Economics Is Haunted By More

The Surest Way For A Poor Nation To Stay Poor Is To Harass, Hobble, And Straitjacket Private Enterprise Or To Discourage Or Destroy It By Subsidized Government Competition, Oppressive Taxation, Or Outright Expropriation.

The Vital Consideration Of Incentives Is Almost Systematically Overlooked In The Proposals Of Agitators For More And Bigger Government Welfare Schemes. We Should All Be Concerned About The Plight Of The Poor And Unfortunate. But The Hard Two-part Question That Any Plan For Relieving Poverty Must Answer Is: How Can We Mitigate The Penalties Of Failure And Misfortune Without Undermining The Incentives To Effort And Success.

Some Champions Of Ever-greater Governmental Power And Spending Invent The Theory That The Taxpayers, Left To Themselves, Spend The Money They Have Earned Very Foolishly, On All Sorts Of Trivialities And Rubbish, And That Only The Bureaucrats, By First Seizing It From Them, Will Know How To Spend It Wisely.

The State, Of Course, Is Absolutely Indispensable To The Preservation Of Law And Order, And The Promotion Of Peace And Social Cooperation. What Is Unnecessary And Evil, What Abridges The Liberty And Threatens The True Welfare Of The Individual, Is The State That Has Usurped Excessive Powers And Grown Beyond Its Legitimate Function - The Super-state, The Socialist State, The Redistributive State, In Brief, The Ironically Misnamed 'welfare State.'

Arbitrary Government Power Is Being Multiplied Daily By The Now Practically Unchallenged Assumption That Wherever There Is Any Problem Of Any Kind To Be Solved, Government Is The Agency To Step In And Solve It.