The consultation of oracles, a practice long thought dead, continues on today in many forms, perhaps in a more subtle and less institutionalized than during antiquity, but powerfully nonetheless. The head of the Fed, writes Christopher Mayer, is a good example.
The judiciary's war on private property continues in Las Vegas. To borrow a line from Rush Limbaugh, the bad guys in the old west used to wear black hats, now they wear black robes.
Government has total power to make and break businessmen. This state of affairs compels businessmen, especially large, successful businessmen, to pay regular extortion money to politicians and government officials. They have to pay bribes, in the form of "campaign contributions" and "donations," to various pressure-group organizations in order not to be harmed or altogether destroyed.
To listen to mainstream economists, including Wall Street analysts, what destruction Isabel wrought is really a bonanza for the economy. Maybe, if we are really desperate to improve the local economies of our cities and towns, what all of us ought to do is bulldoze our property to the ground. Think of all the jobs that will be created when it becomes necessary to rebuild our houses, workplaces, downtowns, shopping malls and other centers of commerce from scratch.
Every once in a while, the truth about government spending somehow leaks out in Washington, writes Gregory Bresiger. Reluctantly, another one of our hired help recently told the truth about how the relentless taxing, inflating and spending of our central government is leading our nation down the road to serfdom. He then recommended more serfdom.
The neoconservative clique and their partners have deepened the state's commitment to empire, but Republicans hold no monopoly on building empire in the recent history of our country. The Clinton regime, now seemingly forgotten except as a kind of Camelot II by the American Left, featured most of the same patterns of imperial conquest and domestic repression.
The proposed tax wasn't about progress. In the next century, the states that relieve dangerous regulatory and tax discrepancies by reducing taxes and regulations will be the ones that maintain their current levels of capital investment and attract new stores of it. Low taxes are no longer an ideal from which to gauge relative policy prescriptions. Rather, they are an imperative.
The issue of government debt and deficits lay dormant throughout the high-revenue 1990s. But with recession and exploding government spending, the issue has become enormously important again. Sadly, just about everyone is missing the central point, which not that we need budget reform so much as drastic monetary reform.
H. Scott Trask sums it up: on the one hand, they believed in fractional-reserve banking, generally following Adam Smith's currency and banking theories. On the other hand, they were resolutely opposed to government-issued paper money, fiat money, legal tender laws, inconvertible paper currency, and land banks. On the question of a national bank, they were divided.
Back when the pegged currency was deemed to provide the only bastion of stability during the Asian crisis, and hence, a stable economy for which to sell American goods, no one cared a whit about establishing a "free market" for the Chinese yuan. While no one is ever safe so long as Congress is in session and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is occupied, this administration's policy, more so than any other in recent history, has been "buy here, sell elsewhere."
