Big Government

The Free Market 24, no. ( 2004)

What is a loophole? For the criminal mind, writes Lew Rockwell, the lock on your door, the combination code on your safe, and the weapon your keep for protection are all loopholes you use to escape the work he wants to do. If he had his way, all these loopholes that permit you to maintain privacy and security would be closed forthwith. The result for him would be vastly more revenue.

In 2003, one in 35 million U.S. cattle were confirmed to have mad cow disease. Infected cattle comprised three millionths of one percent of all cattle. So why the mad cow scare? As Christopher Westley tells us, it reflects an implicit consensus among the body politic that the federal overseers of the U.S. beef industry are not capable of stopping the spread of mad cow once the slightest hint of the disease shows itself on U.S. soil.

The government sets price its flu shot at zero and then wonders how to account for shortages. That's just the beginning of the long history of government errors concerning the flu, writes William Anderson. In the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, an estimated 500,000 Americans died of Spanish Influenza. The outbreak coincided with the last days and the immediate post-armistice days of World War I, with government actions guaranteeing that the flu would spread rapidly.

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.

President Bush’s invasion of Iraq made many observers gasp with amazement. What could have motivated such hasty and ill-advised action? 

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.