The Free Market 8, no. 5 (May 1990)

The sudden collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe has amazed and elated the West. But what does it mean? If Communism has lost, what has won?

The usual answer is “democracy.” And this is assumed to be not only obvious and unambiguous, but unquestionably good.

True, free elections are finally being held in what used to be tyrannical one-party oligarchies. So far, so good. But we are entitled to doubt that this is the end ofthe matter, let alone “the end of history.”

The Free Market 8, no. 6 (June 1990)

Riots in the streets; protest against a hated government; cops arresting protesters. A familiar story these days. But suddenly we find that the protests are directed, not against a hated Communist tyranny in Eastern Europe, but against Mrs. Thatcher’s regime in Britain, a supposed paragon of liberty and the free market. What’s going on here? Are antigovernment demonstrators always, by definition, heroic freedom- fighters in Eastern Europe, but only crazed anarchists and alienated punks in the West?

The Free Market 8, no. 7 (July 1990)

He had been widely touted by the American media as the savior of Peru from hyperinflation and from the dangers posed by the current socialistic Garcia regime as well as the fanatical Maoist-type guerrillas who call themselves “The Shining Path.” Mario Vargas Llosa, tall, aristocratic, eminent avant-garde novelist and ex-leftist, was running for president of Peru.

The Free Market 8, no. 8 (August 1990)

The Soviet Union was the first country to introduce a fully nationalized healthcare system. To the cheers of Western “progressives,” Lenin signed a decree in 1919 stating that every Soviet citizen had a right to free medical care. Looking at the history of Soviet health decrees, it appears as if the system has been improved every year. And the present Soviet constitution, adopted in 1977, contains the right to “health” (not just health care).

The Free Market 8, no. 9 (September 1990)

The “partnership of government and business” is a new term for an old, old condition. We often fail to realize that the point of much of Big Government is precisely to set up such “partnerships,” for the benefit of both government and business, or rather, of certain business firms and groups that happen to be in political favor.

The Free Market 8, no. 10 (October 1990)

Sometimes it seems that our entire apparatus of economic education: countless courses, students, professors, textbooks, backed up—in the case of oil pricing—by a decade of experience in the 1970s, is a gigantic waste of time. Certainly it seems that way when we ponder the near-universal reaction to the Kuwait crisis.

The Free Market 8, no. 11 (November 1990)

The Free Market 8, no. 12 (December 1990)

The Free Market 9, no. 1 (January 1991)

Project Head Start is supposed to be the exception to the Great Society rule - a welfare program that actually works. David Broder of the Washington Post calls it “the most effective anti-crime and anti-drug program in the nation.”  Sen. Edward Kennedy says we should model a “Marshall Plan” in “early education” on it. The New York Times calls it the “Great Society jewel.”  

The Free Market 9, no. 1 (January 1991)

Certain ways of talking take on a life of their own. In the rituals of habitual speech we sometimes literally forget what we are talking about. We use words in socially plausible patterns but lose the faculty of connecting them with experience. This failing may come from simple mental indolence or from the fear of appearing naive.