The Free Market

It's true that the U.S. health care system is a mess, but this demonstrates not market but government failure. To cure the problem requires not different or more government regulations and bureaucracies, as self-serving politicians want us to believe, but the elimination of all existing government controls.

The international diamond cartel, the most successful cartel in history, far more successful than the demonized OPEC, is at last failing on hard times. For more than a century, the powerful DeBeers Consolidated Mines, a South African corporation controlled by the Rothschild Bank in London, has managed to organize the cartel, restricting the supply of diamonds on the market and raising the price far above what would have been market levels.

Special interests have long used the democratic political process to produce legislation for their own private benefit, and the U.S. Constitution contains flaws that make this easier. One attempt to remedy these flaws was the Confederate Constitution.

Last March, I laid out my "Thirty Day Plan" for de-socializing America. But I didn't scrap all of big government; now it's time for more:

The need for privatization is urgent, but unless ex-communists disabuse themselves of the notion that government should administer the transfer of state properties to private hands, privatization will remain an empty promise, and enervated state systems will lumber on indefinitely.

In contrast to conventional wisdom, from Keynesian to monetarist to eclectic, Austrian theory has recently triumphed over its host of detractors in the following ways.

Eco-socialists have to find some way to "Sustainable foist their ideas on the public. The term "socialism" doesn't sell anymore, but there are proxies. One is "sustainable development."

Now that communism has collapsed, the most powerful socialist force in the world is the coalition between George Bush and the national Democratic Party. The Washington establishment has learned absolutely nothing from the collapse of socialism. It still ignores Ludwig von Mises and the Austrian School by responding to its worldwide collapse with—you guessed it—more socialism.

Gather round, taxpayers! This is the moment you've been waiting for! Time to calculate your Peace Dividend! Now that our archenemy, the Soviet Union, is disintegrating into throat-lozenge-sized independent republics with names like "Huzzubegonia," whose primary military activity is knocking over statues of Lenin, we don't need a Defense Department anymore. This means that you, the taxpayers, MAY ALREADY HAVE WON BILLIONS OF DOLLARS! SO DON'T THROW AWAY THIS NEWSLETTER, because we are ABOUT TO TELL YOU THE SIZE OF YOUR PEACE DIVIDEND! Get ready! Better lean close to the page so you won't miss it! That's it—just a little closer... here it comes...

Labor unions are flexing their muscles again. Last year, a strike against the New York Daily News succeeded in inflicting such losses upon the company that it was forced to sell cheap to British tycoon Robert Maxwell, who was willing to accept union terms. Earlier, the bus drivers' union struck Greyhound and managed to win a long and bloody strike. How were the unions able to win these strikes, even though unions have been declining in numbers and popularity since the end of World War II? 

AIan Greenspan has received his foreordained reappointment as chairman of the Fed, to the smug satisfaction and contentment of the entire financial Establishment. For them, Greenspan's still in his heaven, and all's right with the world. No one seems to wonder at the mysterious process by which each succeeding Fed chairman instantly becomes universally revered and indispensable to the soundness of the dollar, to the banking and financial system, and to the prosperity of the economy.

Alan Greenspan has received his foreordained reappointment as chairman of the Fed, to the smug satisfaction and contentment of the entire financial Establishment.

For them, Greenspan's still in his heaven, and all's right with the world. No one seems to wonder at the mysterious process by which each succeeding Fed chairman instantly becomes universally revered and indispensable to the soundness of the dollar, to the banking and financial system, and to the prosperity of the economy.

Environmental activists have recently uncovered a plot to destroy The Planet. A foreign race has managed to infiltrate our most pristine spaces with a simple but devastating scheme: to stomp, chew, and defecate The Planet into oblivion. They are perhaps the least suspect of our fellow fauna. They are The Cows.

The debate over whether or to what extent we should bail out Gorby ($10 billion? $50 billion? $100 billion? Over how many years?) has almost universally been couched in false and misleading terms. The underlying concept seems to be that the United States government has, through some divine edict, become the wise and benign parent of Gorby/the Soviet Union, which, in its turn, has for most of its career been a wild and unruly kid, but a kid that is now maturing and showing signs of taking its place as a responsible member of the family.

Poor IBM. Apparently big isn't necessarily better in the relatively free computer market. How will IBM ever get the public to buy its fancy, expensive personal computers or pick its new operating system? How can IBM stop ACE?

Ludwig von Mises disliked hardboiled detective novels because he always knew who the murderer would be: not the butler, but a prosperous and respected gentleman of high social standing who pretends to virtue, but is actually a hidden criminal and sanctimonious hypocrite. Mises saw egalitarian envy in such tales. 

It's no different on television.

Governments have always intervened in the economy, but today's State—armed with modern data collection as well as an interventionist ideology—has taken us to a new level of regulation and taxation.

Few occurrences have been more dreaded and reviled in the 'history of economic thought than deflation. Even as perceptive a hardmoney theorist as Ricardo was unduly leery of deflation, and a positive phobia about falling prices has been central to both Keynesian and monetarist thought.

There has been a veritable revolution in the attitude of the nation's economists, as well as the public, toward our banking system. Ever since 1933, it was a stem dogma—a virtual article of faith—among economic textbooks, financial writers, and all establishment economists from Keynesians to Milton Friedman, that our commercial banking system was super-safe. Because of the wise establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1933, that dread scourge—the bank run—was a thing of the reactionary past.

In 1928 Herbert Hoover rode the coattails of Calvin Coolidge into the White House, and everyone thought he would hold the line on taxes, for he talked of "individual freedom" and criticized his opponents as "socialists."