While it is morally reprehensible to hate, in a true free market the freedom of citizens to associate with whom they wish must be upheld and private property rights must be enforced. There should be neither forced association nor forced disassociation. This is the social foundation of the free-market economy.
The standard interpretation of the Panic of 1837 and subsequent recession blamed state bank monetary inflation abetted by President Jackson's removal of the federal deposits from the Bank of the United States.
Opponents of the market say we have to stop another Enron from happening again. Yet all the government's watchdog agencies completely missed Enron. The system of cronyism in Washington, D.C., made the debacle possible and made it harder for the public to find out what was going on. Existing laws will put Enron executives behind bars, but they won't touch any of Enron's accomplices in Washington.
Contrary to popular myth, every Republican president since and including Herbert Hoover has increased the federal government's size, scope, or power. Over the last one hundred years, of the five presidents who presided over the largest domestic spending increases, four were Republicans.
During the early 1800s, the U.S. paper money in circulation was issued by banks, most of which were privately owned and state-chartered. There were, in fact, hundreds of banks across the country that issued their own--often distinctive--paper money. From these banking practices arose the infamous $3 bill.
Professional victimologists see bad investors as victims of biased research. But they ignore the fact that smart investors have plenty of chances to avoid bad advice. What the losers from the Enron collapse got taken in by was the Fed-induced Bubble, not someone else's bad research. Those who would impose additional bureaucratic restrictions on Wall Street only penalize everyone to protect the gullible.
Far from an example of a market failure, Enron's saga shows that firms that invest too much in politics can easily become complacent in the face of changing market conditions. In economics, this is called government failure, and we can blame the growing requirement for firms to divert resources to grease palms in Washington as a necessary business investment for its occurrence.
While the facts (as we know them today) of the Enron debacle are easily available in most newspapers and on the Internet, they are accompanied by a number of myths that are being spawned by politicians and their media allies. William Anderson tackles a few of these economic and political "old wives' tales" and helps set the record straight.
Successful people who earn their wealth through free and peaceful exchange may choose to give some of it away, but they'd be no less moral and no less debt-free if they gave away nothing. It cheapens the powerful charitable impulse that all but a few people possess to suggest that charity is equivalent to debt service or that it should be motivated by any degree of guilt or self-flagellation.
