Wallop: ...particularly like NATO, but not an expanded NATO that has no idea of what its role is in the world. The idea that Russia would be part of NATO is to say that NATO doesn't have any relevance to us and our national interest anymore. If NATO wants to have a security arrangement with Russia, that's a little different thing than having Russia part of NATO.
The certain, powerful presence of the United States provides an enormous economic lever to us. When I said this the second time to Bush in late June or early July of '92, he sort of laughed at it, and said, "I don't want to be the world's policeman." I said, "We don't have to be the world's police man, but how would you like to live in a world with no policeman?"
Reason: There are clear differences in the lifestyles of the Eastern and Western United States. A notion of rugged individualism still characterizes life in the West. How much of that is myth and how much reality?
Wallop: It's not all myth by any stretch of the imagination. [Interior Secretary Bruce] Babbitt is an urbanized Westerner, and he makes the mistake of calling the West the most urbanized part of America. Well, it is. If you look at the map more inhabitants of the West live in its urban centers than in the urban centers of Connecticut, but that's partly because you can't live in all the West.
But what Babbitt doesn't understand is that when anybody moves to the West, the first thing you do is buy a pair of cowboy boots. You identify with what you believe the West to be. The West doesn't have to sell itself as a haven for rugged individualists.
The West by and large views itself in tension with the federal government, because of the federal [ownership of] land. And therefore, far more skeptical of the presence of government than people here [in the East] who don't live with that tension.
For most average citizens of Maryland, the idea that the federal government says you can only drive 55 miles an hour is not a whole lot different from a decision their own government would make anywhere in the state. But when you have roads in the West that are 26 miles without a kink in them, nobody believes that their local government [would mandate a 55 mile-per-hour speed limit]. All of the government's presence in the West, and not just with respect to the land, is far more visible and a far more oppressive part of the ordinary citizen's experience than it is here.
Reason: Thanks to, among other things, telecommuting, which allows people to live anywhere they want, people are leaving the cities and suburbs of the East and moving to the West. Can the fragile ecology of the West accommodate such massive migration? And will these newcomers indelibly alter the indigenous culture of the West?
Wallop: The presence of the federal government is going to make that [migration] extremely difficult. And the more you have people like Babbitt in there, the more difficult it's going to be.
Babbitt is trying to make use of the public lands less and less economic for traditional pur poses, and more and more a sort of playground and park for visitors. The private lands then begin to have less and less economic value on their own, and therefore will have to be sold in smaller and smaller parcels.
What Babbitt is doing is the worst possible thing for the environment and the West. We have two options: Go back to a full-blown view of multiple use or privatize the federal lands. One of the early concepts of public land was that it wouldn't be just one big ranch or one big mining operation or mineral or timber operationthere would have to be an economic mix that could provide some economic resiliency, assuming that not every commodity, not every use, would be available at the same time. We had a breadth of economic uses. You can't do that if you assume that any commercial use of federal lands is an affront to the recreational users of it.
My preference would be to privatize. Some people say you'll lose hunting privileges, but the federal government isn't going to be a bit more hospitable to recreational users than the private guy who might make a little money off this person because the private owner would give them a better experience anyway.
Reason: Social Security is a major project of Frontiers of Freedom. What are you doing?
Wallop: We're taking on Social Security as a property rights issue. We figure that every single American has an absolute property right interest in the fruits of his or her own labor. What I work for should be my property.
Along comes the federal government and takes 151/3 percent of that laborer's fruit and prom ises that should you die prematurely, the government is happy to be the beneficiary. Should you live to the time of retirement, you will receive benefits which have not yet been described, at an age which has not yet been guaranteed, and taxed at a level which has not yet been identified.
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