Big Government

Charles Lindblom is at it again. In God and Man at Yale, William Buckley, Jr.’s indictment of leftist teaching at Yale University written half a century ago,

The answers we receive from the academics in response to the collapse of the Enron Corporation and the implosion of other firms are not answers at all. At best, they deal only with effects, or, at worst, reverse the pattern of cause and effect. To put it another way, writes William Anderson, the people who are supposed to know the answers don’t even know what questions they should pursue.

The US government is attacking capitalism under the guise of cracking down on "corporate criminals." Corporate CEOs are being demonized and blamed for the collapsing stock market Bubble. Exploiting the Enron and WorldCom bankruptcies, Washington DC has imposed the most sweeping accounting and securities laws since the 1930s.

What a sight: the legislative and executive branches of government celebrating as they impose new criminal codes against corporate fraud, each politician trying to outdo the other in their moral outrage against business. These are people who created and guard what is perhaps the greatest financial fraud of all time, the $2 trillion federal budget.

A government that can jail the rich and well-known at will and confiscate all of their assets is a government that can do the same thing to "ordinary" people--and at a lower cost to government officials, warns William Anderson.  If people really want a prosecutorial state with no limitations, they will have their wish granted--and lose whatever precious freedoms they may still have.

Whether to distract the American public from the current set of hearings into the national security breakdowns that led to the September 11 attacks or just to be doing something, President George W. Bush has announced plans to create a new Cabinet-level monstrosity ostensibly aimed at making all of us safe from terrorist attack.

The Scana Corporation is a government-created monopoly that provides electricity to most of the state of South Carolina. Like all regulated corporations, it is pressured by regulators to promote politically correct causes and policies--or else. Thomas DiLorenzo highlights the absurd results.

Even apart from Hans Hoppe's policy prescription--that private ownership ought to characterize all of society, economy, and government, while all public ownership should be banned as a form of theft--his thesis offers a highly fruitful framework for understanding everyday political affairs. Jeffrey Tucker explains.

Government bureaucracies always fail to live up to their promises because they are not market institutions. As such, there is no possible way of ascertaining how efficiently the bureaucracy is run since there are no profit-and-loss statements in the government sector, only "budgets."