Honorable mention goes to Bill Bonner for “Parasites, Bureaucracy and Soviet Boots” :The central libertarian principle is the principle of nonaggression. Taken to its logical conclusions it pretty much covers everything that is the cause of so much consternation in the life of our society. You would think that no one could possibly have a problem with this principle, but many people do. In order for the nonaggression principle to mean anything you have to believe you own yourself and, by extension, that you own the fruits of your endeavors. For any statist/collectivist self-ownership is conditional. In other words, you only own yourself to the extent society says you own yourself which is really the same as saying you don’t own yourself at all. You can make the decisions about your life that society/the state says you can make. Ultimately and inescapably, in the statist’s view, society/the state owns everything and anything you own, including yourself — you only own conditionally.
If you follow that logic then society cannot aggress against you since they own you. They cannot aggress against your property, since it is really society’s property. It is amazing to me how many are comfortable with this perspective on things. Without self-ownership the nonaggression principle means nothing. It may be that people don’t generally recognize how they are owned by society/the state and unless they are personally and painfully inconvenienced by their lifetime indenturement or their serfdom. Until it is your property being appropriated by the state by eminent domain and until it is you who is prevented from finding relief from your illness by laws dictating what substances you may or may not ingest into your own body you can continue to pretend to yourself that you are sovereign over your own existence. You can argue until you are blue in the face that conscription and income tax are both forms of slavery and are unjust in their conception, but until people feel it in their gut, they won’t get it. It’s just the price we pay for being “free.”
If you ask virtually any American if they are free the vast majority will tell you yes, this in spite of the multitude of ways we are not free. Most Germans thought they were free under Hitler. You are free only to the extent the government and society does not want anything from you beyond what you are already willing and ready to give and if you were to decide you were not willing and ready to give those things you already do, you would quickly see how free you are not. My argument and the argument of most libertarians is that personal, individual liberty over all aspects of our lives is the only way to achieve all the legitimate, defensible desires of both the right and the left. It is the rational hope for ever having a humane society with liberty and justice for all and the only way for both the right and the left to ever get the things they claim matter to them is to risk embracing liberty in all aspects of life.
This is what we are not communicating to those who oppose us. What they don’t see is that we want all of the things that they legitimately want, but we actually have a way to achieve it. If you want social justice, it is only liberty that can give it to you. If you want prosperity and opportunity and sustainability, if you want equality (in a legitimate sense), if you want peace and commerce and goodwill between men, liberty is the best hope for achieving those things. Libertarians are also often accused of being utopian and that for real liberty to work we must all be men of goodwill and compassion. This is exactly wrong. It is those who think they can fashion society to fit some ideal they imagine who are utopian. Libertarianism is the only political philosophy which actually takes into account the fallibility and corruptibility of man by recognizing that the last thing we should do is give men power over the lives of other men. If man cannot be trusted to govern their own lives as the left and right believe, then how can they possibly be entrusted with the power to govern the lives of others? They like to believe that the best and the brightest will gravitate toward positions of authority over others. Talk about utopian.
When is something worth doing? When people will voluntarily pay you for it. ... Markets are constantly discovering how useful and desirable things are. Prices change all the time. One thing rises…another thing falls…always directing producers and consumers towards the best use of their money.
But government highways, wars, and bureaucracies aren’t priced by markets. So you never know what they are worth. In a real war, a country may be willing to pay its last dime to beat back the enemy. But what about ‘wars of choice’ such as Iraq and Afghanistan? How much are they really worth? No one knows. And no one really cares. They become just a few more government programs…eternally sucking away resources from the real economy. There are dozens…hundreds…of government programs set up during the Great Depression that are still alive. Each one has grown year after year…and each one now employs thousands of well-paid workers. And each worker not only gets his salary check, he also gets health care and retirement benefits…and he needs an office to work in and a place to park his car. And what is he doing? What would happen if he stopped doing it? No one knows.
But here at The Daily Reckoning we can take a guess. Ninety percent of Washington could take a hike…and life would go on as well or better than it was before.
Out of 10 government employees, probably 2 do useful things…things that we would willingly pay for if they weren’t done for us by the government, though we would almost certainly pay less for them than they cost us now. Five others do things that are not worth doing at all – things that are purely wastes of money. And the other three do things that destroy wealth…things that actually make the situation worse. Those three are economists. Or lawyers. Or who-knows-what.
Of course, people in the private sector do stupid things too. ... By and large, in the private sector people get what they want…and what they’ve got coming. People who waste money soon don’t have any to waste. People who make bad business or bad investment decisions go broke. Mistakes are self-correcting…unless the government steps in!
In the public sector, it ain’t so. Mistakes are self-perpetuating. The last thing a bureaucrat wants is for his mission to disappear. If he is fighting illiteracy, it is a fair bet that fewer children will learn to read. If he is fighting poverty, it is a fair bet that more people will be poor. If he is fighting terrorism, put your money on terrorism.
Failure is rewarded with bigger budgets, while success is self-extermination.
So, as the percentage of the economy dictated by the government increases, so does the waste, the inefficiency, and the counter-productivity. As the Soviet Union discovered, you can increase GDP by government order…but all you get is a whole lot of nothing.
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