At the end of the century, Bill Clinton declared Franklin D. Roosevelt the "man of the century" for having "saved capitalism," echoing the gushing praise that Newt Gingrich has heaped on FDR, calling him "the greatest figure of the twentieth century." The greatest phony of the twentieth century would be more appropriate.
The city of Seattle, which had planned to make money on hosting the World Trade Organization, wound up trying to cut its losses by asking the WTO to end its conference early and leave town. Self-described free-traders who helped to create the WTO ought to be feeling the same way. The organization that writes the rules of world trade is now the focus of nearly every unionist, environmentalist, and capitalist-hating pressure group in the world.
What's behind this new less-work-for-the-same-pay legislation is the 11.4 percent unemployment rate in France, a jobless rate that's been steadily expanded by the piling on of excessive labor regulations, government-mandated benefits and overblown taxation. The miracle here, if we're to believe the French socialists, is that an unemployment crisis that's been caused by too many government regulations will now be solved by yet another regulation.
From the 1930s through the 1980s, government claimed it could innovate better than private markets. That' s what the boondoggles like TVA, Nasa, and Semitech were all about. Hardly anyone believes that anymore, so the rationale for government regulation of technology has changed. It now concerns such vagaries as fairness and wise resource use.
"The trouble with socialism," Oscar Wilde once wrote, "is that it takes too many evenings." Indeed, the private lives of socialists are highly politicized. They must not be interested in anything-not even their families-other than socialism. The theory must inform every aspect of their lives, which must be a microcosm of a socialist society: there must be no escape from the All-Embracing Theory. Or the All-Embracing State.
A common misconception in popular thinking about business is that companies need to be helped along and supported by government. If a community fails to help business, it is said, it will miss out on jobs and prosperity. We see this happening across the country. Cities use public funds to build sports stadiums and arenas. States issue bonds and provide tax incentives to large corporations to entice them to locate in specific areas. Politicians then turn to the community and campaign for reelection based on bringing home the corporate bacon. This legal plunder is disguised as "urban renewal" or "community development."
During the 1980s, just as the free market's reputation was beginning to rebound, the guardians of the national psyche discovered "workaholism." The victim of this disorder was defined as working compulsively, spending far too much time at his occupation, too little with friends or loved ones. He loses the capacity to enjoy what little leisure he allows himself, and eventually cannot even recall the point of his own frenetic activity. We were all advised to ease up, slow down, and smell the roses.
Proper liberals feigned shock and disgust when the NAACP released the results of a poll showing that 50 percent of young people believe that racial separation is fine so long as different races have "equal opportunities." The poll, co-sponsored by the NAACP and Zogby International, surveyed more than 1000 people between the ages of 18 and 29. An earlier survey found similar results.
Austrian economists should revel in the story of Ukara, a small, Tanzanian island in Lake Victoria. John Reader, in his astoundingly detailed and fascinating work, Africa: A Biography of the Continent (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), presents among a wealth of other information that should be of genuine interest to economic scholars a little over three pages (beginning at 255) of highly persuasive refutation of the statists' cry for central planning to protect against deadly "sprawl."
