Let's talk more broadly now about the outlook for the economy. In the last issue of Across the Board, I interviewed Pete Peterson, and he argued that a financial meltdown is imminent.
    Pete's been singing that song for twenty years, and the weather outside ain't in meltdown yet. The facts he has are wrong. The deficit of the United States as a percentage of GNP is very low and manageable. There ain't no meltdown. He has an agenda, and that's fine -- it's a free country. But I don't know any economist who agrees with him about it, and I hang out with Milton Friedman and Gary Becker and George Shultz and all these guys. They all say, Forget it -- it's ridiculous. He doesn't address the deficit that means something, and that's Medicare and Social Security, to say nothing of the Army-Navy pension fund, which is trillions of dollars.
    I had lunch a while back with Bob Rubin -- he was nice enough to ask the old crock over. He said, You and I don't agree about things, do we? I said, No, Bob, I think we don't. So he said, What's your beef? I said, Well, the famous lockbox of Social Security has $1.2 trillion of IOUs and no cash. And you took that money and you paid down the public debt and the trumpets blew, and your grandchildren won't have to pay it off. But how the hell do you think you're going to redeem those IOUs? There are three ways. Print the money? Bad news. Get Congress to appropriate the money? Forget it. Borrow the money? Yes. So the federal budget includes the Social Security trust fund as an asset.
    Government accounting makes Enron look like a bunch of boys playing with marbles. It's just terrible. In fact, one of the interesting things is that Congress requires that the comptroller report to them every -- I think it's April 1. And he said in his last report, The internal controls of the federal government are so bad that I can't give any assurance that the numbers in this report can be relied upon by the public.
    If Peterson's favorite topic is meltdown, yours appears to be "the twilight of sovereignty," which, of course, was also the title of a book you wrote in 1992.
    And which Thomas Friedman repackaged ten years later.
    What happens when night falls?
    That's a good question. George Shultz, who is one of my best friends, read the book when it first came out, and we went down to Washington and had a debate about it. He said that if you don't have a sovereign government, then who the hell do you deal with if you've got a problem? Which is true, of course, and that's the problem with Palestine. So sovereignty is important, but with the Internet the power of central governments has attenuated and will continue to attenuate. . . .
    The argument is made that multinationals will take over the powers of the state.
    Yeah, the arrogance of international corporations and so forth. The answer to that is that they can't. I live at UN Plaza, at 49th Street. I can't park on the street because I don't have diplomatic plates. But if I'm the third undersecretary from Bangladesh, I can park any goddamn place I want.  And if I'm drunk and disorderly or if I kill someone, the worst thing to happen to me would be I'd be ejected from the country. . . . But the sovereigns can no longer act capriciously without attracting an enormous audience, and that attenuates their power. . . . We see it in the Tom Brokaws and crazy Dan Rather. Nobody's watching them anymore. Why not? People are on the Internet or they're on cable.
    So you see the Brokaws and Rathers as comparable to the sovereign states.
    They used to be, because they were a monopoly, and now they're not a monopoly.
    Because information recognizes no borders?
    Yes. You can't stop it, just as you can't stop the power of the market. The market is more powerful than governments. Now, you can argue that that's bad -- and you may have a point -- but I'm saying that's the reality, and you can see that power in action every day of the year. Actually, the power of information flowing through the Internet can subject "arrogant multinational corporations" to the same deconstructive tendencies Wriston sees for government and the media.

Actually, the power of information flowing through the Internet can subject "arrogant multinational corporations" to the same deconstructive tendencies Wriston sees for government and the media.