Free marketers voting for George W. Bush in 2000 did not, of course, imagine they would get Calvin Coolidge, or even Ronald Reagan, but they expected a president who would lean generally in the free market direction, and would obstruct congressional and Federal Reserve Board attempts to expand government spending, subsidize special interests, or prolong speculative excess. Needless to say, they are disappointed, and rightly so.

This analysis raises the question: Is there any political organization that a committed free marketer can vote for, not just as the lesser alternative, but out of conviction? Not just in the United States, anywhere? It forms two parts.

In Part 1 Monday, I discussed what a free marketer believes, and what policies he would favor. In this Part 2, I discuss the free marketer’s view of the Bush administration and other governments worldwide.

During 2001, it appeared that free-market voters for Bush could on balance be quietly satisfied. The tax cut was nowhere near returning tax rates to the levels governing after the second Reagan-era tax cut of 1986, and the postponement of many of the most interesting cuts made their eventual appearance unlikely at best, but hey, a cut’s better than a raise.

The reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks was swift and effective; its initial stage also avoided embroiling the United States unnecessarily in the poisonous politics of the Middle East. Even then there were problems. In Bush’s first year, a free marketer would already have been very unhappy at the level of government spending, which was dangerously out of control — fiscal 2002 spending (to Sept. 30) is slated to run $92 billion above the first 2002 budget presented by Bush a year ago, and that slippage will certainly surge above $100 billion before the fiscal year ends.

In the last few weeks, the free-market view of Bush has radically changed. The steel tariff decision of March 5 began that, responsible as it was for the beginnings of a trade war that could do untold damage if, as I believe, the world is in a lengthy recession. The imposition of sanctions against Canadian lumber was another step in this direction. The “stimulus package” that failed to stimulate anything other than government spending and the pocketbooks of wealthy political donors, was another sign that he had run off the rails.

The re-engagement with the Israeli-Palestine mess, sacrificing U.S. interests in fighting terrorism to get once again embroiled in a non-existent “peace process” was also discouraging.

The hysteria about even therapeutic cloning, let alone the more interesting reproductive kind, is another sign that Bush is happy to interfere in the free market for spurious quasi-religious reasons. The agriculture bill is not only a huge handout to those who don’t need the money, it also destroys the relatively sensible policy instituted at great political cost by the Gingrich congress of 1996, and rewards even Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords for his apostasy in depriving the GOP of a majority.

Now even the 1996 welfare reform, that has to free marketers done so much good both economically and socially, appears to be in danger. At this point, the Bush administration has on balance proved destructive to the free market, and it does not appear likely to improve soon.

For free marketers, the situation in the United States seems likely to get worse before it gets better. The recession, far from being over, is in the process of returning to bite us again, much harder this time. By cutting interest rates too soon, pushing the dollar up too far, and unbalancing the budget, U.S. policymakers, particularly Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and the ineffable Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, have both made the recession worse in the long run, and, more importantly, have deprived the government of the fiscal and monetary tools to fight it when the bottom has been reached.

The Democrats — while likely to retain control of the Senate and win control of the House in November — are not for free marketers the answer. The abandonment of the low 1986 tax rates was due at least as much to a spendthrift Democrats’ Congress as to the feeble President George H.W. Bush. Tariff reduction, the Democrats’ issue under Franklin Roosevelt, is certainly not such an issue now, because of strong union support for the party. Even though Democrats have traditionally been more interested than Republicans in providing financial assistance to developing countries, they are unlikely to abandon their union base to assist it.

Al Gore, the most likely Democratic standard bearer in 2004, ran rather against than for free markets in his 2000 campaign. The United States therefore, is unlikely to provide an attractive political alternative for free marketers until at least 2008.

What of Europe? In Italy, the most free-market government in five decades took office last May. In Spain, a government favoring privatization has been in office since 1996. In France, Jacques Chirac, the center-right incumbent, won re-election with a record majority. In Germany, the signs look good for Edmund Stoiber, candidate for chancellor of the most free market party, the Christian Social Union, in the most free-market state, Bavaria.

All these countries, however, as well as Britain, suffer from an overwhelming disadvantage as free-market havens: They are members of the European Union — even in Britain, departure from the EU seems extremely unlikely, and more and more of the Social Democrat Europhile consensus is being supported by the no-longer-Thatcherite opposition Tories.

In theory, it would be possible if a majority of voters in the EU wanted it, for the European Parliament and the European Commission to become dominated by free marketers.

In practice, this is unlikely to happen.

To have a chance of changing Brussels’ Socialist orientation, strongly anti-Socialist governments would have to be elected in the EU’s two core members, France and Germany.

In France, the possibility of a systemic shakeup that appeared to be offered by Le Pen’s first-round success has been snuffed out by Chirac’s overwhelming victory; the likelihood is for five more years of consensus social democrat government — either through power sharing with a Socialist parliamentary majority or simply through drift with a nominally anti-Socialist but in practice pro-Big Government Chirac-led coalition.

In Germany, Stoiber, who spoke in Washington last month, is no iconoclast like his predecessor as CSU leader Franz-Josef Strauss; instead, he is an exemplar of consensus pro-Brussels politics, like former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who will spark no useful reform.

Above all, the EU bureaucracy — growing evermore powerful, and controlling for example the constitutional convention that is currently in progress — wants an ever-closer European Union with, it goes without saying, ever-larger government. At its extreme, it appears that the bureaucracy’s desire is to replicate the people skills of the old Kremlin a thousand miles further west.

Japan, too, is no free-market haven. Until about 1980, it appeared to be; government spending was exceptionally low by international standards, and while income taxes were quite high, they were lower than what then prevailed in the rest of the world. The myth that the Ministry of International Trade and Investment controlled everything was belied by the worldwide success of entrepreneurial companies such as Sony, Matsushita and Honda.

However, after 1980, growth slowed, new entrepreneurs became scarcer and, more important, government spending began an inexorable rise, culminating in the lost decade of the 1990s, with ever-more “stimulus” programs directed at infrastructure-to-nowhere projects.

On the election of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, a year ago last week, I described him as possibly being “Warren G. Koizumi,” that is, a strong free-market leader like President Harding who would roll back government spending and, by orthodox policies, kick-start economic recovery.

The news is not wholly bad; government spending’s inexorable climb has at least been slowed, the yen has dropped against the dollar, and there is every sign that an economic recovery is on its way, a recovery which, unlike that in the United States, is likely to be sustained provided government spending remains under control.

Nevertheless, Koizumi has balked at serious reform and, in general, done less than a free marketer would have hoped to liberate the Japanese economy. He is thus not “Warren G. Koizumi” but only “Dwight D. Koizumi,” a Eisenhower-like cautious centrist who promised much economic liberation but achieved only a little.

At present rate of progress, it may well be that in 20 years time a free marketer will be able to consider India as a haven. Step by step, at the pace appropriate to an impoverished democracy of a billion people, the Indian economy is being liberalized, and as it emerges more and more sectors, first software and now media, are breaking into “Asian tiger” like growth rates.

Should current government policies remain in fashion, it is more than likely that over the next couple of decades, India will achieve more economic growth, and a greater increase in freedom, than any other country. At present, however, the growth and freedom mostly remain potential rather than actual.

There is only one country with a reasonable-sized economy that is attractive for the free marketer, one which, while maintaining a strong social safety net, has led the way in privatization of social security and healthcare financing, putting such purchasing decisions as far as possible into the hands of the beneficiary.

That is, of course, Singapore — where last week the 2003 budget was announced — in which the top personal tax rate was reduced from 24.5 percent to 22 percent for 2003 and 20 percent for 2004. Rich, free from corruption and maintaining free trading while rating close to the top on most indexes of business freedom, Singapore is truly the free market nirvana.

But how sad it is, when nirvana contains less than 0.1 percent of the world’s population, and occupies only 0.0004 percent of the world’s land area.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)

This article originally appeared on United Press International.