1975. Salam's science-fiction reference brought to mind the following passage:
One of the fascinating facts of our cultural history of the past 50 years is the the way in which science fiction, having begun on an optimistic note very early on -- long before the hydrogen bomb -- became extremely pessimistic. If you look at the worlds that are described in science-fiction stories of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, you will find they are not usually the kinds of worlds that most of us would want to live in. They are not, to begin with, liberal; practically all of them are despotisms. Some are benevolent despotisms, some malevolent despotisms. But none of them is a self-governing community, and always for the same reason: Someone has to keep control of the knowledge that can destroy the entire civilization. And there is usually one group that has control of that knowledge: a good group, or a bad group. But what you do not have is anything like a liberal society, a self-governing political community of the kind that we have grown up in, where knowledge is free, where knowledge can be published freely, where knowledge can be circulated widely, and where it is assumed that all this will somehow lead to a good end result. Now the premonitions of science fiction over the past 40 years have come home to roost in actuality in our lifetime. It really is a fact that in 30 or 40 or 50 years, these premonitions will be coping with a reality. It will happen that almost anyone with a smattering of college chemistry and physics will be able to create some form of atomic weapon. It's quite clear that, at the rate things are going, in 40 or 50 years almost anybody will be able to create explosives of a kind that can destroy an entire city. And if anyone can, it is possible to surmise that someone will, the world being what it is and human beings what they are.
You can read all of Kristol's scarily prescient essay, along with the rest of the Public Interest, at the website of National Affairs.