Free Markets

Defenders of the free market are often stigmatized as uncritical apologists for big business. Nothing could be further from the truth, as readers of this book will at once discover.

Randall Holcombe identifies a paradoxical feature of much public argument about economic issues. Socialism has collapsed. The Workers Paradise is no more, and even professed socialists rush to proclaim their allegiance to the market.

There it is, on the cover of Newsweek, in thick, blood-red letters: "Corporate Killers." What follows is mug-like photo after photo, some of them grainy, of rich white men, all menacing and "greedy." They are the CEOs of America's top corporations. The story's thesis is simple: they are destroying the country. 

In the welfare debates, Congress spared what is perhaps the most objectionable part of the welfare state, cash subsidies for illegitimate children. The opponents had committed a terrible error early in the debate. They granted the first philosophical assumption of the program's supporters: that we all should take responsibility for America's children. But should we?

Gus Stelzer, a retired General Motors senior executive, is on a rampage against free trade. It makes sense from his point of view. Like most big business, GM does not welcome competition from abroad, however much it's spurred product improvements over the years. It turns to the government to tax imports that consumers desire more. 

Should free enterprise stop at the border? Of course not, and the attempt to make it so can drive us to ruin. Yet politicians are hammering free trade. Long-refuted myths are back in full force, and the voters are getting a miseducation in the economics of autarky.

Well, the Nissan Motor Corporation just proved that it can be every bit as shortsighted as any American company by giving $150,000 to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. According to the new NAACP president, ex-Congressman Kweisi Mfume, the money will be used for "voter registration and education," presumably to elect more left-wing ideologues like himself.

Want to hear what a scoff sounds like? The next time you're talking to a political scientist, an economist, or a public employee, mention the possibility of a private road. Roads aren't supposed to be private, right? They are supposed to be "public goods," meaning that capitalists can't or won't build them so government has to.

Jews have been a conspicuous presence in black neighborhoods for more than a century, providing food, home furnishings, medical care, living accommodations, and financial services. Most of the Jews involved in these enterprises were first- or second-generation immigrants from Europe. In recent times, as Jews have veered toward more decorous occupations, these functions have been increasingly assumed by newer immigrants, often Korean or Arab.

The sad spectacle of political stalemate in the United States suggests that Americans are stuck with our current size and scope of government—and the lackluster economy that the government's strictures cause. Is the welfare state a tangled web from which no nation can escape?

Evidently not.