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Government Control

• Government effects the economy in 3 major ways - 1) by taxation and spending, 2) by regulation, and 3) by control of money and banking.
• A society with Government regulation is dangerous to every individual person, because anyone may be the next victim, directly or indirectly, of government controls.
• Government intervention far from improving society, can only cause disruptions, distortions, and losses, and move society toward chaos.
• The man who "hires" a government to be his agent of self-defense will, by his very act of entering into a relationship with this coercive monopoly, make himself defenseless against his "defender".

Vs Freedom

• If men aren't free to trade in any non-coercive way which their interests dictate, they aren't free at all.
• Men who aren't free are, to some degree, slaves.
• Without freedom of the market, no other "freedom" is meaningful.
• For this reason, the conflict between freedom and slavery focuses on the free market and its only effective opponent - government.

Money Printing

• The government-inflated currency system stimulates an artificial boom which misdirects the market's signal system.
• Entrepreneurs, thinking they are more prosperous than they really are, make malinvestments and overinvestments. The boom breaks when the nature and extend of the malinvestment is discovered.
• The area in which the consumer is probably most in need of protection, and in which government most endangers him, is in maintaining the value of his money. Money is the lifeblood of any industrial economy - if the money loses its value, the entire economy must collapse.
• A government which uses paper for money, without holding a freely accessible gold and/or silver reserve is forcing its economy to live on borrowed time.
• Holders of capital naturally want to hold it in the form of the most sound money available, so they would move to sell government currencies and buy free-market money. This move itself would further weaken unsound governmental economies, as it would cause a de-facto devaluation of their currencies. It might well precipitate a series of near-fatal financial crises among the nations.
• The Economy should be provided with a medium of exchange to replace the dying dollar.

Monopoly

• Theoretically, there are 2 types of monopoly - market monopoly & coercive monopoly.
  1. A coercive monopoly maintains itself by the initiation of force or the threat of force to prohibit competition and sometimes to compel customer loyalty.
  2. A market monopoly has no effective competition in its particular field, but it can't prevent competition by using physical force. The initiation of force would frighten away business associates and alarm customers into seeking substitute products.
• Only government, which is itself a coercive monopoly, has the power to force individuals to deal with a firm with which they would rather not have anything to do.
• It compels, its citizen-customers by force of law either to buy its services or, if they don't want them, to pay for them anyway.
• If government didn't compel its citizens to deal with it (by maintaining itself as a coercive monopoly), the free market would offer really effective services, efficiently and at lower prices, and the government would lose all its "customers".
• Government isn't a necessary evil - it's an unnecessary one.

Unemployment & Automation

• Without government regulation, businesses would be freer to innovate and would have to compete harder for labor, due to the economic boom created by freedom.
• In any society, unemployment is the product of government intervention in the market.
• Labor is and always has been relatively less abundant than both people's demands for goods and the natural resources necessary to fill those demands. This will hold true unless and until we reach a point of overpopulation where the supply of labor exceed the supply of raw materials, at which point there will be mass starvation.

Instead of government being recognized as the culprit (of unemployment), AUTOMATION has frequently gotten the blame.

• No matter how many wants are filled by machines, there will still be an unlimited number of new wants left unfilled.
• Automation doesn't reduce the number of jobs, it merely rearranges the pattern of demand for labor.
• It has already been shown that poverty is the direct result of government interference in the economy, and that a modern industrial society need have no poverty as we understand it.

Price Controls

• Price control, like all other political controls and regulations imposed on the market by legislative force, is... people control.
• The price of any good on the market will tend to be set at the point where the supply of that good (at that price) is equal to the demand for it (at that price). If the price is set below this equilibrium point, eager buyers will bid it up; if it is set above, the sellers will bid it down until it reaches equilibrium.
• At the equilibrium price, all those who wish to buy or sell at that price will be able to do so without creating surpluses or shortages.
• On the other hand, if government sets the price higher than the equilibrium price, there will be a surplus of the good, bringing financial ruin to those who are unable to sell their excess stock.
• A profit tells the businessman that consumers are pleased with his production. A loss shows him that not enough consumers are willing to buy his product at the price he is asking, so he should either lower his price or redirect his money and effort into some other line of production.
• Individual self-interest is the basis for the whole market system, which is why it works so well. The consumer acts in his self-interest, when he buys things at the lowest prices and with the best quality he can find. The producer acts in his self-interest in trying to make the highest profit possible.

Taxation

• Taxation is economic hemophilia. It drains the economy of capital which might otherwise be used to increase both consumer satisfaction and the level of production and thus raise the standard of living.
• Taxing away this money either prevents the standard of living from rising to the heights it normally would or actually causes it to drop. Taxation must necessarily penalize productivity.
• Some people feel that taxation really isn't so bad, because the money taken from the "private sector" is spent by the "public sector", so it call comes out even.
• But even though the Government spends tax money, it never spends this legally plundered wealth the same way as it would have been spent by its rightful owners, the taxpaying victims.
• Taxation is theft. The abolition of all taxes would stimulate an immediate and rapid spurt of growth throughout the whole economy.
• Imagine what it would do to your personal prosperity to have your real income almost double overnight.

Regulation

• Money which would have been spent on increased consumer satisfaction or invested in production, creating more jobs and more products for consumers, may be used instead to subsidize welfare recipients, controlling their lives and, thus, discouraging them from freeing themselves in the only way possible - through productive labor. Or it may be used to build a dam, which is of so little value without the force of government intervention.
• If taxation bleeds the economy and government spending distorts it, government regulation amounts to slow stragulation.
• Government spending replaces the spending which people, if free, would do to maximize their happiness.

Working Hours & Wages

• Not only does government regulation prevent individuals from going into business for themselves, it also helps freeze many employees into an 8-to-5 grind unnecessarily.
• There are a large number of jobs in our automated world which require, not that a specified number of hours be put in at an office, but that a certain amount of work be accomplished, regardless of how long it takes or where it is done.
• Wages would be high because businesses could keep what bureaucrats call their "excess profits" and invest them in machinery to increase the productivity of their labor (and wages are determined by productivity).

Human Rights

• Any "right" which violates another man's rights, is no right at all.
• There are no collective rights, there are only the rights which every individual has to be free from the coercive actions of others.
• It is this idea - that it is proper and/or necessary for some men to coercively govern others, which is the idea of government - that has prevented the establishment of a laissez-faire society and which has been responsible for incalculable human suffering and waste in the form of political and religious persecutions, taxes, regulations, conscription, slavery, wars etc.
• Trade makes a human existence possible. Trade is an indispensable means of increasing human well-being. If there were no trade, each person would have to get along with no more than what he could product by himself from the raw materials he could discover and process.

Defining Socialism

• Socialism is a system in which the government owns and controls the means of production (supposedly for the 'good of the people' but in actual practice for the good of the politicians).
• Fascism is a system in which governments leave nominal ownership of the means of production in the hands of private individuals but exercises control by means of regulatory legalisation and reaps most of the profit by means of taxation.
• In effect, fascism is a more subtle form of government ownership than socialism.
• The present fascistic alliance between government and business, which definitely is aggressive and imperialistic, is a forced alliance - forced by government.

Property

• Government does not produce anything. Whatever it has, it has as a result of expropriation.
• Property is anything that is owned. When a man is required to "rent" his own property from the government by paying property taxes on it, he is being forbidden to fully exercise his right of ownership. The proof of this is that if he fails to pay the taxes the government will take his property away from him.

In a laissez-faire society, all properly formerly "belonging" to government would come to be owned by private individuals and would be put to productive use.

• Total property ownership would also lower crime rates. A private corporation which owned streets would make a point of keeping its streets free of drunks and any other such annoying menaces.
• Another aspect of total property ownership is that it would make immigration laws unnecessary and meaningless. If all potential property were actually owned, any "immigrant" would have to have enough money to support himself, or a marketable skills. He couldn't just walk into a free area and wander around - he'd be trespassing.
• Pollution problems could not continue to exist in a competitive, laissez-faire society, free-market environment - an environment which governments destroy.

Slavery

• To advocate limited government is to advocate limited slavery.
• Slavery is the condition in which one is not allowed to exercise his right of self-ownership but is ruled by someone else.
• To put it simply, government is the rule of some men over others by initiated force, which is slavery, which is wrong.

People

• Government by its very nature tends to attract the worse of men, rather than the best, to its ranks.
• The success signal for a politician or bureaucrat is not profit, but power.
• Even if a government were started by the best of men with the best of intentions, when the good men died off and the good intentions wore off, men with a lust for power would take over and work ceaselessly to increase government influence and authority (always for the "public good" of course).

💩 These thinkers of the past have not only failed to solve our problems, they've made them incalculably worse, and because the mess is beginning to stink so badly, their time is running out. They'll have to make way for the libertarians (mostly young people) who don't have much influence yet but will have in just a few years.

Education

• One of their most effective weapons has been government supported education, which brain-washes the young into patriotism before they are capable of judging ideas create a Pro-State populace.
• Education itself would be vastly improved if placed on the free market. At present, most students waste a considerable amount of each school day.
• A laissez-faire system of competing, free-market education would provide a tremendous variety...
• No longer would every child be forced through the same educational machine, a machine geared for the great "average" majority and therefore, harmful to minorities of all kinds.
• Not only would companies put promising students through college, they might even pay their high school tuition.

Wars

• It's labor vs management, urbanites vs suburbanites, tax-payers vs tax-consumers, in an endless, costly and totally unnecessary battle.
• Wars and repressions are an inevitable by-product of government - they are simply the coercive monopoly's normal reaction to external and internal threats to its position.
• The more areas outside of its boundaries a government seeks to control (that is, the more imperialistic it is), the more repressions it will have to use against its citizens, and the more bloody and violent these repressions will be.
• The history of governments always has been, and always will be, written in blood, fire and tears.

• Government can't defend its citizens, and it is foolish and sacrificial for the citizens to defend a coercive monopoly which not only enslaves them but makes a practice of provoking conflicts with others coercive monopolies - i.e. with other governments.
• Business is a natural opponent of war because businessmen are traders and you can't trade amid falling bombs. It is not business that gains from war, but government.
• Successful wars leave governments with more power (over both their own citizens and those of the conquered nations), more money (in the form of plunder, tributes and taxes), and more territory.
• There is no societal organization capable of waging a war of aggression except government.

A New System

• A laissez-faire system would, by virtue of its freedom, be superior to any governmental society in 3 key areas - 1) scientific research, 2) industrial development and 3) its monetary system.
• A laissez-faire system could not have "foreign relations" with the nations of the world in the same sense a government does, because each inhabitant would be a sovereign individual speaking only for himself and not for a collective aggregate of his fellows.
• Businesses whose products were potentially dangerous to consumers would be especially dependent on a good reputation.
• The good reputation of a manufacturer's name would be the most precious asset, an asset which no firm would risk.
• Stores would strive for a reputation of stocking only products which were high quality, safe when properly used, and adequately labeled.

• It is obvious that the more men are free to pursue any non-coercive interest, to realize the rewards of their research, and to fully own any property thus earned, the more intelligent effort they will put into research and the more discoveries will be made.
• In short, free men can and will build a stronger economy than men who are taxed, harassed, regulated, legislated, bound - that is, held in some degree of slavery by government.
• A comparison of the American and Soviet economies gives a hint of the vast superiority which a laissez-faire economy would enjoy over any unfree economy.
• Government employees would have to find jobs in private enterprises if they wanted to work.
• Producers in every nation would want to move to a the laissez-faire society. Governments wouldn't be able to offer the men of ability in their countries enough to keep them from flocking.
• A sizeable laissez-faire society, simply by existing, would amplify stresses within the nations and compel them to move rapidly toward either complete freedom or tyranny.
• In nations with relatively limited governments, this conflict may only be minor, but in totalitarian countries it can amount to a latent civil war between the ruled and the rulers.

But first...

• It is probable, however that the majority of governments would fight back by becoming more restrictive and tyrannical; and this is particularly true of countries well along the road of government control. So most of the non-free world would degenerate into various combinations and degrees of tyranny, revolt and social chaos.
• The more totalitarian a country, the more its citizens must be motivated, not by the incentive of expected rewards (the profit motive), but by fear.
• Without freedom to enjoy the rewards of his productivity, a man has no incentive to produce except his fear of a government gun.
• Even more crippling is the fact that threats don't produce innovative ideas. This is why dictatorships find it necessary to permit their scientists and other intellectuals a special privileges status with extra liberties and incentives.
• American and most of the rest of the world, is caught in a wave of economic decay and social upheaval, which nothing can stop.
• People who grow up amid the "democratic traditions of the West" are apt to feel that this governmental initiation of force and disruption of the market is justifiable as long as the government is one which is "chosen by the people through the democratic process of free elections".

The Economy

• They will sooner or later push us over the brink into total economic collapse - the kind of collapse where government money loses all its value...
• The only thing we can say is that a day of reckoning must come for the badly inflated dollar and for all the other shaky currencies of the world.
• If our society continues to be governmentally controlled, we can expect a steady increase in economic troubles, unemployment, inflation, crime, poverty, and eventually, a collapse of the governmental monetary system, bringing widespread starvation.
• We can also expect a steady decrease in our government-permitted "freedoms" as more and more bureaucrats find more and more ways of taking care of us and exercising power over us.

Strength In Ideas

• Freedom is stronger than slavery, and a good idea, once spread is impossible to stamp out.
• When men are free to think and produce, they innovate and improve everything around them at a startling rate.
• Fighting government with ideas of freedom has an interesting built-in safety factor - most of our politicians and bureaucrats, like most other people, can't see the importance of ideas. What counts with them is votes, tax money and political deals.
• Ideas are the motive power of human progress, the force which shapes the world. When an idea gains popular support, all the guns in the world cannot kill it.

Final Quote ...

• It's time for men to grow up so that each individual can walk forward into the sunlight of freedom... in full control of his own life!