Free Markets

How can business comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act? It can't. The ADA has created an inescapable trap for companies, a bottomless pit for liberty and property, and an unremitting excuse for harassment and control.

This past baseball season promised to be the most exciting in my lifetime. Then the players' union opposed the owners' demand for a salary cap and refused to work. Baseball struck out. In the battle over blame, the most curious call is the union's for a "free market." The most often-cited remedy is to remove the owner's antitrust exemption. 

The election of 1994 was an unprecedented and smashing electoral expression of the popular revolution that had been building up for many months: a massive repudiation of President Clinton, the Clintonian Democratic Party, their persons and all of their works. It was a fitting follow up to the string of revolutions against government and socialism in the former states and satellites of the Soviet Union. The anti-government revolution has come home at last.

The phrase "End Welfare As We Know It" is a classic Clinton evasion. It sounds bold and "neoliberal" at first, but on close examination it collapses into nothingness. Almost any change in a policy qualifies as ending it "as we know it." It could mean cuts. It could also mean more spending and redistribution. 

Last March, I laid out my "Thirty Day Plan" for de-socializing America. But I didn't scrap all of big government; now it's time for more:

The need for privatization is urgent, but unless ex-communists disabuse themselves of the notion that government should administer the transfer of state properties to private hands, privatization will remain an empty promise, and enervated state systems will lumber on indefinitely.

Labor unions are flexing their muscles again. Last year, a strike against the New York Daily News succeeded in inflicting such losses upon the company that it was forced to sell cheap to British tycoon Robert Maxwell, who was willing to accept union terms. Earlier, the bus drivers' union struck Greyhound and managed to win a long and bloody strike. How were the unions able to win these strikes, even though unions have been declining in numbers and popularity since the end of World War II? 

Governments have always intervened in the economy, but today's State—armed with modern data collection as well as an interventionist ideology—has taken us to a new level of regulation and taxation.

As I see it now, there are really two economies—two distinct systems of producing and exchanging wealth. Or rather, two systems that purport to do these things, though only one of them really produces anything, and the other is organized by a peculiar form of exchange.

The first is what is called the trade economy—the one summed up in the phrase "the free market." The other might be called "the tax economy."