The great historian Charles A. Beard used to talk about the vital gulf between “appearance” and “reality” that pervades our politics and our political system. Rarely has that gulf been as striking and as revealing as in the bitter and intense struggle over Nafta. On the surface, Nafta dealt with a few puny tariffs covering a small fraction of American trade. So why the fuss and feathers? Why did the Clinton administration pull out all the stops, throwing caution to the winds by openly and shamelessly buying Congressional votes?

Whenever anyone talks about “fairness,” the average American had better look to his wallet. When social pressure groups invoke “fairness,” it means that American business must be saddled with quotas for mandatory hiring or promoting of myriad special interest groups, depending on who can get themselves organized and win the ear of the politicians.

For many years, America’s campuses have been sunk in political apathy. The values of the 1950s are supposed to be back, including concentration on one’s career and lack of interest in social or political causes.

The international diamond cartel, the most successful cartel in history, far more successful than the demonized OPEC, is at last falling on hard times. For more than a century, the powerful DeBeers Consolidated Mines, a South African corporation controlled by the Rothschild Bank in London, has managed to organize the cartel, restricting the supply of diamonds on the market and raising the price far above what would have been market levels.

Sometimes it seems that our entire apparatus of economic education: countless courses, students, professors, textbooks, backed up—in the case of oil pricing—by a decade of experience in the 1970s, is a gigantic waste of time. Certainly it seems that way when we ponder the near-universal reaction to the Kuwait crisis.

Amidst the near-universal hoopla for President Bush’s massive intervention into the Arabian Peninsula, a few sober observers have pointed out the curious lack of clarity in Mr.

In March 1986, I spent a fascinating week at a conference at a hotel in Mrogowo, in the lake country of northern Poland (formerly East Prussia). The conference, a broad-ranging symposium on “Economics and Social Change,” was hosted by the Institute of Sociology at the University of Warsaw, and sponsored by a group of English conservative and free-market scholars.

He had been widely touted by the American media as the savior of Peru from hyperinflation and from the dangers posed by the current socialistic Garcia regime as well as the fanatical Maoist-type guerrillas who call themselves “The Shining Path.” Mario Vargas Llosa, tall, aristocratic, eminent avant-garde novelist and ex-leftist, was running for president of Peru.

In their eagerness to desocialize in 1989, the Soviets called in Western economists and political scientists—trying to imbibe wisdom from the fount of capitalism. In this search for answers, the host of American and European Marxist academics were conspicuous by their absence. Having suffered under socialism for generations, the Soviets and East Europeans have had it up to here with Marxism; they hardly need instruction from starry-eyed Western naifs who have never been obliged to live under their Marxist ideal.

The debate over whether or to what extent we should bail out Gorby ($10 billion? $50 billion? $100 billion? Over how many years?) has almost universally been couched in false and misleading terms. The underlying concept seems to be that the United States government has, through some divine edict, become the wise and benign parent of the Soviet Union, which, in its turn, has for most of its career been a wild and unruly kid, but a kid that is now maturing and showing signs of taking its place as a responsible member of the family.