THE ROAD BACK TO SERFDOM

...Voters still believe that between 25 and 50 cents of every dollar Washington spends is wasted—which is about right...

...One of the few “crazy” people who agreed with Friedman about the primacy of free markets was F.A...

...It really is unbelievable...

...The price of oil has almost exactly paralleled the increasing price of gold since 2001...

...As recently as 2000 John Cassidy wrote in the New Yorker that Hayek’s insight that state planning cannot compete with the free market, in which millions of individual actors act spontaneously to establish prices and allocate resources like capital and labor, “is now widely accepted...

...The Times’s gleeful conclusion was that America can survive only with more government snoops and guardrails and edicts and safety nets to rescue people and businesses from their own bad decisions...

...Three years before his death in 2006 at the age of 94, I had the privilege of having dinner with Milton Friedman and his wife, Rose, at their favorite Chinese restaurant a few blocks from their apartment in downtown San Francisco...

...One wonders if that would include the modern-day Democrats and some in the GOP as well...

...And now the remedy for crazy over-speculation and investment in housing is to provide a 100 percent federal guarantee on mortWhen government rushes in to prevent those mistakes, we are likely to confront what Friedman viewed as the worst form of tyranny of all: a government that tries to protect us from ourselves...

...No one, certainly not Friedman or Hayek, has ever said that, under free market capitalism there will be a continuous and uninterrupted path to prosperity, people won’t make costly mistakes, or there won’t be speculative bubbles inflated by irrational optimism...

...High food and energy prices are also a crisis manufactured by government...

...This will lock in the highest price supports for farmers in history...

...from the neighborhood member of the school board to the Barack Obama for President campaign, is offering the American voter...

...And yet she was rejected by many Democratic primary voters—labor union bosses, trial lawyers, government workers, university professors, the environmentalists —as insufficiently left-wing...

...First came the rancid $300 billion giveaway corporate welfare farm bill, which passed with bipartisan support over President Bush’s veto despite the best year ever for farm incomes...

...And along with a President Obama will come hordes of new Democrats with the same statist mentality as his...

...But this isn’t the first time that the ideas of the left have been so ascendant on so many fronts...

...Two recent examples of government expansionism that received bipartisan support in Congress validate the point...

...But worse is that the Republican Party and even the conservative movement writ large has so few willing to go against the grain of intellectual thought as Friedman and Hayek did 50 years ago—or as Reagan did 30 years ago...

...Finally he went to one of his teachers and said, isn’t there any economist who agrees with me...

...Government solutions are seen as a universal panacea by the Obama Democrats, who have become indistinguishable from the old socialist labor parties of Europe...

...This would be the worst possible outcome for the country, but the best outcome for a Republican Party that has forgotten what it stands for...

...This is what almost every Democratic politician...

...This central planner’s dream would regulate virtually every industrial activity in America, raising an estimated $1.1 trillion over the next decade—money the Democrats are eager to dole out to favored special interest groups so they can lobby for even more government funds...

...t H e R o a D b a c K t o s e R F D o M The left is laying the groundwork for this transition to a more government-directed economy through a renewed intellectual assault on free markets...

...An April 13, 2008 story in the New York Times exalted over what it described as the end of this naïve belief in the supremacy of free market solutions...

...gages, which will only further incentivize reckless underwriting practices...

...Never mind that in 2007 there were already a record 90,000 pages of federal rules and 10,000 commandments that were supposed to be doing just that...

...In short, the welfare state is back, not just for families, but now companies too, as in the bailout of the bondholders of giant investment bank Bear Stearns...

...On issues ranging from government spending (the Democrats want $300 billion a year more), to raising tax rates (income taxes could go as high as 52 percent under Mr...

...That lament seems as true today as ever...

...He has a wonderful quote from Friedman: “You have no idea of the climate of opinion in 1945 to 1960 or ’70...

...It didn’t work...

...It’s hard to imagine Republicans resisting, given that when the GOP had Congress and the White House they passed a multitrillion dollar drug benefit plan...

...I’ve concluded that it makes almost no difference which party is in control of things...

...Hayek...

...My old boss Dick Armey, former Republican House Majority Leader, aptly calls cap and trade “the greatest expansion of government and threat to liberty in generations...

...For the left, global warming is like the magic genie in a bottle that grants their three fondest wishes: more regulation, more taxes, and more spending...

...economy and, unless there is a huge conservative counterassault, it is likely to be turned over to government—as Europe and Canada have done with J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R 2 3 their socialized systems...

...During the later presidential primaries, Sen...

...Serfdom The Road Back to Feckless Republicans and even some conservatives have chosen to mount no defense against the unprecedented By Stephen Moore Democrats,” fumed Milton...

...Milton, and especially Rose, badgered me about the big-government ways of the Republicans in Washing ton...

...write for as a member of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, these ideas are regularly promoted, but many conservatives have even warming, on entitlement reforms, on the farm bill, taken to cutting deals with Democrats: on global On these pages and of course on the pages I on housing bailouts...

...A Wilson Research poll taken in May found that 65 percent of voters weren’t even willing to pay an extra penny in gas prices to finance cap and trade...

...Struggling GM and Ford are almost certainly going to come tin cup in hand to Washington for their own private bailout...

...Not a flat tax...

...It’s a book that sold close to a million copies...

...s t e P H e n M o o R e that most of the gains in the economy are accruing to the rich...

...The free market is not geared to take care of the casualties...

...Food prices—corn, wheat, sugar, rice, etc.—are high for the same reason: a depreciating currency...

...TWouldn’t you rather pay a little more to have : s sk a h t e s e m s i l o p m o n o c n a he e statists i c are pu rom t ancin s g a g voters t a with free health care, to lower college tuition costs, to have a cleaner environment, to save the polar bears, to reduce income inequality, to improve education, to have affordable child care, to create a worker’s paradise...

...Republicans, says Larry Kudlow of the CNBC show Kudlow & Company, “have forgotten how to defend capitalism, wealth creation, and the 100 million Americans who are in the investor class...

...Once upon a time free market champion Milton Friedman taught us that it was the botched performance of government and politicians that created and then deepened the Great Depression...

...Hillary Clinton told distressed homeowners ensnared in the mortgage meltdown crisis that capitalism and freedom are hopelessly pass...

...In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek grouped Stalin and Hitler together, fascists and communists, and appropriately dedicated the book “To the Socialists of All Parties...

...Allen Sinai of Deci sion Economics, Inc...

...Then came the housing bailout bill that if passed would put taxpayers on the hook for up to $300 billion of mortgage losses...

...Bailouts, stimulus spending, and regulations dominate the conversation...

...And as the cap and trade bill demonstrates, they’re now brazenly touting plans that make FDR’s New Deal seem like small potatoes...

...I published Capitalism and Freedom in 1962...

...Not radical reductions in government spending...

...I would venture to guess that at most 100 of the 535 members of Congress today agree with that premise...

...The government now grows relentlessly under Republicans and We each sullenly agreed—and so did voters a few years later...

...He said that thanks to Hayek one of the few things that “most people can agree on” in economics is that “free market capitalism is the only practical way to organize a modern society...

...He was taking economics and found himself at odds with his professors...

...elections—are conflicted...

...In 2006 the real J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R 2 5 Moreover, no other industry in American hist H e R o a D b a c K t o s e R F D o M federal funds rate was negative, meaning that the federal government was paying banks to make increasingly risky loans without regard to the chances of default and foreclosure...

...But the Federal Reserve Board—read: Alan Greenspan—had a lot to do with facilitating that bubble by running interest rates so low from 2003 to 2006 that the federal government was subsidizing credit...

...The Times’s tale went like this: Once upon a time free market champion Milton Friedman taught us that it was the botched performance of government and politicians that created and then deepened the Great Depression, which became the prevailing view in recent decades...

...The housing market unquestionably inflated into a super-sized bubble of get-rich-quick schemes...

...And they said, well when we have conversations among ourselves, we always say you sound like a crazy fellow out in Chicago by the name of Milton Friedman...

...According to Hillary: “We need a new balance between government and regulators”—by which she meant more regulation...

...current assault on market capitalism that threatens to undo the great triumphs of Milton Friedman and F.A...

...In 1980 Reagan said during his nomination speech that “all our economic problems are in direct proportion to the overspending by Washington...

...Taxes, even targeted on the rich, are still not popular and are recognized as an economic wrecking ball by most Americans...

...It is inconceivable that a book on the other side by someone in my position would not have been reviewed in every publication, the New York “I had a letter from a student at Duke University in the 1950s...

...This fecklessness has allowed the advocates of government expansion to blame the current financial breakdowns in the housing and energy sectors on laissez-faire capitalism run amok...

...It wasn’t that long before Friedman and Hayek began to carry the day...

...As an alternative vision, Republicans are offering up…what...

...2 6 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 stephen Moore is senior economics writer for the Wall Street Journal editorial page...

...He’d be cringing if he were alive today, because free market capitalism has seldom been in more disrepute among the ruling class in Washington...

...And one reason the currency is falling is the realization by foreign investors that American politicians are flirting with higher tax rates, trade protectionism, cap and trade, and growing the size of the state...

...What is most troubling, though, is that Republicans and conservatives more generally have lost their nerve to defend free markets, because they view the political atmosphere as hostile to such a message...

...I asked them to finish this sentence: Vote for Republicans in 2008 because…There was awkward silence and a lot of anguished faces...

...When I recently gave a talk to a group of about 60 mostly conservative House Republicans, I gave them a brainteaser...

...Not a free market in health care...

...Hayek...

...But there are also signs that “economic security” has become more important to voters than “economic growth” and 2 4 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 Times, Chicago Tribune...

...tory has received such an artificial boost from government policies—the home mortgage interest deduction, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac securities, the Federal Housing Administration mortgage insurance—as housing...

...When is the last time a Republican, not just John McCain, but any elected Republican, said that...

...Obama), to the regulation of the financial markets, to trade protectionism, to “universal health care,” to price controls and energy windfall profits taxes, free market capitalism is under greater assault in America today than at any time in 30 and perhaps 50 years...

...Gold has risen from $300 to $900 an ounce, just as oil prices have tripled over the same time period...

...2 2 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 But then Milton said something that I will never forget...

...We are now looking at one of the greatest real estate busts of all time...

...Not an abolition of earmarks...

...Hayek observed that “there is scarcely a leaf out of Hitler’s book which somebody or other in England or America has not recommended...

...But our politicians and intellectuals seem to have concluded from this that what we need in America is more socialism...

...If they don’t figure it out soon, America will elect a president who is ideologically to the left of George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry...

...The left has seldom been as emboldened in attacking the “excesses,” “inequities,” and “market failures” of the capitalist system...

...Who knows...

...Middle-class Americans—th h t o n a s i t e n l b y t u c e t n m r o g s i t h h ether v e m n ore e ty s pical r i vote a rs k really wan e - t swing voters in U.S...

...Hillary also declared unabashedly that she doesn’t think it would be such a horrible thing if America went back to the tax rates of the 1950s—she means when the highest tax rate hit 90 percent...

...cap and trade” Warner-Lieberman bill that failed this year, but next year could sail to victory In a special category is the gigantic bipartisan under an Obama or McCain presidency, since both men have endorsed it...

...In his fine biography of Milton Friedman (Palgrave Macmillan, $27.95), Lanny Ebenstein notes that Friedman confronted “an overwhelmingly liberal opinion which pervaded in academia, journalism and much of the government from the 1940s through the 1970s...

...This means that if the dollar had stayed, as Reagan used to say, “as good as gold,” oil today would be selling at closer to $50 a barrel, not $125 a barrel and gas would be back at $2 a gallon...

...Who wants to hold dollars under that anti-growth scenario...

...But when government rushes in to prevent those mistakes, we are likely to confront what Friedman viewed as the worst form of tyranny of all: a government that tries to protect us from ourselves...

...Republicans offer little resistance and sometimes give Democratic leaders Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi a helping hand...

...Health care alone is 14 percent of the U.S...

...Will his former Republican colleagues in Congress put up a fight the way they did against HillaryCare fifteen years ago...

...Climate change is one of the most convenient crises in history...

...The lesson of the last fifty years is that socialism is a failed economic model and that free market capitalism is a far superior organizing system...

...The advocates of government expansion blame the current financial breakdowns in the housing and energy sectors on laissez-faire capitalism run amok...

...But now “a bipartisan chorus has decided that unfettered markets are in need of fettering...

...It was not reviewed by a single American publication...

...Wer matter...

...told the Times, “What Milton Friedman said was that government should not interfere...