Should free enterprise stop at the border? Of course not, and the attempt to make it so can drive us to ruin. Yet politicians are hammering free trade. Long-refuted myths are back in full force, and the voters are getting a miseducation in the economics of autarky.
Well, the Nissan Motor Corporation just proved that it can be every bit as shortsighted as any American company by giving $150,000 to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. According to the new NAACP president, ex-Congressman Kweisi Mfume, the money will be used for "voter registration and education," presumably to elect more left-wing ideologues like himself.
During the "shutdown" of the federal government, bureaucrats were divided between "essential" and "non-essential." The designation caused enormous turmoil within agencies. People with lifetime jobs and gigantic pensions were deemed nonessential, while those holding short-term, highly paid, political positions—so-called Schedule C employees—were deemed "essential" and showed up for work every day.
We're no fans of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and now they know it. After Hurricane Opal caused substantial damage here in Auburn, Lew Rockwell wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times arguing that we'd be better off without post-disaster federal aid. Why should California taxpayers be penalized for our misfortune? he asked. He also had choice words for FEMA bureaucrats who use natural disasters to enhance federal control.
So the phone rang, and it was Morry Goodman of FEMA.
Since October 1993, we have lived through the biggest buying spree of firearms in the history of the U.S. It began just before the passage of the Brady Bill and has yet to die down. And the boom in sales will continue so long as members of the governing elites are infatuated with the prospect of gun bans.
Anyone who listens to the news hears a lot about failed policies. Conservative Republicans in Congress say they are seeking to overturn the failed policies enacted by liberal Democrats. Although the Democrats defend their deeds, they admit that certain policies may have failed and should be reviewed.
The lesson for everyone else is to be skeptical when the government claims it has a central plan to bring prosperity and joy to an entire hemisphere, and all we have to give up is money, power, and freedom.
You're looking for a job. You want to get paid several times your worth, come and go when you please, work only when you feel like it, take as long a lunch as you want, and get ten paid holidays per year and six weeks paid vacation per year. There's only one way to go: work for the federal government.
If you thought the end of the Cold War would mean the death of "defense" socialism, or even the shrinking of the massive Pentagon bureaucracy that has been choking off and diverting the productive sector of the economy since World War II, then think again.
Performance budgeting (PB) is the newest strategy to make the public sector work. Yet as with other similar strategies, PB is fundamentally flawed. Without a system of profit and loss, a bureaucracy not only has trouble motivating its employees; it can't determine the value of what they are doing in the first place.
