The Free Market

One of the pillars of an interventionist US foreign policy is foreign aid. Since World War II, the United States has dispensed billions of dollars in foreign aid to virtually every country on the planet. Foreign aid was lavished on our friends and our foes during the cold war and a decade after. It is extended to both sides of military conflicts. It is even accorded to countries that regularly vote against the US in the UN. The recipient countries are less likely to reform their economies once they get on the US dole.

During the seemingly endless debate over the government's treatment of Microsoft, the consensus seems to be that this is mostly a battle over ideas, including the role of government in economic matters. Whenever the subject of "self interest" appears, it usually deals with Microsoft's competitors that stand to gain from the destruction and looting of that software company.

You've heard that government policies can cause unanticipated bad effects? This view is confirmed many times over when you consider the current forest-fire fiasco. Government is the cause of the fires that raged out of control across the West this summer, just as surely as if the Forest Service had spread the fuel and lit the match.

For decades, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been renowned as one of Washington's biggest boondoggles. HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros admitted to Congress in June 1993: "HUD has in many cases exacerbated the declining quality of life in America." Vice President Al Gore denounced public housing projects in 1996: "These crime-infested monuments to a failed policy are killing the neighborhoods around them."

Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal is excited. The leftist columnist believes that he has found a wonderful "Third Way" example of using government to help poor people without the whole thing becoming yet another socialist giveaway. However, as with most government schemes that Hunt and his statist media colleagues like to tout, the latest example of "social entrepreneurship" is simply another fraud at worst and a misuse of resources at best.

Both Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek were called upon during wartime to weigh in on the question: what is the best economic policy in the conduct of war? Both were opposed to using war as a device for socializing the economy. If a war must be waged, they argued in their roles as value-free economists, better to contract-out the building of munitions to private companies rather than attempt to do it through nationalization and administrative edict.

The Heritage Foundation is no flaming libertarian organization. Not for them the radical privatization of such things as bodies of water, roads, even social security, much less courts, armies, and police.

On the Internet, a war between government-backed trademark holders and small web entrepreneurs is heating up. Thanks to the current managers of the Internet and a little-known agency of the United Nations, the trademark holders are winning.

The economic ignorance of politicians and bureaucrats never surprises me, and the recent events concerning rising oil prices are no different. Recently Sen. Dick Durbin (D- Illinois) accused the oil industry of "gouging" the public stating "It's an increase directly attributable to profit-taking by the oil companies." EPA Secretary Carol Browner said "The oil companies . . . owe us an answer." So it went throughout the Clinton administration and Gore campaign, as spokesman after spokesman issued condemnations wrapped in fallacy.

Those unfamiliar with Wall Street are naturally skeptical of this business of short selling. How can one sell what one doesn't own? Some may remember Daniel Drew's clever ditty "He who sells what isn't his'n must buy it back or go to pris'n." Interestingly enough, Drew was himself a famous short seller.

For two years, the White House has been haranguing owners of large websites, telling them not to violate their visitors' supposed right to privacy. Now, just on the face of it, this is absurd. The proper way to think about websites is as private property. When you go to a website, you are a visitor on someone else's property; the owner has the right to record what interests you. If you don't like it, you shouldn't visit. It's that simple.

My first thought upon gazing upon this site (Mt. Rushmore) was why anyone would mar perfectly good granite with the faces of Roosevelt and Lincoln. Although Washington and Jefferson committed their own grievous errors while serving as chief executive of the central government, their sins were nothing next to those executed by Theodore Roosevelt and Dishonest Abe.

It's true that the protestors at international trade meetings want nothing short of world-government regulations on labor and environment. They want global redistribution and antitrust. They want the UN to tax us and impose an international welfare state. And they hate anything-private property, corporations, national borders-that stands between them and their goal.

The president of the United States was ecstatic. Never had economic prospects in this country looked better. Unemployment was at its lowest level in years, the rate of inflation was relatively low, and the economy had grown continuously for almost eight years. No doubt, said the experts, this country was in the midst of a New Economy.

In The Constitution of Liberty Friedrich Hayek warned that the rule of law could evolve into the rule of despotism unless the rules that are enforced by the state are known, certain, and prospective rather than retrospective. Throughout history, a hallmark of governmental tyranny has been the opposite kind of behavior: random arrests and incarceration for breaking "laws" that the alleged lawbreakers had no way of knowing about; constantly shifting definitions of what is legal and what is not; and sudden announcements that behavior which was thought for years to be legal and proper was illegal.

After attending a leading business school for the last year, I have been witness to capitalist bashing that rivals that of high schools and colleges. The chilling part is that these schools are training future business managers working in a free-enterprise system.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote this translation in the days during and after World War I. Woodrow Wilson's wartime central planning, which led to arrests of businessmen and other dissenters, caused him to wonder what happened to the ideals of the American Revolution. Perhaps the language of the original Declaration was too anachronistic for modern ears? He offered his own translation into American dialect.

University students are going berserk again. No, they are not swallowing goldfish, going on panty raids or stuffing themselves into phone booths, the excesses of a bygone day (the first two are now politically incorrect, and what with modern technology there is nary a phone booth to be found). Nor are they taking over deans' offices and entire college campuses in the name of stopping their institutions from buying real estate in surrounding poor communities. Nor, yet, at the moment, are they protesting in favor of the environment, or bashing free trade, other favorite activities of theirs. What, then, you may ask, are they up to nowadays? They are insisting that the university logo t-shirts and baseball caps sold in campus stores not be manufactured under sweatshop conditions, nor with contributions from child labor.

Watching Joel Klein of the Antitrust Division on television, speaking about the dangers that Microsoft poses to the public, calls to mind a passage from Martin van Creveld's The Rise and Decline of the State: "Born in sin, the bastard offspring of declining autocracy and bureaucracy run amok, the state is a giant wielded by pygmies.

The Pulitzer Prize has been known for honoring great works and great folly. A newspaper colleague of mine in 1977 won a Pulitzer for a very moving (if, albeit, a bit staged) photograph of a legless Vietnam veteran sitting in a wheelchair in the rain watching an Armed Forces Day Parade in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The Pulitzer also is still recovering from the Janet Cooke fiasco of 1981 when the prize committee had to rescind the award given to the Washington Post reporter who wrote a fake story about a nonexistent eight-year-old heroin addict, the story called "Jimmy's World."