“[Market] systems are the ones that are producing
the most for their people and dictatorships and despotism
don’t,” said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld,
commenting on the economic plight of North Korea under
communist rule. Echoing this sentiment two days later,
Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow at the left-wing
Brookings Institution, wrote, “North Korea needs a
market economy ... to improve the lot of its own
people.”
So it’s the free market, not command-and-control
central planning and bureaucratic management, that
provides the best assortment and largest quantity of
goods and services, to the greatest number of people?
What an amazing revelation!
In light of Rumsfeld’s and O’Hanlon’s
discovery, can we now count on this to become official
Bush administration policy on economic matters? If so,
then surely we will see a concerted effort on the part of
the president to eliminate any and all obstacles to the
free working of the market in this country. After all,
what is good for the communists is certainly good for us,
too, right?
Will the alphabet soup of federal agencies that interfere
with the free and voluntary exchange of goods and
services in America, such as OSHA, ICC, FDA, COE, FAA, FTC,
SEC, NLRB, ATF, TVA, and the FCC, just to name a few, be
immediately disbanded, and their legions of bureaucrats
be relieved of the power to regulate and control the
marketplace?
Can we count on the president to call for a free,
unregulated market in our health-care, banking,
transportation, pharmaceutical, housing, steel,
agriculture, manufacturing, telecommunications, broadcasting,
business, computer, and other industries?
Will President Bush ask Congress to repeal the
capital-gains tax, the corporate and personal income taxes, the
Social Security tax, and the Medicare tax to assist
Americans in returning to the days when individuals were
free to make and spend money in the marketplace without
any government interference?
Will we hear any speeches on the evils of wage and price
controls? What about anti-monopoly laws, which interfere
with successful businesses’ gaining as large a share of
their respective markets as their customers freely grant
them? And what about a free-market solution to education?
How confusing it must be for countries such as Cuba and
North Korea to hear our public officials denounce
communist economic systems as pragmatically flawed and
morally bankrupt — while telling the American people
that their version of central planning is actually called
the free market.
Scott McPherson is a policy advisor at The Future of Freedom Foundation.
|
Send to a friend
Printer Friendly PDF Format
Subscribe to FFF Email Update
Subscribe to Freedom Daily
|
|
|
|
