Peters: No utopian, to put it mildly.
Reason: What do you mean by your social views are to the left of Jesse Jackson?
Peters: Rich [Karlgaard, editor of Forbes ASAP] did me, I felt, a disservice in the first piece he ever did on me in Forbes ASAP. He described me as being very pro-market but also a major donor to the ACLU. Which of course is technically correct, but the donation happens to be--and I think the record still holds today--the largest single donation ever given to the ACLU totally oriented toward First Amendment rights protection. I sincerely believe that Hayek should have added free speech to his list of the big three, along with contracts, property rights, and so on. Though he would argue obviously that these somewhat go hand and glove.
I do not support the old Republican Party, which I grew up with--the [Sen.] Mac Mathiases of Maryland and so on, who essentially were completely captives of big corporate America. I am attracted to the fact that the new Republican Party is small businessish in orientation. But if Ralph Reed and his heirs and assigns cease to exist tomorrow, my life would not be the worse for it. The subtle control of the Moral Majority in the school boards of America makes me want to puke.
I just find it so ironic that the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich is essentially a captive of a very statist view of moral controls, which is antithetical to the freedoms I believe in. [Technology writer] George Gilder believes a woman's place is in the home. But he's totally in favor of entrepreneurship. I mean, give me a break.
Reason: There are some signs that Silicon Valley may be going political again, and the last time this happened was....
Peters: When Bob Noyce [a founder of both Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel] got religion and decided that Washington was where it was at for semiconductor manufacturing. I remember that very well. There was a five- or six-year period when the semiconductor association was far to the left of the farm lobbies. And it was just total madness. The good news is they failed. Only Laura Tyson [later chair of the president's Council of Economic Advisers] believed that they had a good case.
Reason: So you agree that something is going on. I'm wondering whether it's going to be any more intelligent than the last go-round.
Peters: Oh no. The obviously long-term answer is that Silicon Valley is the new Pittsburgh and Detroit, and it's the law of economics that once you've arrived, you attempt to achieve monopoly status. Now that we have arrived, if you will, we will undoubtedly try our level-headed best to screw it up.
Reason: It does worry me, this flirtation with Al Gore. I don't know what you think of Al Gore, but....
Peters: I want to love him because he's a dear. I mean, every family should have a teddy bear. I'm not really sure he's that smart. It's a horrible thing to say and I would hate to see it in print and maybe I will, but that's life.
Reason: I always want to shake the people in Silicon Valley who like him, because he was one of the first people to be a government patron of Jeremy Rifkin, and in many cases the only person. He wrote a glowing blurb for Algeny. Somebody who latches onto that is not a friend of technological innovation.
Peters: Here's where I would argue my pragmatic, middle-of-the-road view: Reagan was pro-entrepreneurship, Bush was classic old Republican, pro-big business, and Bush really snubbed Silicon Valley. John Young [then CEO of Hewlett-Packard, who endorsed Clinton in 1992] is as good a Republican as you will find. And you have to really work hard to piss off John Young, because John is not piss off-able. I think Bush really did the Kennebunkport, Eastern establishment, fuck California, fuck Silicon Valley, who are these people, routine. So I'm sympathetic to the 1992 embrace that the Valley gave to Clinton and Gore. It's good old-fashioned Psychology 101 as opposed to Economics 101: If you tell me I'm irrelevant long enough I'm going to eventually lash out at you. Clinton and Gore, for all of their misguided bits and pieces, embraced the California ethos.
Reason: It's not clear that the Republican Party has gotten terribly much smarter about it.
Peters: Newt is still the classic Laundromat small business person. It's a huge problem. All the jobs are not created by small businesses--all the jobs are created by a small number of small businesses that become growth companies. We have this terrible bifurcation between big business Republicanism or Democraticism and small business Republicanism, and it still doesn't have anything to do with how the economy works. I adore the people who have the nerve to start Laundromats, too, but the truth of the matter is, they're not the engines of the economy.
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