In the story of Rumpelstiltskin, an evil dwarf saves the life of a king’s bride by spinning flax into gold. But the price is high for performing this seeming miracle. She must give the dwarf her first-born child.
If it had the will, Congress could kill the redistributionist monster, the Welfare State, that’s consumed at least $5 trillion in wealth since the Great Society. How? Cut anywhere and everywhere, abolish whole agencies, and return the $350 billion saved from next year’s spending to the taxpayers in the form of a tax cut of the same size.
Cheers to the governors of Alabama and Virginia for sending back millions of dollars earmarked for the “Goals 2000” program slated to be imposed on their states’ schools. After decades of federal attacks on local control, they have responded to voter demands that school centralization be halted.
Recycling has a high moral status, mostly because kids come home with bad information from schools and, in turn, use it to intimidate their parents. One poll revealed that 63% of kids have told Mom or Dad to recycle.
Parents, be ashamed no more! Throw that trash away. There’s no virtue in recycling trash that the market won’t pay you for. What our kids are learning is grounded in left-wing ideology, not fact or science.
Washington agencies pay private-sector clipping services so senior management can know who their friends and enemies are. Journalists who write negatively about, say, the BATF, immediately enter the agency’s sights.
Even if nothing is done with the information, the knowledge that it’s being collected is enough to dampen the criticism that appears in the press. Stopping criticism is the prime day-to-day concern of any bureaucracy, second only to keeping the budget high and growing.
Halloween has a socialist tenor. Menacing figures arrive at your door uninvited, demand your property, and threaten to perform an unspecified “trick” if you don’t fork over. That’s the way the government works in a nutshell.
As Victorian England produced the classic Christmas literary work, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, 20th-century America has made its distinctive contribution: the Christmas movie. Unfortunately, this genre has continued Dickens’s contrast of the Christmas spirit with the bottom-line heartlessness of business.
The sad spectacle of political stalemate in the United States suggests that Americans are stuck with our current size and scope of government—and the lackluster economy that the government’s strictures cause. Is the welfare state a tangled web from which no nation can escape?
Stuff those corks back in the champagne bottles. The Republican leadership in Congress can’t celebrate the New Year until it breaks silence on the Mexican bailout. This is a debacle that makes subsidies for midnight basketball seem sensible.
With the Mexican precedent, who knows what 1996 will bring? Is Japan next? What about China? Why not the whole of Europe or even Africa? If Mexico was a good idea, why not back all the world’s governments with the full faith and credit of the U.S.?
The Gold Standard Act of 1890, which officially established the gold standard in America, was the culmination of a twenty-year battle between inflationists, who favored unlimited government purchase of silver (the “Free Silver” movement), and the advocates of sound money based on the gold standard. The inflationists were led by Senator John Sherman, author of the 1890 Sherman Silver Purchase Act (as well as the monopolistic Sherman Antitrust Act), brother of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman.
