On the market, all is harmony. But as soon as intervention appears and is established, conflict is created, for each may participate in a scramble to be a net gainer rather than a net loser - to be part of the invading team instead of one of the victims.
'The General Theory' was not truly revolutionary at all but merely old and oft-refuted mercantilist and inflationist fallacies dressed up in shiny new garb, replete with newly constructed and largely incomprehensible jargon.
Keynes was scarcely a 'revolutionary' in any real sense. He possessed the tactical wit to dress up ancient statist and inflationist fallacies with modern, pseudoscientific jargon, making them appear to be the latest findings of economic science.
Now judicial review, beloved by conservatives, can, of course, fulfill the excellent function of declaring government interventions and tyrannies unconstitutional. But it can also validate and legitimize the government in the eyes of the people by declaring these actions valid and constitutional.
The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively 'peaceful' the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society.
Famine emerges from a lack of interlocal trade; when one locality's food crop fails, since there is virtually no trade with other localities, the bulk of the people starve. It is precisely the permeation of the free market throughout the world that has virtually ended this scourge of famine by permitting trade between areas.
Subjectivism is not an absolute principle; it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for sound methodology.
What is so terrible about transaction costs? On what basis are they considered the ultimate evil, so that their minimization must override all other considerations of choice, freedom, and justice?
The avoidance of explicit ethical judgments leads political scientists to one overriding implicit value judgment - that in favor of the political status quo as it happens to prevail in any given society.
If taxes and government spending are both slashed, then the salutary result will be to lower the parasitic burden of government taxes and spending upon the productive activities of the private sector.
While deficits are often inflationary and always pernicious, curing them by raising taxes is equivalent to curing an illness by shooting the patient.
The major reason for Keynes's rejection of communism was simply that he could scarcely identify with the grubby proletariat.
The fact that natural-law theorists derive from the very nature of man a fixed structure of law independent of time and place, or of habit or authority or group norms, makes that law a mighty force for radical change.
War has generally had grave and fateful consequences for the American monetary and financial system. We have seen that the Revolutionary War occasioned a mass of depreciated fiat paper, worthless Continentals, a huge public debt, and the beginnings of central banking in the Bank of North America.
As Ludwig von Mises conclusively demonstrated in 1912, money does not and cannot originate by order of the State or by some sort of social contract agreed upon by all citizens; it must always originate in the processes of the free market.
Leading the boom of 1838 were state governments, who, finding themselves with the unexpected windfall of a distributed surplus from the federal government, proceeded to spend the money wildly and borrow even more extravagantly on public works and other uneconomic forms of 'investment.'
I think one of the most important directions to be pursued in the 'sciences of human action' is to develop a natural-law ethics based on nature rather than, or at least to supplement, ethics based on theological revelation.
It is in war that the State really comes into its own: swelling in power, in number, in pride, in absolute dominion over the economy and the society.
Gold and silver are always in demand, regardless of clime, century, or government in power. But public confidence in and, hence, demand for paper money depends on the ultimate confidence - or lack thereof - of the public in the viability of the issuing government.
The most famous and one of the most thoroughgoing opponents of bank credit was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson reacted to the panic of 1819 as a confirmation of his pessimistic views on banks.
