The Free Market

A Jewish Batman? A female Robin? The Dynamic Duo battling on behalf of truth, justice, and Austrian economics? Are we in a parallel universe or what? We are indeed if we are reading The Batman Chronicles, the Winter 1998 issue, devoted to "Elseworlds," in which "heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places."

The Free Market 16, no. 2 (February 1998)

In fact, the Roosevelt legacy is not individualism; it is certainly not liberty. His continuing legacy is one of unprecedented government intervention. Roosevelt crushed property rights. He constructed huge public works projects. He also helped lead the U.S. into its disastrous slide into imperialism and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in numerous foreign conflicts (and millions of foreigners). In reality, the leviathan state in all its evil owes much to TR.

Scrooge came in the form of government last year. The company Bill Gates built into the planet's leading money machine is still the target of a federal probe and a senate inquiry. The charge: anti-competitive behavior.

It's time to start thinking of the stock market as a giant S&L. Money continues to pour in, despite a bounty of evidence that the extraordinary gains of the last few years cannot be enjoyed in the near future. The perception has never been stronger that the stock market is the right place to be for your long-term investment needs.

Today's antitrust enforcement reduces tragedy to farce. A federal judge recently upheld the Federal Trade Commission's charge that Toys R' Us conspired to prop up the price of Mr. Potato Head. Why? Because the retail outlet liked to make exclusive deals.

Everyone knows about the class-action lawsuit against Hooters, the restaurant featuring waitresses in shorts and tight t-shirts. In the settlement, Hooters paid $2 million to the men who were denied the opportunity to serve as Hooter Girls, another $1.75 million in lawyer's fees, and created three new "gender-neutral positions."

China is undergoing one of the great economic transformations in human history. It has moved from communism toward what it calls "market socialism" at breakneck pace, and enjoyed double-digit economic growth as a result.

The dispossession of the Indians—culminating in the late 1880s with the surviving tribes of the West being herded onto reservations—was the result of a corrupt and immoral relationship between certain Northern industrialists, particularly government-subsidized railroads, and the federal politicians whose careers they financed and promoted.

When the IMF declares a country an "economic miracle," look out. A financial crisis cannot be far behind.

As public trust in government has plummeted, and resistance to central rule has grown, officials invent ever-new rationales. Here are just a few of the newest benefits the central state promises us if we relinquish more power to Washington.

When the Soviet Union's central planners failed year after year to produce a respectable grain harvest, they blamed "bad weather." If only the weather could be controlled, Moscow dreamed, communism might be made to work. Officially, communism is dead, but the bureaucratic obsession with controlling the weather lives on in Washington, D.C.

Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, emerged a few years back as one of the cleverest cartoonists in the long history of that art. His eponymous protagonist, by now familiar to everyone, is a software engineer with vaguely defined duties at a large technology firm. Dilbert's closest companion is Dogbert, a philosophical pooch with the self-professed aim of world conquest.

After hundreds of years of attacks on Christmas, economists have finally gotten into the act. Yale University's Joel Waldfogel, writing in the American Economic Review, condemns what he calls "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas." Once you cut through the calculus and graphs, his conclusion is clear: though Christmas generates a $50 billion gift-giving industry, a tenth to a third of that is sheer loss. Why? Because the recipient doesn't always get what he wants. Given the chance, the recipient would have purchased something else.

For fifteen tedious years, Republicans demanded that Congress give the president the "line-item veto." Reaganites concocted this policy gimmick as a diversionary tactic. It allowed them to blame Congress when the budget wouldn't balance and spending soared. If only the president could eliminate pork, line by line, spending wouldn't be perpetually out of control.

Employees at the Environmental Protection Agency presume to protect us from all sorts of supposed evils. But in doing so, no bureaucrats, save the tax collectors, are more vicious in their trampling of property rights. For example, they have made life miserable for people who own auto salvage and parts companies, and the drivers who depend on them.

Making lots of money is evil say the politically correct. It's sleazy, socially destructive, and almost always immoral, unless profits are given away to left-wing lobbying groups. Typical of this trendy disgust with getting rich through capitalistic means is Socially Responsible Investing (SRI), a nebulous set of investing standards embracing a host of "progressive" political causes.

For ages, man's right to exploit the living world—to use it for his purposes—went unquestioned. Trees were for lumber, crops for harvesting, animals for eating and skinning as well, of course, as for companionship. When not consumed directly, the products into which human labor transformed living things found their way to the market. Nothing seemed more, well, natural.

Among the tax discussions on Capitol Hill this year are the proposed changes in the 80-year-old inheritance tax. Part of the Republican tax plan calls for an increase in the estate tax exemption from $600,000 to $1,000,000, with considerably larger exemptions for farmers and other small business owners. The less generous Clinton Administration proposal would provide low interest rates on estate taxes paid in installments.

The federal government has rocked the art market by conducting its broadest ever investigation of New York auction houses and dealers. Some two dozen reputable New York art dealers, including Christie's and Sotheby's, have received subpoenas for all types of bidding records.