The Free Market

The Republican leadership and their advisers are confirming Murray Rothbard's doubts. Writing in the Washington Post, Rothbard noted the vast ideological divide between the voters and those who control the Republican Congress. His prediction: the leadership will defend the old order of government control even as its legitimacy is unraveling. The revolution was betrayed, he said, even before the Republicans took control. 

In 1994, bondholders lost hundreds of billions, thanks to Clinton's monetary escapades. What happened? It's a sad story of interest rates and their manipulation by government planners.

When a people rebels and declares its independence, a central state can let them go or beat them into submission. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, we've seen some of both. In Chechnya, and adjacent Ingushetia, however, the Yeltsin government chose mass murder to maintain its evil empire.

Franklin Roosevelt "did bring us out of the Depression," Newt Gingrich told a group of Republicans after the recent election, and that makes FDR "the greatest figure of the 20th century." As political rhetoric, the statement is likely to come from someone who does not support a market economy. The New Deal, after all, was the largest peacetime expansion of federal government power in this century. Moreover, Gingrich's view that FDR saved us from the Depression is indefensible; Roosevelt's policies prolonged and deepened it.

This past baseball season promised to be the most exciting in my lifetime. Then the players' union opposed the owners' demand for a salary cap and refused to work. Baseball struck out. In the battle over blame, the most curious call is the union's for a "free market." The most often-cited remedy is to remove the owner's antitrust exemption. 

America's bankers consider Robert Morris a hero. More than 15,000 of them belong to Robert Morris Associates. Founded in 1914, the RMA organization strives for professionalism in banking practice and considers ethics paramount.

So who is the revered figure after whom this association of ethical bankers is named?

One of the persistent Clintonian themes of the 1994 campaign still endures: if "it's the economy, stupid," then why hasn't President Clinton received the credit among the public for our glorious economic recovery? Hence the Clintonian conclusion that the resounding Democratic defeat was due to their failure to "get the message out" to the public, the message being the good news of our current economic prosperity.

Richard Nixon thought that going off the gold standard would be good for himself politically. But his reckless action made possible, even inevitable, the explosive expansion of government spending, debt, and intervention that followed.

The election of 1994 was an unprecedented and smashing electoral expression of the popular revolution that had been building up for many months: a massive repudiation of President Clinton, the Clintonian Democratic Party, their persons and all of their works. It was a fitting follow up to the string of revolutions against government and socialism in the former states and satellites of the Soviet Union. The anti-government revolution has come home at last.

As political scams go, it's hard to top Social Security. It has imposed a prosperity-crushing tax bite on everyone, promoted financial irresponsibility in the middle class, and torn apart the generations. It has lessened the respect any civilized society should have for its elders, even turning some of them into greedy lobbyists. And it has expanded government's reach beyond what any free society should tolerate. The program doesn't even provide security. 

The two-to-one vote in favor of California's Prop. 187 is a milestone in the battle against the welfare state. It is a victory that will help reclaim individual liberty against centralized power.

The phrase "End Welfare As We Know It" is a classic Clinton evasion. It sounds bold and "neoliberal" at first, but on close examination it collapses into nothingness. Almost any change in a policy qualifies as ending it "as we know it." It could mean cuts. It could also mean more spending and redistribution. 

"Peace on Earth" should be more than a holiday cliché. The costs of war and its perpetual threat are immense, and threaten freedom and civilization itself. Even with the end of the Cold War, the U.S. finds itself in an endless series of military squabbles, including Panama, Iraq, Somalia, and Haiti, with prospects for future involvement in Korea, Bosnia, Cambodia, and Rwanda.

Federal bureaucrats think they, not the financial markets should direct investment spending. They want to rebuild "infrastructure," fund space stations, install magnetic supertrains, and set up information highways (or redistribute the existing ones). That's what President Clinton means when he says he'll "grow the economy" through "investment."

Think of the U.S. Postal Service as a Soviet planning bureaucracy. The P.S. causes severe and systemic dislocations, imposes a terrible burden on enterprise and the citizenry, and is sometimes tyrannical. Also like Soviet planning, the longer it lasts, the worse it gets. It is doomed to fail and be dismantled.

Did 12 years of Reagan-Bush corrupt the Right? "Whatever they might say in their after-dinner speeches or in their op-ed pieces," writes former Wall Street Journal editorialist David Frum in his new book Dead Right, conservatives have "effectively thrown in the towel on government spending" and given up the war against big government.

American government, we are told, is notable for its stability. And so it seems, at least on the surface. But stability over a long period, as the Russian tsars could tell us, is no guarantee of permanence. And the tsars fell very suddenly after ruling far longer than the U.S. government's two centuries.

Governments, especially including the US. government, seem to be congenitally incapable of keeping their mitts off any part of the economy. Government, aided and abetted by its host of apologists among intellectuals and policy wonks, likes to regard itself as a deus ex machina (a "god out of the machine") that surveys its subjects with Olympian benevolence and omniscience, and then repeatedly descends to earth to fix up the numerous "market failures" that mere people, in their ignorance, persist in committing.

Alexandr I. Solzhenitsyn's return to Russia has engendered more than the usual amount of scaremongering. The author, we are told, is a Pan-Slavic nationalistic and religious fanatic whose views are outdated and irrelevant. Yet Solzhenitsyn used his first speech and press conference in Russia to promote two economic ideas that can actually move Russia forward: private property and free enterprise.

President Roosevelt ran against government spending and deficits, but once in office acted like a dictator.

Roosevelt overthrew the traditional limits on government's role and instituted central planning and welfarism in every sector of the economy.