Free Market

Keynesian economics continues to infect much public debate, despite being debunked for decades by Austrian economists, some mainstream economists, and reality itself.

Making splashy headlines, the National Marriage Project of Rutgers University reported this summer that marriage rates are at an historic low. Americans are waiting longer to get married and are choosing alternative arrangements to marriage. Data showing that divorce is on the decline turn out to be more complicated: people are taking fewer risks with marriage in the first place. In thirty years, the percentage of adults living as a partner in marriage has slipped from 68 to 56.

The Mississippi River Basin is the largest river basin in the world, and stretches from New York to Idaho and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. In the course of American history, the river often flooded, but not until 1927 had so many people been killed and left homeless and never had such a large land area been covered by water. It was the greatest flood in history, but this fact is not as well known: government caused it.

America's "War on Drugs" has become primarily a war on marijuana smokers. Federal data released this year reveals almost half of all drug arrests are for marijuana, and that approximately one in seven drug prisoners is now behind bars for marijuana offenses. Research reported by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) in June found that 59,300 Americans are sitting behind bars on marijuana charges.

As the bureaucrats pursue their Draconian war on drugs, the Clinton administration is conspiring with the pharmaceutical industry to provide drugs at taxpayer expense. Under the guise of expanding Medicare—already a massive wealth transfer from young to old—prescription drugs will be included among the benefits the feds use to further rope senior citizens into the government orbit.

Statists never admit their failures. Indeed, to the statist failure is "success." For rather than acknowledging the interventionist "root causes" of urban decay (to borrow one of Janet Reno's favorite phrases), they propose even more intervention. The proposal is to have state governments impose on metropolitan areas, without a vote of the citizens of those areas, a new "regional" taxing authority that could impose a new layer of taxation on the residents of all counties within a metropolitan area. The tax revenues would then be used to continue to fund the failed government school monopoly, welfare, government housing projects, and any number of equally destructive government programs. As Mises warned, one government intervention always begets another.

The most obvious alternative to government-mandated service is to use a free labor market. The government should advertise and recruit appropriate individuals and pay competitive wages. (When I proposed this to a local attorney he looked at me like I was from another planet. Yet, this same attorney thinks nothing of hiring his own paralegal help or advertising in the newspaper to sell his own services.)

Those arguing that Wall Street and other major industries cannot survive without a strong regulatory structure because regulators keep markets fair must now answer a basic question: Who regulates the regulators?

Private subways-even though highly regulated, even though the fare was held to a nickel by government decree--fueled the expansion of the city. As lines were extended, neighborhoods and shopping centers grew around the stations. But by 1940, through rigorous regulation and through Communist labor unions that sabotaged private ownership, the subways were taken over by the city.

The Titanic story began to be politicized as soon as news arrived that the ship had gone down in the North Atlantic during the early hours of April 15, 1912. Senator William Alden Smith, a "progressive" Republican and friend of activist government, called the White House to find out what President Taft intended to do about the disaster. He discovered that Taft did not hold the typical twentieth-century assumption that the president of the United States is responsible for solving every problem in the world. Smith was told that Taft intended to do nothing about the Titanic.