Trapped in their Montana farm, trying to fend off the feds, the worst crime the “Freemen” are accused of is attempting “to compete with the Federal Reserve,” according to the New York Times. Imagine. These people thought that private parties could, on their own initiative, issue checks, print notes, and extend credit without monetary backing....
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Crime and Moonshine
The jurors who tried the 14-year-old black boy who shot and killed three widows last year, one of them my own dear neighbor, found him guilty and gave him several life terms. By law, he got the maximum. He is too young for the death penalty. It is beyond me. If you are old enough...
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Who Are the Taxers?
Never say Republicans can’t learn. After losing the presidency in 1992 on the tax issue, they now use euphemisms for their tax hikes and hide the increases with new and improved fiscal gimmickry. In this Congress, the word “reform” has come to be synonymous with a scheme to extract more money from the private sector,...
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The Truly Dangerous Snakes
Someone must have put a snake on a fence, because it’s raining for the first time in weeks. Jerry the Barber knows what causes weather changes, and if you are fortunate enough to count yourself among his clientele, he’ll explain it. For example, Jerry knows a woman in Waverly, Alabama, who can break a storm....
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The Mexican Bailout
The Mexican bailout was a bipartisan scheme, meaning that its details were kept shrouded in secrecy. The White House and the congressional leadership conspired with the banking industry, and Alan Greenspan even telephoned Rush Limbaugh and ordered him to support it. Limbaugh did not need to be told. Almost alone, Senator Alfonse D’Amato started looking...
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Withdraw from NAFTA
NAFTA will fail a thousand times before its advocates beg forgiveness. Not that an apology should be accepted, but justice requires, at least, that they admit their complicity in the century’s biggest intergovernmental financial seam. NAFTA led (thanks to the Republican leadership) to a $50 billion American bailout of Mexico, the loss of the dollar’s...
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The Contract
The contract with America did not exist before September 1994. This was a time of surprising national fragmentation. Only two months were left before the midterm elections, and all over the country, Republican candidates had built campaigns around radical anti-Washington themes. States’ rights were back. State legislatures passed Tenth Amendment resolutions. Militias were organized. We...
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A Political Obituary
When Jack Kemp ducked out of the presidential run, who really regretted it? Mostly, leaders on the left. He was their foil to the other Republicans. When Kemp yelped at voters for being insufficiently loving of the urban poor—nobody, not even Jesse Jackson, can mau mau like Kemp—the media could complain that others aren’t “reaching...
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Universal Suffrage
Universal suffrage has long been the left-wing ideal, because of its egalitarian symbolism and redistributionist result. Those “nonpartisan” groups bugging people to “vote for the candidate of your choice” aren’t doing liberty and property any favors. The wider the franchise in a collapsing social order, the more property is up for grabs. Thus an ominous...
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Proposition 187
Welfare benefits for illegal aliens must be eliminated, said Californians, and with Proposition 187 they did just this. Voters thus reaffirmed a basic principle of common-sense public policy: foreign lawbreakers should not be entitled to live off the earnings of productive citizens. Surely everyone can agree on this much. Not quite. Bill Bennett and Jack...
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Political Trust-Busting
In the “nihilistic politics of the 1990’s,” warns a newswriter for the Wall Street Journal, “party loyalty counts for almost nothing.” The writer means obeisance to the two major parties, which the civics books imply are ordained by God to rule us. In fact, America needs a breakup of this two-party system, which looks more...
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Consequence of Budget Cuts
Yetta M. Adams, an eccentric and meddlesome bag lady, died on a bench outside the concrete walls of the Department of Housing and Urban Development last winter. If this had been the 80’s, her death would have been cited as a consequence of budget cuts, greed, and flint-heartedness. But thanks to a friendly press and...
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Uprooting Liberty
You may have thought this country’s problems stemmed from runaway central government, but Clint Bolick is here to tell you that the real threat is down the street. “Local government in its various forms is today probably more destructive of individual liberty than even the national government,” says Bolick, chief lawyer of the Institute for...
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A Racket
Jack Kemp, an unemployed bureaucrat who’s never run so much as a lemonade stand, recently started an expensive newsletter to tell other people how to run their businesses. “Let’s Make America Prosper Again . . . Starting With YOU!” he says in a flyer for his Jack Kemp’s American Entrepreneur. Send just $45 and learn...
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Jack Kemp’s Mistaken Identity
President Bush suffered fierce attacks from conservative quarters as the 1992 election year came to a close, and many on the right even celebrated his loss. Fine enough, but after the election the message on the conference circuit and on the nation’s op-ed pages was that conservatives’ great hope for 1996 is Jack F. Kemp....
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A Clearing in the Wilderness
“After all, money, as they say, is miraculous.” —Thomas Carlyle The economics profession, like many other branches of the social sciences, long ago had to decide whether to adopt positivist methods, as if its objects of study were organisms of constant and predictable motion, or to account for the infinite variety in human affairs by...
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After the Riots
After the riots, fires, and looting in Los Angeles, both Jack Kemp, secretary for Housing and Urban Development, and Jesse Jackson blamed the federal government—not for failing to send in the military, but for not providing enough social and economic therapy. Here is Kemp’s analysis, on the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour, of why blacks and Hispanics burned...
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Playing Market
Jack Kemp arrived in February 1989 at the dark halls of the Department or Housing and Urban Development (HUD). During the Energy Crisis, the lights had been dimmed to save electricity, but as secretary, Kemp ordered them turned up. With that action, he began a two-year spending spree which has transformed its colossal concrete headquarters...
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EZ Living
Enterprise zones have been a pillar of the Republican antipoverty agenda for at least twelve years. But today enterprise zones (EZs) represent little more than government welfare by another name. As such, they symbolize a general Republican ideological decline from free-market conservatism to big-government welfarism. Originally, the idea was to use freemarket forces, not subsidies,...
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A Healthy Suspicion
Americans have always had a healthy suspicion of government snooping. When George Washington’s administration undertook the first census in 1790, under the supervision of Thomas Jefferson, it only counted heads. Yet the public resisted on a massive scale. At that time, Americans were widely familiar with the biblical anti-census story of First Samuel. King David...
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Economic Man
Economists, with justice, are accused of holding a narrow, one-dimensional, and somewhat pedestrian world view. Noneconomic factors can determine how well a society is organized, say the critics. An efficient price system won’t solve all of society’s problems; there are also cultural and moral problems that can undermine society, and these have no economic fix....
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Holding the Fort
John Cardinal O’Connor, the distinguished and controversial head of the archdiocese of New York, has played an important role in affecting American politics, both inside and outside the Catholic Church. He is the pope’s point man in the battle for the soul of the US Church, and some say if an American were considered for...