"Good News: 'Experts' predict we can't win!" by Bill Winter, LP News editor,
<i>Libertarian Party News</i>, January, 2000, p. 22<p>

"We got a letter a short while ago from an LP member who had decided not to renew his membership.  He had come to the conclusion, he wrote, that the Libertarian Party 'can't win' -- so he was going to support the Reform Party, which could.<p>

"We don't get a lot of letters like that.  Why?  Because there aren't many Libertarians who think that Reform Party candidates, if elected, would be a 'win' for liberty.<p>

"After all, it's not easy to convince yourself that Pat Buchanan (who never met an immigrant or an import he didn't want to imprison or tax) supports liberty.  Or that Donald Trump (who advocates a $5.7 trillion 'rich people's' tax and socialized medicine
 that would make 'Ted Kennedy blush') is anything but a statist in capitalist's clothing.<p>

"But forget about the Reform Party for a second: It was the 'can't win' part of the letter that amused me the most.  And it reminded me of a list I had seen recently (in <i>American Outlook</i> magazine, Spring 1999).<p>

"The list was simple: Predictions from famous people that had turned out wrong.  <i>Profoundly</i> wrong.  Laugh-out-loud wrong.  You may enjoy the list, too:<p>

<ul>
<li>"In 1927, silent film producer Harry Warner said, 'Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?'
<li>"In 1905, President Grover Cleveland said, 'Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote.'
<li>"Before World War II, Admiral Clark Woodward said, 'As far as sinking a ship with a bomb is concerned, it can never be done.'
<li>"Thomas Edison said, 'The phonograph has no commercial value at all.'
<li>"In 1921, radio pioneer David Sarnoff said, 'The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value.  Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?'
<li>"The president of Michigan Savings Banks advised Henry Ford' lawyer
not to invest in Ford Motor Company because, he said, 'The horse is here to stay, the automobile is a novelty.'
<li>" 'Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible,' said Lord Kelvin, president of the British Royal Society and one of the nineteenth century's greatest experts on thermodynamics.
<li>" 'A rocket will never be able to leave the earth's atmosphere,' declared the <i>New York Times</i> in 1936.
<li>" 'There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom,' said Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Milliken in 1923.
<li>"In 1929, Yale economist Irving Fisher said, 'Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.'  Two weeks later, the stock market crashed.
<li>"MGM executive Irving Thalberg had this for Louis B. Mayer regarding <i>Gone With The Wind</i>: 'Forget it, Louie, no Civil War picture ever made a nickel.'
<li>" 'You ain't going nowhere, son.  You ought to go back to driving a truck,' said Jim Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, in firing Elvis Presley after a performance in 1954.
<li>" 'We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out anyway,' said the president of Decca Records, rejecting the Beatles in 1962.
<li>" 'There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home,' said the president of Digital Electronic Corporation in 1977.
</ol>

"As you mull over this list, keep in mind: These weren't 'ordinary Joes' making these predictions.  They were <i>experts</i> -- Nobel Prize winners.  Great inventors.  Successful corporations.  They were the greatest minds of past generations -- <i>dead w
rong</i>.<p>

"And as I rode to work today on my horse (because the car was just a novelty, you know), and wrote this column will a quill pen (because individuals will <i>never</i> need computers), and whistled to myself (because the radio has no commercial value), I t
hought about the prediction from our Libertarian-turned-Reform Party friend, that the Libertarian Party 'can't win.'<p>

"And I look forward to the day we can add his prediction to the list you just read.  Because I think that's where history will judge that it belongs.<p>