Free First Citizen by Thomas T. Thomas Page A

free market replaced modified central planning.
    I had also missed the deficit pressures of the Nicaraguan war. Like Vietnam before it, this war was fought on the margin—financed with promises and with bulges in the national debt and Consumer Price Index, instead of with direct taxation, which would have entailed some kind of popular referendum.
    Also, I could not foresee the crash program the Federal government would undertake in the mid-Nineties to build new central station power plants. A decade of high interest rates and optimistically low projections of load growth had all but shut down the private utilities’ building programs. The incidents at the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl reactors had put a bad odor on the nuclear option—both for the energy companies that would invest in it and for the public that would watch them. The shouting about acid rain in Canada and our own New England States made coal a sour alternative. Oil or gas cost too much and the sun didn’t always shine on solar power. So all the utilities stopped building new plants and assured themselves that, when the crunch came, they could buy excess power from each other.
    Within three years, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would be commanding extraordinary powers to begin building single-design, site-licensed nuclear power plants in the 550-megawatt class. A nation that was facing evening brownouts and two Black Days a week would applaud the effort and never ask what it was costing. It would cost plenty.
    However, I precede myself.
    At the time I was in Harvard Law School, the Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth Amendments seemed a radical, blue-sky approach to the minor economic problem of the Federal deficit. Just as the Eighteenth Amendment’s ban on making and selling liquor seemed a radical approach to the minor social problem of public drunkenness. The only people who could debate the amendments seriously were the nuts: the Radical Republicans, the Supply-Siders, the “Clean Slaters,” and Deregulationists. Just as the minority Prohibitionists had pushed for the Volstead Act. Their social agendas were so well displayed that the rest of us dismissed them—and those agendas remained effectively hidden.
    But we wouldn’t find that out until the amendments were ratified five years later and the great experiment had begun.
    One of the best things about Harvard was that Gordon Pollock and the crippling envy he represented were at least three thousand miles away.
    In 1994, I graduated seventh in my class. Neither Mother nor Father could attend the ceremonies, but a senior counsel from Petramin’s legal section had come up to take an honorary doctorate of law. He applauded my diploma with the rest of them and then took me to dinner. Within three days, I would report in at the Houston home office, begin studying for the Texas bar, and start earning my way as a bona fide attorney. I was a kid with a lot of potential, and I knew it.
    Veritas.
     
     
    Gordon Pollock: On Reflection
    Twenty-Five Years Later
     
    He was guilty, guilty, guilty! How many times do I have to say that?
    All right, so now he has become a big man: wheels and deals in resources and energy, singlehandedly wins the war in Mexico, welds together the bickering, raggle-taggle TENMAC coalition in the West. Agreed to all of the above.
    But he is not that clean and shiny, no sir. Beneath that bright eye and enameled smile is a corruption as sour and deep as a pus-filled abscess. One day he will break and it will all come seeping out. I tell you I saw him sneaking off around the corner from Ballenger’s office. Saw him! He had the exam questions in his hands. It was for a class in economic history, or some such. Ballenger was the professor. They ran him out of Berkeley for cheating.
    Of course the record says he quit voluntarily. That was the deal they made, they always make. But he had an expulsion order hot on his heels. I know that.
    The point is simply this: His record was