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FOR THE RECORD Left Right and Unreality at UT Editor’s note: Floy Lilley holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the College of Charleston in South Carolina, according to a curriculum vitae on file at the University of Texas. She also earned a Juris Doctor degree from St. Mary’s School of Law in San Antonio. Listed on her CV are pre”Panic in the Cow Patties: Science by Press Release”; “Phasing out Freon or Phasing out Facts?”; “The Perversity of Diversity”; “The Properties of Virtue: The Virtues of Property”; “The Piecemeal Plunder of Private Property Rights”; and “Repelling the Invasion of the Property Snatchers.” She is the program director for the Clint W. Murchison Sr. Chair of Free Enterprise at the University of Texas College of Engineering, a chair established in 1976. Lilley served as master of ceremonies at the Property Rights Seminar \(see editorial, Lilley’s concluding remarks, delivered at the end of the two-day conference. THIS IS NOT RIGHT and left, this is right and reality.We are on the cusp, in a piece of the most interesting time that has ever hit this planet. No generation of people in ten thousand years has been simultaneously a piece in America of the Age Wave and simultaneously on the cusp of the New Knowledge Wave. The Age Wave, the Knowledge Wave? What the heck is this? What it is is reality. An Age Wave for us between the age of fifty and thirty [sic], who are seventy-six million people in America. We are one-third of the population, and there is no replacement population coming up behind us. As a developed nation, we do not have a replacement fertility birth-rate in this country. So those of us who own property, frankly, are going to turn around and look and say “I ain’t paying property taxes any longer because the schools are empty; they’re not filled with bambinos.” And that’s a fact. That’s going to be a fact. Another fact of this Age Wave is: Last year, 1994, in our whole fiscal year, there were fourteen productive Americans who contributed to my mother’s Social Secu Floy Lilley and Dan Morales: “The rity. She’s eighty-one. She thanks you. Fourteen productive Americans. In thirteen years, when I am a seasoned citizen with my little crochet hat, looking for my share, there will be precisely one, one producing American! If nothing else, it tells me it’s a very good day for me to go out and make a friend of a kid. Because the reality is that in America in this Age Wave today, those folks that are in their eighties are the segment of our American population whose life expectancy is exploding…according to our data. For one thing, that segment of our population whose life expectancy is exploding, the octogenarians, those over eighty, gracious, they’re the folks who’ve been exposed to these environmental toxins the longest… And another thing, that Social Security was created at a time when all actuarial tables said you were going to check out at the age of sixty-five, which is why they set payment to you at the age of sixty-five, expecting you would have stepped off the planet by then. Didn’t happen. You fooled them all. You know, people always fool those bureaucrats. Because they go up there snuffin’ that marble dust and somehow it just solidifies what’s between their ears. Seems to stimulate what’s between their legs, but it certainly solidifies what’s between their ears. And the reality that we’re facing is not right and left, it’s right and reality. The reality is that if you are here by the end of the millennia, which, folks, is only five years away, that you’re going to be here 120 or 140 years. I didn’t make the rule up. It is happening because of projects like those down in Houston, called the sequencing of the human genome. And they have already done it on bacteria. Called biotechnology. It’s called the knowledge explosion. And for a fact, Jack, now I can take every tobacco plant out there, in situ, and make out of that delicious protein. Changes the definition of the word pure, doesn’t it? I can also turn tobacco stalks into a product with biotechnology that actually yields every pharmaceutical drug our minds desire. That could be a pretty interesting cash crop for tobacco farmers. What is going on in computer-generated communications capabilities! And knowledge communications capabilities! You are on the cusp of only the third revolution that has ever hit this planet earth. Future is Ours!” ALAN POGUE THE TEXAS OBSERVER 5