Senator Daniel P. Moynihan (D-NY) has performed a signal service for all Americans by calling into question, for the first time since the early 1980s, the soundness of the nation’s beloved Social Security System. A decade ago, the public was beginning to learn of the imminent bankruptcy of Social Security, only to be sent back into their half-century slumber in 1983 by the bipartisan Greenspan commission, which “saved” Social Security by installing a whopping and ever-rising set of increases in the Social Security tax.

The latest large-scale assault upon property rights and the free market comes from the insurance industry and its associated incurrers of liability: particularly groups of manufacturers and the organized medical profession. They charge that runaway juries have been awarding skyrocketing increases in liability payments, thereby threatening to bankrupt the insurance industry as well as impose higher costs upon, or deprive of liability insurance, those industries and occupations that juries have adjudged to be guilty.

One of Ludwig von Mises’s keenest insights was on the cumulative tendency of government intervention. The government, in its wisdom, perceives a problem (and Lord knows, there are always problems!). The government then intervenes to “solve” that problem. But lo and behold! instead of solving the initial problem, the intervention creates two or three further problems, which the government feels it must intervene to heal, and so on toward socialism.

Ever since its inception in the 1930s, the welfare state has proceeded in the following way. First, liberals discover social and economic problems. Not a difficult task: the human race has always had such problems and will continue to, short of the Garden of Eden. Liberals, however, usually need scores of millions in foundation grants and taxpayer-financed commissions to come up with the startling revelations of disease, poverty, ignorance, homelessness, et al.

One of the most horrifying features of the New Deal was its agricultural policy: in the name of “curing the depression,” the federal government organized a giant cartel of America’s farmers. In the middle of the worst depression in American history, the federal government forced farmers to plow under every third acre of wheat and to kill one-third of their little pigs, all to drive up food prices by forcing the supply of each product downward.

The media focuses primarily on the horrifying shots of starving children, and secondarily on the charges and countercharges about which governments—the Western, the Ethiopian, or whatever—are responsible for relief not getting to the starving thousands on time. In the midst of the media blitz, the important and basic questions get lost in the shuffle. For example, why does Nature seem to frown only on socialist countries? If the problem is drought, why do the rains only elude countries that are socialist or heavily statist?

It is a common myth that the near-disappearance of the whale and of various species of fish was caused by “capitalist greed,” which, in a shortsighted grab for profits, despoiled the natural resources—the geese that laid the golden eggs—from which those profits used to flow. Hence, the call for government to step in and either seize the ownership of these resources, or at least to regulate strictly their use and development.

We all know how the environmentalists, seemingly determined at all costs to save the spotted owl, delivered a crippling blow to the logging industry in the Northwest. But this slap at the economy may be trivial compared to what might happen to the lovely city of San Antonio, Texas, endangered by the deadly and despotic combination of the environmentalist movement and the federal judiciary.

Natural disasters, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and volcanic eruptions, occur from time to time, and many victims of such disasters have an unfortunate tendency to seek out someone to blame. Or rather, to pay for their aid and rehabilitation. These days, Papa Government (a stand-in for the hapless taxpayer) is called on loudly to shell out.

Most people agree that government is generally less efficient than private enterprise, but it is little realized that the difference goes far beyond efficiency. For one thing, there is a crucial difference in attitude toward the consumer. Private business firms are constantly courting the consumer, always eager to increase the sales of their products. So insistent is that courtship that business advertising is often criticized by liberal aesthetes and intellectuals as strident and unmannerly.