The Free Market

It's a myth that the Federal Reserve is independent of politics. It's a lie so brazen, in fact, that it's fit only for Fed press releases. Every administration, to take just one example, tries to get the Fed chairman to time monetary policy so as to insure its reelection.

It's no shock that the Senate has taken another step towards socializing the medical sector. That's been the pattern for nearly a century. What's appalling is that this socialization is confused with authentic insurance, a viable market institution.

As the Cold War wound down, opinion elites discovered a new menace: "unfair trade practices." These are the subsidies, protectionist tariffs, and various regulations and business practices other countries use, which hamper the export of American goods.

In the famed 1995 budget battles between the White House and the Congress, Bill Clinton told a whopper that put him on the rhetorical offensive. He said that Congress's proposed cuts in a particular program amounted to "raising taxes on the poor."

Republicans seemed sincere when they argued against a minimum-wage increase. In their rhetoric they were right: it increases unemployment, especially among the poor, by making work illegal. Even the head of Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers denounced the minimum wage—when he was a private economist.

One peculiar aspect of the 1993–95 trade debate was the contradictory purposes—or so it seemed—of Nafta and Gatt. They embrace different theories of how the U.S. should conduct trade policy. The "bilateralistists" think that the U.S. should negotiate trade with one country at a time. The "multilateralists" say that leads to protectionist alliances; what we really need is one big agreement with the world.

Pizza deliverers have been robbed, assaulted, and killed. To protect their employees, and hold down liability losses, pizza chains like Domino's won't deliver pizzas in the highest crime areas. The company has cleverly developed computer software that allows its franchises to "flag" addresses that are unsafe. Some are noted as green (deliver), others as yellow (curbside only), and still others as red (no way).

The good news is that supply-siders want to cut taxes. The bad news is...well, let's accentuate the positive for the moment. The supply-siders reject Washington's tendency to think in static terms. To most politicians and bureaucrats, the economy is a pie for the tax collectors and special interests to slice up and gorge themselves on. Then they are shocked when the economy stops growing.

In an episode of "Married With Children," Jefferson Darcy tells Al Bundy that he can get fast cash by suing a mall for his stress-related injury. "Malls set aside millions for this type of thing," says Darcy. "If we don't get it, it'll go to Social Security and then no one will get it!"

Everyone laughs, but the reality is no laughing matter.

In a state-funded education system, bad ideas live longer than they would in a free market. That's the best explanation for the staying power of the two opposing errors of our time: nihilism and pseudo-omniscience in the social sciences.

Media personality Kathie Lee Gifford took quite a pounding when the National Labor Committee, a labor union organization, found that some of the clothes sold under her label in the U.S. were made by children in a Honduran "sweat shop."

Shannon Faulkner's two-and-a-half year fight to become the first woman in The Citadel's corps of cadets went out with an embarrassing whimper. She couldn't handle the physical and psychological demands of Hell Week, landed in the infirmary, and dropped out. 

If there's anything a government bureaucrat hates more than the unhampered market, it's the automobile. He'll do anything to take it away from people, though of course he'll couch his true intentions in euphemistic banalities about "cleaning up the air."

Now in its seventh year, the school voucher experiment in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is held up as a model for the nation. But the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has found itself fighting its own track record as much as the city's public school establishment. The early cascade of hurrahs has slowed in recent days. This is a thankful development, given the sense of racial entitlement that drives this program and other symptoms of voucher fever.

"We Russians are doomed to teach mankind," wrote philosopher Grigory Chaadayev in 1848, "some awful lesson." The lesson turns out to be more than proving socialism's brutality and futility. It is also about the unlikelihood that elections alone will resolve a deep social and economic crisis.

A wealthy broker of questionable repute is trying to sell a mutual fund. If it stock goes up, he says, you profit. If it goes down, he adds, he'll send you a personal check to put it back on par with the original purchase price. He promises do this forever. Thus its value can't decline, no matter how much you buy.

In a truly free society, it wouldn't matter who the president was. We wouldn't have to vote or pay attention to debates. We could ignore campaign commercials. There would be no high stakes for ourselves, our families, or the country. Liberty and property would be so secure that we could curse him, love him, or forget about him.

A premise many conservatives share with liberals is that government largess harms its beneficiaries. Welfare supposedly creates dependence and "traps" its recipients in poverty. Much as the poor want to support themselves and their families, they are lured into sloth by Aid to Families with Dependent Children and other programs. Similar criticisms are brought against affirmative action, which supposedly labels its beneficiaries as inferior.

Voter opposition to major "free trade" agreements helped propel a surge in protectionist rhetoric this year. Even constituencies when should be naturally free trade—Republican conservatives—have fallen prey to old fallacies.

The rise in oil prices provoked a frenzy of opportunistic posturing by politicians of both parties. Yet neither Clinton nor Dole will acknowledge the real reasons for sustained high prices—taxes and environmental regulations designed to keep prices high—or the reason for the newest price rise itself. Both are complicit in their genesis, and both are conspiring to keep gas prices high and prevent American consumers from getting relief