Free Market

In this year of Millennium Lists ("Best Ten Songs of the Millennium," etc.), the Wall Street Journal tried its hand at the ten economists--whom it called the "best and brightest"--who have "made a difference" in the last thousand years. Of course, the big problem in twentieth-century intellectual history is that the "best and the brightest" were not the ones who "made a difference." While the list did contain some names to cheer (Aquinas, Hayek, and Schumpeter) it also had plenty to boo (Marx, Keynes, and Veblen).

If there were justice in the world, Joan Claybrook, the head of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration during the Carter administration, would be handcuffed to the steering column of a Volkswagen Beetle while an air bag was repeatedly blown up in her face. While in the government Claybrook forced on us the mandatory air bag rule. Then years later, after dozens of children were killed by air bags, she lied about her role in making them mandatory, as attorney Sam Kazman recently proved in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 trampled on the rights of states to regulate their own labor markets, by overturning local laws enacted to protect women from working long hours, working at night, lifting heavy objects, and working during pregnancy. In addition, the 1963 law prohibited employers and employees from voluntarily agreeing to separate pay scales for men and women.

The policy agenda of the Clinton administration is usually described as halting, pragmatic, and poll driven. But in its approach to the issue of medical insurance and the drive to socialize medical care, it has been systematic, principled, and highly strategic. The Clinton government is using the failures and internal contradictions of the welfare state to pursue a program of universal entitlements.

To hear educators and activists talk, one might actually believe that apathy threatens to become the defining existential feature of American youth.

Creative accounting by the Clinton administration has taken the government's budgetary imbalances out of the media's spotlight. But there is no basis for believing that we are entering a new era of fiscal responsibility. Deficits are likely to dominate future decades just as they dominated the past three.

In what can only be termed as truly bizarre, an Alabama local of the steelworkers union demanded that Alabama Governor Fob James close the international port at Mobile to all steel imports. Besides the fact that it would be clearly a violation of the U.S. Constitution for the governor to grant the union's demands, it would illegally abrogate existing contracts between suppliers and purchasers. It would also be bad economics.

Politics takes no account of individuals. You and I are merely a tiny speck on the vast blob called "the American people," and what this blob "thinks" is only relevant insofar as it accords with a political agenda advantageous to the State and its friends.

Unreconstructed Keynesians the world over are now calling for a "Global New Deal" ostensibly to put an end to the business cycle once and for all.

The most talked-about financial failure of the year is Long-Term Capital Management, an investment partnership (loosely termed a hedge fund) run by Wall Street darling John Meriwether.