[This article is excerpted from "Man vs. the Welfare State". It was first published in 1949.]

Most of the champions of deficits — including the eminent John Maynard Keynes himself, the theory's chief architect — at least publicly professed to believe that the required deficit could be financed by selling bonds directly to the public, to be paid for out of savings. But again, the more sophisticated deficiteers must have seen that a man who buys a $1,000 bond out of his savings surrenders that much purchasing power for the life of the bond. In short, he loses just as much buying power as the government gains. On net balance, no new buying power has been created.

How, then, can the government "create" new purchasing power? It can do so only if it does not increase taxes at all, but "sells" its bonds to the banking system, and if the banks "pay" for them by creating deposit credits on their books in favor of the government. This leads to an increase in "the money supply" — that is, an increase either in the amount of currency or of demand bank deposits.

If the government's new bonds are sold directly to member banks, there tends to be a dollar-for-dollar increase in the money supply compared with the amount of new bonds. But if the government's securities get into the hands of the Federal Reserve Banks, they are used to create what is called "high-powered" money. This can lead to the creation of about $6 of new money for every dollar of new government securities.

It is not easy to give a satisfactory but short explanation of the reason for this to readers without any previous knowledge of monetary theory. When member banks "buy" government bonds and "pay" for them by creating a deposit credit on their books against which the government can draw, they are adding to the nation's supply of purchasing media. They are creating money out of government promises, and some would say they are creating money out of thin air.

Now if a member bank that has bought such government bonds sells them to its regional Federal Reserve Bank, it can ask that Reserve bank to credit the proceeds to the member bank's reserves with that Reserve bank. But if the member bank is a "city bank," it is required to keep a reserve with the Federal Reserve Bank of only 16½% against its net demand deposits. This means that the member bank is entitled to lend, and so create demand deposits for, about six times the amount of its reserves with the Federal Reserve Bank. That is why money created directly or indirectly by the Federal Reserve Banks is called "high-powered" money.

Thus new "purchasing power" is brought into being. Thus people have more money to buy more goods, create more jobs, stimulate more output, and restore prosperity.

At least so it seems for the moment. But soon there are other consequences.

If there have been heavy unemployment and much "idle capacity," the new monetary purchasing power in the system, by increasing the demand for commodities, may indeed lead to an increase in production, and hence to an increase in employment. This has been hailed as the great Keynesian contribution to economic theory and policy. But there are fatal flaws in it.

Unless there were some serious lack of coordination among prices, costs, and wages, mass unemployment would not exist in the first place. When it does exist, the only appropriate cure is individual adjustment of prices, costs, and wages to each other — the return of coordination. But this can be brought about automatically only if the competitive forces of the market are given free play.

The reason the Keynesian medicine can work — under special conditions and for short periods — is that by increasing monetary demand and prices it may increase both sales and profit margins, and so restore production and employment. Yet this could be done even more effectively — and without the poisonous side effects and aftereffects — by restoring freedom of competition and individual coordination of prices and wages.

The Keynesians think in terms of aggregates. Their remedy is to increase the total money supply, and thereby to bring the price "level" sufficiently above the wage "level" to restore or maintain profit margins and so keep the wheels of industry spinning at full speed.

This remedy is defective in two respects. It tacitly assumes that there is a uniform discrepancy between prices and wages and a uniform percentage of "idle capacity" throughout industry. Neither is true. If "industry" is estimated to be operating at 80% of capacity, we must remember that this figure is at best an average. It may cover a situation in which, say, industry A is operating at only 60%, industry B at 63%, and so on up to industry M at 97% and industry N at 100%. If we try to expand the money supply enough to return industries A and B to full capacity, we may completely "overheat" industries M and N and produce serious productive distortions and bottlenecks.

What is more, an increase in the stock of money, contrary to Keynesian theory, will begin to force an irregular increase in prices long before "full capacity" has been reached and the "slack" taken up — if only for the reason that the "slack" is never uniform throughout industry. In a very short time, also, with the increase in prices and the increase in the demand for labor, wages will start climbing too. Then, if the previous trouble was that most wages were already too high in relation to most prices, there will again be discoordination between wages and prices; and the Keynesian prescription will call for still further doses of government spending, deficits, and new money.

So the Keynesian medicine must lead to chronic deficits and chronic inflating of the money supply. This is precisely what we have had. It is no accident that we have just run eight annual deficits in succession, and that we have had 32 deficits in the last 38 years. It is no accident that the US money supply (currency plus demand deposits) has been increased more than fivefold — from $36 billion at the end of 1939 to $199 billion in September, 1969. And so it is no accident that, in spite of a tremendous increase in industrial production in this thirty-year period, consumer prices have increased (to June, 1969) by 164%.

Today the Federal Government is spending in a single year 269 times as much as in the fiscal year before the outbreak of World War I. The recent increase in annual spending is being attributed by government spokesmen to the cost of the war in Vietnam. Yet though in 1970 scheduled national defense expenditures are $35.6 billion greater than in 1960, total expenditures are $103.1 billion greater. This means that non-defense expenditures alone have increased $67.5 billion in the same period. It is not the war, but the determination to impose the welfare state, that has led to this incredible squandering.

A central fallacy of Keynesianism, as of all inflationary nostrums, is that they chronically confuse "income" in terms of paper money with real income in goods and services. It is possible to increase paper-money income to any amount by debasing the currency. But real income can only be increased by working harder or more efficiently, saving more, investing more, and producing more.

So let us not be too impressed by politicians who constantly cite the increase in dollar incomes, in dollar "gross national product," to show that we never had it so good. In Italy today, as a result of past inflations, it takes 624 lire to buy an American dollar. So anyone in Italy with an annual income or even total property worth more than $1,600 American dollars is already a millionaire in his own currency.

[This article was extracted from A Future of Peace and Capitalism (1973), available in full here]

Government intervention can be classified in two ways: either as prohibiting or partially prohibiting an exchange between two people -- between two consenting adults, an exchange beneficial to both parties; or forcing someone to make an "exchange" with the government unilaterally, in which the person yields something up to the government under the threat of coercion. The first may include outright prohibition of an exchange, regulating the terms--the price--of the exchange, or preventing certain people from making the exchange. As an example of the last intervention, in order to be a photographer in most states, one must be a duly licensed photographer--proving that one is of "good moral character" and paying a certain amount of moolah to the state apparatus. This in order to have the right to take somebody’s picture! The second kind of intervention is a forced "exchange" between us and the government, an "exchange" that benefits only the government and not ourselves. Of course, taxation is the obvious and evident example of that. In contrast to voluntary exchange, taxation is a matter of leaping in and coercively seizing people’s property without their consent.

It is true that many people seem to believe that taxation is not imposed without our consent. They believe, as the great economist Joseph Schumpeter once said, that taxes are something like club dues, where each person voluntarily pays his share of the expenses of the club. But if you really think that, try not paying your taxes sometime and see what happens. No "club" that I know of has the power to come and seize your assets or jail you if you don’t pay its dues. In my view, then, taxes are exploitation--taxes are a "zero-sum" game. If there’s anything in the world that’s a zero-sum game, it’s taxation. The government seizes money from one set of people, gives it to another set of people, and in the meanwhile of course lops off a large chunk for its own "handling expenses." Taxation, then, is purely and pristinely robbery. Period.

As a matter of fact, I challenge any of you to sit down and work out a definition of taxation that would not also be applicable to robbery. As the great libertarian writer H. L. Mencken once pointed out, among the public, even if they are not dedicated libertarians, robbing the government is never considered on the same moral plane as robbing another person. Robbing another person is generally deplored; but if the government is robbed all that happens, as Mencken put it, "is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before."

The great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer, who wrote a magnificent little book called The State, put the case brilliantly. In essence, he said, there are only two ways for men to acquire wealth. The first method is by producing a good or a service and voluntarily exchanging that good for the product of somebody else. This is the method of exchange, the method of the free market; it’s creative and expands production; it is not a zero-sum game because production expands and both parties to the exchange benefit. Oppenheimer called this method the "economic means" for the acquisition of wealth. The second method is seizing another person’s property without his consent, i.e., by robbery, exploitation, looting. When you seize someone’s property without his consent, then you are benefiting at his expense, at the expense of the producer; here is truly a zero-sum "game"--not much of a "game," by the way, from the point of view of the victim. Instead of expanding production, this method of robbery clearly hobbles and restricts production. So in addition to being immoral while peaceful exchange is moral, the method of robbery hobbles production because it is parasitic upon the effort of the producers. With brilliant astuteness, Oppenheimer called this method of obtaining wealth "the political means." And then he went on to define the state, or government, as "the organization of the political means," i.e., the regularization, legitimation, and permanent establishment of the political means for the acquisition of wealth.

In other words, the state is organized theft, organized robbery, organized exploitation. And this essential nature of the state is highlighted by the fact that the state ever rests upon the crucial instrument of taxation.

I must here again comment on Professor Averitt’s statement about "greed." It’s true: greed has had a very bad press. I frankly don’t see anything wrong with greed. I think that the people who are always attacking greed would be more consistent with their position if they refused their next salary increase. I don’t see even the most Left-Wing scholar in this country scornfully burning his salary check. In other words, "greed" simply means that you are trying to relieve the nature given scarcity that man was born with. Greed will continue until the Garden of Eden arrives, when everything is superabundant, and we don’t have to worry about economics at all. We haven’t of course reached that point yet; we haven’t reached the point where everybody is burning his salary increases, or salary checks in general. So the question then becomes: what kind of greed are we going to have, "productive greed," where people produce and voluntarily exchange their products with others? Or exploitative greed, organized robbery and predation, where you achieve your wealth at the expense of others? These are the two real alternatives.

Returning to the state and taxation, I would point out incidentally that Saint Augustine, who is not famous for being a libertarian, did however set forth an excellent libertarian parable. He wrote that Alexander the Great had seized some pirate, and asked the pirate what he meant by seizing possession of the sea. And the pirate boldly replied: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a little ship, I am called a robber, while you, because you do it with a great fleet are called an emperor." Here Augustine highlights the fact that the state is simply robbery writ large, on an enormous scale, but robbery legitimated by intellectual opinion.

Taxation is a hotly contested topic amongst economic and political pundits and enthusiasts, like me.  Most people have an opinion on it anyway, people prefer it to be as low as possible but they genuinely believe their tax dollars prevent people from dying on the street, thanks to the government's responsible use of our money.  I believe this last statement to be a fallacy, but that isn't the reason for this particular article.

The principle of taxation as a means of financing public services that we all use by necessity is generally uncontested, except by interesting arguments by Walter Block.  So this means roads, bridges, police, army, judiciary and of course, the politicians themselves.  But there is a separate class of goods and services that are financed by our tax dollars that I consider to be unjustifiable: the majority welfare, medicare, social security and some stand-alone policies such as the first home owners grant and the recent Rudd money.

People such as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams will present to you compelling arguments that demonstrate that most welfare subsidies irresponsibility and is thus the cause for the need of more welfare in the future, and if this is a new concept (or an offending one, Youtube both names and listen to their arguments).  People like Peter Schiff, Tom DiLorenzo and Thomas Woods will explain to you how medicare and social security are unsustainable and drive up medical costs for everyone.  So these fine individuals will explain to you the reasons how these policies can't work and often result in the very opposite of what they intend to achieve.

But is necessary to address another issue, why are these policies wrong... as in, why are they morally wrong.  How can they be morally wrong when they intend to help people, you may ask?  The answer is, ignore intentions for just a moment, and focus on the acts.  

Most of our rights come from owning property... as in we own our bodies (or have stewardship of our own bodies), therefore we have the right to live.  If somebody takes away somebody else's right to live, they are called a murderer.  The murderer didn't own the individual and therefore had no right to terminate his life.  Likewise, you have rights over what you own.  For example, if you own your home, you can put a hole in the wall if you want to.  Why, because you own the home and you have the right to do whatever you want to your property, because it's yours.  Your neighbor can't come into your home and stop you because it isn't his property and therefore he has no right to firstly be in your home and secondly stop you from doing to your property what you want.  Last point, you own your thoughts and your ability to think.  Therefore, you have the right to think what you want to think and say what you want to say... no one has the right to shut you up and make you speak things you don't want to (unless you do it voluntarily of course).  These rights are not given or granted by the government because they do not own you or what you make.  People confuse rights and privileges often because of this fundamental principle... something given is not a right, it's a privilege.  Something you own, you have rights to.

Likewise the sum of your time and labor, which you can label as your life, turns resources into productivity... as in your work by producing a good and enacting a service.  In exchange for your time and labor, or life, you typically receive money.  That money represents that value of your time and labor, or life, that you invested in your job.

Here is the key point: you own that money.  It is yours and you have full rights to it.  The government has no more right to your income than a mugger on some dark street in the city.  Therefore, for the government to impose an 'income tax', which puts a claim on a % of your income, basically states that 'we (the government) own 100% of your income and permit you to hold on to whatever portion we see fit'.  It also says that you have no rights or ownership to your income, but the government does.  If you resist, the government will coerce you with the threat of violence until you pay.

What about the use of the money, it's for noble purposes... good intentions?  If a mugger grabs you on your way home, takes your wallet/purse and removes $100 at gunpoint, and you say 'that's not fair, that's my money', what if the robber says this: "No it's ok, I'm going to spend exactly $25 to buy skateboard, which is good for the economy, and I'm going to spend $50 for my sister's medical bill and I'm giving the last $25 to the poor."  Does the nobility of his intentions change the fact that the robber stole for you?  Of course not, even if the robber promises to pay you back, the very fact that he took from you without your consent, without voluntary exchange (his pledge for your money), makes it theft... even if he also promises to pay you back.  It's similar to the story of a father who keeps $50 hidden away for his son so he can buy a new bicycle, and then his son steals the money to spend it on what he wants.  Why is the father heartbroken, because his son stole from him... it didn't matter that it was his son or that the money was originally meant for him, he took what was not his.  Of course when the government does, we call it taxation, but what is it really?  

Jesus Christ once said to men, who tried to trap him with a taxation question (nothing much has changed in 2000 years), "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's."  A more brilliant answer couldn't be found.  I agree that there are services that the government provides that should be paid for by taxation... roads, bridges, police, army, judiciary and yes, even politicians.  But when the government actively steals from me and gives the money to someone else to pay for their medical bills, the retirement fund, their mortgage, economic stimulus (which doesn't) and even to the financially disadvantaged, I will call it what it is: theft.

If I want to be charitable, I will be charitable.  If I want to pay my neighbors medical bills, I will make a choice to.  If I want to help my friend buy a mortgage, guess what... it's my choice to do so, because I have rights to my money, it is my property.  The government has no more rights to your money than it does to your body.  If you understand this and if you believe it, consider carefully what you ask the government to do on your behalf, because they have no money themselves, all they have is what they take from the rest of us.

God bless,

Dr Washo

[This article is excerpted from "Studies in Philosophy", Politics and Economics, pp. 270–76".

Some people may feel doubt about the importance of this phenomenon. To the present writer it seems the main cause of the recurrent waves of unemployment. That during every boom period a greater quantity of factors of production is drawn into the capital goods industries than can be permanently employed there, and that as a result we have normally a greater proportion of our resources specialised in the production of capital goods than corresponds to the share of income which, under full employment, will be saved and be available for investment, seems to him the cause of the collapse which has regularly followed a boom. Any attempt to create full employment by drawing labour into occupations where they will remain employed only so long as credit expansion continues creates the dilemma that either credit expansion must be continued indefinitely (which means inflation), or that, when it stops, unemployment will be greater than it would be if the temporary increase in employment had never taken place.

If the real cause of unemployment is that the distribution of labour does not correspond with the distribution of demand, the only way to create stable conditions of high employment which is not dependent on continued inflation (or physical controls) is to bring about a distribution of labour which matches the manner in which a stable money income will be spent. This depends of course not only on whether during the process of adaptation the distribution of demand is approximately what it will remain, but also on whether conditions in general are conducive to easy and rapid movements of labour.

This leads to the second and more difficult part of our question to which, perhaps, no certain answer can be given, though the probability seems to us to point clearly in one direction. This is the question whether workers will on the whole be more willing to move to new occupations or new localities when general demand is rising, or whether mobility is likely to be greater when total demand is approximately constant. The main difference between the two cases is that in the former the inducement to move will be the attraction of a higher wage elsewhere, while in the second case it will be the inability to earn the accustomed wages or to find any employment in the former occupation which will exercise a push. The former method is, of course, the more pleasant, and it is usually also represented as the more effective. It is this latter belief which I am inclined to question.

That the same wage differentials which in the long run would attract the necessary greater number of new recruits to one industry rather than another will not suffice to tempt workers already established in the latter to move is in itself not surprising. As a rule the movement from job to job involves expenditure and sacrifices which may not be justified by a mere increase in wages. So long as the worker can count on his accustomed money wage in his current job, he will be understandably reluctant to move. Even if, as would be inevitable under an expansionist policy which aimed at bringing about the adjustment entirely by raising some wages without allowing others to fall, the constant money wages meant a lower real wage, the habit of thinking in terms of money wages would deprive such a fall of real wages of most of its effectiveness. It is curious that those disciples of Lord Keynes who in other connections make such constant use of this consideration regularly fail to see its significance in this context.

To aim at securing to men who in the social interest ought to move elsewhere the continued receipt of their former wages can only delay movements which ultimately must take place. It should also not be forgotten that in order to give all the men formerly employed continued employment in a relatively declining industry, the general level of wages in that industry will have to fall more than would be necessary if some of the workers moved away from it.

What is so difficult here for the layman to understand is that to protect the individual against the loss of his job may not be a way to decrease unemployment but may over longer periods rather decrease the number which can be employed at given wages. If a policy is pursued over a long period which postpones and delays movements, which keeps people in their old jobs who ought to move elsewhere, the result must be that what ought to have been a gradual process of change becomes in the end a problem of the necessity of mass transfers within a short period. Continued monetary pressure which has helped people to earn an unchanged money wage in jobs which they ought to have left will have created accumulated arrears of necessary changes which, as soon as monetary pressure ceases, will have to be made up in a much shorter space of time and then result in a period of acute mass unemployment which might have been avoided.

All this applies not only to those maldistributions of labour which arise in the course of ordinary industrial fluctuations, but even more to the task of large-scale reallocations of labour such as arise after a great war or as a result of a major change in the channels of international trade. It seems highly doubtful whether the expansionist policies pursued since the war in most countries have helped and not rather hindered that adjustment to radically changed conditions of world trade which have become necessary. Especially in the case of Great Britain the low unemployment figures during recent years may be more a sign of a delay in necessary change than of true economic balance.

The great problem in all those instances is whether such a policy, once it has been pursued for years, can still be reversed without serious political and social disturbances. As a result of these policies, what not very long ago might merely have meant a slightly higher unemployment figure, might now, when the employment of large numbers has become dependent on the continuation of these policies, be indeed an experiment which politically is unbearable.

Full employment policies, as at present practised, attempt the quick and easy way of giving men employment where they happen to be, while the real problem is to bring about a distribution of labour which makes continuous high employment without artificial stimulus possible. What this distribution is we can never know beforehand. The only way to find out is to let the unhampered market act under conditions which will bring about a stable equilibrium between demand and supply. But the very full employment policies make it almost inevitable that we must constantly interfere with the free play of the forces of the market and that the prices which rule during such an expansionary policy, and to which supply will adapt itself, will not represent a lasting condition. These difficulties, as we have seen, arise from the fact that unemployment is never evenly spread throughout the economic system, but that, at the time when there may still be substantial unemployment in some sectors, there may exist acute scarcities in others. The purely fiscal and monetary measures on which current full employment policies rely are, however, by themselves indiscriminate in their effects on the different parts of the economic system. The same monetary pressure which in some parts of the system might merely reduce unemployment will in others produce definite inflationary effects. If not checked by other measures, such monetary pressure might well set up an inflationary spiral of prices and wages long before unemployment has disappeared, and—with present nation wide wage bargaining—the rise of wages may threaten the results of the full employment policy even before it has been achieved.

As is regularly the case in such circumstances, the governments will then fi nd themselves forced to take measures to counteract the effects of their own policy. The effects of the inflation have to be contained or 'repressed' by direct controls of prices and of quantities produced and sold: the rise of prices has to be prevented by imposing maximum prices and the resulting scarcities must be met by a system of rationing, priorities and allocations.

The manner in which inflation leads a government into a system of overall controls and central planning is by now too well known to need elaboration. It is usually a particularly pernicious kind of planning, because not thought out beforehand but applied piecemeal as the unwelcome results of inflation manifest themselves. A government which uses inflation as an instrument of policy but wants it to produce only the desired effects is soon driven to control ever increasing parts of the economy.

[This article is excerpted from "Human Action". It was first published in 1949.]

In eighteenth-century France the saying laissez faire, laissez passer was the formula into which some of the champions of the cause of liberty compressed their program. Their aim was the establishment of the unhampered market society. In order to attain this end they advocated the abolition of all laws preventing more industrious and more efficient people from outdoing less industrious and less efficient competitors and restricting the mobility of commodities and of men. It was this that the famous maxim was designed to express.

In our age of passionate longing for government omnipotence the formula laissez faire is in disrepute. Public opinion now considers it a manifestation both of moral depravity and of the utmost ignorance.

As the interventionist sees things, the alternative is "automatic forces" or "conscious planning."[1] It is obvious, he implies, that to rely upon automatic processes is sheer stupidity. No reasonable man can seriously recommend doing nothing and letting things go as they do without interference on the part of purposive action. A plan, by the very fact that it is a display of conscious action, is incomparably superior to the absence of any planning. Laissez faire is said to mean: Let the evils last, do not try to improve the lot of mankind by reasonable action.

This is utterly fallacious talk. The argument advanced for planning is entirely derived from an impermissible interpretation of a metaphor. It has no foundation other than the connotations implied in the term "automatic" which it is customary to apply in a metaphorical sense for the description of the market process.[2] Automatic, says the Concise Oxford Dictionary,[3] means "unconscious, unintelligent, merely mechanical." Automatic, says Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary,[4] means "not subject to the control of the will,...performed without active thought and without conscious intention or direction." What a triumph for the champion of planning to play this trump card!

The truth is that the alternative is not between a dead mechanism or a rigid automatism on one hand and conscious planning on the other hand. The alternative is not plan or no plan. The question is whose planning? Should each member of society plan for himself, or should a benevolent government alone plan for them all? The issue is not automatism versus conscious action; it is autonomous action of each individual versus the exclusive action of the government. It is freedom versus government omnipotence.

Laissez faire does not mean: Let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: Let each individual choose how he wants to cooperate in the social division of labor; let the consumers determine what the entrepreneurs should produce. Planning means: Let the government alone choose and enforce its rulings by the apparatus of coercion and compulsion.

Under laissez faire, says the planner, it is not those goods which people "really" need that are produced, but those goods from the sale of which the highest returns are expected. It is the objective of planning to direct production toward the satisfaction of the "true" needs. But who is to decide what the "true" needs are?

Thus, for instance, Professor Harold Laski, the former chairman of the British Labor Party, would determine as the objective of the planned direction of investment "that the use of the investor's savings will be in housing rather than in cinemas."[5] It is beside the point whether or not one agrees with the professor’s view that better houses are more important than moving pictures. It is a fact that the consumers, in spending part of their money for admission to the movies, have made another choice. If the masses of Great Britain, the same people whose votes swept the Labor Party into power, were to stop patronizing the moving pictures and to spend more for comfortable homes and apartments, profit-seeking business would be forced to invest more in building homes and apartment houses and less in the production of expensive pictures. It was Mr. Laski’s desire to defy the wishes of the consumers and to substitute his own will for that of the consumers. He wanted to do away with the democracy of the market and to establish the absolute rule of the production tsar. Perhaps he believed that he was right from a higher point of view, and that as a superman he was called upon to impose his own valuations on the masses of inferior men. But then he ought to have been frank enough to say so plainly.

All this passionate praise of the supereminence of government action is but a poor disguise for the individual interventionist's self-deification. The great god State is a great god only because it is expected to do exclusively what the individual advocate of interventionism wants to see achieved. Only that plan is genuine which the individual planner fully approves. All other plans are simply counterfeit. In saying “plan” what the author of a book on the benefits of planning has in mind is, of course, his own plan alone. He does not take into account the possibility that the plan which the government puts into practice may differ from his own plan. The various planners agree only with regard to their rejection of laissez faire, i.e., the individuals' discretion to choose and to act. They entirely disagree with regard to the choice of the unique plan to be adopted. To every exposure of the manifest and incontestable defects of interventionist policies the champions of interventionism react in the same way. These faults, they say, were the results of spurious interventionism; what we are advocating is good interventionism, not bad interventionism. And, of course, good interventionism is the professor's own brand. Laissez faire means: Let the common man choose and act; do not force him to yield to a dictator.

[1] Cf. A. H. Hansen, "Social Planning for Tomorrow," in The United States after the War (Cornell University Lectures, Ithaca, 1945), pp. 32-33.
[2] See above, pp. 315-316.
[3] (3rd. ed. Oxford, 1934), p. 74.
[4] (5th ed. Springfield, 1946), p. 73.
[5] Cf. Laski’s broadcast, "Revolution by Consent," reprinted in Talks, X, no. 10 (October, 1945), 7.

Here at Aussienomics, we endeavor to shed light on economic truth, as expressed via the Austrian School of Economics.  As anyone studying economics knows, you cannot separate economics and politics.  In a way, economics is the theory and politics is the practice.  Or like in the Godfather part III, "You understand guns.  Finance is a gun.  Politics, is knowing when to pull the trigger."  If you've read some of my previous articles, you know by now that I like to comment on the economic-political nexus.  Austrian economics advocates free market capitalism (as in free from government intervention), private property rights, the right of privacy, private contracts and an individual's natural rights... that the most good is accomplished between individuals if all of the aforementioned rights and practices are respected and defended by individuals and the government they elect to represent them.  

Now I'm in no fairy land, we don't live in such a world today, and for the most part we learn to tolerate the gradual erosion of our freedom in exchange for the perception of security, while still in deception of liberty.  In reality, the governments of this world are moving towards a greater and tighter control of individual lives in the name of some legitimate or fabricated 'greater good' that they are apparently elected to preserve.  However, once in a while, a government policy comes around that is truly evil.  So evil, that it entices us to believe that this legislation was born in hell itself due to its sheer cruelty and malevolence.  I present to you such an abomination: http://gizmodo.com/5328825/britain-putting-cctv-cameras-in-homes-to-make-sure-kids-do-their-homework

They are going to setup CCTV cameras, within the UK, in public housing to ensure kids do their homework and accomplish other activities that will be mandated by the state.  Do I even need to articulate the malicious nature of this proposal?  What about when they put up CCTV cameras to monitor your financial dealings, relationship with your husband/wife/children, what you say in reaction to the news on your television, what your browse on the internet etc.  

This is horrible precedent and an unconscionable violation of privacy and morality, I invite you to express your outrage here.