Honorable mention goes to Gary Galles for excerpting Louis Carabini in “The Inclination to Love Liberty” :Economics is not politics. One is a science, concerned with the immutable and constant laws of nature that determine the production and distribution of wealth; the other is the art of ruling. ...
The intrusion of politics into the field of economics is simply an evidence of human ignorance or arrogance, and is as fatuous as an attempt to control the rise and fall of tides. Since the beginning of political institutions, there have been attempts to fix wages, control prices, and create capital, all resulting in failure. Such undertakings must fail because the only competence of politics is in compelling men to do what they do not want to do or to refrain from doing what they are inclined to do, and the laws of economics do not come within that scope. ...
...It is an invariable principle that men labor in order to satisfy their desires, or that the motive power of production is the prospect of consumption; ... . Hence, when the State intervenes in the economy, which it always does by way of confiscation, it hinders consumption and therefore production. The output of the producer is in proportion to his intake. It is not wilfulness that brings about this result; it is the working of an immutable natural law. The slave does not consciously "lay down on the job"; he is a poor producer because he is a poor consumer.
...The Welfare State is in fact an oligarchy of bureaucrats who, in return for the perquisites and prestige of office, undertake to confiscate and redistribute production according to formulae of their own imagination, with utter disregard of the principle that production must fall in the amount of the confiscation. It is interesting to note that all welfarism starts with a program of distribution—control of the market place with its price technique—and ends up with attempts to manage production; that is because, contrary to their expectations, the laws of economics are not suspended by their political interference, prices do not respond to their dicta, and in an effort to make their preconceived notions work they apply themselves to production, and there too they fail.
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The ink was hardly dry on the Constitution before its authors, now in position of authority, began to rewrite it by interpretation, to the end that its bonds would loosen. ... The process of judicial interpretation, continued to the present day, was later supplemented by amendment; the effect of nearly all the amendments, since the first ten (which were written into the Constitution by social pressure), was to weaken the position of the several state governments and to extend the power of the central government. Since State power can grow only at the expense of social power, the centralization which has been going on since 1789 has pushed American Society into that condition of subservience which the Constitution was intended to prevent.
In 1913 came the amendment that completely unshackled the American State, for with the revenues derived from unlimited income taxation it could henceforth make unlimited forays into the economy of the people. The Sixteenth Amendment not only violated the right of the individual to the product of his efforts, the essential ingredient of freedom, but it also gave the American State the means to become the nation's biggest consumer, employer, banker, manufacturer, and owner of capital. There is now no phase of economic life in which the State is not a factor, there is no enterprise or occupation free of its intervention.
No one owes us gasoline, medicine, food, jobs, or anything else, so why should we criticize the person for the price he charges us or the wage he offers for something that he was not obligated to provide for us in the first place?
In a small setting, we view the use of force as a means to help others to be the antithesis of charity. However, in a political arena, we find ourselves condoning, even promoting, the use of physical force as the proper means to extract aid. And when such force is used, we paradoxically refer to it as an act of charity and compassion.
In the real world, someone must work to provide and pay for all the free benefits that others receive — and that "someone" isn't the State.
A claimant of a right to a free ride, such as free health care, is a disclaimer of the natural inalienable rights of the person upon whom the claim is made.
The democratic State simply provides an attractive means for some to acquire the resources produced by others at little or no cost to themselves, while preventing any real recourse for those from whom those resources are taken.
Those who earn wealth by producing goods and services that others choose to purchase have freed multitudes from the miseries that nature would have otherwise bestowed.… Because the earning of wealth in free markets is dependent upon those who perceive value in the earner's goods and services, the greater the wealth earned by one necessitates the greater the perceived wealth (well-being) gained by another.
Earning wealth is neither a zero-sum nor a negative-sum game.
When the State acquires the assets of an estate, they are simply distributed to persons other than those chosen by the earner. When one argues that heirs don't deserve the assets because they didn't earn them, what can be said about those persons who receive those assets via the State?
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