Rumor has it that the economics profession has finally been "won over" to a free-market view of the world. If the complimentary economics textbooks that cross my desk are a bellwether, however, it is not yet time to break out the champagne.
In October, the press began reporting Albert Gore's startling catalog of lies. They were legion. How can a person tell so many falsehoods so often about so many things? One newspaper account theorized that it was a habit developed from growing up in a highly-political family.
For decades, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been renowned as one of Washington's biggest boondoggles. HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros admitted to Congress in June 1993: "HUD has in many cases exacerbated the declining quality of life in America." Vice President Al Gore denounced public housing projects in 1996: "These crime-infested monuments to a failed policy are killing the neighborhoods around them."
You've heard that government policies can cause unanticipated bad effects? This view is confirmed many times over when you consider the current forest-fire fiasco. Government is the cause of the fires that raged out of control across the West this summer, just as surely as if the Forest Service had spread the fuel and lit the match.
During the seemingly endless debate over the government's treatment of Microsoft, the consensus seems to be that this is mostly a battle over ideas, including the role of government in economic matters. Whenever the subject of "self interest" appears, it usually deals with Microsoft's competitors that stand to gain from the destruction and looting of that software company.
On the Internet, a war between government-backed trademark holders and small web entrepreneurs is heating up. Thanks to the current managers of the Internet and a little-known agency of the United Nations, the trademark holders are winning.
Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal is excited. The leftist columnist believes that he has found a wonderful "Third Way" example of using government to help poor people without the whole thing becoming yet another socialist giveaway. However, as with most government schemes that Hunt and his statist media colleagues like to tout, the latest example of "social entrepreneurship" is simply another fraud at worst and a misuse of resources at best.
The Heritage Foundation is no flaming libertarian organization. Not for them the radical privatization of such things as bodies of water, roads, even social security, much less courts, armies, and police.
Both Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek were called upon during wartime to weigh in on the question: what is the best economic policy in the conduct of war? Both were opposed to using war as a device for socializing the economy. If a war must be waged, they argued in their roles as value-free economists, better to contract-out the building of munitions to private companies rather than attempt to do it through nationalization and administrative edict.
For two years, the White House has been haranguing owners of large websites, telling them not to violate their visitors' supposed right to privacy. Now, just on the face of it, this is absurd. The proper way to think about websites is as private property. When you go to a website, you are a visitor on someone else's property; the owner has the right to record what interests you. If you don't like it, you shouldn't visit. It's that simple.
