Leave it to the federal government to generate sympathy, albeit inadvertently, for the richest man in the world. For five years, Bill Gates and Microsoft have been hounded by the Justice Department for engaging in “anticompetitive practices.”
Want to please a lawyer? Find a long-established legal rule that minimizes disputes. Then propose that this rule be radically changed. Such thrill seeking seems to be the motive behind a recent proposal to make advertisers liable for “puffery.”
Some Americans are no doubt touched by Bill Clinton’s concern for the health of children. His press secretary even declared that it was now the President’s personal responsibility to prevent American youth from smoking.
From Left and Right, capitalism is condemned for all the cultural failings of the modern world—everything from mindless TV to dirty books to slatternly art to trashy movies to debasing music. It’s an extension of the liberal habit of blaming a system for what are actually the failings of individuals.
My aunt in Massachusetts, who’s never had much interest in politics, is now a land-rights activist. Bureaucrats hounded her for months, insisting that her small plot is a wetland “protected” under federal law, and demanding that she repent of the high crime of planting a garden on her own property. Now the swelling anti-government citizens’ army has another soldier.
Finally, thought some Mexicans, part of the $50 billion that Western taxpayers sunk into the bailout would get to native investors. In late August, Finance Minister Guillermo Ortiz waved $1.1 billion in the air for indebted individuals and companies. The result: the peso sunk like a rock, again.
American money was never more sound, or banking more free, than 200 years ago. Since then, it’s been a long, steady decline from the gold standard and competitive banking to our Fed-run system of inflated paper currency, deposit insurance, and perpetually shaky banks on the dole.
Copy Japan! was the cry of the 1980s. That country, economically speaking, appeared to have it all: an industrial policy that knew good and bad investments before markets themselves did, a disciplined workforce, and, most of all, an unshakable banking system in which everyone had confidence.
Surveying the present wreckage, it’s hard to believe these banks were once the envy of moneylenders worldwide. Now they have a reputation no better than the U.S. public school system.
Since October 1993, we have lived through the biggest buying spree of firearms in the history of the U.S. It began just before the passage of the Brady Bill and has yet to die down. And the boom in sales will continue so long as members of the governing elites are infatuated with the prospect of gun bans.
