Due to the weakening economy, the red-hot job market appears to be at an end. Employers are already handing out pink slips, giving rise to complaints about the “injustices” of the market system, particularly among younger workers whose careers have been furthered by an unusually long economic boom.
A proper education reform would involve at least three steps. First, end all involvement in the issue by the federal government. Second, at the state level, end compulsory attendance laws that strike at the heart of individual and family freedom. Third, privatize the system so that users pay the going market price and nonusers are let off the hook.
Some ninety percent of all antitrust lawsuits are litigated by the private antitrust bar, which is to say, they involve one company suing one of its rivals, as opposed to the government bringing the suit. As a rule, whenever one company sues a rival it is because the rival is charging lower prices or providing superior products and services. Antitrust lawsuits are meant to throw a monkey wrench into the smoothly-functioning gears of the competitive process, and are therefore inherently anticompetitive.
One of the modern hero-myths the State has cultivated about itself is that government vaccination programs drastically reduced some common communicable diseases in the twentieth century. For decades, the government has required certain vaccinations for entry into schools, and most parents have passively submitted to the inoculation of their children. Now, in response to increasing evidence that vaccines may not be the boon to our health that has been supposed, opposition to mandatory vaccination programs is building.
In an earlier article in the FreeMarket, I questioned whether or not Joel Klein, who headed the US Justice Department’s Antitrust Division during the Clinton administration’s jihad against Microsoft, was doing so as a “public servant,” or might there be a more personal agenda. We now have our answer: Klein was going for the big bucks.
I may not make a ton of money doing what I do, but it sure is fun.
I go into my office seven days a week most weeks, and I haven’t had a vacation in two years. But the environment I work in, surrounded by my friends, all recruited to our small real estate management company through the most stringent system of nepotism, makes it seem like one long hang-out session.
Religious social services soon may be getting a new ally in their efforts to rescue people from the clutches of poverty, drug addiction and other personal problems: the federal government. The hook is “compassionate conservatism,” and as the linchpin of President Bush’s domestic policy, stand-and-deliver time has come early. But his plan, if fully realized, should succeed mainly in underscoring the folly of state-sponsored private charity of any type.
“That which hurts, teaches.”
--Max Gunther
Among the follies of our own age seemingly has been the dot.com boom. Indeed, it is apparent now that much of the resources invested in the Internet were wasted.
Editor’s Note: This piece, which Rothbard wrote in 1956, is published here for the first time. The problem of “payola”--money given by recording companies to radio stations as a quid pro quo for air time--is still in the news. Some companies have even banded together to call for federal regulation because “greed and corruption” is supposedly dominating the market (See Salon.com, April 3, 2001).
