The idea of the steel tariff is to help one inefficient, bloated, and pampered industry at the expense of all U.S. consumers of steel, including U.S. businesses, and all producers in Europe, Asia, Brazil, and Australia. This brazen protectionism is deeply harmful all around, not to mention morally repugnant.
A quarter century ago, there was a gasoline crisis--caused more by gasoline price controls than OPEC--which convinced Congress that Americans were not competent to make their own automotive choices. Thus, CAFE standards were born. They were intended to force us to get better mileage by imposing harsh penalties on any automaker whose fleet did not meet rising fuel economy standards. The Senate rejected an increase but what about existing rules?
The U.S. government's plan to introduce an improved Consumer Price Index that theoretically would measure inflation more accurately is an exercise in futility. Inflation is not about a general increase in prices; it is about increases in the money supply. Hence, whatever the improved index would measure has nothing to do with true inflation.
Since people are self-interested, it is essential that no one person, firm, or state be allowed to set the terms under which competition takes place, whether the competition is in the marketplace or the sports arena. To allow otherwise would be to allow the reappearance of mercantilism.
A heritage of honesty and hard work are marvelous tools for papering over the failures of welfarism and subtle servitude. With the right attitude, a prison population can settle into a comfortable and egalitarian existence, one that might even impress Queen Catherine passing by on a boat. Such is the case in Denmark today.
Using changes in the margin regulation as a stick to beat the stock bubble does not work, fails to solve the underlying problem, and further injures investors by restricting their choices. What Fed Chairman Greenspan didn't know is something that the young Greenspan and his mentor Ludwig von Mises did: that monetary freedom is the way to end market bubbles once and for all.
There are some people who think that leaving the setting of many of the terms of California's energy trade to politicians and bureaucrats constitutes a substantially regulated, not a deregulated, energy market. Just because there were some aspects of this trade that were removed from the province of California's government, it does not follow that the market was deregulated--meaning, set free.
Politicians are never ones to miss a chance to use a current issue to impose more economic controls, this time on crematories. Before we see these folks as heroes who are attempting to fight against the ravages of profit-mongering capitalists, perhaps we should take another look at this and other situations where massive fraud has taken place within a business setting.
Opponents of the market say we have to stop another Enron from happening again. Yet all the government's watchdog agencies completely missed Enron. The system of cronyism in Washington, D.C., made the debacle possible and made it harder for the public to find out what was going on. Existing laws will put Enron executives behind bars, but they won't touch any of Enron's accomplices in Washington.
It is time for Argentines to cash in their experience with government power, government law, government regulation, government money, and government care. They attended a hard school and paid high tuition. It taught all who cared to learn that, after every conceivable political device has been tried and found wanting, there remains freedom.
