Foreign policy from Truman to the Reagan exacted a huge toll on American prosperity, diverting resources and expanding the government’s grip on national life, writes Karen De Coster. A new book by Derek Leebaert sizes up the actual price that we paid for granting government military planners and their connected industries a blank check.
One of the justifications for socialism and interventionism has been that some commodities simply are “too important to leave to the market.” Thus, the New York Times, certainly no friend to free markets, recently editorialized about California and the Enron affair:
The UK government is contemplating a radical reform of the British political system through far-reaching changes to the Parliament’s second chamber, the House of Lords. The socialists who favor this reform know exactly what they are doing. The result cannot be good for liberty and property, which have been under attack in Britain for a very long time.
The historical consensus has long ascribed the authorship of the independent federal treasury to President Martin Van Buren, or implicitly to his advisers, although a few historians have maintained that the idea originated within the Jackson administration. Certainly Van Buren deserves credit, as Jackson does not, for proposing its adoption, which he did in his special message to Congress, in September 1837. The real author was William M. Gouge, a Philadelphia newspaper editor and political economist specializing in monetary and banking theory.
Arthur Andersen’s transgressions have opened the doors to unbridled regulatory madness, writes Karen De Coster. The effect of legislation (like CARTA) will be to replace the oversight bodies that currently watch over the accounting profession with regulators who will do an even worse job of it.
