New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and others who claim that the Enron scandal will be a watershed for regulation miss the point. Government regulation already dominates our economic landscape. Tossing on a few more rules might do damage, but it will not prevent fraud from occurring in the future.
Professional victimologists see bad investors as victims of biased research. But they ignore the fact that smart investors have plenty of chances to avoid bad advice. What the losers from the Enron collapse got taken in by was the Fed-induced Bubble, not someone else's bad research. Those who would impose additional bureaucratic restrictions on Wall Street only penalize everyone to protect the gullible.
Shortly after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush created an Office of Homeland Security. How many of us have stopped to ponder the meaning of that action? For more than fifty years, the United States has maintained an active—some might say hyperactive—Department of Defense. If it does not defend our homeland, what does it defend?
Consumer protection regulation is the consumer’s worst nightmare. In fact, it is not protective at all. It is merely another one of those regulatory rackets that has the appearance of providing necessary security for a collective group in an entirely positive sense while encompassing no negatives. After all, how can anything entitled "protection" have a downside?
Far from an example of a market failure, Enron's saga shows that firms that invest too much in politics can easily become complacent in the face of changing market conditions. In economics, this is called government failure, and we can blame the growing requirement for firms to divert resources to grease palms in Washington as a necessary business investment for its occurrence.
There has been a lot of talk recently about foreigners who hate our prosperity and civilization, and seek ways to inflict violence in retaliation. Well, here is another case in point, except these are not swarthy Islamic terrorists; they are diplomats and statesmen on nobody's list of suspicious characters.
The January 15 decision in EEOC v. Waffle House (99-1823) promises to reduce the immense efficiency gains to seeking resolution outside the court system by blocking another exit to the state's courts. If the right to choose an alternative venue for dispute resolution can be so severely circumscribed by the courts, one more check on judicial tyranny has been lost.
How does the left get away with describing right-wing thought as Talibanish, especially when compared to the left-wing agenda of speech codes, economic regulation, and authoritarian intervention in every aspect of American private life?
While the facts (as we know them today) of the Enron debacle are easily available in most newspapers and on the Internet, they are accompanied by a number of myths that are being spawned by politicians and their media allies. William Anderson tackles a few of these economic and political "old wives' tales" and helps set the record straight.
Edmund Burke was born in Dublin on this day--January 12--some 273 years ago. He is often called the father of conservatism, but the central passion throughout his writings and speeches is opposition to arbitrary power, especially in the hands of the government, with its "officious, universal interference" in people's lives.
