The meltdown of liberty can be stopped. But it won’t be stopped until those who understand the problem speak out courageously against the clear and present danger, which is the state at war. It is a danger even if the state wins. As Mises says: "no citizen of a liberal and democratic nation profits from a victorious war."
The free market is not a panacea. It does not eliminate old age, and it won't guarantee you a date for Saturday night. Private enterprise is fully capable of awful screw-ups. But both theory and practice indicate that its screw-ups are less pervasive and more easily corrected than those of government enterprises, including regulatory ones.
What may be the more important factor in manufacturing future Enrons is the role of government in fostering the boom-bust cycle. Enron, then, is just one casualty of many--albeit the largest so far--of massive credit expansion and of manipulation of interest rates by the central bank.
Hey, accountants are people, too, and they're not very happy ones these days. Arthur Andersen’s accountants--not unjustifiably--think that they are unfairly being made the scapegoats for much of Enron’s unreported sins, and the consequences could be devastating for the accounting concern’s survival.
If the Enron bankruptcy proves anything, it is that there are sinners in all walks of life, and that the market economy provides mechanisms for rooting out and punishing systematic liars. Those who clamor for Congress to “do something” to assure that this kind of thing will never happen again are delusional if they think Congress has the ability to legislate away sin or otherwise improve on the market system of profit and loss. Such delusions are a testament to the successful brainwashing of generations of public school students who have been taught to worship the “god” of the state and to look to it to solve all of life’s problems.
It is ironic that America is often derided by some critics for its rough-and-tumble capitalism--hence, these critics maintain, the need for government interventions of every kind. Reality, however, is quite different; America’s brand of capitalism seems to enjoy freshening the wells of failure. In America, if you’re big enough and rich enough, or if you have a world-class lobbying team, you can get the American taxpayer to underwrite your failures.
Robert Kaplan's newest book seems to be, bottom line, a briefing book to justify the switches and turns, contradictions, and conflicting rationales for American foreign policy and the domestic political control to which it is tightly bound, while freeing the government to to do anything it wants, anywhere in the world it wants.
On May Day 1971, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, later known as Amtrak, took over a group of overregulated bankrupt private railroads. Officials of Amtrak, which is a blending of the words American and track, announced that the government would make money on these bankrupt railroads. The public sector, they said, was going to do what the private sector couldn’t.
A heritage of honesty and hard work are marvelous tools for papering over the failures of welfarism and subtle servitude. With the right attitude, a prison population can settle into a comfortable and egalitarian existence, one that might even impress Queen Catherine passing by on a boat. Such is the case in Denmark today.
Politicians are never ones to miss a chance to use a current issue to impose more economic controls, this time on crematories. Before we see these folks as heroes who are attempting to fight against the ravages of profit-mongering capitalists, perhaps we should take another look at this and other situations where massive fraud has taken place within a business setting.
