Be the Ball

© Laurence B. Winn

Jul 1, 2001

It was with astonishment and no small measure of trepidation that the inhabitants of Petrograd saw the old order of Russian wealth and privilege swept away in the Fall of 1917, only to be replaced by a new caste of "people's" tyrants. The October Revolution produced a gray nightmare world born of a terrible envy and cynical manipulation, a world completely typical of enclosure, in which limited resources are "protected" by a central authority.

When the old Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, we thought that was that; on with the "new world order" and the "peace dividend". However ...

In the spring of 2001, the marketing director of a small, privately held U.S. manufacturing firm lost his way on the streets of Caracas, Venezuela. He had been taking his usual morning walk on the advice of his cardiologist. Accustomed to the grid-like layout of cities in Minnesota, he was unprepared for the organic urban arrangement in which four right turns do not necessarily return you to the portal of your hotel. Instead, he was forced to practice his scant language skills on suspicious and heavily-armed police guarding the street corners.

The necessity to read the terrain awakened him to his surroundings, and he was treated to the spectacle of fortified wealth protected from the proletariat of the mud huts by guns, dogs and concertina wire. None of it is unique to Caracas. It is not so different from what you see in Mexico City, where the homes of wealthy residents have yards decorated with razor wire and dogs.

On the Ecuadorean mainland, increasing poverty has created a surge in the human population of the environmentally sensitive Galapagos Islands, where intensive fishing activity is driving some marine life to extinction. The trade in delicacies like lobster, destined for the United States, and sea cucumbers and shark fins, prized in Asia, can only be compared in profitability to drug trafficking. Shark fins, taken illegally, go for $50 a pound. Restrictions on fishing and government patrols affect mainly the small fishermen, who react with resentment. They say it's strange how, at night, they can see the lights of industrial ships taking away tons of fish while, somehow, the authorities can't. They seem to think suitcases full of money are involved.

On his return from Venezuela, the American marketing director thanked his good fortune, clean living and right thinking for the happy circumstance of his residing in America, where such things as he saw in Caracas never happen. But in the upscale subdivisions of Long Island, New York, houses are set ablaze by amateur arsonists to "Stop urban sprawl", as their graffiti claims, promising "If you build it, we will burn it". More ominously, and probably more representative of genuine sentiments, they have left the spray-painted message, "Burn the rich."

The U.S. may not be like Russia in 1917, but it has its Bolsheviks in ecological terrorist cells with names like Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Doubtless some of the members are idealists. The Bolsheviks had their idealists, too. At least some, though, are certainly fired by the zero-sum ethic, the realization that there is only so much stuff and somebody else is getting most of it most unfairly. Examples of the stuff in short supply include a luxury home bordering a national forest in Indiana, a ski resort in Vail and a $2.4-million home under construction in Niwot, Colorado.

Small businessmen in the U.S. are resentful, too - resentful of state and Federal regulatory enforcement that sometimes assumes a KGB-like aspect. One owner of a family-owned Connecticut construction company described in a recent letter to the editor of a trade magazine how three armed officers from the Department of Motor Vehicles descended on his place of business for a routine inspection, demanding to be shown commercial drivers licenses, medical certificates, safety training certificates, Department of Transportation licenses, copies of daily inspection reports for their one vehicle, random drug testing results and the father's old military drivers license. He thought the regulatory environment for small business might be a little inhibiting.

All of the undesirable effects described above are typical of enclosure, the absence of frontiers. Frontier theory renders these conditions, and those to follow, easily predictable. In the absence of a new frontier, they herald a global return to conditions like those existing in Europe prior to 1500, when the old world (nobility excepted) was sick, starving, half-naked, constantly at war and without hope save that afforded by death.

It is an end we will see perhaps fifty years hence, but not today. Today there is still time to prosper by joining those who, by accident or through malice, lead the world, or to join those who will foment rebellion. Without a frontier, you can't opt out. You have to play the game. Or be the ball.