America's bankers consider Robert Morris a hero. More than 15,000 of them belong to Robert Morris Associates. Founded in 1914, the RMA organization strives for professionalism in banking practice and considers ethics paramount.
So who is the revered figure after whom this association of ethical bankers is named?
Franklin Roosevelt "did bring us out of the Depression," Newt Gingrich told a group of Republicans after the recent election, and that makes FDR "the greatest figure of the 20th century." As political rhetoric, the statement is likely to come from someone who does not support a market economy. The New Deal, after all, was the largest peacetime expansion of federal government power in this century. Moreover, Gingrich's view that FDR saved us from the Depression is indefensible; Roosevelt's policies prolonged and deepened it.
Federal bureaucrats think they, not the financial markets should direct investment spending. They want to rebuild "infrastructure," fund space stations, install magnetic supertrains, and set up information highways (or redistribute the existing ones). That's what President Clinton means when he says he'll "grow the economy" through "investment."
Special interests have long used the democratic political process to produce legislation for their own private benefit, and the U.S. Constitution contains flaws that make this easier. One attempt to remedy these flaws was the Confederate Constitution.
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?
The "partnership of government and business" is a new term for an old, old condition. We often fail to realize that the point of much of Big Government is precisely to set up such "partnerships," for the benefit of both government and business, or rather, of certain business firms and groups that happen to be in political favor.
History usually proceeds at a glacial pace, so glacial that often no institutional or political changes seem to be occurring at all. And then, wham! a piling up of a large number of other minor grievances and tensions reaches a certain point, and there is an explosion of radical social change. Changes begin to occur at so rapid a pace that old markets quickly dissolve. Social and political life shifts with blinding speed from stagnation to escalation and volatility. This is what it must have been like living through the French Revolution.
When Ronald Reagan was elected to the presidency in 1980, many conservatives (myself among them) were euphoric. They expected a wholesale reform in American government; there was even talk of a "Reagan Revolution."
When Reagan left office eight years later, it looked as if the liberals had been right.
