Uncle Sam wants you, even if you are still in diapers. Incredible as it may sound, the Washington, DC, city council is considering a bill that would extend mandatory school attendance laws to very young children—even some 2-year-olds. Bill 14-261 requires all children who turn three before December 31 of an academic school year to be schooled.
The Federal Reserve System may have run out of room to maneuver. Facing a looming recession, it resolutely lowered its discount rate and frantically expanded its credits. Eager to stimulate the sagging economy, it enabled and encouraged businessmen to invest more and consumers to go ever deeper into debt. Yet the specter of recession refuses to fade away.
Does business run on greed?
More than a few commentators are saying so. Reacting to the corporate accounting scandals and the bursting of the Internet stock bubble, some pundits are claiming that recent business events are symptoms of a larger crisis. “Capitalism itself is corrupt,” the pundits say. “The spirit of enterprise is nothing more than the spirit of greed.”
Many of the same people who debunked Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, and ridiculed its failures, are enthusiastically backing George W. Bush’s War on Terror. Both are big-government programs. Why back one and not the other?
As details of the 2000 Census emerge, commentators across the country are spinning “somebody done somebody wrong” economics to describe the US economy in the 1990s. Their recurring theme is that rich Americans got richer because poor Americans got poorer.
Proponents of markets often note that there is no such thing as a free lunch. The logic of this argument is simple, yet profound. Resources are scarce and all have alternative uses. Any time we consume any good, it comes as an expense to someone. Government does not create, it redistributes. The true costs of the things that government supplies to people may be dispersed or unseen, but they exist as surely as we do.
Late last year, in a move that gives even politics a bad name, the Federal Reserve announced yet another cut in its key interest rates. Around the same time, Fed Governor Ben Bernanke gave a speech praising the power of alchemy to lower the price of gold, and, similarly, the power of the Fed to print as many dollars as it wants. Hence, the Federal Funds Rate is down to 1.25 percent, while the discount rate stands at 0.75 percent.
