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What if?

By Theresa Fritz Camoriano

As I was hearing the news of hurricane Katrina heading into the Gulf of Mexico, I remembered how we used to track the hurricanes when I was in high school and lived near Houston.  We would watch the hurricane’s path and do our best to prepare as it appeared to be headed our way, boarding up the windows and preparing to leave for higher and safer ground farther inland.  My parents still live near the coast, so, of course, I was concerned about them, especially as I learned of the tremendous wind speeds of this latest hurricane.  Then, my mind wandered a bit, and I wondered whether it would ever be possible to harness the energy from hurricanes and tornadoes, converting them from dreaded forces of destruction to welcomed energy sources.  What kind of a device could be used to harness those winds and convert them into usable energy?  How could that energy be stored for later use?  I did a little searching to see what I could find on the subject, and I learned that people in Oregon now are doing research to harness the power of ocean waves, and a man in Florida thinks his polymer product might be able to take the punch out of hurricanes.

I was pleased to see that some people are using their imaginations and making some effort in this area, but I wish I had found more.

We benefit tremendously from those few people who are truly creative and who are willing to take the risks to try to bring their creative ideas to market.  It is difficult to imagine what life will be like even twenty or thirty years from now, given the rapid changes we are seeing in technology and given the fertile imaginations of our scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs who are willing to ask the “what if” questions.  I am very fortunate to have had a career as a patent attorney, working with some of these creative people and helping them protect their inventions, and I have a great appreciation for the contributions they make to our world.  They solve problems; they create jobs for workers and profits for shareholders; they make the world a better place for all of us. 

No doubt many of my libertarian views have been formed from watching the struggles of these creative entrepreneurs and realizing how government intervention hampers their creative efforts.  Taxes, regulations, and lawsuits all create a drag on those people upon whom we depend for creating the technologies and enterprises of the future.  To the extent that we succeed in hampering them and dragging them down, our economy stagnates, and we do not receive the benefits of their fertile imaginations. 

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if people did not have to worry about the destruction from hurricanes and tornadoes in the future?  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could tap additional sources of clean energy?  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if creative people were free to think big, to take risks, and to keep the profits when they succeed?  Then they would have the incentive and the resources to soar, and they would take us along with them as we all would benefit from their success. 

Unfortunately, the greedy government and the jealous losers in our society do their best to quash those creative efforts.  They think they have a right to take away a large portion of the profits when someone succeeds, even though they did nothing to contribute to that success and probably were a hindrance rather than a help.  Many of them have never been very successful themselves and are jealous of those do succeed, gleefully taxing them and regulating them in order to try to drag them down to their loser level.  They pretend they are doing this in order to achieve some good in society, that their only goal is to use the money to help the poor or the children, but that is nonsense.  They are really plundering the successful for their own selfish reasons, be it power or money or jealousy.  In their hearts they really know that the poor and the children would be much better off in a society that appreciated its creative members and gave them the freedom to succeed.

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