My aunt in Massachusetts, who’s never had much interest in politics, is now a land-rights activist. Bureaucrats hounded her for months, insisting that her small plot is a wetland “protected” under federal law, and demanding that she repent of the high crime of planting a garden on her own property. Now the swelling anti-government citizens’ army has another soldier.
Finally, thought some Mexicans, part of the $50 billion that Western taxpayers sunk into the bailout would get to native investors. In late August, Finance Minister Guillermo Ortiz waved $1.1 billion in the air for indebted individuals and companies. The result: the peso sunk like a rock, again.
American money was never more sound, or banking more free, than 200 years ago. Since then, it’s been a long, steady decline from the gold standard and competitive banking to our Fed-run system of inflated paper currency, deposit insurance, and perpetually shaky banks on the dole.
Copy Japan! was the cry of the 1980s. That country, economically speaking, appeared to have it all: an industrial policy that knew good and bad investments before markets themselves did, a disciplined workforce, and, most of all, an unshakable banking system in which everyone had confidence.
Surveying the present wreckage, it’s hard to believe these banks were once the envy of moneylenders worldwide. Now they have a reputation no better than the U.S. public school system.
Since October 1993, we have lived through the biggest buying spree of firearms in the history of the U.S. It began just before the passage of the Brady Bill and has yet to die down. And the boom in sales will continue so long as members of the governing elites are infatuated with the prospect of gun bans.
In the story of Rumpelstiltskin, an evil dwarf saves the life of a king’s bride by spinning flax into gold. But the price is high for performing this seeming miracle. She must give the dwarf her first-born child.
If it had the will, Congress could kill the redistributionist monster, the Welfare State, that’s consumed at least $5 trillion in wealth since the Great Society. How? Cut anywhere and everywhere, abolish whole agencies, and return the $350 billion saved from next year’s spending to the taxpayers in the form of a tax cut of the same size.
Cheers to the governors of Alabama and Virginia for sending back millions of dollars earmarked for the “Goals 2000” program slated to be imposed on their states’ schools. After decades of federal attacks on local control, they have responded to voter demands that school centralization be halted.
Recycling has a high moral status, mostly because kids come home with bad information from schools and, in turn, use it to intimidate their parents. One poll revealed that 63% of kids have told Mom or Dad to recycle.
Parents, be ashamed no more! Throw that trash away. There’s no virtue in recycling trash that the market won’t pay you for. What our kids are learning is grounded in left-wing ideology, not fact or science.
Washington agencies pay private-sector clipping services so senior management can know who their friends and enemies are. Journalists who write negatively about, say, the BATF, immediately enter the agency’s sights.
Even if nothing is done with the information, the knowledge that it’s being collected is enough to dampen the criticism that appears in the press. Stopping criticism is the prime day-to-day concern of any bureaucracy, second only to keeping the budget high and growing.
