The madness of crowds. A phrase that easily comes to mind when you watch any financial news channel these days, as indices nose-dive like ace airman Ernst Udet in his prototype Stuka.

But it's not only markets and investors that are behaving like certifiable loons: When the papers mentioned that 60+% of Americans polled voiced support for Janet Reno's Gestapo-hour raid on the Miami home of Elián González, I couldn't help but think that the last decade surely has had a devastating effect on the average American's valuation of freedom.

When I was growing up in West Berlin, a city surrounded by communist East Germany and entirely dependent on moral and material support from the West, you couldn't help being exposed to at least a small aspect of what totalitarianism meant in all its drab, controlling ugliness.

There were the police dogs, led by field-gray border guards, sniffing for potential refugees under the trains entering West Berlin... the miles and miles of document folders maintained by the Stasi on what East Germany's citizens were thinking and saying... the robot shooting devices along the heavily fortified borders... and, not least, that row of small wooden crosses along the banks of the Spree River, commemorating those who paid with their lives for their desperate attempt to gain their freedom.

All that disappeared 10 years ago when one Eastern Bloc country after the other imploded. Except for Cuba, where the same old regime is hanging on to power—driving those with the aspirations to create a life in freedom for their kids to take to the sea in inner tubes and makeshift rafts.

But it seems that after eight years of Bill and Hillary in the White House, mainstream America—the guarantor of liberty for the better half of a century—has forgotten what that liberty is all about.

What Jane Reno and the Clinton Administration enforced at gunpoint that morning before Easter was not an issue of immigration or family law. (Although both of these aspects came in handy in the press conferences...)

This was a political and philosophical statement: By affirming that a father who demands that his child be returned to what amounts to a free-range prison is indeed better qualified to take care of this child than blood relatives honoring the mother's manifest intent to raise that child in a free society, Janet Reno once and for all made clear that in the eyes of the Clinton Administration, there is no difference between the U.S. and a totalitarian system.

For those whose relatives, parents and friends risked life and limb to obtain that liberty—like most of the Cuban community in Florida and pig-headed reprobates like myself—the Eli·n case represents the capitulation of the West's notion of liberty to Big Government pragmatism.

At Taipan, we have made it our mission to swim against the mainstream...and come up ahead. Our point of view may not always be popular.

But to us, it is a matter of principle: To be able to realize your aspirations in life—no matter if financially or spiritually—you require the basic liberties provided by a free society. And this is one of the few things in life worth fighting for.

Cordially yours,

J. Christoph Amberger
Publisher, Taipan

P.S.: On a lighter note, let me point out what you probably noticed as you pulled this month's Taipan issue from your mailbox: As of this month, we have added 25% more content to our newsletter.

Plus, we have expanded our daily updates and market commentaries within our new umbrella web site 247profits.com. As a Taipan member, you have free access to all our partner bureaus—an additional perk of your subscription!