From: GA.JRG@forsythe.stanford.edu (June Genis)
Subject: Perot speaks
Organization: Stanford University, California, USA
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1992 21:32:27 GMT

Christian Science Monitor, scheduled to run 4/7/92

Op-Ed Column on Ross Perot

By Williamson M. Evers

What would an America run by H. Ross Perot look like?  Perot, the
latest candidate running for President of the United States, would
run America from the top down as a business executive runs a
business. He is a manager who wants to apply what he calls "the
engineering process" not merely to trestles and cantilevers or
electronic circuitry, but to political decisions governing our
lives, property, and liberty.

At the same time, Perot says he would want considerable feedback
from the stockholders (the voters). In his March 18 speech to the
National Press Club, in an interview the same day with Brian Lamb
on C-SPAN, and on the March 25 Phil Donahue Show, Perot outlined
plans to replace the representative institutions of a
constitutional republic with what he calls an "electronic town
hall." Apparently this would be some sort of "Love
Connection"-style electronic plebiscite in which the public pushed
buttons to pick among different plans--possibly while President
Perot himself described the plans on television.

Perot told Brian Lamb that he wouldn't let the Constitution stand
in the way of federal election reforms he wants: a time-limit on
campaigns and a ban on exit polls. Perot revealed something of his
mindset when Lamb suggested that Perot's proposals would violate
the First Amendment's protection of freedom of speech and the
press. Perot replied: "We'd probably have to get about 30 lawyers
on that one." If there's an obstacle, just send in the hired-gun
attorneys. "We can amend this dang Constitution, if we have to,"
Perot told Lamb.

Nor would Perot let the Constitution interfere with his policies
on street crime and on drugs. He told the National Press Club how
much he admired authoritarian-run, crime-free Singapore ("a jewel
of a city; when you're there, you're looking at tomorrow").

The Constitution protects citizens against warrantless searches
and confiscations of firearms; it requires "equal protection of
the laws," regardless of race. In 1986, during a crime wave in
Dallas, Perot set up a series of roundtable meetings between
police officers and people in the news media. In those meetings,
according to former Dallas bureau chief for Business Week Todd
Mason in his 1990 biography of Perot, he "espoused cordoning off
minority neighborhoods and searching door-to-door for weapons and
narcotics."

On NBC's "Today Show" on Oct. 25, 1989, Perot called for
suspending constitutional rights and declaring martial law to
combat the drug trade: "You can declare civil war and the drug
dealer is the enemy. There aint't no bail....[Drug dealers] go to
POW camp. You can start dealing with the problem in straight
military terms. We can apply the rules of war."

Perot would be the Boss of America. The economy in America is a
process of interchange between thousands of separate business
firms as well as consumers. But when Brian Lamb asked Perot about
economic issues, his answer revealed that he would treat each
company as if it were a division of one big Perot-managed firm:
USA, Inc. "You're going to have to work on [the jobs] problem on
an industry-by-industry basis," he said. "You're going to then
have to have a plan company-by-company, on the big companies in
trouble." Such a national industrial policy would make as many
mistakes as Soviet-style central planning. Can-do claims and
executive-suite jargon can't disguise what amounts to subsidizing
losers.

In fact, subsidizing losers is Perot's program for education as
well. Rather than advocating parental choice and privatization
that would break the debilitating monopoly of the public school
system, Perot advocates reforms that haven't worked (like higher
pay for teachers). Doron Levin, in his book Irreconcilable
Differences (1989), describes Perot during his 1983 educational
reform efforts in Texas as supporting higher taxes "like some New
Deal Democrat" in order to turn over more money to public-school
teachers and administrators.

Last but not least, under Perot, there'd be a crackdown:

     *on people who dare to invest abroad ("[Capitalists'] job is
to create and protect jobs in America--not Mexico," Perot says;
such investment may bother Perot because it would fall outside the
control of Perot's hands-on management of the economy in America),
     *on people who dare to defend themselves and their families
with firearms (Perot told the National Press Club that he favors
gun controls "much tighter" than the Brady Bill),
     *on young people who dare to evade compulsory national
service, building roads or emptying bedpans for the federal
government (Perot told Nick Thimmesch in an interview published in
the April 1983 Saturday Evening Post that the U.S. government
should make it a "requirement" that "every 18-year-old" young man
or woman should do one to two years of such work),
     *on people who are company presidents and dare to earn more
than Perot finds acceptable (Perot says he favors confiscating CEO
salaries that he considers excessive), and
     *on people who dare to pay less in taxes than the IRS thinks
they should (Perot told the National Press Club he wants the IRS
to acquire a "decent computer system" that would ensure that it
would take in $100 billion more in taxes; surely, under Perot's
plan, the Big Brother IRS will inspect every financial detail of
our lives, especially if we try to pay less than last year).

Why does a feisty, outspoken business executive have such a Big
Government agenda? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that Perot
is America's first poverty billionaire. Perot made his money by
satisfying not ordinary customers in the marketplace, but
welfare-state bureaucrats. He developed and administered computer
systems to process Medicare and Medicaid claims in states around
the country. Perot's Big Government agenda is really no surprise.
What would be surprising would be if someone who made billions off
of government medical programs didn't agree that medical care is a
human right, as Perot did on the Phil Donahue Show on March 25.

H. Ross Perot might well make Amtrak run on time. But he'd run
over our liberties to do it.
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Williamson M. Evers is a political scientist and a visiting fellow
at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
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