Remember how, when you were a kid, the drawstrings on your jacket were constantly catching on the seesaw or the swing? How sometimes a passing car would snag the drawstrings of a friends hood, garroting him before your eyes? Neither do I. But someone at the Consumer Product Safety Commission must, because drawstrings are on their way out.
The welfare state keeps being reinvented under new labels. In 1993, the Clinton administration renewed the Bush program (dreamed up by then HUD secretary Jack Kemp) called “Moving to Opportunity” (MTO). It gave welfare recipients housing vouchers worth as much as $1,677 per month for rental housing in middle-class neighborhoods.
Congress proved it: not even childbirth is off limits to federal mandates. Forty-eight hours will heretofore be the minimum hospital stay for new mothers, Congress said, double the time insurance companies used to cover. Who could disagree with such tender loving care, courtesy of D.C.?
They should have called it the Federal Advisory Panel for a Huge and Sneaky Tax Increase and a Massive Increase in Corporate Welfare. That—and not “privatization”—is the real upshot of what the advisory counsel to fix Social Security recommended.
It is the widespread view in academia that John Maynard Keynes was a model classical liberal in the tradition of Locke, Jefferson, and Tocqueville.
Like these men, it is commonly held, Keynes was a sincere, indeed, exemplary, believer in the free society. If he differed from the classical liberals in some obvious and important ways, it was simply because he tried to update the essential liberal idea to suit the economic conditions of a new age.
The personal, political, and scholarly papers of Ludwig von Mises have been discovered in a formerly secret archive in Moscow. So have the papers of many of Mises’s colleagues and associates during his years in Vienna, including friends and foes in academia, politics, and business.
President Clinton, standing tall among Miami schoolchildren and pushing the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, calls on America’s youth to stand for values. So does the U.S. Department of Education in its master plan, Goals 2000. As do Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, the Rainbow Curriculum in New York City, and the Dade County School District in Florida.
The Washington Times asked the new UN head why he thinks the agency has a PR problem in the United States. “It is a leftover from the late seventies and eighties,” he said, “when there was a lot of talking about getting government off the back of people.”
Washington’s sudden fixation on campaign finance won’t bring about honesty in government, and it won’t increase anyone’s liberty. But it does give the public a real-world civics lesson. For it shows that government is no neutral arbiter of justice, but a corrupt scheme by which the politically powerful enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else.
On the presidential campaign trail, Bob Dole spoke often about his own private charity, the Dole Foundation. He used it to showcase his personal compassion for those in need, particularly people with disabilities.
In televised debates, he conjured up images of himself and his wife digging into their personal savings to make it all possible. “Don’t talk about it much,” he would demure. Dole may appear to be a skinflint, but here is proof that he cares after all.
