Garet Garrett wrote in 1932, “Mass delusions are not rare. They salt the human story.” Indeed, mass delusions are no more apparent than in the realm of public policy and especially in the faith people have in their government to carry out functions designed to promote the public good. How else to describe the persistent belief that government is a good steward of resources of any kind?
At some point, and nobody knows when, the stock market is going to reverse its climb. It may even collapse. It is interesting to speculate on what kind of political response that would generate. Given the politics of entitlement and the propensity of the Fed to intervene, the picture looks pretty grim.
The workaholic, or more precisely worry about him, is back.
Austrian economists should revel in the story of Ukara, a small, Tanzanian island in Lake Victoria. John Reader, in his astoundingly detailed and fascinating work, Africa: A Biography of the Continent (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), presents among a wealth of other information that should be of genuine interest to economic scholars a little over three pages (beginning at 255) of highly persuasive refutation of the statists’ cry for central planning to protect against deadly “sprawl.”
Proper liberals feigned shock and disgust when the NAACP released the results of a poll showing that 50 percent of young people believe that racial separation is fine so long as different races have “equal opportunities.” The poll, co-sponsored by the NAACP and Zogby International, surveyed more than 1000 people between the ages of 18 and 29. An earlier survey found similar results.
Thank goodness this bloody century, the era of communism, national socialism, fascism, and central planning-in short, the century of government worship-is coming to an end. May we use the occasion to re-pledge our allegiance to human freedom, which is the basis of prosperity and civilization itself, and to repudiate every ideological force that opposes it.
A strong economy is the mortal enemy of the welfare bureaucracy. If Americans are productive and prospering, who needs all those welfare bureaucrats? So, to eliminate the threat of diminished funding of its pay, privileges, and perks, the Washington welfare bureaucracy, led by President Clinton, is proposing to redefine “poverty.” Currently, a family of four is in “official poverty” if it earns less than $16,600 per year-an amount that would be middle class in most of the world, and wildly rich in some countries.
From the 1930s through the 1980s, government claimed it could innovate better than private markets. That’s what the boondoggles like TVA, Nasa, and Semitech were all about. Hardly anyone believes that anymore, so the rationale for government regulation of technology has changed. It now concerns such vagaries as fairness and wise resource use.
