Free Market

When discussing NASA and its impact upon our society, one must deal with myths that have been spawned by the agency and its supporters over the last four decades, the first being that NASA, supposedly driven by technology, has created new technologies that have been easily transferred to civilian use.

Consider: the government reports that job discrimination complaints against private employers increased 4 percent in 2002, to a total of 84,442, the highest level in seven years. Those filing complaints took in $310.5 million in monetary benefits. The main complaint involves race, followed by sex, but the big increase came with allegations involving religion, age, and national origin. The trend represents a huge diversion from the main goal of restoring economic growth.

The New York Times recently ran a three-part series on a string of tragic industrial accidents at facilities owned by McWane Inc., a large producer of sewer and water pipe based in Alabama. The series describes nine apparently needless and sometimes especially gruesome deaths, as well as several horrendous injuries suffered by workmen. All of them are presented as taking place in an environment of such reckless irresponsibility and callous disregard for the value of human life as to strain credulity.

There was a time when what we are currently experiencing was called a depression. But after the 1930s, that word was ruled out. Now we are losing the term recession as well. Those who follow economic headlines seek the answer to a thousand little questions but only one big one: are we getting richer or poorer? The answer to the big question is becoming increasingly obvious: we are losing ground.

When some left-wing acti-vists recently began their What Would Jesus Drive? campaign against sport utility vehicles, the first reaction of most folks—and especially libertarians—was a simple, "Are these people really serious?"

As the Washington Post recently reported, "The Federal Reserve Board has recently waged a vigorous campaign of defense, arguing that it was better to have boomed and busted than never to have boomed at all." Poetic perhaps, but is it sound?

Late last year, in a move that gives even politics a bad name, the Federal Reserve announced yet another cut in its key interest rates. Around the same time, Fed Governor Ben Bernanke gave a speech praising the power of alchemy to lower the price of gold, and, similarly, the power of the Fed to print as many dollars as it wants. Hence, the Federal Funds Rate is down to 1.25 percent, while the discount rate stands at 0.75 percent.

To read the works of Bastiat is to read economic clarity and logic at its finest. However, numerous examples of the same "broken window fallacies" Bastiat debunked some 150 years ago can be found today in abundant supply. While these neoprotectionist arguments are cloaked in modern language, their core sophisms remain unchanged.

The Free Market 21, no. 2 (February 2003)

Proponents of markets often note that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

As details of the 2000 Census emerge, commentators across the country are spinning "somebody done somebody wrong" economics to describe the US economy in the 1990s. Their recurring theme is that rich Americans got richer because poor Americans got poorer.

Many of the same people who debunked Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty, and ridiculed its failures, are enthusiastically backing George W. Bush’s War on Terror. Both are big-government programs. Why back one and not the other?

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union ceased to exist two years later, many western commentators optimistically declared that socialism had fallen with those two entities. However, as we limp from one economic morass into another, it has become clear that the dream of socialism is far from dead.

Does business run on greed?

The Free Market 20, no. 12 (December 2002)

The Federal Reserve System may have run out of room to maneuver. Facing a looming recession, it resolutely lowered its discount rate and frantically expanded its credits. Eager to stimulate the sagging economy, it enabled and encouraged businessmen to invest more and consumers to go ever deeper into debt. Yet the specter of recession refuses to fade away.

Uncle Sam wants you, even if you are still in diapers. Incredible as it may sound, the Washington, DC, city council is considering a bill that would extend mandatory school attendance laws to very young children—even some 2-year-olds. Bill 14-261 requires all children who turn three before December 31 of an academic school year to be schooled.

As the markets continue to wallow in bear territory, and as consumer—and, more important, investor—confidence falls, writers and commentators of all stripes have weighed in to give their two cents’ worth concerning the key question: who or what is at fault?

here are those who want to believe that a market economy is itself unstable, prone to periods of excess and in need of stabilization by some outside authority. As Jeff Madrick wrote recently for the New York Times, “government itself is a necessary bulwark against recession.”

The US government is attacking capitalism under the guise of cracking down on "corporate criminals." Corporate CEOs are being demonized and blamed for the collapsing stock market Bubble. Exploiting the Enron and WorldCom bankruptcies, Washington DC has imposed the most sweeping accounting and securities laws since the 1930s.

What a sight: the legislative and executive branches of government celebrating as they impose new criminal codes against corporate fraud, each politician trying to outdo the other in their moral outrage against business. These are people who created and guard what is perhaps the greatest financial fraud of all time, the $2 trillion federal budget.