"Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else," writes Frederic Bastiat in his 1848 essay, Government, which may be the most insightful critique of America's government available today.
No government can live up to its billing as a semi-divine problem solver. Government intervention is not an alternative to the market; it merely creates a different kind of market full of con men selling very sour lemons.
Instead of incorporating the agenda of those who would malign free enterprise, business schools should do more to educate tomorrow's corporate executives about the myriad ways in which business advances social progress.
As America's economy continues to struggle in response to Federal Reserve policy during the 1990s, and as regulators are given free reign during wartime, China could be poised to overtake the U.S. as the world's leading economic superpower within the next ten to twenty years.
Forest industry and other private timberland owners increasingly are burdened by environmental and other government regulations that in many cases constitute de facto seizures of their property rights.
Drug war-related injuries are bound to dominate the emergency room services of virtually all inner-city hospitals. And, although this incredible violence in America's inner cities is almost exclusively the result of the war on drugs, none of it should come as a surprise.
We tend to think of trade as low-grade war with winners and losers, but the reality is otherwise. A vibrant trade in agriculture with the Third World would mean that the masses of people in both the developed and developing worlds would benefit.
Contrary to popular thinking, economics is not about GDP or CPI or other economic indicators as such, but about human activities that seek to promote people's lives and well-being. So what are the tools that economists and financial experts utilize in their assessments of the economy? What is the basis of their framework of thought?
Even without the war, we are doing everything wrong that the Hoover-Roosevelt-McDonald governments and the Strong-Norman bankers did in the 1930s, after their long decade of easy money and paper prosperity imploded under the weight of too much debt and too great a strain on real capital resources.
While the politicians and their media allies prattle on about "winners" and "losers" in the Microsoft antitrust case, they miss the larger story, one that has become a typical American tale: the ongoing assault of the Leviathan State upon the once free and productive business sector.
