Winter’s economic crisis in Asia was blamed on “go-go capitalism” and “crony capitalism,” but those explanations don’t get to the root cause. The Asian meltdown stems from structural defects deep within the world monetary system itself. These are defects that no amount of bailouts, exchange controls, IMF power, or even U.S. monetary discipline can repair.
For years I received the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes mailing and just tossed it. No way would I waste my time for what amounts to a minuscule chance to win a bundle of dough. Sure, some folks win, but they are extremely few. The gimmicks were too obvious. (”When you win, do you want a red, green, or white Jaguar?”)
Recent blows to quotas in public employment and education such as California’s Prop. 209 and the Hopwood decision have spurred efforts to entrench racial preference more securely in the private sphere. This has inspired its advocates to invent strange defenses that were undreamed-of thirty-four years ago, when quotas were introduced. Among the most perverse is that quotas are economically beneficial.
Labor Day, 1998. Time for picnics and taking it easy. Time too for thousands of blue-collar faithful to gather in Detroit not far from the United Automobile Workers Solidarity House to hail pet politicos and union chiefs and speechify, talk up income redistribution, snitch credit for America’s high living standards, and gratuitously attack Wall Street, the rich, and corporate greed.
When the three top dogs of the U.S. global empire went to Ohio University, hoping to explain why we needed to drop bombs on Iraq, they were met with fierce resistance. This event, broadcast worldwide, caused the Clinton administration to rethink its bombs-away strategy. A war was averted and untold numbers of lives were saved.
The resistance in Ohio took three forms:
I was one of only two non-socialists who managed to gain an invitation to Hillary Clinton’s “White House Conference on Child Care.” As I entered The Presidential Palace, it was like entering a carnival house-of-mirrors, a place where all was not as it seems, where reality grows distorted in grotesque ways.
Around the country, sports entrepreneurs have been responding to a perceived social problem by doing what they do best: efficiently serving customers. The advent of the work-out craze led to the blossoming of a prospering health-club industry. Along with growth, however, came certain problems, some of which are the result of men and women using the same fitness facilities.
Bill Clinton has long enjoyed the support of prominent feminists. They not only know a political ally when they see one; they recognize that many of Clinton’s detractors are actually attacking sexual harassment laws. But, in light of the Clinton sexual scandals, some, like Anita Hill, fear the laws may be weakened. Indeed, this may be the only happy outcome of an otherwise dreary episode.
Having failed to nationalize health care at the beginning of its first term, the Clinton administration seeks to nationalize children in its second. With little opposition from Republicans, the administration has proposed spending tens of billions of dollars on subsidized day care, mostly through federal grants to state day-care bureaucracies.
G.K. Chesterton called the family an anarchistic institution. He meant that it requires no act of the state to bring it about. Its existence flows from fixed realities in the nature of man, with its form refined by the development of sexual norms and the advance of civilization.
