Since natural laws govern the forces of life that created this universe in which we live, all of those laws are in harmony with each other. If man can learn more about them, and use them in his human and economic relations, he will learn to live in peace with his fellow men, and in harmony with his environment . . . .

As defined by one economist, economics is the science of making scarce materials go around. If we let it work, the natural system of economic law will provide that the scarce resources of earth continue to meet human needs.

It is when man intervenes to upset the workings of economic nature that he begins to have troubles. It is when he tries (always without success) to repeal natural laws by artificial trade barriers, price controls, production quotas, inflationary policies, and other means in that we find ourselves destroying our natural resources and our environment.

Source: C. R. Batten
Natural Controls

Topics: Economics

Few of us seem to want to keep government out of our personal affairs and responsibilities. Many of us seem to favor various types of government-guaranteed and compulsory “security.” We say that we want personal freedom, but we demand government housing, government price controls, government-guaranteed jobs and wages. We boast that we are responsible persons, but we vote for candidates who promise us special privileges, government pensions, and government subsidies.

Many of us are drifting back to that old concept of government that our forefathers feared and rejected. Many of us are now looking to government for security. Many of us are no longer willing to accept individual responsibility for our own welfare. Yet personal freedom cannot exist without individual responsibility.

Source: Dean Russell
Personal Freedom and Individual Responsibility

Topics: Free Agency; Politics

Helping One’s Neighbor

It has been my observation and experience everywhere I have lived that almost everyone is willing to help his neighbor who is truly in need—if the receiver respects the giver’s right to do it voluntarily and in his own way. So far as I can now recall, no person has ever refused any sincere and logical request of mine for help, whether my need was medical, legal, spiritual, financial, educational, or whatever. In fact, so many hundreds of persons have given me assistance at various times and in various ways that I cannot now possibly recall all their names!

There are many sincere and charitable persons who truly want to help their less fortunate fellow men; but they want to perform their charitable acts on a large scale with other people’s money, instead of on the basis of their own individual capabilities and with their own money. Their sincere but misguided idea of helping people is to pass a law to force everyone to contribute to government which, in turn, will distribute the money “to those who need it most.” This concept is sometimes called the “service state” or “welfare government.” The people who hold this concept are especially dangerous because their intentions are so good. The purity of their motives tends to obscure the ultimate evilness of their acts.

Source: Dean Russell
“Equality and Security” (1952)

Topics: Charity; Welfare

How is . . . legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law—which may be an isolated case—is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.

Source: Frederic Bastiat
The Law - Legal Plunder

Topics: Welfare

Wherever two boys swap tops for marbles, that is the market place. The simple barter is in terms of human happiness no different from a trade transaction involving banking operations, insurance, ships, railroads, wholesale and retail establishments; for in any case the effect and purpose of trade is to make up a lack of satisfactions . . . . In like manner, the Detroit worker who has helped to pile up a heap of automobiles in the warehouse is none the better off for his efforts until the product has been shipped to Brazil in exchange for his morning cup of coffee. Trade is nothing but the release of what one has in abundance in order to obtain some other thing he wants.

Source: Frank Chodorov

Topics: Economics

The Function of Protectionism

The main function of tariffs and other protectionist devices today is to disguise the real effects of interventionist policies designed to raise the standard of living of the masses. Economic nationalism is the necessary complement of these popular policies which pretend to improve the wage earners’ material well-being while they are in fact impairing it.

Source: Ludwig von Mises
Human Action

Topics: Taxes

Blue Eagles and Déjà Vu

If the proponents of central planning came right out and said they wanted to create an economic police state, their cause would never get off the ground. So, they resort to “doublespeak,” as Mario Pei so aptly called it, the usual camouflage for the ultimate use of force against the individual. Ludwig von Mises summed it up when he wrote: “All this talk: the state should do this or that ultimately means: the police should force consumers to behave otherwise than they would behave spontaneously. In such proposals as: let us raise farm prices, let us raise wage rates, let us lower profits . . . the us ultimately refers to the police. Yet, the authors of these projects protest that they are planning for freedom and industrial democracy.”

Perhaps the oldest lesson of history is that an assault on one aspect of freedom is an attack on the whole, as the framers of the Constitution were well aware. To think that the bell that tolls for economic freedom does not toll for academic freedom or for freedom of the press is a delusion, and a dangerous one . . . .

All current proposals for a managed economy rest on an underestimation of the intelligence of the American people. They assume that you and I are just not smart enough to decide how to spend the money we earn.

Source: Walter Wriston
The Freeman, September 1975

Topics: Free Agency; Government

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding.

Source: Justice Louis D. Brandeis
Dissenting in Olmstead v. United States
277 U.S. 438 (1928)

Topics: Government

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it was by the indulgence of one class of the people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that those who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it, on all occasions, their effectual support.

Source: George Washington
on Religious Toleration
A letter to the congregation of Touro Synagogue
Newport, Rhode Island, 1790

Topics: Government

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