In the 18th century, as he had for millennia, the urban peddler went from door to door with a sack on his back. When we see this antique method of economic organization, not in a museum setting at Colonial Williamsburg but daily on the streets of every city and town in America, we know the government is in charge.
Modern liberalism works in a simple but effective manner: liberals Find Problems. This is not a difficult task, considering that the world abounds with problems waiting to be discovered. At the heart of these problems is the fact that we do not live in the Garden of Eden: that there is a scarcity of resources available for us to achieve all of our desired goals. Thus: there is the Problem of X number [to be discovered by sociological research] of people over 65 with hangnails; and the Problem that there are over 200 million Americans who cannot afford the BMW of their dreams.
In primitive societies, witchdoctors legitimized tyrannical government by naming it the mandate of heaven. In return, they got a cut of the earthly loot.
In the U.S., some economists serve the same function. For promoting government intervention as scientific, and advising on the most efficient forms, they receive power, prestige, and money from Washington.
American families need more affordable child care. But the answer is not more government involvement. When child care is run, funded, and regulated by the government, it can only make the existing problem worse. And it’s bad for our liberty as well.
On August 2, 1988, President Ronald Reagan announced that he had changed his mind about the pro-union plant-closing bill. He had vetoed it three months earlier, but now let it become law without his signature after intense pressure from presidential nominee George Bush and former Treasury Secretary James Baker, now Bush’s campaign chairman. Reagan claimed that only this action would enable him to sign a Congressional trade bill almost unequaled in its anti-consumer protectionism.
International statists have long dreamed of a world currency and a world central bank. Now it looks as if their dream may come true.
European governments have targeted 1992 for abolishing individual European currencies and replacing them with the European Currency Unit, the ECU. Next they plan to set up a European central bank. The next step is the merger of the Federal Reserve, the European central bank, and the Bank of Japan into one world central bank.
There is no clearer demonstration of the essential identity of the two political parties than their position on the minimum wage. The Democrats propose to raise the legal minimum wage from $3.35 an hour, to which it had been raised by the Reagan administration during its allegedly free-market salad days in 1981. The Republican counter was to allow a “subminimum” wage for teenagers, who, as marginal workers, are the ones who are indeed hardest hit by any legal minimum.
One of the ironic but unfortunately enduring legacies of eight years of Reaganism has been the resurrection of Keynesianism. From the late 1930s until the early 1970s, Keynesianism rode high in the economics profession and in the corridors of power in Washington, promising that, so long as Keynesian economists continued at the helm, the blessings of modern macroeconomics would surely bring us permanent prosperity without inflation. Then something happened on the way to Eden: the mighty inflationary recession of 1973–74.
A roar, a shudder, and the end of the world. That was Soviet Armenia on December 7th when the great earthquake struck. Whole cities disappeared, as nurseries and factories, offices and homes, collapsed into rubble. In a few moments, more than 55,000 men, women, and children were crushed to death.
But no matter what seemed to be the cause, these people weren’t victims of geologic forces; they were casualties of socialism.
A Free Market Breakthrough
by Jeffrey M. Herbener
