"I never watch the news anymore. It's too depressing," said my wife's friend Melissa. "There's never any good news on TV." Or anywhere else, she might have added.
She's right, of course. The mass media, the glossy newsmagazines and TV networks and prestigious urban newspapers all seem to be members of some secret crisis-of-the-week club, and if some new food additive doesn't get you, a hitherto unnoticed social problem will eat your children.
Ordinary, sensible people will usually find the right solution to bothersome problems in their lives, and sensible Melissa has found exactly the right solution to this one: Don't listen to them. These "crises" are nearly always phony, and even when they may have some reality behind them, the government action recommended by the Leading Experts will only wind up making matters worse.
For example, Hillary Clinton, our beloved First Fascist, recently made the rounds of Washington cocktail parties and TV news talk shows (which seem more and more to be the same thing) whining about the Day Care Crisis and how the federal government needs to take an "active role" (translation: control with threats, i.e. new regulations, and bribes, i.e. more of your money for their friends) in "providing day care to America's children."
Since when, though, are these "America's" children? Actually they're their parents' children, of course, and their parents don't seem to be having much of a problem finding day care when they need it. Studies show that 96% of mothers who use day care are satisfied with both its quality and its price, and there is no sign of any shortage. As to affordability for the working poor, 50% of low-income working mothers don't pay cash for their day care anyway; they typically leave their kids with grandma or some other family member. Some part-time workers "trade kids" with another working mother on a different schedule.
So the people who care most about these children -- their parents -- are meeting their particular day-care needs in their own way; human creativity and the free market are doing very well, thank you, with millions of different solutions to the problem and without any help from Hillary.
Another "crisis" that's been in the headlines recently is the instability of some financial markets in Asia. Crisis! If the stock market crashes or the currency loses value in Djakarta or Seoul, American workers will soon be standing in bread lines -- so our government, through the International Monetary Fund, has to send bucketfuls of your money over to bail out their government, to save them from evil speculators. Here's what the Cato Institute says about the IMF:
The main problem, however, is that [IMF] loans, whatever the formal conditions accompanying them, effectively subsidize the cause of borrowers' poverty when their economic policies are badly distorted. Among the fund's major clients have been Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and (the now dismembered) Yugoslavia, all of which have promulgated anti-growth, dirigiste policies for decades despite IMF loan programs. That fund officials lack either a conscience or common sense is evident from the organization's support of the odious Ceaucescu regime in Romania and the Mobutu dictatorship in Zaire.In other words, the reason these economies are in trouble in the first place is that their governments have been mismanaging them for years, pretending that their currency was worth far more than it is and controlling finances to create artificial economic booms (and line the pockets of political cronies). The speculators make money by observing the reality of the situation and profiting from the discrepancy between the facts and the governments' pretenses.
Why should American taxpayers have to pay for the shortsighted financial opportunism of foreign governments, whether in Mexico or in the Pacific Rim? Here again, the free market is working just fine: it's keeping the Asian governments in touch with economic reality. If their politicians learn the lesson, the Asian economies will keep growing -- your Korean TVs and Indonesian computer parts aren't in any danger. Bailing out Asian politicians with American IMF money isn't doing anyone a favor; it's more like giving another martini to an alcoholic.
Both of these examples, though, pale to insignificance next to the greatest "crisis" fraud of the decade -- the Great Global Warming Hoax. The President (along with his greener-than-thou Veep) wants to sign a treaty that will let him impose enormous new taxes on fuel and place a huge burden of new regulations on businesses — businesses which already spend upwards of three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year complying with current regulations -- in the name of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
We have to do this, they tell us, because if we don't, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will heat up the planet, melting the polar ice caps and raising the oceans, drowning New York City and Washington DC, and make a desert out of Iowa.
But there's no evidence at all that this is going to happen, or even that it might plausibly happen (no matter how appealing the idea of drowning Washington may be). The global temperature has risen about one degree Fahrenheit in the last century, most of the rise taking place before 1940, and therefore before most of the increase in atmospheric CO2. In the last two decades, the best measurements available show a very slight cooling (about a tenth of a degree Celsius) of the Earth's surface.
In fact, the global warming hysteria is based solely on computer models which are so bad that they can't come anywhere close to predicting the surface temperature of the ocean. So the right temperature for the ocean is simply plugged in to their equations manually. Now, the ocean covers about 70% of the globe, so the computer model is given 70% of the right answer to start with, and even so, it produces predictions for this century that are off by anywhere from 200% to 500%. Suppose you asked someone to add two and two, and hinted that the right answer was very close to three. He thinks for a while and comes up with the answer eight. Would you make him your accountant?
But of course, Global Warming provides an unprecedented excuse to increase the power of government bureaucrats, so we simply must do something about this crisis. Have you noticed that the same Washington interest groups pushing this "crisis" were the ones pushing increased fuel taxes and regulations to prevent global cooling in the 1970s?
And so on and so on. Thirty years ago, to distract our attention from the wretched Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson created a phony poverty crisis to justify the federal War on Poverty, which has destroyed our inner cities and soaked up trillions of taxpayer dollars. Richard Nixon used a phony energy crisis as an excuse to impose price controls on gasoline, which immediately created a gasoline shortage. The shortage disappeared, of course, as soon as Reagan removed the controls.
More than sixty years ago, Roosevelt used the Depression as an excuse to vastly expand federal power over the economy -- but the Depression was created by the Federal Reserve, which had been established less than 20 years before to prevent recessions!
The crisis-mongers never stop trying to scare you -- your refrigerator is destroying the ozone layer, your neighbors will become homicidal maniacs unless we ban assault weapons, illegal immigrants will steal your job unless we militarize our borders, everybody will die in car wrecks unless we force the automakers to install air bags.
Don't be taken in by this hokum. The only thing worth worrying about is government "help". We are not destroying the planet, our economy is just fine even though the government is wasting half our income, and -- God rest ye merry, gentlefolk -- your neighbors are regular, sensible, decent people, just like you.
Unless, of course, you live next door to a politician......
Computer guru Craig Goodrich lives in a house in the woods in Elkmont, with his wife, two children, and five cats. He is the Huntsville district representative of the Libertarian Party of Alabama, a smoker, and a gun owner.