Production & Plunder: "Govt is a Trade-Off Between Production & Plunder."
Monty Pelerin / Economic Noise
Most people accept government as if it were a normal part of their life and the economy. They know no better and have no sense of history. Government is a trade-off between production and plunder. The more government, the greater the strain on the productive sector of society. At some point, government actually threatens continuance of society and civilization itself.
A sophisticated case can be made that government is unnecessary. An easier case can be made that it is always and everywhere unproductive.
Growing Doubt
LUDWIG VON MISES
Regarding the necessity of government, reasonable people disagree. Even classical liberals who believed strongly in free markets and free men took different positions. Ludwig von Mises, dean of the modern Austrian School of Economics and a great thinker beyond his specialty in economics, was of the opinion that some government was necessary. His star American pupil, Murray Rothbard, disagreed. Rothbard advocated anarchy (not to be confused with chaos) because he believed letting the camel’s nose into the tent could not be contained there. Both Mises and Rothbard are considered extremists or Neanderthals by today’s Statists.
The political spectrum can be defined as extreme communism on the far left to extreme anarchy on the far right. Most of us fall between these extremes or tend to tilt toward one of the poles. Government has grown wildly over time and moved mass thought toward the left pole.
A dramatic example of this change can be provided by examining the political positions of John F. Kennedy, Democrat elected president in 1960. His positions today have no place in the modern Democrat Party. Indeed, many would be considered too far right for the Republican Party.
The masses sense that things are not working properly in the economy and in society. Most don’t know why, but realize that life has become harder for them and more difficult to make ends meet. Conceptual and theoretical arguments may be beyond many of these people, but experience is a teacher that is not ignored without consequence. Some of the issues troubling people are the following:
- Has government become too big and too powerful?
- Is it doing things that could be done better in the private sector?
- How much freedom can we relinquish and still function as a free society?
- Is government involvement (taxes, interventions, etc.) adversely affecting my ability to provide for my family?
- Are there any limits to what government can take away from us or do to us?
- If government goes too far, can it be reined in?
HARRY AND BESS TRUMAN IN MO.
The necessity of government may be an unthinkable for many, however few still believe in the nobility of government. Why and how public servants become millionaires without producing anything does not go unnoticed. When Harry Truman left the White House he was broke. There was no pension, secret service or even an escort home. He drove himself back to Missouri to the home he had inherited from his mother-in-law.
History
History is revealing regarding government and how it came into being. There is nothing noble about its formation. It began by force, not agreement. Will and Ariel Durant stated:
No student takes seriously the seventeenth-century notion that states arose out of a “social contract” among individuals or between the people and the ruler.
Franz Oppenheimer, in his analysis of the origin of the state, was more blunt. He argued that every instance of government came about as a result of force. He differentiated between two different ways of surviving — production or plunder:
There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others… I propose in the following discussion to call one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others, the “economic means” for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the “political means.”
For many, the thoughts of the Durants and Oppenheimer are unheard of and heresy. They learned nothing of this sort in the propaganda that passes for “state education.” Nor do they hear anything like this from the formal media which is a public relations arm of the State and provides only Statist propaganda.
The two sources quoted above are hardly outliers. Historical literature is filled with similar observations.
Read more at EconomicNoise.com:
http://www.economicnoise.com/2015/04/27/production-and-plunder/
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