The Lord of the Rings is the epic journey to destroy the One Ring, which symbolizes power. More precisely, the book aligns itself against power--not "economic power" or "social power," but specifically political power. This is also the central theme of the classical liberal political tradition.
If we are to take one lesson from the current state of the world economy--and the geopolitical stresses and ideological divides which reflect this--we should alter the (oft-misquoted) phrase from the second book of Timothy. Rather than holding that "the love of money is the root of all evil," we should all fervently avow that "the existence of dishonest money is the root of all evil."
Contrary to popular myth, every Republican president since and including Herbert Hoover has increased the federal government's size, scope, or power. Over the last one hundred years, of the five presidents who presided over the largest domestic spending increases, four were Republicans.
The prolonged Japanese economic slump is not due to price deflation but is the product of aggressive fiscal and monetary policies aimed at arresting the general fall in prices of goods and services. Contrary to the popular view, as a rule, price deflation is always good news for the economy. Thus, when prices are falling in response to the expansion of real wealth, this means that people's living standards are rising.
John Walker Lindh has pleaded not guilty to the charge that he conspired to kill Americans. It does seem like this religious pilgrim was caught at the wrong place, on the wrong side, at the wrong time. He was drawn to Islamic fundamentalism. For him it was the radical alternative to what he came to regard as the corrupt materialism of the West. He was there when the U.S. troops came, and now he faces life in prison.
The City of New York monopolizes the distribution of water, and as such the supply is always in jeopardy. Rather than study the details of the city's recently adopted Drought Management Plan, New York residents would be wiser to pray for rain.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and others who claim that the Enron scandal will be a watershed for regulation miss the point. Government regulation already dominates our economic landscape. Tossing on a few more rules might do damage, but it will not prevent fraud from occurring in the future.
Amtrak was sold to taxpayers back in May 1971 as something that would be superior to privately owned passenger railroads, and with the promise that the government would make money running trains. That's something Amtrak has never done in its sorry history. Indeed, it has never once even come close to breaking even, nor does it have any prospect of doing so in the future.
It is the widespread view in academia that John Maynard Keynes was a model classical liberal in the tradition of Locke, Jefferson, and Tocqueville. But if Keynes was such a model champion of the free society, how can we account for his peculiar comments in 1933 endorsing the social "experiments" that were going on at the time in Italy, Germany, and Russia? And what about his strange introduction to the 1936 German translation of General Theory, where he writes that his approach to economic policy is much better suited to a totalitarian state such as that run by the Nazis?
While assorted financial journalists, market pundits, policy wonks, Fed governors and even mainstream macroeconomists have been thrown into a panic by the slight whiff of price deflation they detected in the last few months in the U.S. economy, they have almost completely ignored the wrenching confiscatory deflation that is now going on in Argentina
