Labor unions are flexing their muscles again. Last year, a strike against the New York Daily News succeeded in inflicting such losses upon the company that it was forced to sell cheap to British tycoon Robert Maxwell, who was willing to accept union terms. Earlier, the bus drivers’ union struck Greyhound and managed to win a long and bloody strike. How were the unions able to win these strikes, even though unions have been declining in numbers and popularity since the end of World War II?

We live, increasingly, in a Jacobin Age. Memory, embodied in birthdays, anniversaries, and other commemorations, is vitally important to an individual, a family, or a nation. These ceremonies are critical for the self-identity and the renewed dedication to that identity, of a person or of a people.

Privatization is the “in” term, on local, state, and federal levels of government. Even functions that our civic textbooks tell us can only be performed by government, such as prisons, are being accomplished successfully, and far more efficiently, by private enterprise. For once, a fashionable concept contains a great deal of sense.

Free-market advocates are clear about what should be done about government services and operations: they should be privatized. While there is considerable confusion about how the process should be accomplished, the goal is crystal-clear. But apart from trying to speed up privatization, and also forcing that process indirectly by slashing the budgets of government agencies, what is supposed to be done in the meantime?

Most people exhibit a healthy lack of interest in the United Nations and its endless round of activities and conferences, considering them as boring busywork to sustain increasing hordes of tax-exempt bureaucrats, consultants, and pundits.

There is a continuing dispute about whether President Clinton is an Old “tax-and-spend” (read: socialistic) Democrat, or a New “centrist” Democrat. What a centrist New Democrat is supposed to be is vague, but the two examples of the New Democrat noted so far seem indistinguishable from the Old.

California’s Prop. 174 was the most ambitious school voucher plan to date. It was carefully planned well in advance, led by a veteran campaign manager, boosted by a nationwide propaganda effort of conservatives and libertarians, and tried out in a state where it is widely recognized that the public school system has failed abysmally. And yet, on the November 2 ballot, Prop. 174 was clobbered by the voters, losing in every county, and going down to defeat by 70–30 percent.

In recent years, Americans have been subjected to a concerted assault upon their national symbols, holidays, and anniversaries. Washington’s Birthday has been forgotten, and Christopher Columbus has been denigrated as an evil Euro-White male, while new and obscure anniversary celebrations have been foisted upon us. New heroes have been manufactured to represent “oppressed groups” and paraded before us for our titillation.

Many conservatives and free-marketeers believe that an inherent conflict exists between profits, free-markets, and “soulless capitalism,” and money-making on the one hand, as against traditional values, devotion to older culture, and historical landmarks on the other. On the one hand, we have bumptious bourgeoisie devoted only to money; on the other, we have people who want to conserve a sense of the past.