Washington, D.C. -- President Clinton shocked no one with his recent veto of the bill that would have permitted a school choice experiment to go forward for a handful of poor students in Washington D.C., proving that this
supposed “centrist” is really just an agent of reactionary liberalism, standing athwart history yelling
“Stop!” Years from now it is likely that liberalism’s intransigent opposition to school choice will be seen as
the dying gasp of a discredited governing philosophy, as perverse as governor George Wallace blocking the
schoolhouse door in Alabama in 1963.

The Microsoft antitrust suit is perhaps another example of liberalism’s exhaustion. With years of litigation
ahead, one is tempted to ask: Is this the best you can do? In the good old days liberals would have proposed
government regulation of the software industry; today the idea is so patently absurd that not even Ralph Nader is willing to float it. Administration officials have said they intend to “take a look” at the antitrust concerns
generated by the wave of mergers currently underway, but this is clearly the expression of bureaucrats looking for something to do, like Governor LePetomaine’s panicked plea in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles: “Quick, we’ve got to do something to save our phoney-baloney jobs!”

These contrary sentiments recently came to mind upon reading a single sentence from Washington Post columnist
Richard Harwood: “No serious American politician even contemplates much less proposes alternatives to the ‘free
market.’” Who would have thought that we would ever live to see such a remark in the paper otherwise known as
“Pravda on the Potomac?”

This contrasts sharply with the smug confidence and moral superiority liberals used to have. “Whether government should or should not tamper with the private economy,” the socialist economist Robert Lekachman wrote during the election season of 1964, is an “obsolete question.” Lekachman brusquely dismissed the economists advising Barry Goldwater, including Milton Friedman and other members of the Chicago School, as an “ingenious sect” and “minority position among economists.”

Nowadays, of course, it is Lekachman’s creed that is clearly obsolete, and so fully discredited that it can’t
even be described as a “minority position among economists.”

All this should be kept in mind when surveying the confusions and setbacks of the moment. And we should take
a cue from everyone’s favorite market these days -- the stock market. We are constantly reminded to ignore the day-to-day fluctuations in the market because, as the famous Ben Graham taught, the market is irrational on any given day, but supremely rational over the long term. Therefore, invest for the long term.

Like the stock market, the political market is susceptible to the “extraordinary popular delusions and
the madness of crowds” (to borrow Charles Mackay’s famous title) such as the current anti-tobacco jihad, but in the long run the political market is also driven by reason and value. In other words, the long run still looks
bright. John Maynard Keynes pooh-poohed the long run with his famous crack that “In the long run, we’re all dead.” Well, Keynes himself is dead in more ways than one.

-- Steven Hayward