Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer – except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs.

~ George Orwell, Animal Farm

The beginning of political wisdom is the realization that despite everything you've always been taught, the government is not really on your side; indeed, it is out to get you.

Sometimes government functionaries and their private-sector supporters want simply to bully you, to dictate what you must do and what you must not do, regardless of whether anybody benefits from your compliance with these senseless, malicious directives. The drug laws are the best current example, among many others, of the government as bully. Our rulers presently enforce a host of laws that combine the worst aspects of puritanical priggishness and the invasive, pseudo-scientific, therapeutic state. They tolerate our pursuit of happiness only so long as we pursue it exclusively in officially approved ways: gin, yes; weed, no.

Notwithstanding the great delight that our rulers take in tormenting us with their absurdly inconsistent nanny-state commands, they generally have bigger fish to fry. Above all, the government and its special-interest backers want to take our money. If these people ran a store, they might aptly call it Robberies R Us. Their credo is simple and brazen: "you have money, and we want it." Read more

Our rulers are destroying the economy. Not little by little, as they usually do, but in huge swaths. Each great assault on the free market, whether it be denominated a bailout, a stimulus, or some other species of purported salvation, brings us visibly closer to the complete ruin of an economic order that required centuries to build. Awestruck, as if we were observing a tsunami sweep across an island, we can only watch the rulers' devastating actions, for which, strange to say, they expect the public to be grateful―and, truth be told, most people are grateful, and clamor for more of the same. We listen to the kingpins' lunatic ravings as they describe their perceptions of the current situation and solemnly declare their determination to "do something" to restore the prosperity that they themselves have demolished by previously "doing something" of the very same kind. Read more

This article was published in December 1994; Volume 12, Number 12 of the Free Market Magazine.

"Peace on Earth" should be more than a holiday cliché. The costs of war and its perpetual threat are immense, and threaten freedom and civilization itself. Even with the end of the Cold War, the U.S. finds itself in an endless series of military squabbles, including Panama, Iraq, Somalia, and Haiti, with prospects for future involvement in Korea, Bosnia, Cambodia, and Rwanda.

This policy must be re-evaluated, especially by those concerned about the fate of American liberty. In his 1994 book War and the Rise of the State, historian BruceD.Porter extensively surveys the fatal linkage between war and collectivism. He maintains that the history of the West during the past six centuries can be reduced to a simple formula: war made the state, and the state made war. In the process, countless individuals suffered the destruction of their liberties, property, and lives. "A government at war is a juggernaut of centralization," he says, and that has been "a disaster for human liberty and rights." Read more

"Thou shalt not steal" is a rule as old as human society itself. It must have been, else no complex human society would have proved viable.

We are all taught very early to respect what belongs to others: "Don't take your sister's toy away from her," your mother admonished, punishing you if you persisted in your toddler's larceny. By the time you were three years old, you understood the difference between mine and thine. If you didn't take the lesson to heart and persisted beyond your childhood years in treating everybody's property as something for you to take, so long as you could get away with it, then you were viewed as a sociopath, an enemy of decency and of civilization itself.

Government as we know it, however, rests entirely on this kind of sociopathy. Rulers take what does not belong to them and dispose of it to suit themselves.

When the government has only recently placed itself in a position of domination over a group of people, the people recognize full well that the government's taking amounts to looting. They pony up only because they are given the stark choice of "your money or your life," and they want to go on living. Read more

Mises Circle in Houston, 24 January 2009.

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Slavery existed for thousands of years, in all sorts of societies and all parts of the world. To imagine human social life without it required an extraordinary effort. Yet, from time to time, eccentrics emerged to oppose it, most of them arguing that slavery is a moral monstrosity and therefore people should get rid of it. Such advocates generally elicited reactions that ranged from gentle amusement to harsh scorn and violent assault.

When people bothered to give reasons for opposing the proposed abolition, they advanced many different ideas. In the first column of the accompanying table, I list ten such ideas that I have encountered in my reading. At one time, countless people found one or more of these reasons an adequate ground on which to oppose the abolition of slavery. Read more