Government has total power to make and break businessmen. This state of affairs compels businessmen, especially large, successful businessmen, to pay regular extortion money to politicians and government officials. They have to pay bribes, in the form of "campaign contributions" and "donations," to various pressure-group organizations in order not to be harmed or altogether destroyed.
Every once in a while, the truth about government spending somehow leaks out in Washington, writes Gregory Bresiger. Reluctantly, another one of our hired help recently told the truth about how the relentless taxing, inflating and spending of our central government is leading our nation down the road to serfdom. He then recommended more serfdom.
The neoconservative clique and their partners have deepened the state's commitment to empire, but Republicans hold no monopoly on building empire in the recent history of our country. The Clinton regime, now seemingly forgotten except as a kind of Camelot II by the American Left, featured most of the same patterns of imperial conquest and domestic repression.
How damaging would another round of protectionism be? With international relations already highly strained—thanks largely, if not wholly, to the unwontedly belligerent approach generally adopted by the current U.S. Administration in its dealings with others—the clear peril here is that a series of escalating trade disputes impairs the ability of flows of goods to discharge the existing financial burdens of debt service and repayment as they come due.
Scott Trask shows that the period of the Articles of Confederation was not characterized by chaos and increasingly bad economic times, as historians tend to assume. Rather, the Articles proved themselves to be a perfectly viable structure for a free society, encouraging trade and prosperity and adherence to the highest ideals of 1776—until the mercantilists and nationalists overthrew it.
Christopher Westley formulates his own law of economics, which highlights how consumers apply much lower standards to government output, no matter what it is, than they do to the output that results from private markets. How else to explain hysteria about market failure and corporate mis-behavior as compared with unending government government failure?
The tragedy of mercantilism is that it tends to creep up when it can do the most damage, that is, during economic downturns. Sure enough, the US is experiencing a wave of protectionist sentiment, legislation, and action, some of it supported by the supposed friends of free trade. Let us begin the round up.
"Social responsibility" is out. Richard Teather explains that activists are demanding even more: corporate citizenship. This concept demands that a company's whole actions be carried out with regard to their "social impact" as interpreted by unions, environmentalists, poverty campaigners, and other non-profits. Of course, and mainly, it also means big donations to their organizations.
Why has the Concorde failed? The market determines whether and to what extent certain services such as speed are desired by society relative to competing demands on resources. No one can say a priori that faster is always and everywhere better. It may need to take a back seat to other priorities, like cheap tickets or mass availability or frequency of travel opportunities.
Gregory Bresiger tells the tale of how he was officially terminated: "How was I killed off at a relatively young age—well, 50 really doesn't seem that old today—and then miraculously raised from the dead by these mail carrying ghouls? Well, how does anything work in the federal government? It's difficult to explain. I'll give it my best shot."
