Compared with life in Western countries, where the socialist sector is sizable, life under total socialism is miserable.
The standard of living is so deplorable that, in 1961, the socialist East German government built a system of walls, barbed wire, electrified fences, minefields, automatic shooting devices, watchtowers, watchdogs, and watchmen, almost 900 miles long, to keep people from running away from socialism.
The Marxists call it “impressionism”: taking social or economic trends of the last few weeks or months and assuming that they will last forever. The problem is not realizing that there are underlying economic laws at work. Impressionism has always been rampant; and never more so than in public discussion of interest rates.
The hottest new topic in mathematics, physics, and allied sciences is “chaos theory.” It is radical in its implications, but no one can accuse its practitioners of being anti- mathematical, since its highly complex math, including advanced computer graphics, is on the cutting edge of mathematical theory.
The Federal Reserve—the U. S. government’s central bank—was schemed at a secret meeting in 1910 at J. P. Morgan’s hunting club on Jekyll Island, Georgia.
Mark Shields, a columnist for the Washington Post, recently wrote of President Reagan’s “blind devotion to the doctrine of free trade.” If President Reagan has a devotion to free trade, it must be blind because he has been way off the mark. In fact, he has been the most protectionist president since Herbert Hoover.
If the media tell us that “the opening of XYZ mill has created 1,000 new Jobs,” we give a cheer. When the ABC company closes and 500 jobs are lost, we’re sad. The politician who can provide a subsidy to save ABC is almost assured of wide-spread public-support for his work in preserving jobs.
In the 18th century, as he had for millennia, the urban peddler went from door to door with a sack on his back. When we see this antique method of economic organization, not in a museum setting at Colonial Williamsburg but daily on the streets of every city and town in America, we know the government is in charge.
Modern liberalism works in a simple but effective manner: liberals Find Problems. This is not a difficult task, considering that the world abounds with problems waiting to be discovered. At the heart of these problems is the fact that we do not live in the Garden of Eden: that there is a scarcity of resources available for us to achieve all of our desired goals. Thus: there is the Problem of X number [to be discovered by sociological research] of people over 65 with hangnails; and the Problem that there are over 200 million Americans who cannot afford the BMW of their dreams.
In primitive societies, witchdoctors legitimized tyrannical government by naming it the mandate of heaven. In return, they got a cut of the earthly loot.
In the U.S., some economists serve the same function. For promoting government intervention as scientific, and advising on the most efficient forms, they receive power, prestige, and money from Washington.
American families need more affordable child care. But the answer is not more government involvement. When child care is run, funded, and regulated by the government, it can only make the existing problem worse. And it’s bad for our liberty as well.
