The pattern is all-too-familiar: Congress and its bureaus of executive-branch henchmen arrogantly mock the Constitution, only to be applauded by the courts. Nowhere is this pattern more evident than the recent case of Leslie Salt Co. vs. the United States. Here are the facts.
Want to hear what a scoff sounds like? The next time you’re talking to a political scientist, an economist, or a public employee, mention the possibility of a private road. Roads aren’t supposed to be private, right? They are supposed to be “public goods,” meaning that capitalists can’t or won’t build them so government has to.
The government always wants more of our money, and too many economists are ready to make the case for surrendering our last dime. During the budget hysteria of 1990, for example, many economists claimed that the government needed to raise taxes to balance the budget. Anyone who disagreed was supposedly unwilling to confront the hard fiscal reality that the public needed to be taxed more.
The joy erupting in Howard University’s student union was palpably motivated; O.J. Simpson would walk. “As the verdict was read, the place erupted into screaming and jumping. You couldn’t hear,” one observer put it. To the students, a falsely accused black man was able to get justice—in racist America, no less.
George Wallace’s famous contention that “there ain’t a dime’s worth of difference” between Democrats and Republicans has received ample corroboration since the 1994 elections. The $50 billion Mexican peso bailout, opposed by some 80% of Americans, has been only the most flagrant example of the real meaning of “bipartisanship.”
During the “shutdown” of the federal government, bureaucrats were divided between “essential” and “non-essential.” The designation caused enormous turmoil within agencies. People with lifetime jobs and gigantic pensions were deemed nonessential, while those holding short-term, highly paid, political positions—so-called Schedule C employees—were deemed “essential” and showed up for work every day.
In 1984, at a Mises Institute conference in Houston, some of us met O.P. Alford, III, for the first time. He was a quiet gentleman dressed in unassuming khaki trousers and shirt. His intelligence was evident and his manners were strikingly aristocratic.
In the welfare debates, Congress spared what is perhaps the most objectionable part of the welfare state, cash subsidies for illegitimate children. The opponents had committed a terrible error early in the debate. They granted the first philosophical assumption of the program’s supporters: that we all should take responsibility for America’s children. But should we?
Should free enterprise stop at the border? Of course not, and the attempt to make it so can drive us to ruin. Yet politicians are hammering free trade. Long-refuted myths are back in full force, and the voters are getting a miseducation in the economics of autarky.
There it is, on the cover of Newsweek, in thick, blood-red letters: “Corporate Killers.” What follows is mug-like photo after photo, some of them grainy, of rich white men, all menacing and “greedy.” They are the CEOs of America’s top corporations. The story’s thesis is simple: they are destroying the country.
