For decades, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been renowned as one of Washington’s biggest boondoggles. HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros admitted to Congress in June 1993: “HUD has in many cases exacerbated the declining quality of life in America.” Vice President Al Gore denounced public housing projects in 1996: “These crime-infested monuments to a failed policy are killing the neighborhoods around them.”
You’ve heard that government policies can cause unanticipated bad effects? This view is confirmed many times over when you consider the current forest-fire fiasco. Government is the cause of the fires that raged out of control across the West this summer, just as surely as if the Forest Service had spread the fuel and lit the match.
During the seemingly endless debate over the government’s treatment of Microsoft, the consensus seems to be that this is mostly a battle over ideas, including the role of government in economic matters. Whenever the subject of “self interest” appears, it usually deals with Microsoft’s competitors that stand to gain from the destruction and looting of that software company.
Statism was the primary theme of this year’s election. The political issues of the day were all approached from the interventionist point of view. For George W. Bush and Al Gore, it was not a matter of whether government should be running a social security scheme or not. It was only a matter of how government might save it.
Many of us have had close calls or experienced rude behavior from distracted drivers with handheld cellular phones pressed to their ears. Some can tell hair-raising stories, and a small number of fatal auto accidents are said to be attributable to cell phone use.
In October, the press began reporting Albert Gore’s startling catalog of lies. They were legion. How can a person tell so many falsehoods so often about so many things? One newspaper account theorized that it was a habit developed from growing up in a highly-political family.
One of the pillars of an interventionist US foreign policy is foreign aid. Since World War II, the United States has dispensed billions of dollars in foreign aid to virtually every country on the planet. Foreign aid was lavished on our friends and our foes during the cold war and a decade after. It is extended to both sides of military conflicts. It is even accorded to countries that regularly vote against the US in the UN. The recipient countries are less likely to reform their economies once they get on the US dole.
Rumor has it that the economics profession has finally been “won over” to a free-market view of the world. If the complimentary economics textbooks that cross my desk are a bellwether, however, it is not yet time to break out the champagne.
According to the dictionary, the word “wanton” means undisciplined or unruly, with connotations of self-indulgent, arrogant recklessness, and a disregard for justice or the rights of others. The word goes back to Middle English, being a combination of the words “wanting” or “wane,” meaning a lack of, and “towen,” which is related to education or upbringing. The idea is that “wanton” indicates being spoiled and self-centered.
History frowns upon the belief that government protects children’s rights, and yet that is precisely the claim that undergirds child labor laws, now enforced in most parts of the world. Hardly anyone dares question their existence, much less the conventional history of child labor, no matter how many children and families continue to be victimized by government regulation of labor.
