People who advocate tax-funded school vouchers for private schools frequently hail the G.I. Bill of Rights education vouchers for World War II veterans as a model. In truth, the G.I. Bill was a budget-busting middle-class entitlement scheme that had destructive effects on higher education, and set the stage for virtually all our current educational problems.
At times in this strange book, Mr. Pinkerton sounds like an advocate of the free market; fortunately, he really is not. "Fortunately," because our author has an anti-Midas Touch.
The excuses given for big government take many forms. But NASA has surely come up with something unique in world history. They are trying to convince us that there is life on Mars, that we'd better speed our way there to find out more, and that's why they need more of your money.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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."
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.
John Kenneth Galbraith has been writing about economics for over fifty years, with considerable elegance but with little grasp of sound theory.
