Global Economy

Let us just say we abolish all federal labor law. What happens then?

Two Austrian economists argue that the markets are overinflated. 

 Half of U.S. currency is held overseas. What happens if (when?) it is repatriated?

British Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized for doing "too little" in response to the Irish Potato Famine of the 19th century that killed one million people and brought about the emigration of millions more. But in fact, the English government was guilty of doing too much.

The 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan provided another occasion for the media to celebrate the government's good works. The U.S.'s headlong plunge into global welfarism (nearly $100 billion in current dollars), they said, saved European economies after the Second World War. One reporter, Garrick Utley of NBC, even theorized that Marshall aid explains why East Germany was poor and West Germany rich.

One peculiar aspect of the 1993–95 trade debate was the contradictory purposes—or so it seemed—of Nafta and Gatt. They embrace different theories of how the U.S. should conduct trade policy. The "bilateralistists" think that the U.S. should negotiate trade with one country at a time. The "multilateralists" say that leads to protectionist alliances; what we really need is one big agreement with the world.

"We Russians are doomed to teach mankind," wrote philosopher Grigory Chaadayev in 1848, "some awful lesson." The lesson turns out to be more than proving socialism's brutality and futility. It is also about the unlikelihood that elections alone will resolve a deep social and economic crisis.

The sad spectacle of political stalemate in the United States suggests that Americans are stuck with our current size and scope of government—and the lackluster economy that the government's strictures cause. Is the welfare state a tangled web from which no nation can escape?

Evidently not. 

Copy Japan! was the cry of the 1980s. That country, economically speaking, appeared to have it all: an industrial policy that knew good and bad investments before markets themselves did, a disciplined workforce, and, most of all, an unshakable banking system in which everyone had confidence.

Surveying the present wreckage, it's hard to believe these banks were once the envy of moneylenders worldwide. Now they have a reputation no better than the U.S. public school system.

Newt Gingrich claims that "Alvin and Heidi Toffler have given us the key to viewing current disarray within the positive framwork of a dynamic, exciting future" .