Jean-Claude Castex is surrounded by miracles, or at least the quest for miracles. As the official feutier, or tender of religious candles, at Lourdes, the spot in France where the Virgin Mary appeared in a grotto to a poor miller’s daughter in the nineteenth century, Castex sees, on average, some 14,000 pilgrims heading his way each day.
“The trouble with socialism,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, “is that it takes too many evenings.” Indeed, the private lives of socialists are highly politicized. They must not be interested in anything-not even their families-other than socialism. The theory must inform every aspect of their lives, which must be a microcosm of a socialist society: there must be no escape from the All-Embracing Theory. Or the All-Embracing State.
At the end of the century, Bill Clinton declared Franklin D. Roosevelt the “man of the century” for having “saved capitalism,” echoing the gushing praise that Newt Gingrich has heaped on FDR, calling him “the greatest figure of the twentieth century.” The greatest phony of the twentieth century would be more appropriate.
It was 1934, and government- caused mass unemployment supposedly was being solved by a near mass takeover of the economy by that same government. However, “Do you have a job?” was not the only important question that Uncle Sam had for his subjects. He also wanted to know, “Are You Training Your Child To Be Happy?”
The city of Seattle, which had planned to make money on hosting the World Trade Organization, wound up trying to cut its losses by asking the WTO to end its conference early and leave town. Self-described free-traders who helped to create the WTO ought to be feeling the same way. The organization that writes the rules of world trade is now the focus of nearly every unionist, environmentalist, and capitalist-hating pressure group in the world.
The left, most recently New York politico Lenora Fulani, likes to render the Boston Tea Party as a protest against corporate capitalism, and thereby analogous to the property-destroying protests at the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle. A more traditional interpretation regards the Boston Tea Party as simply a revolt against taxed tea, so perhaps the WTO, which purports to support tariff reductions, fulfills the promise of the Tea Party.
America’ s first wage and price controls were enacted in Massachusetts, a little more than a hundred years after the first pilgrims arrived. The opportunities available in the New World combined with a strong work ethic were raising the wages of working men, to the consternation of their employers. In 1630, the colony’ s Court of Assistants capped wages for several categories of skilled workers and for common laborers at 16 pence and 12 pence per day.
