Halloween has a socialist tenor. Menacing figures arrive at your door uninvited, demand your property, and threaten to perform an unspecified “trick” if you don’t fork over. That’s the way the government works in a nutshell.
As Victorian England produced the classic Christmas literary work, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, 20th-century America has made its distinctive contribution: the Christmas movie. Unfortunately, this genre has continued Dickens’s contrast of the Christmas spirit with the bottom-line heartlessness of business.
The sad spectacle of political stalemate in the United States suggests that Americans are stuck with our current size and scope of government—and the lackluster economy that the government’s strictures cause. Is the welfare state a tangled web from which no nation can escape?
Stuff those corks back in the champagne bottles. The Republican leadership in Congress can’t celebrate the New Year until it breaks silence on the Mexican bailout. This is a debacle that makes subsidies for midnight basketball seem sensible.
With the Mexican precedent, who knows what 1996 will bring? Is Japan next? What about China? Why not the whole of Europe or even Africa? If Mexico was a good idea, why not back all the world’s governments with the full faith and credit of the U.S.?
The Gold Standard Act of 1890, which officially established the gold standard in America, was the culmination of a twenty-year battle between inflationists, who favored unlimited government purchase of silver (the “Free Silver” movement), and the advocates of sound money based on the gold standard. The inflationists were led by Senator John Sherman, author of the 1890 Sherman Silver Purchase Act (as well as the monopolistic Sherman Antitrust Act), brother of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.
Once again, a national gay rights bill is before Congress, with the difference that, this time, it has President Clinton’s endorsement. For the first time, an American President has put the power and prestige of his office behind a gay version of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to outlaw discrimination against homosexuals in housing, employment, and public accommodations.
There is no oil in Nashville or sheep in St. Louis, and only the female Baltimore oriole is brown. But that hasn’t stopped the Rams from moving to Missouri, the Cleveland Browns from moving to Baltimore, or the Houston Oilers from moving to Nashville.
People made fun of Gerald Ford’s buttons that said “WIN,” meaning “Whip Inflation Now.” The buttons and the accompanying propaganda campaign implied that consumers’ bad vibes were the cause of inflation. Ha, Ha.
Middle-class incomes, the core of what we call the “standard of living,” have been falling for more than two decades. Though people have known this intuitively, only recently have we heard much about it. Economists and the media have been conditioned to look for the ups and downs in the business cycle, meanwhile missing the single most ominous trend in American economic life.
