It is a common error: the tendency to inflate the ability of government to shape the world according to its liking. Politicians and their critics both are guilty of this. In truth, government cannot outsmart the market, and it is far less powerful than the laws of economics and the buying and selling decisions of consumers and entrepreneurs. Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., explains how and why this is so, and what it means for our future.
No, there are no economic agencies in this country like Gosplan, but the U.S. Government, as well as many state and local governments, engage in central economic planning all the same. As Bill Anderson tells us, in the end, it is still central economic planning and, not surprisingly, it does not work any better here than it did in the U.S.S.R.
Nearly everyone knows that the Social Security system faces eventual collapse, but John Attarian remarkably claims that semantics lies at the root of the crisis.
If Peter Brimelow is to succeed in showing, as his subtitle states, that teacher unions — he has in mind principally the National Education Association — are destroying American education, he faces a preliminary task.
President Bush’s invasion of Iraq made many observers gasp with amazement. What could have motivated such hasty and ill-advised action?
As with the EU, Mercosur, NAFTA and other regional trading arrangements all vying for supremacy, and mercantilism entrenched at the heart of the dispute settlement system, the WTO is anything but committed to unfettered trade between individuals across national borders. Grant Nulle explains how and why.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. Did anyone who voted for Bush think that he would far surpass Clinton in expanding the Leviathan state? Actually, writes Christopher Westley, the Republican Party has never been the party of fiscal restraint. It was defined by a neo-mercantile philosophy from its inception as the new Whig party in the 1850s up through the Progressive Era.
What free-marketeers don't always make explicit is that the government and media Chicken Littles are right in part: Corporations are indeed out to make a profit. Of this point we must first observe the first lesson of business economics, as taught by the classical school markets in the 18th century. The institutions of the market channel questionable motivations to a social end.
Thanks to the untiring efforts of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Americans have been faced with the greatest expansion of the government into medical care since the 1960s. When these moves are complete, the free market in American medicine will be practically gone. Interventionism will be in complete possession of the field of battle, and the task of the government will be to mop up the remaining opposition.
