The 5th Street Theater in Seattle, Washington, is one of a dwindling number of houses of its kind. It receives no government money whatsoever. Its revenues come from a permanent endowment and ticket sales to its popular, if small-scale shows. Its charter prevents it from raising money from other private sources. It keeps a low profile in the arts community, but its staff is as loyal and dedicated as its steady stream of patrons.
The World Trade Organization has a fantastic but undeserved reputation in international circles as the world’s premier institution of free trade. Despite all of the WTO’s pretensions to greatness, this glorified trade-management bureaucracy exists only to promote the interests of well-heeled trade lobbyists and political power brokers.
If you love bad news, devote your life to studying government. You’ll learn about the colossal waste of NASA, the diseases spread by the school-lunch program, the lies of the FBI, the corruption subsidized by foreign aid, and the debauchery of the military base.
An hour before midnight, February 3, 1997, a sheriff’s car with its lights flashing pulled up to a middle-class home in Effingham County, Georgia. It had come for Debbie Gaskin, wife and mother. She was arrested, handcuffed, fingerprinted, and photographed. She posted bond, and was released.
What crime had Mrs. Gaskin committed? Three weeks earlier, she had removed her 5-year-old daughter, Jaynie, from the local public school and decided to educate her at home.
Amid media fanfare, the Pentagon has released its report on U.S. military and foreign policy into the next century. The report says that the U.S. should retain the military capability to fight two foreign wars at once. The Cold War may be over, the Pentagon admits, but it warns against any attempt to pare back the warfare state or cut the cash flow to arms dealers.
Our domestic automakers produce fine cars and trucks that people freely choose to buy. They make lots of money doing this. So why is the federal government shoveling hundred of millions of dollars annually in corporate welfare their way?
The Clinton administration has targeted a new batch of global enemies. It wants to crush them with the usual mix of negotiation, treaty, and enforcement through spying, fines, and propaganda. It’s all in a day’s work for the “world’s indispensable nation”—the administration’s new name for itself.
At last, the Republican Congress has proposed cutting death taxes. It wants the exemption to be raised from $600,000 to $1 million. Not bad for a start. But if Congress is serious about reducing the tax, the rate should immediately index the exemption to the inflation rate. If the inflation of the last 10 years continues over the next, the $1 million exemption will be worth a third less. Why should the government get rich by mismanaging the monetary system?
Academia has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. Take a look at the recent book catalog of Duke University Press, once a prestigious publishing house. Today it features third-rate, race-obsessed, sex-obsessed, solipsistic tirades masquerading as scholarship.
The 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan provided another occasion for the media to celebrate the government’s good works. The U.S.’s headlong plunge into global welfarism (nearly $100 billion in current dollars), they said, saved European economies after the Second World War. One reporter, Garrick Utley of NBC, even theorized that Marshall aid explains why East Germany was poor and West Germany rich.
