Editorials/Big Boy Economics/My Maxim
Jr, R. Emmett Tyrrell
EDITORIALS Big Boy Economics by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. T he high honor and awesome responsibility of a Democratic presidential nomination is now within reach of Arkansas' most celebrated governor...
...Soon Boy Clinton's ads were depicting Tsongas as an agent of Wall Street and a menace to Social Security...
...Clinton's fundamental error is his beAdapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by King Features...
...They can keep it going only if they can afford to lose money or finagle a government subsidy, but, continues Friedman, "if a government enterprise is a failure, it is expanded...
...Boy Clinton would champion Growth, Fiscal Sanity, Competitiveness, and hey-get-me-thename-of-that-pretty-girl-in-the-third-row...
...Yet let minor infractions of the health code be committed by an otherwise law-abiding restaurateur and—whammo...
...He is a carrier of tuberculosis and tests HIV-positive...
...I challenge you to find an exception...
...He appeared on "CBS This Morning" free to 12 The American Spectator June 1992 pontificate, because a magistrate could them...
...Experience has demonstrated at heavy cost to the taxpayer that this is not Big Government's way...
...Will they successfully prevail on President Clinton to end government support and allow bankruptcy...
...At the outset of the saga, our hero leaped to center stage, proclaiming himself a bold innovator eons removed from his party's long line of fatuous big-spenders and sure losers...
...Another way of responding to Boy Clinton's scheme is to remind him that government ceased to be a solution for social and economic problems in the 1960s, when it lost the capacity to say no to militants and to the morally superior...
...Today it cannot even say no to dangerously antisocial louts...
...Examples of government's futility abound...
...The front page of the New York Times tells us of a 34-year-old homeless man who "is considered a walking public health threat...
...He is violent, suffers from schizophrenia, and capriciously checks himself in and out of scores of government centers at great cost and peril to all involved...
...As for me, I am off to MorMorristown, New Jersey, a foul-smelling ristown to encourage the town's shapely mischief-maker is free to disrupt the lo- librarian to complain that the library's cal library because government cannot tormentor stares at her bodily parts...
...Each day Boy Clinton provides yet another revelation of the marvels he has wrought...
...The people who own it have a very clear bottom line...
...In Government...
...Now he has revealed his panaceas for the economy, and it is manifest that Clinton is as much a believer in social engineering and Big Government as he was back in 1972 when he campaigned for George McGovern, the most radical Democratic presidential nominee in modern times...
...El...
...The special interests reaping those benefits can always confect a compelling case for maintaining them...
...After all, in recent years Big Government's only notable success has been to increase the military, win the arms race, and bankruptthe Soviet Union—an admirable achievement, but then governments were originally constituted to protect the citizenry...
...If the enterprise is a failure that means it loses money...
...Today, all over the world, stagnant economies are overthrowing Big Government and opting for free markets, yet at the Wharton School of Business the other day, Boy Clinton offered a hoary program of tax breaks, subsidies, and trade policies for special business ventures—in sum and in fine: an elite corps of government experts with magic wands to oversee all areas of the economy...
...In his 1991 Wriston Lecture to the Manhattan Institute, Friedman explains why government bureaucrats are no improvement on free markets: "If [an] enterprise were an obvious success, it would probably already be in existence...
...If Clinton succeeded in setting up his agencies for encouraging ventures thitherto unrecognized by free market entrepreneurs, only one thing is certain: Big Government would get bigger...
...As Milton Friedman, a genius among twentieth-century economists, explains, "Government actions often provide concentrated benefits while imposing widely distributed costs...
...But what if by some freak occurrence the bureaucrats and professors are wrong about a product...
...lief that bureaucrats and professors know more about promising products and profits in various markets than entrepreneurs...
...Then the primaries began and he encountered the real innovator among the Democratic candidates, Paul Tsongas...
...T he high honor and awesome responsibility of a Democratic presidential nomination is now within reach of Arkansas' most celebrated governor since Orval Faubus...
...Only the law-abiding have to fear its authority...
...Government cannot quarantine him, as it might have at the turn of the century...
...The loon who assaulted former President Ronald Reagan the other day is at large on his own recognizance...
...It is the Planned Economy of 1936 with a facelift...
...One say no and in fact had to give him a can be a harasser, but woe to the sexual small fortune for denying him his right to harasser—suggesting another point: Our stare at patrons and otherwise harass Government is incoherent...
...Still Boy Clinton places his faith in not adjudge him a danger to society...
Vol. 25 • June 1992 • No. 6
