Among the conventional weapons in the arsenal of the modern Warfare State, none is crueler or more indiscriminate than economic sanctions. While a bomb, missile, or other military ordnance can devastate an entire neighborhood in a moment, the slow death of economic strangulation can so degrade an entire people that they are reduced to a pre-civilizational state, modern savages living at a subsistence level.
Medical researchers are often so convinced of the overriding social importance of their work that they won’t let something as petty as market valuations get in the way of their agenda. That’s why they haven’t missed many opportunities at securing tax-funded grants and subsidies, and they’re about to score again.
The Clinton administration, applying its theory that all good things should be subsidized with tax dollars, proposes new spending to upgrade the Internet. But it’s not the government that has turned this medium into the most promising venue for free-market exchange in our time. It’s the astounding power of market commerce itself.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized for doing “too little” in response to the Irish Potato Famine of the 19th century that killed one million people and brought about the emigration of millions more. But in fact, the English government was guilty of doing too much.
Winter’s economic crisis in Asia was blamed on “go-go capitalism” and “crony capitalism,” but those explanations don’t get to the root cause. The Asian meltdown stems from structural defects deep within the world monetary system itself. These are defects that no amount of bailouts, exchange controls, IMF power, or even U.S. monetary discipline can repair.
For years I received the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes mailing and just tossed it. No way would I waste my time for what amounts to a minuscule chance to win a bundle of dough. Sure, some folks win, but they are extremely few. The gimmicks were too obvious. (”When you win, do you want a red, green, or white Jaguar?”)
Recent blows to quotas in public employment and education such as California’s Prop. 209 and the Hopwood decision have spurred efforts to entrench racial preference more securely in the private sphere. This has inspired its advocates to invent strange defenses that were undreamed-of thirty-four years ago, when quotas were introduced. Among the most perverse is that quotas are economically beneficial.
Labor Day, 1998. Time for picnics and taking it easy. Time too for thousands of blue-collar faithful to gather in Detroit not far from the United Automobile Workers Solidarity House to hail pet politicos and union chiefs and speechify, talk up income redistribution, snitch credit for America’s high living standards, and gratuitously attack Wall Street, the rich, and corporate greed.
When the three top dogs of the U.S. global empire went to Ohio University, hoping to explain why we needed to drop bombs on Iraq, they were met with fierce resistance. This event, broadcast worldwide, caused the Clinton administration to rethink its bombs-away strategy. A war was averted and untold numbers of lives were saved.
The resistance in Ohio took three forms:
I was one of only two non-socialists who managed to gain an invitation to Hillary Clinton’s “White House Conference on Child Care.” As I entered The Presidential Palace, it was like entering a carnival house-of-mirrors, a place where all was not as it seems, where reality grows distorted in grotesque ways.
