As Murray Rothbard used to point out, the ruling elite that controls any State, democratic or otherwise, always has a very tenuous grip on power supported ultimately only by a false ideology designed to veil its true nature and intentions. One false move or random event may cause the ideological curtain to flutter back and reveal the self-serving knaves and dolts trying to operate the creaky and unstable institutions of the mighty State. The Fed, with a rigid and bumbling academic and political naif as its Chairman, may just have set the curtain afluttering.

Being decentralized and voluntary, the free market is much less likely than is government to foist the consequences of unethical or incompetent actions on everyone collectively. And because Uncle Sam faces virtually no competition (it is the only national government permitted to operate in these United States) its mistakes and malfeasances take longer to be exposed and remedied than do mistakes and malfeasances committed in private, competitive markets – a fact that means that mistakes and malfeasances are likely to be committed more frequently by government officials than by participants in private markets.

As a direct consequence of our trade deficit, foreigners have invested almost $3.5 trillion directly into the U.S. economy since 1960 in American companies, with about half of that investment occurring in the last decade. Those trillions of dollars of investments in U.S. companies HAVE generated HUGE benefits for the American economy, and are responsible for millions of U.S. jobs for Americans working at Toyota, Honda, BMW, IKEA, etc. In 2008 (latest year available), foreigners owned almost $12 trillion of total corporate assets in the U.S., and those foreign-owned companies generated almost $3.5 billion in sales, spent almost $200 billion on property, plant and equipment and employed 5.593 million Americans

I assume most Republican members of Congress will be hopeless at explaining this issue past a couple of talking points. Some Republican members of Congress are quite old and have lost something off their fastball. Some are hacks who are just there to be there and aren’t about to take on a complicated and controversial issue with enormous political downside risk. They will run for cover after the first AARP blast email. Some have real limited government principles but have demonstrated little ability (and perhaps little interest) in communicating to people who haven’t already bought into the conservative narrative. Some congressional Republicans fit into more than one of the above categories.

America’s experiment with government ownership of urban transit systems has proven to be a disaster. Since Congress began giving states and cities incentives to take over private transit systems in 1964, worker productivity — the number of transit riders carried per worker — has declined by more than 50 percent; the amount of energy required to carry one bus rider one mile has increased by more than 75 percent; the inflation- adjusted cost per transit trip has nearly tripled, even as fares per trip slightly declined; and, despite hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies, the number of transit trips per urban resident declined from more than 60 trips per year in 1964 to 45 in 2008.

The money we save buying oil more cheaply on global markets allows our whole economy to operate more efficiently. Oil is the ultimate upstream input that virtually all U.S. producers use to make their final products, either in the product itself or for shipping. If U.S. manufacturers and other sectors are forced to pay sharply higher prices for petroleum products because of import restrictions, their final goods will cost more and will be less competitive in global markets. If households are forced to pay more for gasoline and heating oil, consumer will have less to spend on domestic goods and services.

Conservatives note that socialism kills motivation, and this is true. But even more disastrously, socialism kills investment because socialism destroys capital. This decay has happened at the federal, county, state, city, town, and sewer district level, over a period of many decades. One cannot glibly dismiss it as the fault of the Coke party or the Pepsi party. One cannot say that it was a specific, particular, concrete one-off unique case of an incompetent bureaucrat or a dishonest city planner. It is long-term, chronic, endemic, and systemic. Isn’t it time people acknowledged that it is a corrupt principle, this business of socializing businesses like power, water, sewer, and transportation? It is not merely that these particular cases occurred, but that they *necessarily* occurred and will continue to occur until we stop causing them. Until then, per the History Channel, Americans are going to have to get used to declining reliability of electricity, bridge collapses, water mains flooding streets, dangerous roadways, sewer backups and related disease outbreaks, etc. In other words, now that we are pursuing the same policies as the Third World, we will continue to sink to their level.