In recent months, we have been inundated with a pro-Teddy Roosevelt barrage from PBS to the Weekly Standard. He was, writes David Brooks, “a distinctly American kind that married nationalism to individualism.” His bust adorns the desks of Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole. His profile is carved into Mount Rushmore.
The conventional wisdom on the defeat of Fast Track trade legislation is dead wrong. As the press would have it, the failure of Fast Track reflects the rise of grass-roots protectionism. The vote in Congress to deny Clinton the authority to negotiate trade deals is a response to constituent pressure.
Seen and heard almost everywhere in New York are these four words: “Hey, you never know.” It’s the slogan of the New York State Lottery Commission, and it is used to trick people into a self-imposed form of higher taxation.
A Jewish Batman? A female Robin? The Dynamic Duo battling on behalf of truth, justice, and Austrian economics? Are we in a parallel universe or what? We are indeed if we are reading The Batman Chronicles, the Winter 1998 issue, devoted to “Elseworlds,” in which “heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places.”
While American “liberals” tend to view Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton as their political and philosophical idols, conservatives at the Weekly Standard magazine and elsewhere have begun touting Henry Clay as their first political icon.
President Bill Clinton called on nine opponents of affirmative action during his manipulative “national dialogue on race,” and asked a reasonable question. “What do you think we should do?”
The right answer is nothing. Do nothing at all.
Among the conventional weapons in the arsenal of the modern Warfare State, none is crueler or more indiscriminate than economic sanctions. While a bomb, missile, or other military ordnance can devastate an entire neighborhood in a moment, the slow death of economic strangulation can so degrade an entire people that they are reduced to a pre-civilizational state, modern savages living at a subsistence level.
Medical researchers are often so convinced of the overriding social importance of their work that they won’t let something as petty as market valuations get in the way of their agenda. That’s why they haven’t missed many opportunities at securing tax-funded grants and subsidies, and they’re about to score again.
The Clinton administration, applying its theory that all good things should be subsidized with tax dollars, proposes new spending to upgrade the Internet. But it’s not the government that has turned this medium into the most promising venue for free-market exchange in our time. It’s the astounding power of market commerce itself.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized for doing “too little” in response to the Irish Potato Famine of the 19th century that killed one million people and brought about the emigration of millions more. But in fact, the English government was guilty of doing too much.
