Price fixing occurs when individuals from competing firms agree on what prices to charge for their products and services. Because private price fixing is illegal in the United States, these meetings are done in private and carry potential criminal penalties if the participants are apprehended. However, lest one think price fixing is a shady activity, consider that governments at all levels are the primary price fixers.
To cascade onto George W. Bush the title of "great one" is merely a way of linking greatness with the ability to wage conflict and perpetuate the growth of the State. And nowhere is liberty infringed upon more than in times of war--a president's most useful crisis for manipulating power to the advantage of his office and its administrators. From this cause, advancing statism determines who we are expected to deify as our redeemer.
The 1922 baseball antitrust exemption ruling is one of the few remaining precedents adhering to the earlier, limited-government understanding of the commerce clause. So while some local sports fans may support further limiting baseball's antitrust exemption as a way to keep their teams from moving to another town, it comes at a constitutional price that is too high.
Economies do not subside because demand wanes--we could all use a shiny new car, or a beautiful new house pretty much any time. However, in a world where means, unlike wants, are not infinite, we have to be able to offer something in exchange. We do that by first profitably producing things other people require, at a price they are willing to pay, not by stamping our feet and making demands like a petulant 5-year-old.
The American nation state has effectively served as the church of this religion in the United States. The American "Vatican" is Washington, D.C., also a unique governing jurisdiction within the boundaries of a nation-state, like its Roman counterpart. Led by its economic priesthood, the American government administers the affairs of the nation to achieve a secular salvation for all its citizens--the attainment of a new heaven on earth.
In uncertain times such as today, it is too easy to look the other way when the federal government expands its power and curtails our freedoms. In a fit of rhetorical frenzy, the attorney general himself told a Senate panel that those who scare "peace-loving people" with "phantoms of lost liberty" are themselves aiding terrorists.
Since the government's rules for money creation are not working, it seems that the only plan of action that today's Keynesian economists should accept is for government to make counterfeiting legal. Lest anyone think this is silly, imagine the "stimulus" benefits that counterfeiting would produce.
It does not take $30 billion to determine that one hundred years of trying to rule the world was bound to result in retaliation at some point, or that $300 billion will not stop determined fanatics. All the CIA had to do to find out that a major terrorist attack was coming was to have had one clerk read the web for the last few years.
Watchdog groups are correct to monitor the disbursement of the Red Cross's September 11 donations. And the issue of appropriate uses of charitable funds promoted for a particular purpose must be addressed. But the same issue should be raised about innumerable government initiatives whose claimed goals are also undermined by the same diversion of resources.
Successful people who earn their wealth through free and peaceful exchange may choose to give some of it away, but they'd be no less moral and no less debt-free if they gave away nothing. It cheapens the powerful charitable impulse that all but a few people possess to suggest that charity is equivalent to debt service or that it should be motivated by any degree of guilt or self-flagellation.
