Honorable mention goes to Patrick Barron for “C + I + G = Baloney” :... What the State, what every would-be tyrant wants, of course, is war. War, especially a war that the State is in no danger of losing, provides the perfect milieu for all power to redound to the State, for siphoning wealth from private into governmental hands, for 'making the bastards obey'. War, as Randolph Bourne so perceptively pointed out a half-century ago, "is the health of the State."
For, generally, in their private lives, people wish only to go about their business in freedom, to be left alone with the money they have earned to run their lives as they see fit. Throughout history, governments and their rulers have sought to pull the wool over the eyes of their subjects, to make them like, or at least be resigned to, the oppression and exploitation they suffer at the hands of the State. And War has always been the open sesame to this end: the specter of the enemy at the gates makes the public yield to the eternal plea of their State masters for discipline and sacrifice. The plea for sacrifice is always the harbinger of the despot. Few people stop to ponder this fact: in every sacrifice, of life and freedom and property, there is always a set of people to whom the sacrifices are made. In the old days of superstition, the beneficiaries of sacrifice were the gods, and their priestly interpreters on earth; in the new days of "reason," the beneficiaries are the State.
But war in this nuclear age is dangerous, and, as Vietnam and Angola have clearly shown, the United States can no longer blithely assume that God has always ordained it to emerge the victor. And so the Carter administration looked frankly for the "moral equivalent of war" — the peacetime substitute for war hysteria and war despotism, for the zeal for sacrifice.
... Carter's energy address to the nation on April 18 disclosed his objective frankly and revealingly: "Our decision about energy will test the character of the American people and the ability of the President and the Congress to govern this nation. This difficult effort will be the "moral equivalent of war" — except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not to destroy." (New York Times, April 19)
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Most revealingly, Time added, "But even more than that, Schlesinger views the energy crisis as a blessing in disguise, a beneficial testing of the nation's spirit and ability to cope. In his estimation, the crisis, if handled properly, will provide the opportunity for the American people to recapture the old virtues of sacrifice and a sense of shared destiny." (Time, April 25)
In short, we are to obey their orders, and we are to sacrifice — to them. For, make no mistake: despite the collectivist rhetoric of "we," we can rest assured that Carter, Schlesinger, and the rest are not going to do any of the "sacrificing"; that's the job of the rest of us, while they applaud our willingness to suffer. Of course, the one problem that Carter & Company may have is that many of us don't like to make sacrifices; and so there must also come the warning that we must forget our petty, narrow, individual "selfish" interests in the rush to the common good. And sure enough, there is the warning in Carter's April 18 energy address: "We [the collective, obfuscating 'we' again] must not be selfish or timid…."
All this was neatly calculated to appeal to the nation's intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, especially the well-fed in the seats of power, who are ever quick to call upon the American people to make sacrifices. Nowhere was this masochism-for-the-other-guy better expressed than in the column of everybody's favorite liberal conservative, George F. Will. Moving inexorably toward his Pulitzer Prize for thoughtful political commentary, Will entitled his energy piece without apparent shame — "Hit Us Hard, Please, Mr. Carter" (Newsweek, April 18). Jimmy, of course, proved happy to oblige. In true conservative spirit, Will called upon the American people to be "mature"" by curbing their "appetites" and suppressing two of their "cherished" values: "comfort and convenience."
There is nothing that makes a conservative swell more with moral righteousness than calling upon everyone else to abandon their appetites and their comfort. The "us" that Will wants to be hit hard by the government is, one must repeat, a convenient collective word that obscures exactly who is doing the hitting (Carter, Schlesinger, Will et al.) and who are being hit (you, me, and the rest of the American public outside the seats of power).
The key fallacy embedded in Keynesian economics and the GNP equation is the idea that government spending adds to an economy's health. In reality, the opposite is true: government spending subtracts from an economy's health. The real economy is the private economy — there is no other. Government spending must come out of the private economy.
In olden days, no one would have accepted the argument that the king could help his nation's economy by increasing his spending. The king's spending was funded by taxes from the people. It is the same today, notwithstanding the eyewash of central bank manipulations of its manufactured paper money.
All government spending is parasitical. The less government we have the better off we are. No one would claim that an increase in crime (thus making more police necessary) or an increase in international tensions (making a larger military necessary) would be good for an economy. We are all better off when people are honest and other nations are friendly so that we do not need to provide resources for more police and a larger army. We would much prefer that our sons and daughters produce goods and services that improve the quality of our lives rather than standing sentry on America's frontiers at our expense.
Government programs that do not provide essential security services are especially illogical. For example, paying people not to work, which is the consequence of unemployment insurance, must come out of funds that would have otherwise employed people. Indeed, all government welfare programs are funded by the private sector and do not, as the Keynesian equation might imply, add to the nation's wealth. The funds for these programs come out of the private economy and further stifle its ability to increase the nation's wealth by reducing capital formation.
Caring people often feel it is necessary to lobby the government for more funds for charity — even if taking from some at gunpoint to give to others is morally questionable — but they cannot and should not claim that providing such funds is anything but harmful for any economy. Once the government gets the power to tax for the purpose of alleviating poverty, there is no logical stopping point. The people will demand further expansion of these programs, not because they believe them to be worthwhile, but because they feel victimized and want some of their money back in the form of benefits.
The common man may not know the term "tragedy of the commons", but he knows it when he sees it. As the scramble for public resources ensues, however, another economic phenomenon kicks in: the fallacy of composition, which states that what benefits one segment of the economy at the expense of everything else cannot possibly prove beneficial for the economy as a whole. Put simply, we cannot all subsidize each other and come out ahead. While most want to be subsidized by others without having to pay anything in return, special interests from all sides ensure that the looting becomes universal.
Keynesianism institutionalizes the tragedy of the commons and believes that the fallacy of composition does not apply. It ignores the fact that government spending must come either from tax dollars or from the printing presses, both of which harm the common man. Instead, Keynesianism promises that we can all pick one another's pockets — and all get rich doing it!
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... Cuts in government spending are not "austerity programs," as the mainstream media so often states, but rather are acts of economic liberation. ...
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