The economic acumen of Establishment politicians, economists, and the financial press, never very high at best, has plunged to new lows in recent years. The state of confusion, self-contradiction, and general feather-brainedness has never been so rampant. Almost any event can now be ascribed to any cause, or to the contradiction of the very cause assigned the previous week.

Financial scandals are juicy, dramatic, and fun, especially when they bring down such arrogant and aggressive social lions as Salomon Brothers’ head, John Gutfreund and his crew. And even more so when they elevate, as the rugged Nebraskan in the white hat riding in to Wall Street to try to save the day, Mr. Integrity, billionaire Warren Buffett (coincidentally, the son of my old friend, the staunch libertarian and pro-gold Congressman, the late Howard Buffett). But when we have stopped exhilarating in Mr.

Ever since Black, or Meltdown, Monday October 19, 1987, the public has been deluged with irrelevant and contradictory explanations and advice from politicians, economists, financiers, and assorted pundits. Let’s try to sort out and rebut some of the nonsense about the nature, causes, and remedies for the crash.

Myth 1: It was not a crash, but a “correction.”

Quick: what do the following world-famous men have in common: John Kenneth Galbraith, Donald J. Trump, and David Rockefeller? What values could possibly be shared by the socialist economist who got rich by writing best-selling volumes denouncing affluence; the billionaire wheeler-dealer; and the fabulous head of the financially and politically powerful Rockefeller World Empire?

There is a veritable Reign of Terror rampant in the United States—and everyone’s cheering. “They should lock those guys up and throw away the key. Nothing is bad enough for them,” says the man-in-the-street.

The “partnership of government and business” is a new term for an old, old condition. We often fail to realize that the point of much of Big Government is precisely to set up such “partnerships,” for the benefit of both government and business, or rather, of certain business firms and groups that happen to be in political favor.

The press touted it as yet another chapter in the unending success story of “government-business cooperation.” The traditional tale is that a glaring problem arises, caused by the unchecked and selfish actions of capitalist greed. And that then a wise and far-sighted government agency, seeing deeply and having only the public interest at heart, steps in and corrects the failure, its sage regulations gently but firmly bending private actions to the common good.

Empiricism without theory is a shaky reed on which to build a case for freedom. If a regulated airline system did not “work,” and a deregulated system seemed for a time to work well, what happens when the winds of data happen to blow the other way? In recent months, crowding, delays, a few dramatic accidents, and a spate of bankruptcies and mergers among the airlines have given heart to the statists and vested interests who were never reconciled to deregulation.

Little over 25 years ago a revolutionary event occurred in the world of business and in American society generally. It was a revolution accomplished without bloodshed and without anyone being executed. The Xerox 914, the world’s first fully-automated plain-paper copier, was exhibited to the press in New York City.

One of the fascinating features of the current political scene is its bitter, and nearly unprecedented, polarization. On the one hand, there has been welling up in recent months a palpable, intense, and very extensive popular grass-roots movement of deep-seated loathing for President Clinton the man, for his ideology and for his politics, for all those associated with Clinton, and for the Leviathan government in Washington.