Press Action ::: Press Action Hero of the Week: AMY PHILLIPS

Friday, January 24, 2003

Press Action Hero of the Week: AMY PHILLIPS

Amy Phillips, the 20-year-old force behind the website called The Fifty Minute Hour, is a libertarian with a heart. What a refreshing concept. Her writings show that she strongly believes everyone should be free to do as they choose so long as they don’t infringe upon the freedom of others. And her definition of freedom doesn’t completely revolve around economics, personal or corporate.

Glancing at The Fifty Minute Hour’s homepage, plus leafing through its archives, reveals a prolific writer with a well-developed political philosophy. Phillips says the name of her website originally came from a Dar Williams song called “What do you hear in these sounds?”. Since launching her site a couple years back, Phillips says the title has “sort of evolved into my way of sorting out the things worth reading and talking about in a world where it feels like there’s never enough time to get to everything. It represents taking some time out of your day to think about the world and politics and philosophy and the other stuff that mainstream media often misses.”

In sorting through the recent surge in antiwar activity in the United States, Phillips takes aim at the ANSWER coalition for allocating time to speakers at its anti-Iraq war rallies who address issues other than why the United States should not invade Iraq. At its Jan. 18 rally in Washington, D.C., for instance, ANSWER gave time at the podium to a woman who talked about her anti-imperialist work in the Philippines. ANSWER justifiably decided to hold an abbreviated rally on Jan. 18 because of the bitter cold temperatures and yet the group still found a slot on its agenda for a speech about U.S. government involvement in the Philippines.

“If we truly want to build a coalition against the war, that needs to stop,” Phillips wrote in a Jan. 24 post entitled Marching with the Enemy. “If a liberal came to a rally against war and I got up on stage and started ranting about how if only we had more free markets, ended the trade embargo, and stopped funneling money into foreign nations, we wouldn’t be starting wars all over the place, that liberal would likely be turned off to the movement. If I started yelling about how the war is just a way for the U.S. government to justify raising taxes and starting more ‘aid’ programs, the liberal would probably get mad.”

The concept of groups with divergent philosophies coming together on a single issue on which they agree is an attractive one, especially on something as important as military violence. Sadly, though, many on the right and the left routinely attack this form of open-mindedness, even though it could go a long way toward solving hostilities around the world.

Phillips, a philosophy student at New York University, says she started out as a liberal before gradually moving toward libertarianism, starting in the ninth grade. “Until high school, I was wholeheartedly in favor of the welfare state and other big government programs to help people,” she tells Press Action. “What’s had the biggest effect on my political philosophy has been reading and finding out the extent to which those well-meaning programs fail to help and often hinder the very people who need it most.”

Why do most libertarians begin their political journey from the right before adopting many of the principles of libertarianism? As someone who is an exception to the rule, Phillips explains that Republicans “tend to support more free trade, albeit while raising subsidies at home, and a lot of them are in favor of generally leaving people alone to make their own choices.”

Most libertarians who support Republicans, though, “underestimate the extent to which both parties support statism and big government in many forms.” Phillips says. “Republicans want to tell us what to read, what god to believe in, with whom to have sex, what to ingest, and a thousand other things about how to run our lives. They want to take our hard earned money and give it to corporations in a misguided attempt to bolster the economy. The Democrats, on the other hand, want to tell us that we have to be nice to everyone, what we can buy and sell, how to spend our money, and another thousand things about how to run our lives. They want to take our hard earned money and give it to poor people in a misguided attempt to get them out of poverty by making it profitable to be poor.”

Libertarians are of the opinion, Phillips notes, that social coercion, such as trying to tell people what to think, is less pernicious than economic coercion, such as taking all of people’s money away and spending it as the government sees fit. “They’re wrong,” she says. “Both are equally bad and we need equally rigorous defenses against each.”

Fifty Minute Hour also contains Phillips’ strong views on the environment and animal rights. Phillips argues that companies should be economically responsible for any damage they cause. “If a company spews smoke and gives people cancer, those people should be able to recoup damages sufficient to make it unprofitable for the company to continue operating in that way,” she says.

But Phillips also places some of the blame on the government because of its ill-conceived regulations. She points to a case in which Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., sponsored and got passed a bill to mandate sweepers in any chimneys of coal-fired power plants. “Sounds like a great plan, right?” she says. “Clean up the air, make coal cleaner, etc.”

Byrd championed the bill, Phillips argues, because West Virginia mines the nation’s dirtiest coal while the hydrocarbon makeup of the coal mined in Colorado allows it to burn much cleaner in power plants. “Because of various emissions rules, companies were willing to pay more for the cleaner burning coal so that they wouldn’t have to pay for cleanups later,” Phillips explains. “That coal burns much cleaner than the West Virginia coal with the sweepers. However, using West Virginia coal with sweepers still put the company under the emissions limits, and since they had to install the sweepers anyway, it no longer made sense to buy the cleaner burning Colorado coal. So in essence, due to environmental regulations, the air is now dirtier than it would be had we just stuck with the liability standard we used previously.”

Market competition combined with economic liability for ecological damage has produced many of the methods used today to conserve natural resources, according to Phillips. Most cars these days get more miles to the gallon than the previous generation of cars, not because of some law mandating fuel efficiency but because people like to buy a car that will cost less to fuel, she says.

Echoing the arguments of Danish statistics professor Bjorn Lomborg, author of the book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, Phillips says “the environmental crisis isn’t as big as many people make it out to be. The air is cleaner, and industrialized nations are polluting less than ever before.”

Nations without free market economies tend to be less prosperous, she argues, and poorer nations pollute more because when nations can’t feed their citizens, they “don’t have time to speak for the trees.”

Many of the treaties that people support to limit emissions and restrict growth into protected areas actually cost more than what it would cost to pollute and then clean it up, according to Phillips. “Having parks full of redwoods that no one’s allowed to cut down may make us feel good, but the better way is to allow loggers to cut them down with the understanding that they have financial incentives to plant new trees as they go so that they’ll never run out of wood sources,” she says. “In other words, we’re not doing so badly, and market solutions can make us even better.”

Phillips’ belief in freedom from violence extends to non-human animals. In a Dec. 28 post on The Fifty Minute Hour, she targets Hollywood-types who rally against wearing fur but then don’t speak out as strongly against farms that raise animals for meat and leather. “But no matter what the justification, it’s painfully obvious to me that if it’s wrong to raise, torture, and kill animals to wear as fur hats and stoles, it can’t be any less immoral to raise, torture, and kill them to make shoes, handbags, steaks, or burgers,” she writes.

Phillips explains that at the root of her political philosophy is the idea that people are basically good. “I’ve also seen a lot of people do a lot of really nice things for total strangers, just out of the goodness of their hearts,” she says. “I think there’s less of that the more laws we make, because we consider the state separate from ourselves, and we think that if the state has a responsibility to care for the less fortunate, individuals must not have that responsibility.”

Given the opportunity, people “will usually do the right thing without a law telling them they have to,” she says.

-- Mark Hand

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