The World Trade Organization has a fantastic but undeserved reputation in international circles as the world's premier institution of free trade. Despite all of the WTO's pretensions to greatness, this glorified trade-management bureaucracy exists only to promote the interests of well-heeled trade lobbyists and political power brokers.
If one passage in Robert Barro's excellent book attracts notice in the wrong quarters, he is liable to find himself in serious trouble.
The Washington Times asked the new UN head why he thinks the agency has a PR problem in the United States. "It is a leftover from the late seventies and eighties," he said, "when there was a lot of talking about getting government off the back of people."
The furor over the supposed racism of Texaco's management dramatizes, in miniature, the tragedy and danger of so-called civil-rights legislation. The Texaco story paints a vivid picture of what we've become: an economy distorted and abused by a racial spoils system, in which race is pitted against race, employees pitted against employers, and all power is held by federal bureaucrats and magistrates who "resolve" disputes by taking capitalists to the cleaners.
The physical impossibility of Santa got me thinking about the economics of the old boy's operations. After all, he is not paid for the goods he delivers, and it would be improper for him to send a bill the next morning. Nobody asked him to leave the stuff, or contracted with him to do so. But that means he gets no feedback from the consumer, much less a clear indication of profit or loss.
It's no shock that the Senate has taken another step towards socializing the medical sector. That's been the pattern for nearly a century. What's appalling is that this socialization is confused with authentic insurance, a viable market institution.
As the Cold War wound down, opinion elites discovered a new menace: "unfair trade practices." These are the subsidies, protectionist tariffs, and various regulations and business practices other countries use, which hamper the export of American goods.
Murray Rothbard had a remarkable ability to ask fundamental questions that others, even those within his own free-market camp, missed. After Rothbard touched an issue, it could never remain the same.
Voter opposition to major "free trade" agreements helped propel a surge in protectionist rhetoric this year. Even constituencies when should be naturally free trade—Republican conservatives—have fallen prey to old fallacies.
Yet despite aggressive marketing and loads of free PR, neither Honda nor Chevrolet (which sells the Geo line) could give these pint-sized Edsels away. It turn out that the views of the fuel-efficiency killjoys and the general population sharply diverge.
