by Jack Criss
Publisher of the Metro Business Chronicle
as featured in the March 2007 edition
“We’re looking a robber baron in the face,” said Attorney General Jim “Robin” Hood of State Farm.
“Anti-trust laws—shouldn’t every company in America have to comply with that?” said Senator Trent Lott at a Congressional hearing where he was a lead-off witness. Oh, he was referring to the robber baron insurance companies, by the way.
Hearing Jim “Robin” Hood mutter such historical and economic inanities as he did recently when discussing insurance companies is not that shocking. Following the lead of his predecessor and staying true to the trial-lawyer way, Hood is getting a lot of air time by painting big business as evil and dastardly. What Mike Moore did to Big Tobacco, “Robin” Hood hopes to do to State Farm and the insurance industry.
But along comes Trent Lott with the same line of approach, essentially. One of the best-known Republicans in the country is calling for further enforcement of the most pernicious and bizarre pieces of government intervention known, anti-trust.
Joined by she-of-Katrina-fame, the vacuous Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Lott called for placing the property/casualty insurance industry under federal control via the Federal Trade Commission. Here’s one example of why I am not a Republican, ladies and gentleman. That a leading light of the GOP would call for more federal intrusion into the marketplace, ostensibly to insure “fairness”, shows a total betrayal of the principles that the party, and the Right, once stood for.
Political expediency and appeals to emotion now trump reason, logic and sound economics in our culture today. From the unjustified hysteria over global warming to the shrieks for socialized medicine, to calling for more anti-trust and dealing with Muslims out to destroy us, facts are routinely ignored or dismissed as irrelevant especially when the perceived culprit of all our supposed ills is business. And it’s always business, isn’t it?
Industrial civilization is facing a crisis such as we have never seen in the history of mankind. Rule of law, free trade, individual rights, medical and technological progress—progress as such—are all under assault because the philosophical girder holding all of these things up—man’s reasoning mind—is increasingly being dismissed by our intellectuals as arbitrary, culturally-based, biased, untrustworthy, illusory.
Of course, Hood and Lott are not philosophers. Yet their statements echo the bad philosophy, which has engulfed our universities and colleges and now has seeped like sewage into our daily lives. This bad philosophy, in turn, is responsible for the lack of economic knowledge— something our so-called political leaders have an appalling absence of.
