The politics of discrimination have been a major force for statism for decades. Only recently have some politicians yielded to public pressure to pull back from their absurd enforcement of quotas.
Californians rescinded their preferential treatment for protected minorities in state colleges. Courts overturned pro-minority-biased admissions policies at the University of Texas Law School as unconstitutional.
Opinion polls on taxes are the shabbiest of the lot. People are asked questions like: would you rather have Congress cut taxes or provide more essential government services? The results are invariably ambiguous. Reporters then claim that a surprising number of people are pleased with the amount of taxes they pay. Conclusion: there is no tax revolt.
Jesse Ventura, Governor of Minnesota, took a position that is extremely rare in state government. He said that neither the state nor the city nor any other unit of government should spend any money on funding yet another municipal ballpark or providing a taxpayer subsidy to professional ball teams and their media flunkies. “The taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill for new stadiums,” said Ventura.
Even when the market produces amazing new technology, it can become a basis for criticism. There are two main excuses used today to justify intervention in the technology market. The first argues that manufacturers build a planned obsolescence into their designs. The second argues that a path dependency subsidizes some firms artificially at the expense of others. Let’s take them in order, with examples.
Garet Garrett wrote in 1932, “Mass delusions are not rare. They salt the human story.” Indeed, mass delusions are no more apparent than in the realm of public policy and especially in the faith people have in their government to carry out functions designed to promote the public good. How else to describe the persistent belief that government is a good steward of resources of any kind?
At some point, and nobody knows when, the stock market is going to reverse its climb. It may even collapse. It is interesting to speculate on what kind of political response that would generate. Given the politics of entitlement and the propensity of the Fed to intervene, the picture looks pretty grim.
The workaholic, or more precisely worry about him, is back.
Austrian economists should revel in the story of Ukara, a small, Tanzanian island in Lake Victoria. John Reader, in his astoundingly detailed and fascinating work, Africa: A Biography of the Continent (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), presents among a wealth of other information that should be of genuine interest to economic scholars a little over three pages (beginning at 255) of highly persuasive refutation of the statists’ cry for central planning to protect against deadly “sprawl.”
Proper liberals feigned shock and disgust when the NAACP released the results of a poll showing that 50 percent of young people believe that racial separation is fine so long as different races have “equal opportunities.” The poll, co-sponsored by the NAACP and Zogby International, surveyed more than 1000 people between the ages of 18 and 29. An earlier survey found similar results.
