Think of the U.S. Postal Service as a Soviet planning bureaucracy. The P.S. causes severe and systemic dislocations, imposes a terrible burden on enterprise and the citizenry, and is sometimes tyrannical. Also like Soviet planning, the longer it lasts, the worse it gets. It is doomed to fail and be dismantled.
Federal bureaucrats think they, not the financial markets should direct investment spending. They want to rebuild "infrastructure," fund space stations, install magnetic supertrains, and set up information highways (or redistribute the existing ones). That's what President Clinton means when he says he'll "grow the economy" through "investment."
Did 12 years of Reagan-Bush corrupt the Right? "Whatever they might say in their after-dinner speeches or in their op-ed pieces," writes former Wall Street Journal editorialist David Frum in his new book Dead Right, conservatives have "effectively thrown in the towel on government spending" and given up the war against big government.
Eco-socialists have to find some way to "Sustainable foist their ideas on the public. The term "socialism" doesn't sell anymore, but there are proxies. One is "sustainable development."
Environmental activists have recently uncovered a plot to destroy The Planet. A foreign race has managed to infiltrate our most pristine spaces with a simple but devastating scheme: to stomp, chew, and defecate The Planet into oblivion. They are perhaps the least suspect of our fellow fauna. They are The Cows.
Project Head Start is supposed to be the exception to the Great Society rule—a welfare program that actually works.
Government control takes freedom of choice away from the public and puts it in the hands of bureaucrats responsive only to their own interests and those of the state, instead of the buying public. Private enterprise in medical care means patient sovereignty. The Soviets ignored this principle, and the public is now paying for it with their health and lives.
Senator Daniel P. Moynihan (D-NY) has performed a signal service for all Americans by calling into question, for the first time since the early 1980s, the soundness of the nation's beloved Social Security System.
American agricultural policy offers many instructive lessons on how to cripple a major sector of the economy. For 60 years, the U.S. government has waged a war against the market. And for 60 years, American taxpayers and consumers have been the biggest losers.
The broadly held corporation was one of the most important developments of the 19th century. The capital of thousands and then millions of stockholders made possible the profitable development of large firms, which enriched not only their owners, but society as a whole.
