The Washington Times asked the new UN head why he thinks the agency has a PR problem in the United States. "It is a leftover from the late seventies and eighties," he said, "when there was a lot of talking about getting government off the back of people."
The personal, political, and scholarly papers of Ludwig von Mises have been discovered in a formerly secret archive in Moscow. So have the papers of many of Mises's colleagues and associates during his years in Vienna, including friends and foes in academia, politics, and business.
Washington's sudden fixation on campaign finance won't bring about honesty in government, and it won't increase anyone's liberty. But it does give the public a real-world civics lesson. For it shows that government is no neutral arbiter of justice, but a corrupt scheme by which the politically powerful enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else.
The welfare state keeps being reinvented under new labels. In 1993, the Clinton administration renewed the Bush program (dreamed up by then HUD secretary Jack Kemp) called "Moving to Opportunity" (MTO). It gave welfare recipients housing vouchers worth as much as $1,677 per month for rental housing in middle-class neighborhoods.
My idea of a great president is one who acts in accordance with his oath of office to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." Not since the presidency of Grover Cleveland has any president achieved greatness by this standard. Worse, the most admired have been those who failed most miserably. Evidently my standard differs from that employed by others who judge presidential greatness.
Congress proved it: not even childbirth is off limits to federal mandates. Forty-eight hours will heretofore be the minimum hospital stay for new mothers, Congress said, double the time insurance companies used to cover. Who could disagree with such tender loving care, courtesy of D.C.?
Remember how, when you were a kid, the drawstrings on your jacket were constantly catching on the seesaw or the swing? How sometimes a passing car would snag the drawstrings of a friends hood, garroting him before your eyes? Neither do I. But someone at the Consumer Product Safety Commission must, because drawstrings are on their way out.
They should have called it the Federal Advisory Panel for a Huge and Sneaky Tax Increase and a Massive Increase in Corporate Welfare. That—and not "privatization"—is the real upshot of what the advisory counsel to fix Social Security recommended.
Academic fraud has never been more acceptable. Works of literature are purged of material contrary to the latest political fad. Photographs are airbrushed to exclude incorrect habits like smoking. Movies with the wrong message are cut.
The same is true in economics, and the most recent con job involves the manipulation of data that reflect poorly on the government.
Among the many excuses for government planning is that it makes life safer for one and all. The automobile bears the brunt of this central planning. Like most all interventions in the free market, the effect of mandates to make the car safer is nearly the opposite. Witness the recent air bag fiasco.
