the law perverted

A friend emailed me a copy of a NY Times editorial by Paul Krugman.  I had told him that I read almost nothing printed by the Times since it is quite predictable what will be said and also because in order to read articles with the Times, one must register with them.  And register with them I will not do.

So when he emailed Krugman’s opinion, All the President’s Zombies, I read it.  The link here is to the San Jose Mercury so you will not have to subscribe to the NY Times to check it out.

Krugman sets up his reading audience in his second paragraph with this assessment:

Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — an ideology that says government intervention is always bad and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.

The rest of the article is based on this false premise.  What false premise?  Oh, what Krugman wishes us to believe is that Reaganism (also sometimes called Reaganomics) is the same thing as laissez-faire capitalism.  I personally do subscribe to the belief that laissez-faire capitalism in conjunction with free markets in money will be infinitely more efficient in regulating markets than all of the governments and all of the bureaucrats in the world.  But this was not what Reaganism was all about.

Reaganism (when one gets to its essence) was primarily a commitment to lower taxes but continue to spend by increasing deficits.  There were certainly many other aspects of Reagan and his administration but I believe it’s essential to define the core.  In no way did Regan dismantle the myriad channels of government intervention in our markets.  He did take tiny little bites out of the sides of the vast government bureaucracy but there was never any serious attempt or even the intention of seriously reducing government interventions.  Does anyone remember that while campaigning he promised to eliminate the Dept of Education which his predecessor had created?  We all know how far that idea sailed.

No one alive in this country today has a recollection of free markets and sound money.  The closest thing to free markets in this country began to disappear after 1900 and the era of Teddy Roosevelt.  See this excellent short article by Floy Lilly describing Robert Higgs book, Crisis and Leviathan.  Higg’s book chronicles the interventions created through the 1920’s at the latest.  I hope there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the eerie shadow of government bureaucracy has continued to do nothing but grow over the years.  In fact, if anything it has grown at a continually faster pace.

Free markets and sound money were slowly eliminated from our history and our memory because these are the essentials of individual liberty.  When one understands that the very nature of government is to grow and increase its power over individual lives, one will be able to see through the constant fog of misinformation fed to us on a daily basis through government statistics and the willing fools who call themselves journalists in the news media.