Free Market

Senator Daniel P. Moynihan (D-NY) has performed a signal service for all Americans by calling into question, for the first time since the early 1980s, the soundness of the nation's beloved Social Security System.

It is generally agreed, both inside and outside Eastern Europe, that the only cure for their intensifying and grinding poverty is to abandon socialism and central planning, and to adopt private property rights and a free-market economy. But a critical problem is that Western conventional wisdom counsels going slowly, "phasing-in" freedom, rather than taking the always-reviled path of radical and comprehensive social change.

The banking dilemma seems eternal, like the monetary dilemma, the tax dilemma, and the marital dilemma. The essence of the banking dilemma, however, is that the depositors' money is not in the vault awaiting the depositors' decision to withdraw it. Instead it is out on loan or invested in the money market or in mortgage-backed securities.

The pace of change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is so brisk that it is risky to write anything about it. Nevertheless, the virtual dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of liberalization in East Germany are exhilarating news, the climax of months of historic developments.

Why must taxpayers A and B be forced to pay for natural disasters that strike C? Why can't C—and his private insurance carriers—foot the bill?

American agricultural policy offers many instructive lessons on how to cripple a major sector of the economy. For 60 years, the U.S. government has waged a war against the market. And for 60 years, American taxpayers and consumers have been the biggest losers. 

The belief in over-population is an ancient one. The leaders of the French Revolution were convinced that there were too many Frenchmen, and that an ideal France necessitated the elimination of many people. The myth of over-population did not originate with them. It is an ancient belief of statist man

Government cannot be trusted to pick and choose acceptable art, and that's merely one more reason to junk the two endowments. It's time Congress i and the administration promoted unlimited free expression by abolishing federal handouts to those doing the expressing.

History usually proceeds at a glacial pace, so glacial that often no institutional or political changes seem to be occurring at all. And then, wham! a piling up of a large number of other minor grievances and tensions reaches a certain point, and there is an explosion of radical social change. Changes begin to occur at so rapid a pace that old markets quickly dissolve. Social and political life shifts with blinding speed from stagnation to escalation and volatility. This is what it must have been like living through the French Revolution.

When Ronald Reagan was elected to the presidency in 1980, many conservatives (myself among them) were euphoric. They expected a wholesale reform in American government; there was even talk of a "Reagan Revolution." 

When Reagan left office eight years later, it looked as if the liberals had been right.