It’s holding us hostage today
By Cathy Giessel
What Is a “Generation”?
President Ronald Reagan famously warned that “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” The quote is often repeated, but rarely examined. Recently, my pastor cited it and then posed the essential follow‑up question: What is a generation?
The Oxford Dictionary defines a generation as “the average time in which children grow up, become adults, and have children of their own,” usually considered to be about 30 years.
President Reagan’s point was not abstract. He was reminding us that the lived knowledge of history—the details, the costs, the sacrifices, and the hard work behind major events—rarely survives intact beyond a single generation. Roughly thirty years is all it takes for firsthand understanding to fade and be replaced by secondhand stories, simplified narratives, or convenient myths.
This insight is directly applicable to the Alaska Permanent Fund and the later‑created Permanent Fund Dividend.
The Permanent Fund was established by Alaska voters in 1977, forty‑eight years ago—well over a generation. The Permanent Fund Dividend was created by the governor and legislature in 1982, forty‑three years ago—also more than a generation.
Recently, I asked a room of approximately forty Alaska business leaders how many of them had feet on the ground in Alaska in 1977 and were eligible to vote at the time. Only one person, besides myself, raised a hand. That means that one of the most consequential financial decisions of Alaska’s twentieth century is not known firsthand by nearly everyone in that room.
This loss of lived knowledge makes it remarkably easy to reshape the story of the Permanent Fund and the PFD in ways that do not align with historical fact. That is precisely what is happening today.
Most Alaskans no longer understand how the Permanent Fund was created or where its wealth truly comes from. Very few have ever traveled to the North Slope, stood on an oil drill rig, or driven an ice road on a mid‑winter Arctic day—where daylight doesn’t exist and conditions are unforgiving.
Into this vacuum of historic experience has grown a fictional narrative: that the Permanent Fund Dividend is a “right,” owed to every Alaskan as personal compensation for oil that supposedly belongs to them.
That narrative is compelling. It is also completely false.
The Permanent Fund was not created as a personal entitlement program. It was established as a long‑term savings mechanism—designed to convert a finite, nonrenewable resource into enduring financial security for future generations of Alaskans.
When a generation loses its connection to how and why a system was created, it becomes vulnerable to misunderstanding—and eventually to misuse. President Reagan’s warning was about freedom, but the principle is universal: what one generation fails to teach, the next is free to forget—or to redefine.
The Myth of the PFD as a “Right”
The claim that the Permanent Fund Dividend is a personal right—owed to every Alaskan as direct compensation for oil taken from land they individually own—has no basis in Alaska’s constitutional text, its ballot history, or the public record of the time.
When voters approved the Permanent Fund in 1976 and it became effective in 1977, they did not create an entitlement program. They approved a constitutional amendment requiring that at least 25 percent of certain mineral revenues be deposited into a permanent savings account. The purpose was explicit and collective: to preserve a portion of Alaska’s nonrenewable resource wealth for the long-term benefit of the state.
There was no promise of annual checks. There was no assertion of individual ownership of oil revenues. And there was no suggestion that future legislatures would be bound to distribute earnings as cash payments to residents.
The historical context matters. Alaska had watched other resource-rich regions exhaust their wealth through short-term spending and political pressure. Our own Legislature had quickly spent the $900 Million from the first lease sale (though justifiably the needs were serious and many in our new state). The Permanent Fund was conceived as a guardrail—a structural protectionagainst exactly that outcome. Its core principle was restraint: save first, spend carefully, and think beyond the present generation.
The Permanent Fund Dividend emerged later, in 1982, as a statutory policy decision by the governor and legislature. It was not embedded in the Constitution. It could have been designed differently—or not created at all. Its purpose was pragmatic: to give Alaskans a visible, personal reason to support preservation of the Fund’s principal and to resist raids on its earnings.
In other words, the dividend was a means to protect the Permanent Fund, not the reason the Fund exists.
Over time, as the generation that debated and enacted these decisions passed from public life, the dividend’s origin story blurred. What began as a policy tool gradually acquired the language of entitlement. The annual payment came to be described not as a distribution chosen by lawmakers, but as a moral or legal right.
That shift in understanding carries real consequences. Rights, by definition, are absolute and immune from reconsideration. Policies, by contrast, are designed to be evaluated against changing economic conditions, fiscal realities, and competing public needs. Treating the dividend as a “right” elevates it above schools, public safety, infrastructure, and other essential functions of government—outcomes never contemplated by the Fund’s creators.
The deeper danger is not disagreement over dividend levels. It is the loss of historical grounding that allows a savings account—created to serve future generations—to be reimagined as a present-day entitlement.
This is the dynamic President Reagan warned about. When one generation no longer remembers why an institution was created, the next is free to redefine it. Not maliciously, but confidently—and often incorrectly. If Alaskans wish to debate the future of the Permanent Fund and the dividend, they should do so honestly, with a clear-eyed understanding of their origins. Stewardship requires memory. Without it, even the most farsighted decisions can be undone—not by force, but by forgetting.