In what can only be termed as truly bizarre, an Alabama local of the steelworkers union demanded that Alabama Governor Fob James close the international port at Mobile to all steel imports. Besides the fact that it would be clearly a violation of the U.S. Constitution for the governor to grant the union’s demands, it would illegally abrogate existing contracts between suppliers and purchasers. It would also be bad economics.
Unreconstructed Keynesians the world over are now calling for a “Global New Deal” ostensibly to put an end to the business cycle once and for all. President Clinton championed this view in a recent speech before a joint meeting of the World Bank and IMF in which he repeatedly cited President Franklin D. Roosevelt as he urged foreign governments to “create mechanisms” that can “tame the cycles of boom and bust that today shake the world economy.”
The policy agenda of the Clinton administration is usually described as halting, pragmatic, and poll driven. But in its approach to the issue of medical insurance and the drive to socialize medical care, it has been systematic, principled, and highly strategic. The Clinton government is using the failures and internal contradictions of the welfare state to pursue a program of universal entitlements.
To hear educators and activists talk, one might actually believe that apathy threatens to become the defining existential feature of American youth.
Creative accounting by the Clinton administration has taken the government’s budgetary imbalances out of the media’s spotlight. But there is no basis for believing that we are entering a new era of fiscal responsibility. Deficits are likely to dominate future decades just as they dominated the past three.
Duality is the Visa and MasterCard management policy that allows banks doing business with one to issue both credit cards. It is a contractual arrangement the merits of which must be tested by the market. There is no way to know ahead of time which contracts will (and should) survive and which will (and should) go by the wayside.
The Equal Pay Act of 1963 trampled on the rights of states to regulate their own labor markets, by overturning local laws enacted to protect women from working long hours, working at night, lifting heavy objects, and working during pregnancy. In addition, the 1963 law prohibited employers and employees from voluntarily agreeing to separate pay scales for men and women.
Former National Football League star Walter Payton has been stricken by a rare liver disease and needs a transplant in order to live. Unfortunately, the demand for available organs far outstrips the supply, and several thousand Americans this year will die waiting for those life-saving organs.
