It's no shock that the Senate has taken another step towards socializing the medical sector. That's been the pattern for nearly a century. What's appalling is that this socialization is confused with authentic insurance, a viable market institution.
Republicans seemed sincere when they argued against a minimum-wage increase. In their rhetoric they were right: it increases unemployment, especially among the poor, by making work illegal. Even the head of Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers denounced the minimum wage—when he was a private economist.
Media personality Kathie Lee Gifford took quite a pounding when the National Labor Committee, a labor union organization, found that some of the clothes sold under her label in the U.S. were made by children in a Honduran "sweat shop."
If there's anything a government bureaucrat hates more than the unhampered market, it's the automobile. He'll do anything to take it away from people, though of course he'll couch his true intentions in euphemistic banalities about "cleaning up the air."
A premise many conservatives share with liberals is that government largess harms its beneficiaries. Welfare supposedly creates dependence and "traps" its recipients in poverty. Much as the poor want to support themselves and their families, they are lured into sloth by Aid to Families with Dependent Children and other programs. Similar criticisms are brought against affirmative action, which supposedly labels its beneficiaries as inferior.
John Kenneth Galbraith has been writing about economics for over fifty years, with considerable elegance but with little grasp of sound theory.
Voter opposition to major "free trade" agreements helped propel a surge in protectionist rhetoric this year. Even constituencies when should be naturally free trade—Republican conservatives—have fallen prey to old fallacies.
"Forget the minimum wage," says Nate, a dishwasher and cook's helper at our restaurant. "It's taxes that are killing me." He is a college student by day, washes about 1,000 dishes during the dinner rush, and stuffs and rolls grape leaves until midnight.
Two years ago, the Clinton administration fell into near total disrepute among the public. The primary reason was its plot to socialize and nationalize the entire medical industry and conscript doctors and patients into a central plan.
