The Free Market

The civil rights juggernaut has now invaded sports, that one-time redoubt of pure merit and standing embarrassment for affirmative action. Not only does this latest beachhead presage significant real-world consequences, it reveals something of the strategy of the privilege lobby.

When Clinton declared he would use budget surpluses to "fix" Social Security, the ruse was obvious. He was trying to forestall the only moral use of any surplus: cutting taxes. But a few days later, a very strange trend began to develop. Clintons words were endorsed and echoed by D.C. conservatives and libertarians.

Far from having been reformed, much less abolished, welfare continues to grow. The most recent example is the attempt by the Clinton administration to convince Americans that there is a "child care crisis," which can only be "solved" through expansion of government. The welfare state has become a deeply destructive but sadly unavoidable fact of life in modern society.

Why did Mises address family and marriage in an economics book refuting socialism? He understood—unlike many economists today—that the opponents of the free society have a broad agenda that usually begins with an attack on this most crucial bourgeois institution.

Having failed to nationalize health care at the beginning of its first term, the Clinton administration seeks to nationalize children in its second. With little opposition from Republicans, the administration has proposed spending tens of billions of dollars on subsidized day care, mostly through federal grants to state day-care bureaucracies.

When government punishes sexual attitudes, as opposed to crimes against person and property, it interferes with personal freedom and steps beyond the bounds of good law.

Around the country, sports entrepreneurs have been responding to a perceived social problem by doing what they do best: efficiently serving customers. The advent of the work-out craze led to the blossoming of a prospering health-club industry. Along with growth, however, came certain problems, some of which are the result of men and women using the same fitness facilities.

I was one of only two non-socialists who managed to gain an invitation to Hillary Clinton's "White House Conference on Child Care."

Labor Day, 1998. Time for picnics and taking it easy. Time too for thousands of blue-collar faithful to gather in Detroit not far from the United Automobile Workers Solidarity House to hail pet politicos and union chiefs and speechify, talk up income redistribution, snitch credit for America's high living standards, and gratuitously attack Wall Street, the rich, and corporate greed.

Recent blows to quotas in public employment and education such as California's Prop. 209 and the Hopwood decision have spurred efforts to entrench racial preference more securely in the private sphere. This has inspired its advocates to invent strange defenses that were undreamed-of thirty-four years ago, when quotas were introduced. Among the most perverse is that quotas are economically beneficial.

For years I received the Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes mailing and just tossed it. No way would I waste my time for what amounts to a minuscule chance to win a bundle of dough. Sure, some folks win, but they are extremely few. The gimmicks were too obvious. ("When you win, do you want a red, green, or white Jaguar?")

Winter's economic crisis in Asia was blamed on "go-go capitalism" and "crony capitalism," but those explanations don't get to the root cause. The Asian meltdown stems from structural defects deep within the world monetary system itself. These are defects that no amount of bailouts, exchange controls, IMF power, or even U.S. monetary discipline can repair.

When the three top dogs of the U.S. global empire went to Ohio University, hoping to explain why we needed to drop bombs on Iraq, they were met with fierce resistance. This event, broadcast worldwide, caused the Clinton administration to rethink its bombs-away strategy. A war was averted and untold numbers of lives were saved.

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 Clinton administration, applying its theory that all good things should be subsidized with tax dollars, proposes new spending to upgrade the Internet. But it's not the government that has turned this medium into the most promising venue for free-market exchange in our time. It's the astounding power of market commerce itself.

Over the past ten years, the budget of the National Institutes of Health has doubled, and the government medical research outfit is demanding even more dramatic increases in the future. Scientists on the government dole gush about the possibilities for new discoveries—and last year's budget of $13.6 billion wasn't enough to bring them about.

Among the conventional weapons in the arsenal of the modern Warfare State, none is crueler or more indiscriminate than economic sanctions. While a bomb, missile, or other military ordnance can devastate an entire neighborhood in a moment, the slow death of economic strangulation can so degrade an entire people that they are reduced to a pre-civilizational state, modern savages living at a subsistence level.

Seen and heard almost everywhere in New York are these four words: "Hey, you never know." It's the slogan of the New York State Lottery Commission, and it is used to trick people into a self-imposed form of higher taxation.

End the lies, smears, and attacks against average people for their supposed intractable racism. Stop the federal occupation of local school districts in the name of racial balance. Dethrone the federal judges who impose de facto quotas in every public institution and mandatory preferences in every private one. Come clean on the real purpose of racial politics, which is not justice but power and political spoils.

While American "liberals" tend to view Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton as their political and philosophical idols, conservatives at the Weekly Standard magazine and elsewhere have begun touting Henry Clay as their first political icon.