Since my destination was located in Colorado springs, I assumed the college was a nest of Christian fundamentalists. Colorado Springs is the headquarters of James Dobson's "Focus on the Family," a movement perhaps the equal of the Christian Coalition, and in some ways scarier in terms of fascist potential. Their guy in Washington is Gary Bauer. CS is also home to the Air Force Academy.
Turns out that Colorado College is a little bastion of liberalism amidst this sea of piety. The Air Force folks in their own way are probably more cosmopolitan in this sense as well. My audiences turned out to be upscale students and retirees. The students, as it happens, are not quite as liberal as they think they are, except by local standards.
In general my news is not good. Social Security privatization has a very strong hold on the students. They feel they will do better with their own little accounts than the "Ponzi game" program. The political dilemma is that in many cases, this could turn out to be true, and there is no way to persuade an upper-middle class college kid their life may not turn out to be peaches and cream.
One unhelpful feeling they have is that the Boomers are going to coast into retirement and then hand them the bill. In fact, most Boomers have a good number of years of payroll taxes ahead of them. Second, under mediocre economic projections, the "Gen X" people will have higher living standards on average in any case.
The old folks were more realistic about the need for social insurance, though in the present debate they are being relegated to spectator status. The right is promising up and down not to touch the benefits of current retirees. (The CPI gambit has not been that well exposed as yet.) The only shreds of hope in this corner is that the Right may overreach and try to nail current beneficiaries, or that the staff of the AARP may push the organization into a more far- sighted posture. Not a lot to cling to there.
One line that seemed to work well went to the absurdity of basing radical policy changes on 40-year predictions. In this case, the conservative rhetoric about the incompetence of government has a boomerang effect.
Another point which resonated and also pressed all the buttons of my adversary, the aforementioned Bill Niskanen, was the extent of money supporting privatization propaganda. You don't have to attack the conservative ideologues (and implicitly, the audience) to make the point that the donors to this campaign are probably not acting out of public spirit.
On the bright side, there was zero sentiment for absolutely shrinking the size of government in general, almost none for expanding defense, and a good bit for expanding the public sector. There was also agreement for preserving part of Soc Sec as a "safety net," rather than scrapping it altogether. If we can only sell the notion that the whole program is the safety net, we'll have gotten somewhere.
The most eloquent point may have been made the following day in the extensive local newspaper coverage. I was one of two keynoters at the meetings. The paper had a front page article which said something like "all experts agree Social Security in heap big trouble." Inside they ran long statements by "the three keynoters." My name and statement were nowhere to be found. I had to pinch myself on the plane to reassure that I had indeed been there.
As a sidenote, some may recall a little conversation we had about corporate limited liability as government intervention in the market. I asked Niskanen his position on the matter, and he kept going to the premise that the firm and its investors/lenders ought to be able to make any agreement they liked, as long as it was voluntary. I couldn't make him understand that it was the consumer or other possible aggrieved third parties who were in question. He wasn't being evasive (he seldom is); he was just particularly dense on this point.
MBS