From its inception America was largely the land of the free, but there were a few exceptions. One was the blatant subsidies to the politically powerful maritime industry. Trying to protect what has long been a chronically inefficient industry from international competition, one of the initial actions of the first American Congress in 1789 was to pass the Jones Act, which protected both maritime owners and their top employees. The Jones Act provided that vessels of five or more tons in American waters had to be owned by U.S.

In 1988, we were living through the most significant and exciting event of the twentieth century: nothing less than the collapse of socialism.

It is truly sobering these days to turn from a contemplation of American politics to world affairs. Among the hot issues in the United States has been the piteous complaint about the “martyrdom” of Jim Wright, Tony Coelho, and John Tower to the insidious advance of “excessive” ethics. If we tighten up ethics and crack down on graft and conflict of interest, the cry goes, how will we attract good people into government?

Everyone in Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe wants to desocialize. They are convinced that socialism doesn’t work, and are anxious to get, as quickly as possible, to a society of private property and a market economy. As Mieczyslaw Wilczek, Poland’s leading private entrepreneur, and Communist minister of industry before the recent elections, put it: “There haven’t been Communists in Poland for a long time. Nobody wants to hear about Marx and Lenin any more.”

It is generally agreed, both inside and outside Eastern Europe, that the only cure for their intensifying and grinding poverty is to abandon socialism and central planning, and to adopt private property rights and a free-market economy. But a critical problem is that Western conventional wisdom counsels going slowly, “phasing-in” freedom, rather than taking the always-reviled path of radical and comprehensive social change.

Even in the days before perestroika, socialism was never a monolith. Within the Communist countries, the spectrum of socialism ranged from the quasi-market, quasi-syndicalist system of Yugoslavia to the centralized totalitarianism of neighboring Albania. One time I asked Professor von Mises, the great expert on the economics of socialism, at what point on this spectrum of statism would he designate a country as “socialist” or not.

Every war in American history has been the occasion for a Great Leap Forward in the power of the State, a leap which, at best, could only be partly rolled back after the war.

The election of 1994 was an unprecedented and smashing electoral expression of the popular revolution that had been building up for many months: a massive repudiation of President Clinton, the Clintonian Democratic Party, their persons and all of their works. It was a fitting followup to the string of revolutions against government and socialism in the former states and satellites of the Soviet Union. The anti-government revolution has come home at last.

If conservatives and free-market economists are supposed to have one dominant virtue, it is a thoughtful awareness of the indirect and not just the immediate consequences of a public policy. In the spirit of Henry Hazlitt’s “Broken Window Fallacy,” they are supposed to bring a “look before we leap” attitude into political life.