I think of my self as a free-markets fanatic. I’ve earned my keep on that score, through everything including testimony to Congress. Hey, I was even asked to contribute a blurb to a collection of F.A. Hayek readings from the U. Chicago press.
Nonetheless …
I started my day, you’ll be glad to hear, with a clean T-shirt. Made in China, of course, but odds are, made in China from highly subsidized cotton grown in Texas. Milk on my cereal this morning, rather inexpensive, courtesy the New England Dairy Compact. Off to the country store to get papers—traveling on a tax-subsidized road. Waved to neighbor’s children waiting for a subsidized bus heading to a subsidized school. Whoops, forgot, was online at dawn’s early light; most of the tools I used, microchips, Internet, etc., were to a significant degree products of Department of Defense-funded R&D.
If my sore throat doesn’t get better, off to the doc’s. More subsidized roads, and when I get to the office, out comes my Medicare card. Several testing devices will doubtless have been covered in part by subsidies of some sort.
And so on.
And on.
So I will go on preaching self-sufficiency, free markets, unfettered entrepreneurialism, and the like. But every now and then I reserve the right to laugh at myself for thinking that I’m a self-reliant person.