Those unfamiliar with Wall Street are naturally skeptical of this business of short selling. How can one sell what one doesn't own? Some may remember Daniel Drew's clever ditty "He who sells what isn't his'n must buy it back or go to pris'n." Interestingly enough, Drew was himself a famous short seller.
My first thought upon gazing upon this site (Mt. Rushmore) was why anyone would mar perfectly good granite with the faces of Roosevelt and Lincoln. Although Washington and Jefferson committed their own grievous errors while serving as chief executive of the central government, their sins were nothing next to those executed by Theodore Roosevelt and Dishonest Abe.
The economic ignorance of politicians and bureaucrats never surprises me, and the recent events concerning rising oil prices are no different. Recently Sen. Dick Durbin (D- Illinois) accused the oil industry of "gouging" the public stating "It's an increase directly attributable to profit-taking by the oil companies." EPA Secretary Carol Browner said "The oil companies . . . owe us an answer." So it went throughout the Clinton administration and Gore campaign, as spokesman after spokesman issued condemnations wrapped in fallacy.
After attending a leading business school for the last year, I have been witness to capitalist bashing that rivals that of high schools and colleges. The chilling part is that these schools are training future business managers working in a free-enterprise system.
It's true that the protestors at international trade meetings want nothing short of world-government regulations on labor and environment. They want global redistribution and antitrust. They want the UN to tax us and impose an international welfare state. And they hate anything-private property, corporations, national borders-that stands between them and their goal.
In The Constitution of Liberty Friedrich Hayek warned that the rule of law could evolve into the rule of despotism unless the rules that are enforced by the state are known, certain, and prospective rather than retrospective. Throughout history, a hallmark of governmental tyranny has been the opposite kind of behavior: random arrests and incarceration for breaking "laws" that the alleged lawbreakers had no way of knowing about; constantly shifting definitions of what is legal and what is not; and sudden announcements that behavior which was thought for years to be legal and proper was illegal.
The president of the United States was ecstatic. Never had economic prospects in this country looked better. Unemployment was at its lowest level in years, the rate of inflation was relatively low, and the economy had grown continuously for almost eight years. No doubt, said the experts, this country was in the midst of a New Economy.
The Pulitzer Prize has been known for honoring great works and great folly. A newspaper colleague of mine in 1977 won a Pulitzer for a very moving (if, albeit, a bit staged) photograph of a legless Vietnam veteran sitting in a wheelchair in the rain watching an Armed Forces Day Parade in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The Pulitzer also is still recovering from the Janet Cooke fiasco of 1981 when the prize committee had to rescind the award given to the Washington Post reporter who wrote a fake story about a nonexistent eight-year-old heroin addict, the story called "Jimmy's World."
Watching Joel Klein of the Antitrust Division on television, speaking about the dangers that Microsoft poses to the public, calls to mind a passage from Martin van Creveld's The Rise and Decline of the State: "Born in sin, the bastard offspring of declining autocracy and bureaucracy run amok, the state is a giant wielded by pygmies.
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote this translation in the days during and after World War I. Woodrow Wilson's wartime central planning, which led to arrests of businessmen and other dissenters, caused him to wonder what happened to the ideals of the American Revolution. Perhaps the language of the original Declaration was too anachronistic for modern ears? He offered his own translation into American dialect.
