Krugman: Obamacare Is Starting To Unravel, at economicpolicyjournal.com. Obamacare is working exactly as planned. It was the next step toward a single payer Government run system.
Feds Force Michigan Cherries To Rot – In order To Raise Prices, at michigancapitalconfidential.com. Who says government bureaucrats don’t understand economics. Constricting supply raises the price. FDR mandated these type of edicts during the great depression. Pigs were killed and buried in pits so the price of pork would remain high (read here), even though people were starving. Central planning isn’t easy!
Sweden Creates 55 “No-Go Zones” As It Loses Control Of Refugee Crisis, at zerohedge.com. The Refugees are trying to implement Shira law and they are succeeding. Police have given up trying to control the violence in the No-Go zones. What’s happening in Europe can’t happen here, can it?
France’s New Sharia Police, at zerohedge.com. If immigrants don’t assimilate into the existing culture, the existing culture will be taken over. This can’t happen here?
Who Really Lost This Weeks Presidential Debate? America Did, at zerohedge.com. America is an ideal where the individual is sovereign and the government is subordinate. Hillary and Trump are for bigger government. The bigger the government the smaller the individual. The debate was between big Government and bigger Government. America lost.
Are The “Invisible Americans” The Key Players In This Election?, by Charles Hugh Smith, at oftowminds.com. Excerpt from the article: “The gulf between reality and the official happy story of “recovery” spewed by the status quo’s well-paid army of apparatchiks, flunkies, flacks, hacks, toadies, lackeys and functionaries gorging at the trough of the status quo is widening to the point of surrealism. Memo to the D.C. Beltway/mainstream media apologists and propagandists: the 25 million Invisible Americans are no longer buying your shuck-and-jive con job.” This article has great analysis by CHS.
Let’s Take A Break From All This B.S.
Ryder Cup Heckler Has To Put Up Of Shut Up. He Makes Putt He Said He Could Make.
The European Ryder cup guys were great. I like how Dave Johnson didn’t want to take the $100 dollar bill from Justin Rose that Rose put on the green next to the ball before Johnson hit the putt.
Can government create a job? Yes! Government can create millions of jobs. They could outlaw farming equipment tomorrow which would immediately create millions of farming jobs. But would these new farming jobs be productive jobs?
Government jobs by definition aren’t productive jobs. Does a government job produce more than the cost of the labor? The only way to find this out would be to compete in the market and discover what the price of labor would be according to the law of supply and demand.
High school teaching jobs are examples of jobs that are both free market jobs (private school teachers) and government jobs (public school teachers). What do I mean by this? A private school teacher gets paid considerably less in wages, benefits, and retirement, than a public school teacher. A private school has to provide a quality service at a price that individuals value more than the money they freely exchange for that service. If they can’t, they will go out of business. A public school has no such incentive to provide quality at a lower price. They receive ever-increasing revenue through local tax levies and state and federal funding. Because of this, teachers unions procure ever-increasing wages and benefits for their teachers who provide a lower quality service. People’s next best alternative, private schools or home schooling, are considerably more expensive, which is why it is difficult to escape public schools.
Government wages are higher than market wages. The true price a teacher could command if we had a free market educational system, would be somewhere between the monopoly wage of the public schools and the wage paid by the private schools. We can’t know what it would be, all we know is the wage would be revealed through the interactions between individual demanders and suppliers of the service in the market. The true price of a teachers wage can only be discovered through the market process.
GOVERNMENT STIFLES JOB CREATION
Below are two great articles. One is about how Government regulatory costs make it difficult, if not impossible, to create real jobs in the private sector. And the other tells how we must get back to the understanding that the individuals rights as a free person trumps some vague idea of a collective good.
“Government regulation is supposed to address life safety and exploitation of workers and the public. But unbeknownst to the status quo, it’s supposed to do so with an eye on cost-benefits and diminishing returns.”
“The government’s solution to absurdly high costs of opening a small business is: borrow more money….. we make the rules, you follow them, and if you can’t afford to follow the rules, then don’t open the business.”
“This is how you get an economy of bureaucrats justifying their existence with 500-page manuals regulating private enterprise and abandoned main streets and malls. The government assumes private enterprise will jump through an endless number of hoops to operate a business, and that there is an endless supply of willing entrepreneurs who will volunteer to put themselves at risk of bankruptcy.”
“Back in reality, there is not an endless supply of people willing to jump through an insane number of hoops and risk their capital and health on starting a risky enterprise.”
“Guess what, our government: you forgot that ultimately you live off the private sector. Yes, let’s pile on another 500 pages of regulations–no problem–nothing could be easier for those in secure jobs funded by taxpayers. But if the private-sector jobs go away, who’s left to pay for state employees to shuffle thousands of pages of regulations and enforce countless “improvements”?”
“America must rediscover and reestablish its own founding principles and philosophical ideas…This means recapturing the spirit and meaning of individualism and individual rights. That every human being should be considered a free person, allowed to live his or her own life as he or she wished, guided by their own goals, purposes and ideals that will give their life meaning, value and worth, as they define it.”
“This means liberating ourselves from the false notion that the individual is owned and subservient to the collective, the tribe or the group into which they were born, and to which a political and ideological elite asserts they are to be sacrificed and obedient; that their life is not their own, but the property of the collective.”
“As long as the underlying collectivism is not challenged and overcome, real and sustainable freedom cannot be restored. America was founded on the idea of sovereign individuals, who associated with each other for mutual betterment through voluntary trade and consensual association. Government was meant to secure and protect each individual’s right to his life, liberty and honestly acquired property (meaning peaceful production and/or voluntary exchange).”
“Privileges and favors, subsidies and artificial protections for some at the expense of others must be repealed and abolished. There must be an equality of individual rights before the law, not an inequality of government-imposed “entitlements” and redistributive “rights”….”
“Freeing markets under a regime of equal individual right under an impartial rule and enforcement of the law would do far more to help those that “progressives” claim there are most concerned about in society than the entire array of interventionist and welfare statist programs have done in more than a half a century of coerced redistribution since the heady hopes of LBJ’s Great Society programs.”
VIDEO FROM LEARN LIBERTY
Below is a video from Learn Liberty, that talks about the ramifications of the new sharing economy. This sharing economy is challenging the status quo businesses that are protected by government regulations.
The battle between upstart competitor Uber and the monopoly held by the taxi cartel isn’t anything new. Around 1915, owner operated taxi services called ‘jitneys’, fought this battle against the government created rail transportation monopoly. The rise of Uber and their battle with the taxi cartel reminded me of something I read in Thomas Sowell’s book Knowledge and Decisions, published in 1980. (Everyone should read this book.) In the chapter, Trends in Economics, Dr. Sowell talks about “forcibly changing costs” through government regulation. Here are his words. Does this sounds eerily similar to what Uber is doing?
“The history of American transportation, from municipal bus and street lines to railroads and airlines is a history of government – imposed cross-subsidies. Initially, municipal transit was privately owned by a number of firms operating streetcars along various routes. The creation of city-wide franchises – monopolies – was usually accompanied by fixed fares, regardless of distance traveled or transfers required. “
“When a price is simply made higher by government fiat…it conveys a false picture of the “society”, thereby causing potential consumers to forego the product even though others are perfectly willing to supply it for a price that they are willing to pay.”
“Like most price discriminators, municipal transit was vulnerable to competitors who chose to serve the overcharged segment of their customers. Around 1914-1915, the mass production of the automobile led to the rise of owner-operated bus and taxi services costing five cents and therefore called “jitneys” the current slang for nickles:”
“The jitneys were owner-operated vehicles which essentially provided a competitive market in urban transportation with the usual characteristics of rapid entry and exit, quick adaptation to changes in demand, and, in particular, excellent adaptation to peak load demands. Some 60 percent of the jitneymen were part-time operators, many of whom simply carried passengers for nickel on trips between home and work. Consequently, cities were crisscrossed with an infinity of home-to-work routes every rush hour.
The jitneys were put down in every American city to protect the street railways and, in particular, to perpetuate the cross-subsidization of the street railways city-wide fare structures. As a result, the public moved to automobiles as private rather than common carriers…”
“The rush-hour traffic congestion caused by thousands of people going to work separately in individual automobiles has been denounced by social critics as “irrational” and explained by some mysterious psychological attraction of Americans to automobiles. It is, however, a perfectly rational response to the incentives and constraints conveyed. The actual costs and benefits of automobile-sharing are forcibly prevented from being conveyed by prices. As in other areas, claims of public irrationality are a prelude to arguments for a government-imposed “solution” to the “problem”. As in other areas, it is precisely the government’s use of force to prevent the accurate transmission of knowledge through prices that leads to the suboptimal systemic results which are articulated as irrational intentional results of a personified “society”.”
“…maintenance of incumbent transportation entities, often implies the maintenance of incumbent technologies ie., subsidized obsolescence, resisting the phasing out of existing modes of operation, as competing modes arise…..competing modes with technological or organizational advantages are either penalized or prohibited (as in the case of the jitneys), to preserve incumbent organizations and technology.”
MONOPOLIES CAN’T EXIST WITHOUT GOVERNMENT SANCTION
Uber is the modern-day version of the jitneys from 100 years ago. The taxi cartel is the protected “incumbent transportation entity”. The street rail system couldn’t foresee a competitor until a new technology, the automobile, came into existence, just as the taxi cartel couldn’t foresee a competitor until a ride sharing app came into existence. Government created monopolies look to government for help in stifling competition. When a business begins to expand because they win a larger share of the market, its efforts turn away from serving customers and toward protecting their market position. They lobby government to pass regulations making it more difficult, if not illegal, for competitors to enter the market. The combination of big business and big government is toxic to the economy and consumers.
FREE MARKETS OR CENTRAL PLANNING
In this article, Once A Sure Bet, Taxi Medallions Becoming Unsellable, there is a video of a Chicago taxi driver complaining about Uber drivers not having to jump through all the government hoops that taxi drivers have to jump through to be licensed to drive people around. He doesn’t realize that he is actually making the case against government intervention into the taxi industry. Starting with the price of the taxi medallion and going through all the other costly regulations is an indictment of government, not Uber.
This article, Major Trouble For Uber In California, is an example of governments trying to regulate Uber, at the cost of the consumer. Politicians and bureaucrats don’t understand that a free market creates the incentive for businesses to provide great service, or the consumer has an option of going to a competitor. Under a government created monopoly system the business has no incentive to provide great service for the consumer, because there are no competitors, (Think DMV) read this article, Uber vs Big Taxi: Time To Resolve Driver Complaints – Seconds/Days vs. Years.
The consumer pays a higher price because the supply of cabs is limited to the amount of medallions issued by the government. In a free market supply and demand coordinates the number of cab drivers and passengers at a particular price. Allowing the price to change, allows supply and demand to be continually coordinated according to the changing values of demanders and suppliers.
HOW UBER WORKS
The ride sharing Genie is out of the proverbial bottle. Governments can’t stop it. With how quickly technology changes, don’t be surprised if something different comes along that will challenge Uber as the most cost effective way of transporting people from one place to another. Can you say, “Beam me up Scottie”?
Here is a video of The President talking about net neutrality.
Sounds like he really wants to protect us, the little guys, from big corporations doesn’t it. Why should we believe the man who pushed a bill titled, “The Affordable Care Act”, which made healthcare less affordable. Is the term “Net Neutrality” any different from “The Affordable Care Act”. You can bet your life that Net Neutrality regulations will make the internet less neutral, less free, and more expensive.
This video is an example of the truth about Obamacare aka The Affordable Care Act. The administrations favorite economist when it came to Obamacare, Jonathan Gruber, is proud of the lies that were told in order to sell Obamacare to the public. When you watch this guy, you are actually watching what the President, his administration, and the Congressmen and Senators who voted for this, think about you.
Obamacare has made individuals less free to choose how they want to pay for their healthcare. Insurance companies were for this law because they thought they would benefit by its passage. With the stroke of the pen, the law created 30 million more costumers for insurance companies. The fact that it expanded Governments power over the individual makes politicians and bureaucrats happy. But who among us wouldn’t want our power expanded?
Net neutrality laws will help the already established tech companies and hurt the upstart competitors who, under normal market conditions, would normally be a check on the big providers. The threat of competitors trying to get market share keeps them in line. This is what Uber is doing to the taxi cartel. Big tech companies will be for this, or at least be tepid in their resistance to it. Once Government regulates the internet, these tech companies will be the protected cartel.
Politicians and bureaucrats will not only be able to tax the internet more easily, they will be able to make rules about content and access. Think of what bureaucrats (Lois Lerner) in the IRS did to stifle liberty minded groups from getting their message out. Politicians and bureaucrats are only in favor of free speech if they agree with what is said, they are never neutral when it comes to losing power.
Politicians and bureaucrats have been trying for years to figure out how to intervene into the internet. The internet is what has allowed our economy to grow in spite of the interventions by the Government and the Fed. Now, for some reason, the President and bureaucrats want to intervene into an area of the economy that has had exponential expansion without the “help” of Government regulations.
Tyrants want to control information because truth is never on their side. Since the internet is the marketplace for truth, even democratically elected tyrants want to have the ability to control and/or propagandize their message.
Even if the President and the FCC succeed in getting regulations, the internet Jeannie is out of the bottle. They will show their true tyrannical colors with these regulations, but the marketplace will find ways to deliver a highly demanded market good outside of these Government regulations. The tighter they squeeze, the more will slip from their hands.
The recent bashing of Burger King about their merger with Tim Hortons is nothing more than political theater being staged for the upcoming November elections. The political strategy of: divide us into as many groups as possible, pit us against each other using propaganda, and set up the false narrative that Government is the only solution to the made up problem is in full swing. In this case it’s the usual tried and true tactic of the haves vs. the have-nots.
POLITICAL PROPAGANDA / HOME OF THE WHOPPER
A corporate tax inversions is simply a corporation merging with an overseas company from a country that has a lower tax rate. The President has been propagandizing inversions lately for political reasons. If you don’t believe me watch this short video ( if you can get through the first minute). The words used, the tone of his voice, and the misinformation in this video would make Joseph Goebbels envious.
Tactics like this aren’t new. In May of 2013 Apple was brought in front of a Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee hearing to be lambasted about their tax practices. These hearings are always political theater. But in this case something different happened. Senator Rand Paul took the unpopular stance of defending Apple.
Which video do you believe is factually true of just a piece of propaganda. We have to be able to sift through the propaganda and rhetoric of both sides in order to get to the truth.
TAX INVERSION MATHMATICS
The Federal Government will collect $20 billion less in tax revenue over a decade if tax inversions aren’t halted (read here). That’s only $2 billion a year out of a $3.7 trillion yearly Federal budget, or .001 percent of the budget. If you add the fact that the Fed is still printing $25 billion a month, you see the insignificant amount of money involved. Politicians will propagandize inversions by saying, “this will ‘cost tax payers’ blah blah blah”, or something about corporations, “trying to avoid paying their fair share”. This is purely political posturing through propaganda.
PERVERSE BED FELLOWS
Here is an article titled, Buffett Burger King Funds Flip Obama’s Inversion Calculus. It is interesting to see all the corners these crony capitalists and politicians get paint into because of their incestuous relationship with each other. Here are some excerpts.
“Billionaire Warren Buffett was an ally of President Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and the force behind Obama’s “Buffett Rule,” designed to increase tax bills for the wealthiest Americans. Now, the second-richest man in the U.S. has dented Obama’s effort to stamp out corporate inversions.”
“The danger for Democrats is that Buffett’s investment in the burger-fries-and-a-Coke company’s inversion might flip that calculation and make it politically easier for other corporations to follow suit without suffering repudiation from the public or the White House.”
“That’s because Buffett in the past has served as a sort of unofficial adviser to Obama on business and financial matters, someone whose stamp of approval has offered political cover when the president has been accused of being anti-business or of unfairly targeting the wealthy….If Obama were to question the Burger King deal publicly now, it would mean putting himself at odds with Buffett.”
“I proposed closing this unpatriotic tax loophole for good,” Obama said in his weekly address on July 26. “Rather than double-down on the top-down economics that let a fortunate few play by their own rules, let’s embrace an economic patriotism..”
“…Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew called on Congress to pass a law requiring that foreign shareholders account for 50 percent of the ownership of a new merger between a U.S. company and a foreign one … The administration wants that change made retroactive to May…. legislation taking effect after the president signs it into law — could have the perverse effect of encouraging corporations to act more quickly, negotiate new deals and rush to close those transactions before the bill is enacted,” Lew wrote. “It would be a mistake for Congress to pass anti-inversion legislation that creates a race against the clock and encourages more, not fewer, inversions.”
I want to disinfect myself after reading that.
GEORGE McGOVERN: FREE MARKET CONVERT?
Former Senator and 1972 Democratic Presidential nominee George McGovern talked about his experience dealing with Government regulations and mandates after he retired from politics and became a business owner, in this article titled What I Know Now: Nibbled To Death. Here are a few excerpts from the article.
“The second lesson I learned by owning the Stratford Inn is that legislators and government regulators must more carefully consider the economic and management burdens we have been imposing on U.S. business.”
“….if I were back in the U.S. Senate or in the White House, I would ask a lot of questions before I voted for any more burdens on the thousands of struggling businesses across the nation….. I would ask whether specific legislation exacts a managerial price exceeding any overall benefit it might produce. What are the real economic and social gains of the legislation when compared with the costs and competitive handicaps it imposes on businesspeople?”
“…While running my struggling hotel, I never once missed a payroll. What happens to the people who counted on that, and to their families and community, when an owner goes under? Those questions worry me, and they ought to worry all of us who love this country as a land of promise and opportunity.”
I think this article was written around 1993. If Senator McGovern thought regulations and mandates were bad then, what would he think about them if he were alive today. Senator McGovern was a big Government leftist, but he realized at some point regulations and mandates destroy economic activity. [Or did he just want regulations to be at a level in which his business could survive? Would he have written this this article if regulations weren’t at a level that affected his business? His business just happened to be the submarginal business, what if it had been the supramarginal business?}.
CONCLUSION
“The economy” is what results when each individual is free to make decisions on what to produce, consume, save, or exchange according to what he values at any particular time. Outside of protecting property rights, contracts, and torts: government interventions hamper the decision-making by individuals, by definition hurting the economy.
Government intervention substitutes the decisions of individual politicians and bureaucrats, for the decisions of free individuals in the market, creating a lower overall standard of living, and individuals who are less satisfied.
Politicians are always performing in the political theater, because they realize that the political process is the only way they can get in positions of power to enforce their superior wisdom on the masses. We have to realize this, and be able to weed out the propaganda from the facts if we are going to be able to turn the big Government ship around.
"THE COORDINATION OF MENS ACTIVITIES THROUGH CENTRAL PLANNING OR THROUGH VOLUNTARY COOPERATION ARE ROADS GOING IN VERY DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS, THE FIRST TO SERFDOM AND POVERTY THE SECOND TO FREEDOM AND PLENTY."
"THERE IS NO SUBTLER, NO SURER MEANS OF OVERTURNING THE EXISTING BASIS OF SOCIETY THAN TO DEBAUCH THE CURRENCY. THE PROCESS ENGAGES ALL THE HIDDEN FORCES OF ECONOMIC LAW ON THE SIDE OF DESTRUCTION, AND DOES IT IN A MANNER WHICH NOT ONE MAN IN A MILLION IS ABLE TO DIAGNOSE."
Most Recent Quote
F.A. Hayek - "Since the value of freedom rests on the opportunity it provides for unforseen and unpredictable actions, we will rarely know what we lose through a particular restriction of freedom."
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Matthew McCaffrey - "Building a freer society means winning the battle of ideas, not the empty contests put on by the central Government every four years. Freedom is never obtained by endorsing the least offensive applicant for the position of chief villain."
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Ludwig von Mises - "The middle system of property that is hampered, guided, and regulated by government is in itself contradictory and illogical. Any attempt to introduce it in earnest must lead to a crisis from which either Socialism or Capitalism alone can emerge."
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F. A. Hayek - "While it may not be difficult to destroy the spontaneous formations which are the indispensable bases of a free civilization. It may be beyond our power deliberately to reconstruct such a civilization once these foundations are destroyed."
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Murray Rothbard - "The market promotes and rewards the skills of production and voluntary cooperation. The Government enterprise promotes the skills of mass coercion and bureaucratic submission...and those who get to the top will be those with the most skill in that particular task."
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John Adams - "Government is instituted for the common good: for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people. And not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men..."
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Milton Friedman - "Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."
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Chris Rossini - "The state is a monster that destroys. Those who gain control of the levers, choose the targets."
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Murray Rothbard -"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics...but it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."
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Murray Rothbard -"Democracy can be only a possible route toward a free society rather than an attribute of it. In a purely free society there would be nothing for democratic electors to vote about."
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Robert Bradley Jr. - "When Government tries to pick winners and losers, it typically picks losers. Why? Because the Free market consumers pick winners to leave the losers for Government."
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Benito Mussolini - "Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Men must choose between the market economy and socialism....some agency must determine what should be produced. If it is not the consumer by means of demand and supply on the market, it must be the Government by compulsion."
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F. A. Hayek - "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know, about what they imagine they can design."
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Detlev Schlichter - "Any intervention in the market (by the state) must direct resources away from how private owners would have employed them and toward how state officials and their economic advisers would like to see them employed."
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Henry Hazlitt - "The question is not whether we wish to see everybody as well off as possible....the real question concerns the proper means of achieving it. And in trying to answer this we must never lose sight of a few elementary truisms. We cannot distribute more wealth than is created. We cannot in the long run pay labor as a whole more than it produces."
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Murray Rothbard - "Whether or not man lives at the level of poverty or abundance depends upon the success that he and his ancestors have had in grappling with nature and in transforming naturally given resources into capital goods and consumers goods.... Free markets tend to lead to abundance for all of its participants.... violent intervention in the market and a hegemonic society tend to lead to general poverty."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Inflation and credit expansion are the means to obfuscate the fact that there prevails a nature-given scarcity of the material things on which the satisfaction of human wants depends. The main concern of capitalists private enterprise it to remove this scarcity as much as possible and to provide a continuously improving standard of living for an increasing population.....but however remarkable these improvements may be, there will always be a strict limit to the amount that can be consumed without reducing the capital available for the continuation and, even more, the expansion of production."
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Ludwig von Mises - " It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of Governments. Ideologically, it belongs in the same class with political constitutions and bills of rights."
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Murray Rothbard - "To reduce the working population while the consuming population remains undiminished is to lower the standard of living."
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Murray Rothbard - "Increasing the money supply confers no social benefit. It relieves no economic scarcity. It simply benefits some at the expense of others."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Political ideas that have dominated the public mind for decades cannot be refuted through rational arguments, they must run their course in life and cannot collapse otherwise than in great catastrophe."
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Milton Friedman - "A society that puts equality- in the sense of equality of outcome- ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests."
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F. A. Hayek - "It has already been suggested that it is not necessary, for the working of this free market capitalist system, that anybody should understand it. But people are not likely to let it work if they do not understand it."
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C. S. Lewis - "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; But those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
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Ludwig von Mises - "For the naive mind there is something miraculous in the issuance of fiat money. A magic word spoken by the Government creates out of nothing a thing which can be exchanged against any merchandize a man would like to get."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Many think that governments are free to achieve all they aim at without being restrained by an inexorable regularity in the sequence of economic phenomena....they maintain that the state is God."
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George Gilder - "Under capitalism, economic power flows not to the intellectual, who manipulates ideas and basks in their light, but to men who gives himself to his ideas and tests them with his own wealth and work."
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Thomas Sowell - "Perhaps the greatest achievement of market economies is in economizing on the amount of knowledge needed to produce a given economic result. That is also their greatest political vulnerability."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Anti capitalistic policies sabotage the operation of the capitalist system of the market economy. The failure of interventionism does not demonstrate the necessity of adopting socialism. It merely exposes the futility of interventionism. All those evils which the self-styled "progressives" interpret as evidence of the failure off capitalism are the outcome of their allegedly beneficial interference with the market."
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F.A. Hayek - "The battle for freedom must be won over and over again, the socialists of all parties must be persuaded or defeated if they and we are to remain free men."
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F. A. Hayek - "Planning, or central direction of economic activity, presupposes the existence of common ideals and common values; and the degree to which planning can be carried is limited to the extent to which agreement on such a common scale of values can be obtained or enforced."
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Thomas Sowell - "In political competition accurate knowledge has no decisive competitive advantage, because what is being sold is not an end result but a plausible belief about a complex process"
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Thomas Sowell - " Taxing away what other people have earned, in order to finance one's own moral adventures via social programs, is often depicted as a humanitarian endeavor, while allowing others the same freedom and dignity as oneself, so that they can make their own choices with their own earnings is considered pandering to greed. Greed for power is no less dangerous than greed for money, and has historically shed far more blood in the process."
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Peter Earle - "In a world of infinate desires and limited means, choices must be made; a study of history and economics reveals that, while markets make no promises, they never lie. The only choice is whether distribution, or redistribution as the case may be, is to be accomplished by the organic, apportioning hand of the price system, or by the corrupt, spoilative claw of states."
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Thomas Jefferson - "....To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with public debt....we must make our choice between economy and liberty or confusion and servitude....if we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and comforts, in our labor and in our amusements.... if we can prevent the Government from wasting the labor of the people under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy."
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F. A. Hayek - "The democratic statesman who sets out to plan economic life will soon be confronted with the alternative of either assuming dictatorial powers or abandoning his plans."
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Jean Baptiste Say - "...The encouragement of mere consumption is no benefit to commerce, for the difficulty lies in supplying the means, not in stimulating the desire of consumption; and we have seen that production alone, furnishes those means. Thus, it is the aim of Good Government to stimulate production, of bad Government to encourage consumption."
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Ludwig von Mises - "The middle-of-the-road policy is not an economic system that can last. It is a method for the realization of socialism by installments."
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Thomas Sowell - "What is politically defined as economic planning is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by Government officials."
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Thomas Sowell - "The market is simply the freedom to choose among many existing or still to be created possibilities. The Government establishes an army or a post office as the answer to a given problem.... The diversity of personal tastes insures that no given institution will become the answer to a human problem in the market."
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Thomas Sowell - "Just as a poetic discussion of the weather is not meteorology, so an issuance of moral pronouncements or political creeds about the economy is not economics."
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Paul Craig Roberts - "We should all be thankful to the Soviets, because they have proved conclusively that socialism doesn't work. No one can say they didn't have enough power or enough bureaucracy or enough planners or they didn't go far enough."
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Alexis de Tocqueville - "Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man, socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality, but notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude."
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George Gilder - "The Real Issue is between the rule of law and the rule of leveler egalitarianism, between creative excellence and covetous "fairness", between admiration of achievement versus envy and resentment of it'.
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Thomas Jefferson - "The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite."
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Judge Leonard Hand - "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; if it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Modern civilization is a product of the philosophy of laissez faire, it cannot be preserved under the ideology of Government omnipotence."
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Ludwig von Mises - "The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution."
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H.L. Menken - "Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is an advance auction on the sale of stolen goods"
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F.A. Hayek - "Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's Government is not necessarily to secure freedom."
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Detlev Schlichter - "Economics is the science of how we use social institutions such as private property and voluntary exchange on free markets to make the best use of scarce resources. The printing press tries to do away with scarcity."
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Thomas Sowell - "The God like approach to social policy ignores the diversity of values and the cost of agreement among human beings."
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Henry Hazlitt - "Whenever men are allowed liberty, and freedom of choice, they will make mistakes. Liberty is not a guarantee of omniscience. But neither are the mistakes of free men a valid excuse to take away their liberty, and impose Government controls in its stead, on the ground that all wisdom and disinterestedness resides in the people who are going to do the controlling."
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Thomas Sowell - "Nothing is easier than to confuse broader powers with deeper insight. But almost by definition, those with the broadest powers are the most remote from the specific knowledge needed for either deciding, or for knowing, the actual consequences of their decisions."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Credit expansion is the Government's foremost tool in their struggle against the market economy. In their hands it is the magic wand designed to conjure away the scarcity of capital goods, to lower the rate of interest or to abolish it altogether to finance lavish Government spending."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Economic history is a long record of Government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics."
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Chaderov - "Since the State thrives on what it expropriates, the general decline in production that it induces by it's avarice foretells its own doom. Its source of income dries up. Thus in pulling society down it pulls itself down."
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Thomas Sowell - "If an informed citizenry is the foundation of democratic Government, than an uninformed citizenry is a danger."
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Thomas Sowell - "The free market works best when there is a level playing field but politicians win more votes by tilting the playing field to favor particular groups."
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Thomas Sowell - "However dramatic or attractive a particular vision may be, ultimately everyone must live in the world of reality. To the extent that reality has been filtered to fit a vision, this filtered information is a misleading guide to making decisions in an unforgiving reality, to which we must all adjust because it is not going to adjust to us."
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Thomas Sowell - "Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name "Social Justice"."
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Murray Rothbard - "Bureaucracy incompetent enough to plan a stationary system, is vastly more incompetent at planning a progressing one."
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Ludwig von Mises - "Freedom is incompatible with equality of wealth and income. Men are born unequal and it is precisely their inequality that generates social cooperation and civilization."
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Murray Rothbard - "Government subsidy systems promote inefficiency in production and efficiency in coercion and subservience, while penalizing efficiency in production and inefficiency in predation (plundering)."
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Francisco Capella - "The right of property is a negative right of noninterference. Humans do not have natural positive rights that imply that others must do something for them, and there is no natural duties towards others (present and future). Positive rights and duties arise by means of contracts."
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Victor Davis Hanson - "Social justice sees the Government's proper moral obligation not as ensuring equality out of the starting gate, but as guaranteeing that we will all reach the finish line at the same exact moment."
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F.A. Hayek - "A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a Government with totalitarian powers."
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Thomas Sowell - "People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together. In this situation, for the intelligentsia to impose their notions on ordinary people is essentially to impose ignorance on knowledge."
"Credentialed ignorance is still ignorance."
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Thomas Sowell - "People have to be aware of the dangers in letting economic decisions be made through political processes."
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Winston Churchill - "Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery."
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George Gilder - "Socialist and totalitarian Governments are doomed to support the past, because creativity is unpredictable, it is also uncontrollable. If the politicians want to have central planning and command, they can not have dynamism and life. A managed economy is almost by definition a barren one.
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George Gilder - "The ambitious agenda of contemporary liberalism simply ensures that Government will do nothing well, except to expand itself as an obstacle of growth and innovation. Government best supports the future by refraining as much as possible from trying unduly to shape it."
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Francisco Capella - "Markets are never perfect because human beings are limited in their abilities; proposing state fixes to alleged problems that individuals cannot solve freely seems to forget that the state is also made up of humans; and perhaps not the best ones. ( Bureaucrats are not disinterested angels, and the worst might get to the top.)"
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George Washington - "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force, like fire it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master."
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Thomas Jefferson -- "I think we have more machinery of Government than is necessary, to many parasites living on the labor of the industrious."
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Thomas Jefferson -- "I sincerely believe with you that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, it's but swindling futurity on a large scale."
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Thomas Jefferson -- "The two enemies of the people are criminals and Government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first."