One of the teachers at the recently-completed Language of Liberty camps was fond of telling students a certain joke: “Do you know what the most frightening sentence in the English language is? I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

The students in Portugal and Poland didn’t laugh. They didn’t really see the humor in government trying to help people.

We’re in Berlin now. The Sulejow Language of Liberty camp has ended, and we’ve stopped in Berlin for one night before returning home to D.C. The ghost of the wall that once separated this city is eerily memorialized in the fragments still here. The East Side Gallery is a kaleidoscope of political art and irreverent graffiti. The Brandenburg Gate stands solemn, alone, like a doorway to a room that no longer exists.

We have lunch with the director of Berlin think tank. He asks us if we’ve noticed anything interesting about the police in Berlin. “Their priority is de-escalation,” he explains. “That’s what they’re trained for — de-escalating situations before they become violent.” He says policemen try to avoid making arrests whenever possible, even when they’re insulted or threatened. “More or less, they really are just there to help,” he says. “It’s a bit different than in America, no?”

If the American government is a paternal government — a strict, protective disciplinarian — then most European governments are decidedly maternal. They provide care. They nurture. They purport to do for the people what the people cannot or will not do for themselves.

Cities across the European continent are scarred by the vestiges of fascist and communist regimes. There is a real and recent memory here of what it means to be truly frightened of one’s government. There is also a collective memory of revolution. It’s a memory made manifest in monuments, museums, and cemeteries. It’s permanently sewn into the fabric of political language. American Tea Partiers may have taken their name from revolutionaries, but in Europe, revolution is more than a story of national origin. It’s something many of these cities experienced in the 20th century. The memories of oppression and revolution, so patent in the urban landscape of Berlin and other cities, are a constant reminder of what happens when state power ceases to be a tool of the people.

Europe’s history of tyranny is what sets the tone for the current citizen-government relationship here. Governments are careful not to dictate or demand. Instead, they guide; they de-escalate. And with the experience of oppressive paternalism now largely behind them, the new European generation gladly accepts democratic maternalism. The students we met at the Language of Liberty camps think that their governments are flawed, but essentially good. They don’t really understand the anti-nanny-state angst of Americans. Most of these students don’t want to scale back state power; they just want to fix state power. They want to help their governments to better help their people.

This is why there’s a disconnect between American and European political discourse — why the classical liberal movement is floundering in the home countries of Friedrich Hayek and Frederic Bastiat. European governments don’t wear heavy boots anymore; they wear kid gloves. When the people and the state are in tandem — finally happy with each other after an unhappy past — the people are overwhelmingly and dangerously tempted to allow the state to suffocate them with maternal care.

When we left Portugal for the Language of Liberty camp in Poland, we left a wine country for a vodka country. At the supermarket near the campsite in Sulejow, Poland, our host stands in front of several shelves of vodka and tells us what the difference is between each brand. He also picks up a large jar of pickles. “To eat with vodka,” he explains.

But the students at the camp aren’t very interested in drinking. Most are between the ages of 18-23. Over half of them are male. Some of them don’t drink at all. The ones who do drink have a small glass of vodka as they grill kielbasas over the campfire.

For these students, drinking alcohol is not an activity unto itself. It’s a part of their culture. They grow up with it. They take it for granted.

One can’t help comparing their drinking habits with the habits of the average American college student.

The Polish government is not completely laissez-faire in regulating the sale and consumption of alcohol. The minimum drinking age is 18. Many cities have open-container laws. Recently the government banned the serving of alcohol before and during the recent state funerals for the victims of the Katin plane crash.

But the Polish students laugh when I ask if the government enforces the drinking age. Teenagers here are not arrested for drinking. Parents here are not threatened by child services for giving alcohol to their kids.

If the United States government wants future American youths to drink less (or drink differently), they have only to look to European models. Liberalization — not criminalization — is the answer. Here in Poland, a country known for its production of vodka, the youth is completely unimpressed by the idea of drunkenness. One night on the beach at the edge of camp, some of the teachers ask the students if they know any icebreaker games like the drinking games freshmen play in American universities. The Polish students are confused. They don’t know what drinking games are.

On our way to the Language of Liberty campsite in Sulejow, Poland, we were told that religion is the greatest antidote to government power. Our guide, Konrad, is from the Polish-American Foundation for Economic Research Education (PAFERE). He was kind enough to take us on the hour-long bus ride from the industrial city of Lodz (pop. 780,000) to Sulejow, a tiny town surrounded by farms and forests.

Konrad told us that Catholicism is what keeps the people of Poland together. He said, the government is afraid of the church, because the church is more powerful than the government. Later, at the camp, we had a beer with a Polish businessman who was here to give a guest lecture on entrepreneurship. He agreed with Konrad. “Even if you don’t believe in God,” he said, “the Ten Commandments give us values. There is a God-value in life, and it is separate from government.”

The Catholicism of the Polish students is interesting. The Catholic Church almost acts like a government itself, yet unlike governments, membership in the Church is voluntary. In a sense, there is competition in Poland between the Church and the State. Almost everyone in Poland is Catholic, thus giving the church great power and influence. Because of this, the church and its members keep government power in check. Even the most skeptical agnostic and atheist libertarians might see some value in this.

This division of power is not a new concept for Poland. For nearly 1,000 years, the Catholic Church, royalty (government), and szlachta (nobility/property owners) were powerful political forces in Poland. Poland has spent much of its history fighting off larger neighboring powers. When the people weren’t being terrorized by Russia, they were being brutalized by Germany. The only constant throughout all of this was the Catholic Church. One student said, “When the communists ruled Poland, the Catholic Church was the center of the resistance. The priests were leaders of the resistance and the churches were the meeting places.”

The communists were fearful of the Catholic Church of its power. When I asked why the communists didn’t abolish the Church, another student smiled and said, “Abolishing the religion was impossible, everyone in the country was a Catholic and you can’t do that.”

Many priests and resistance members were killed by the communists, but the resistance movement was too big to eradicate. The Catholic Church was the main force behind the Solidarity movement and Pope John Paul II (born in Poland) was a huge supporter of Solidarity. The businessman who lived under communist rule in Poland said, “When the Pope visits, it gave us much hope for the Solidarity movement.”

The result of this history is a unique Polish brand of libertarianism. The Polish students at the Sulejow Language of Liberty camp are largely anti-government and believe in the liberating power of capitalism. Unlike the students in Portugal, these students are not interested in political careers. They’re interested in entrepreneurship. They’re interested in money as a medium that improves exchange and thus their lives and their country’s place in the world. Their voluntary membership in the Catholic Church is not only for religious guidance, but also an organization that will resist oppressive and tyrannical government.

Some things at the Porto Language of Liberty camp are lost in translation.

One problem is political labels. They call us “liberals,” meaning classical liberals. The teachers call themselves libertarians. In lectures, some of the teachers criticize “liberals,” meaning leftists. The politically-active students told us they belonged to the equivalent of a Republican Youth group, but their group is Juventude Social Democrata—Social Democrats. They’re the right-wing of Portugal, and they thought we’d understand that better by thinking of them as Republicans. In truth, most of them would be considered moderate Democrats in America. They are right-wing because the rest of the country is far left.

But they are looking for solutions to their country’s problems, and are interested what the teachers at Language of Liberty have to say. In a workshop about education reform, an argument breaks out. Some of the students say that Portuguese schools are failing. They believe the system—in which the best students go to public universities and the worst go to private—is not encouraging the Portuguese youth to be productive and accountable for themselves.

The recurring question this week has been how to make the Portuguese less dependent on the government and more focused on individual economic achievement. One student has said several times that Portugal suffers because the government treats the people like children. Now education reform may be a matter of economic survival for the country. Portugal’s public debt is currently 80 percent of their GDP. The future of Portugal depends on the productivity and independence of their youth.

One student in the workshop says Portugal should reform education by adopting a Swedish model of school choice. But a group of students—who speak softly in rapid Portuguese until the teacher forces them to speak in English—say that a Swedish model may not work for Portugal. “We’re a different culture,” one student says firmly.

A 17-year-old student, the youngest at the camp, agrees. “For example, if you told Swedish students to come to a Language of Liberty lecture at 9:30 am, they’d come at 9:30 am,” he says dryly.

Everyone laughs. The big joke at the camp has been about the Portuguese concept of time. When the lectures are scheduled for 9:30 am, the students come at 10:15; if we schedule at 10, they come at 10:30. “It’s normal,” one student told Glenn Cripe on the first day when Glenn wondered why everyone was late.

Now, the students are half-serious when they talk self-deprecatingly about “Portuguese time.”

“We’re soft,” one student jokes.

“We’re a Latin country,” another amends.

“We need a more disciplined education system.”

“A Fascist system!”

People laugh and start speaking in Portuguese again. The student who first suggested implementing the Swedish school choice model speaks up.

“The reality is we need to change our culture when we change education and change the government. And people will suffer at first. But in the long run, Portugal will be better off.”

The Portuguese Constitution guarantees the provision of many social services, including free health care. The students at the Porto Language of Liberty camp remind us of this several times.

“My party is working on a plan to reform the constitution,” one young man offers when the issue comes up. The other students roll their eyes and say it’s very complicated.
And many of them don’t want to cut social services. Even the more libertarian-minded of them say society would suffer too much without high unemployment benefits, socialized medicine, and a healthy welfare state. The Portuguese people have learned to depend on it. “You try to take these things away, there will be a revolution,” says one economics student. He’s very serious.

Between lectures, two of the students take us on a drive though Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia, the town across the river. The driver, a lawyer and an elected representative in his town, gives us a brief history of Portugal. He says the North, where we are, is far more open to libertarian ideas than the South, where Lisbon is. Lisbon has the money and the political power; yet they’re influenced by “all things Red.”

“When the communists first came to the South,” the lawyer explains, “the communists killed the farmers. But in the North, the farmers killed the communists. There they still have communists. Here? Not so much.”

In the afternoon at the planetarium, we watch The Call of the Entrepreneur. One of the vignettes spotlights a successful dairy farmer who makes high-quality compost from cow manure. Afterwards, in the discussion, a teacher asks the students why the farmer worked so hard to develop a good product.

“To make the world better?” one student guesses.

The others remind him that the farmer said he worked hard not to create a better world, but to create a better life for himself and his family. Some of the students are laughing, remembering the footage of the farmer’s sons and daughter standing next to long piles of cow manure.

“It’s the American dream,” a guy at the back of the room jokes. The others laugh.

Much later we’re having a post-midnight meal with a couple students and a businessman in his 30s who’s involved in the Republican Youth group. The businessman is speaking somberly about Portugal’s future. This generation will suffer for the nation’s economic problems; yet many in Portugal are reluctant to change their way of life. “The thing is that in America, you have the American dream,” the businessman says. “But here, we don’t have a Portuguese dream.”

On the plane to Lisbon—on our way to our first Language of Liberty camp—I watched the first half of the unwatchable Prince of Persia. Alfred Molina has a small role as an outlaw who runs an ancient gambling house/bar/brothel. As usual, Molina is too clever for the film he’s in. In one scene, he explains that he’s crafted his reputation as a cold-blooded killer in order to escape “the most insidious evil lurking in this forsaken country of ours—taxes.”

Half a day and a train ride later, Drew Tidwell and I sit in a planetarium in seaside Porto as Glenn Cripe—the founder of Language of Liberty—explains Ayn Rand’s argument against taxation to a group of young Portuguese men and women. Glenn has been running programs like this for five years. He works with local organizations around the world to host week-long seminars for students and young professionals interested in learning about classical liberal ideas. He’s recently held seminars in Slovakia, Ghana, and Kyrgyzstan. This trip, he’s going to Portugal and Poland.

Here in Porto, the students are mostly active members of Portugal’s Republican Youth group. They are politically ambitious and curious. Some are lawyers, a few are studying economics, and one is an urban planner.

Many of them are having trouble accepting the libertarian and Objectivist arguments put forth by the teachers. Today is the first day of the camp. Before the Ayn Rand lecture, we had a welcome speech by the deputy mayor of Porto; an introduction to political philosophy taught by a young American; a lecture on the history of classical liberalism by a businessman from Luxembourg; and a viewing of John Stossel’s “Is There Anything Government Can’t Do?,” which provoked an animated discussion among the students about the value of social programs in Portugal.

After Glenn’s lecture, Drew and I step outside to have a cigarette with one of the students, a young lawyer from Porto who speaks in near-perfect English. He says we and the other teachers are far too libertarian for Portugal.

“It’s our tradition,” he explains. He says the Portuguese government has long provided goods and services for the people, ever since the government first started sending tall ships around the world and bringing back foreign goods for the Portuguese market. “For us, the government is like a father,” he says with an apologetic shrug.

But he recognizes some of the faults of a paternalistic government system. Public universities are crowding out private universities in Portugal. All of the medical schools are public. Many Portuguese students go to Spain or elsewhere to study medicine at private universities.

“I think it makes sense that if the government invests in your education, you work for the public health system,” the lawyer says. “But it’s not right that you don’t have a choice.”

Calling all you pro-freedom, liberty-loving activists! It’s time for the 3rd annual Sammies – the awards given by the Sam Adams Alliance to the hardworking everyday folks who are trying to make this country and the world a freer place. Check the categories:

Blogger: Cover state and local issues in your blog? Broken a story recently? An award for a dedicated citizen journalist who not only breaks the story but who strategically frames the debate: $3,000.

Video: Know how to edit video? Have the skills to go viral? An award for an exceptional online video that  presents the ideals of liberty in relation to a contemporary issue: $3,000.

Watchdog: Fancy yourself a private eye? Good with FOIA? An award for an intrepid citizen investigator who uncovers government waste, abuse, patronage, and/or fraud: $3,000.

Town Hall: Give a town hall speech? Capture it on video? An award for an individual who delivered an eloquent and passionate town hall speech and, moreover, used that experience as a launchpad to speak out on other issues and work for local change: $3,000.

Tea Party: Organize a tea party? Turn that protest into concrete action? An award for the leader of a successful and ongoing local tea party movement: $3,000.

Modern-Day Sam Adams: The grand prize. An award for a remarkable individual who achieved a major political victory for freedom: $5,000.

Remember, kids – entries are due on February 17, 2010. The Sam Adams Alliance will fly the winners to Chicago (just like Oprah!) for a red-carpet presentation ceremony in April. To enter the Sammies, visit the Sammies website.

In the new movie “Julie & Julia,” Meryl Streep does well portraying the late Julia Child, but one can say Streep also benefits from her subject.  The much-loved food author and pioneering television chef had a vibrant personality and passion about preparing food that made millions of Americans welcome her into their kitchens. It’s likely that no matter who played Julia in a biopic, her legions of fans would have flocked to the theaters.

So it is strange that Streep acts so ungrateful to Child in an interview with the U.K. newspaper the Telegraph. She berates Child for disagreeing with her on boosting organic foods and criticizing fats, proclaiming that Child was “seduced” by a “front orgnanization for agro-business and petrochemical business.”

Streep apparently still has a grudge against Child for refusing to lend her support to Streep’s fringe enviro group Mothers and Others for Pesticide Limits. That group was one of the leading promoters of the discredited scare about the pesticide Alar that was spread on apples.

In a low point for Congressional hearings on science, Streep, despite her lack of any scientific credentials, was invited to testify in 1989 before a Senate Labor and Human Resources subcommittee. She proclaimed: ”We don’t know what’s on our food . . . I no longer want my children to be part of this experiment.”

As Neil Hrab, CEI’s 2003-04 Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow, recounted in the American Spectator: “Within weeks of Streep testifying before Congress, Uniroyal, the company that manufactured Alar, began the triage to save its reputation, withdrawing the chemical from the U.S. market. In November of 1989, the EPA ordered a ban on the sale, distribution and use.”

But major scientific bodies would conclude that the Alar scare had been nothing but a bunch of hype. The American Medical Association stated in 1992: “The Alar scare of three years ago shows what can happen when science is taken out of context or the risks of a product are blown out of proportion. When used in the approved, regulated fashion, as it was, Alar does not pose a risk to the public’s health.” Others who condemned the scare included the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences, and former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.

Yet in the Telegraph interview, Streep seems oblivious to these facts and to her role in hyping a costly and unnecessary scare. Instead, she bashes Child for daring to question the organic orthodoxy and what many call the “Food Police.”

Streep recalls Child’s turning down a request to help Mothers and Others in its campaign to get supermarkets to carry organic agriculture. “She was very resistant and brushed us off quite brusquely,” Streep says. Also bashing Child’s love of rich fatty foods, Streep rips Child for not making “a connection between the high fat diet of a heavily laden cordon bleu-influenced cusine and cholesterol levels. (I admit I have no idea what “cordon-bleu influenced cuisine” means, but I imagine neither does Streep, who admitted in the same interview that she knew virtually nothing about cooking before she played Child.)

Streep also bashes Child for her involvement with a public health group that also had a long working relationship with CEI in promoting sound science: the American Council on Science and Health.  “I remember being so disappointed that she was in the thrall [of the ACSH],” Streep said. Calling the group a “front organization” for agribusiness and chemical companies, Streep stated, “They seduced Julia into giving them money, so she was on the other side for a while.”

But the only one sucessfully seduced is Streep– into faddish irational fears about conventioanlly grown and fatty foods. Longtime ACSH President Elizabeth Whelan, who knew Child for about 20 years, writes that Child “had two major pet peeves:

•She despised people who demonized specific foods, like butter and sugar.

•She despised activists who terrified people about the safety of their food. ”

Whelan adds: “For Julia, there were no “good foods” or “bad foods” — again, just a variety of foods, all in moderation — including an occasional cordon bleu. Julia, unlike her fictional counterpart, exhibited a constant stream of common sense.”

As for Streep’s charge of ACSH being a “front group” for corporate interests – and similar charges are levied against CEI — Whelan answers that the claim is “absurd — given the organization is funded by a full spectrum of foundations, individuals, and unrestricted grants from corporations.” CEI has a similarly broad-based funding structure.

The cherry on the cake of Streep’s nonsensical rant to the Telegraph is Streep’s claim that “Eventually I think she came around” to Streep’s point of view. But interviews from the last few years before she died show that Child never did “come around” to Streep’s anti-fatty food and anti-food technology extremism.

When asked by Business Week in 2000 what she thought of the low-fat movement, Child replied, “I don’t go for that at all.” She then reiterated the motto of the American Institute of Wine and Food, which she co-founded with winemakers Robert Mondavi and Richard Graff to advance enjoyment of food: “Small helpings No seconds. No snacking. A little bit of everything and have a good time.”

Child also fully endorsed what another bete noir of many enviros — food biotechnology or genetic engineering. In 1999, Child told the Toronto Star: “I think it’s all fascinating. There’s no one-minute answer. The technology’s here. If they can give us a better tomato, I’m for it.”

Perhaps the best epitaph for Julia Child came from Thomas Lifson, editor of American Thinker, upon her death at age 91 in 2004. Lifson wrote in American Thinker:  ”Julia Child, who played a major role in changing the way Americans think about, prepare and eat food, has died at the ripe old age of 91, after a lifetime of urging Americans to go ahead and use butter in their sauces and fry lardons to render some pork fat in which to fry the beginnings of a stew. Take that, health Nazis!”

Our good friend and CEI alumna Kendra Okonski is looking for writers and journalists to enter the distinguished and lucrative Bastiat Prize Competition, presented by the International Policy Network. The competition is designed for writers whose published works promote the institutions of a free society. This year, the Prize has been expanded and  includes a new category for online journalism (including blogs and self-published articles). The first place winner will take home $10,000 and a lovely crystal candlestick.

Past winner have included Bloomberg columnist Amity Shlaes, ABC News co-anchor John Stossel, syndicated columnist Deroy Murdock and Atlantic Monthly editor Clive Crook. Visit the IPN website to read the rules and access the entry form.

Hundreds of people turned out in the pouring rain for Washington, DC’s Tea Party – one of many tax protest events taking place around the U.S. today. A sea of multi-colored umbrellas filled Lafayette Park, which is situated near the White House. Many protesters made a family day of the outing, carrying homemade signs expressing outrage at the unprecedented government bailouts of the banking and auto industries over the past year, along with the high level of government spending to which taxpayers are now committed to paying back. Check out some photos of the event on CEI’s flickr account.