The media often cite economists on why taxes should be cut. For example, the Wall Street Journal reports “widespread agreement” among economists that federal gas taxes are too low. And the Washington Post cites the “authority” of economists who says a $500-per child tax credit is “fiscal snake oil.”
The rise in oil prices provoked a frenzy of opportunistic posturing by politicians of both parties. Yet neither Clinton nor Dole will acknowledge the real reasons for sustained high prices—taxes and environmental regulations designed to keep prices high—or the reason for the newest price rise itself. Both are complicit in their genesis, and both are conspiring to keep gas prices high and prevent American consumers from getting relief.
Voter opposition to major “free trade” agreements helped propel a surge in protectionist rhetoric this year. Even constituencies when should be naturally free trade—Republican conservatives—have fallen prey to old fallacies.
But mainstream Republicans largely have themselves to blame for this phenomenon. By allowing straightforward free trade agreements to be encumbered with special interest favors, they have opened the door to political controversy.
A premise many conservatives share with liberals is that government largess harms its beneficiaries. Welfare supposedly creates dependence and “traps” its recipients in poverty. Much as the poor want to support themselves and their families, they are lured into sloth by Aid to Families with Dependent Children and other programs. Similar criticisms are brought against affirmative action, which supposedly labels its beneficiaries as inferior.
In a truly free society, it wouldn’t matter who the president was. We wouldn’t have to vote or pay attention to debates. We could ignore campaign commercials. There would be no high stakes for ourselves, our families, or the country. Liberty and property would be so secure that we could curse him, love him, or forget about him.
A wealthy broker of questionable repute is trying to sell a mutual fund. If it stock goes up, he says, you profit. If it goes down, he adds, he’ll send you a personal check to put it back on par with the original purchase price. He promises do this forever. Thus its value can’t decline, no matter how much you buy.
“We Russians are doomed to teach mankind,” wrote philosopher Grigory Chaadayev in 1848, “some awful lesson.” The lesson turns out to be more than proving socialism’s brutality and futility. It is also about the unlikelihood that elections alone will resolve a deep social and economic crisis.
In a state-funded education system, bad ideas live longer than they would in a free market. That’s the best explanation for the staying power of the two opposing errors of our time: nihilism and pseudo-omniscience in the social sciences.
Nihilism comes in the form of postmodernism, a pretentious body of academic blather that has invaded almost all academic fields over the last 15 years. Students despise it and good faculty fear it, while tuition-paying parents know virtually nothing about it.
Now in its seventh year, the school voucher experiment in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is held up as a model for the nation. But the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has found itself fighting its own track record as much as the city’s public school establishment. The early cascade of hurrahs has slowed in recent days. This is a thankful development, given the sense of racial entitlement that drives this program and other symptoms of voucher fever.
If there’s anything a government bureaucrat hates more than the unhampered market, it’s the automobile. He’ll do anything to take it away from people, though of course he’ll couch his true intentions in euphemistic banalities about “cleaning up the air.”
