Free Market

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 internet provides a remarkable test case of the free market. What have we learned?

According to the hoopla, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was created in 1995 as an instrument of global free trade. Instead, it is proving to be a vehicle for corruption, economic reprisals, and politicization of trade.

Civilization is subverted by inflation. Readers old enough to remember 13 percent inflation remember how it turned life upside down. Savers were considered to be suckers while financial profligacy was considered wise. Plans of a lifetime were gutted, employees were always angry, and businessmen found even the simplest accounting tasks to be maddeningly confusing. And yet 13 percent is hardly high by this century's egregious standards.

Free markets may be productive, a common complaint runs, but they lead to unjust results.

The international socialist movement, led by Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, is attempting to revive the disastrous policy of war socialism with which the current century began.

After the US government attacked Yugoslavia, the first act of the Republicans was to take tax cuts off the table (if they were ever really on it). This symbolic gesture underscores a point: when a war is on, the work of liberty is off. For this reason, everyone concerned about freedom must oppose war.

There is no magic in democracy or in democratic processes that transcends the inherent defects and limitations of government itself. A democratic government will still be a government, and this fact is more important than the mechanism by which leaders are selected.

Nowadays every frontier of human achievement faces a regulatory barrier that must be crossed. Those regulatory barriers are often prompted by interest group fears based more in political theory than reality. In particular, biotechnology is one of the more contested and feared additions to man's arsenal of control over his environment.

Without an accurate accounting picture, federal agencies do not know the costs of their programs and do not have the financial information needed to make informed day-to-day decisions. The government's failure to maintain common accounting standards creates the possibility that billions of dollars have been stolen or wasted.